27. Finn
Chapter twenty-seven
Finn
Catalina and I are barely speaking, and it’s the quiet kind, which is worse than the loud kind because there’s nothing to push against.
Since the charity event she’s been all business with me.
Clipped. Professional. She looks at me now the way she must have looked at me the first week, a placement to be managed, a risk to be tracked, and I did that, I put that look back on her face myself, and there’s no play I know that fixes it.
So I do the only move I’ve got. I show up.
I do my work. I keep my head down and I try to be, in my body, what I can’t seem to say in words, which is that I heard her, and she’s right, and I’m trying to be someone who deserves the version of her I got before I wrecked it.
I’m mucking the far stalls at dusk when I hear the sound.
I’ve never heard it before and I know instantly it’s wrong.
It’s high, and it’s ragged and it comes out of a horse like something being torn, and it’s Bonita, and she’s two weeks from foaling, and a sound like that out of a pregnant mare means something has gone wrong fast. I drop the fork and I run.
I get to the stall and the picture stops my heart for a second because I can’t make it make sense.
Jason’s in the corner. Backed into it, flat against the boards, a feed bucket dropped and rolling at his feet and fresh hay scattered across the floor.
And Bonita has come apart.
She’s screaming, that torn high sound, ears flat back against her skull, tail whipping side to side like something with its own mind.
She’s swung her hindquarters toward Jason and away, toward and away, a thousand pounds deciding, and she keeps snapping her head around to bite at her own flank, at her own side, like she’s trying to tear something out of herself.
I don’t know what I’m looking at. I know it’s the worst I’ve ever seen her, that it’s nothing like the mare who leans on me at the rail, and that Jason is in the corner of it.
“Finn.” Jason’s voice is a thread. “Finn, man. I can’t get out. Every time I move she…”
“Don’t move.” I’m already at the stall door. “Don’t move, Jase. Look at me.”
I keep his eyes on me because it’s the only useful thing I can give him from the doorway while Vicente gets to us.
I go in like I belong there, because she’s mine and I’m hers and I have earned this a hundred nights at this rail. That’s what I’m telling myself. I know her.
“It’s the foal.” Vicente’s voice, low, behind me at the door.
He’s read the whole thing in a heartbeat, the way I never could.
“Bad position, got a foot down in her where it shouldn’t be.
See that push on her ribs, low, there? Every time it kicks her it takes another piece of her mind.
” There’s something in how he says it that stops me cold, worse than the scream did.
Vicente doesn’t rattle. Twenty years, I’ve never heard him anything but flat.
And right now, under the flat, there’s a thread of something that sounds a lot like fear, and if Vicente’s afraid then I am standing in the middle of something I have badly underestimated.
“She is not a horse right now, Finn.” Quiet. Careful. “She’s a thousand pounds of pain with no thought left in it. She’ll go through Jason to get away from a thing she can’t get away from, and she’ll go through you, and she will not know she did it.”
Behind me Jason makes a sound. Bonita’s head snaps toward it and she squares up and my whole body wants to lunge, to grab, to do something fast and big, and that is exactly the instinct that gets Jason killed.
“Don’t move,” Vicente says. “Either of you. Finn. You’re already in there, so you’re the one who does this. You do exactly what I say, when I say it, and you do not improvise. Jason comes out through you. You’re his door.”
“Don’t look at her head-on. You’re a wolf when you stare. Turn sideways to her. Make yourself small.”
I turn away from her. I collapse, my knees buckling and my chin tucking in, allowing the fear that usually makes me expand to shrink me down, a sensation akin to death, yet I embrace it.
“Smaller. Good. Now you’re not going to her. You go to Jason. Slow. Slower than that. You’ve got all night.”
I don’t have all night. Jason’s white and the mare is a storm and every cell I own is screaming to move. I move slow. One foot. Wait. The floor of the stall is a mile wide. Another foot.
“Talk to her. Don’t matter the words. Low. Kind. Like she’s already calm.”
And here’s what cracks something open in me right there in the worst moment: the voice that comes out of me is not a voice I’ve ever used.
It’s low, and it’s easy and it’s got no fear in it that she can hear, and it’s loving, there’s no other word, I’m murmuring to a killing-scared animal like she’s the most precious thing in the world, easy now, easy, girl, I’ve got him, you’re alright, you’re alright, and I mean every syllable, and somewhere under the terror I understand that this is the voice that was in me the whole time, under all the noise, waiting for something worth using it on.
I reach Jason. I don’t grab him. I put my body between him and her, slow, still folded small, still not looking at her, and I say, “On my word, you slide along the boards to the door. You don’t stand up. You don’t run. You slide. Vicente’s right there.”
“Finn, I…”
“You slide, Jase. Now. Go.”
He goes. Along the wall, low, and Bonita’s head comes up and I feel the whole storm of her swing toward the movement and I step into it, small and sideways and murmuring, giving her the only thing I have to give, which is a body that isn’t a threat and a voice that isn’t afraid, and I hold there, right in the path of a thousand pounds that could end me, and I do not flinch and I do not stare and I do not stop talking to her.
And Jason’s hands find the door. And Vicente pulls him through.
Now it’s just me and her.
And this is the part that takes a moment, the part you can’t rush or fake or force, and God knows I’ve tried to force everything in my life.
I stay small. I stay sideways. I keep the low kind voice going into the space between us, there she is, there’s my girl, it’s just me, it’s just me, and I wait.
She watches me. She knows me, I think, somewhere down under it, but she isn’t herself, and knowing me isn’t the same as trusting me right now, so she keeps me fixed, one eye and then the other, waiting to see what I am.
The foot pushes at her ribs and she flinches and swings and I hold, and I don’t move, and I keep talking low, and I let her watch me as long as she needs to watch me.
It takes a long time. Longer than is comfortable.
Longer than my legs want to stay folded and my nerve wants to hold.
I stay, and I let her read me, and slowly, by degrees I can barely see, the thing in her starts to come down.
Her sides stop heaving so hard. The scream is gone. The ears come off her skull.
And then her look changes.
It’s not the pinned, black, all-white-around-the-edge look anymore. It’s something quieter, something that’s got her back in it. She holds my eye one more beat with it.
And then she looks away.
On purpose. Deliberate, unhurried, a choice, turning her head off me and out toward the dark of the stall, and I understand it the way you understand a language you didn’t know you spoke: she’s not dismissing me.
She’s telling me. Come in close. I won’t hurt you now.
The look-away is the whole invitation, the exact opposite of the flat-eared thing that met me at the door, and it undoes me a little, standing there being handed a thing this animal has no other way to say.
So I go to her. Slow. Still soft, still low.
I bring my hand up where she can see it and I lay it under her jaw first, the safe place, and she lets me, and I move it slow behind her ears, and she drops her head into it an inch, and I go to the top of her head, that stubborn mane she’s never let me touch on a good day, and then along her neck to the withers, and she leans the weight of her head against me and lets out a breath that empties her whole body, and she’s shaking, and I’m shaking, and I stand there in the dark holding up a thousand pounds of animal that decided, tonight, of everyone, to let me be the one.
“There she is,” I tell her. “There you are.”
Later, when Dr. Salinas has come and gone and the foal’s shifted and Bonita’s standing quiet and worn out in fresh straw, Vicente finds me at the rail where I can’t seem to stop standing.
“That was the dumbest thing I’ve seen a man do on this ranch.” He says it without heat. “You had no business in that stall.”
“I know.”
He looks at me a while, and doesn’t say anything about how it went, because Vicente doesn’t hand out praise and I don’t need him to. “Where’d you learn it?” is all he says. “To fold up like that. To go small.”
I think about it. I think about the night this mare backed off and squared up when I came to the rail still carrying a fight, making me put it down before she’d have me. She already taught me this. The lesson finally clicked tonight, after a friend’s life was on the line.
“She kept showing me,” I say, and tip my head at the stall.
“I’m slow.” Jason’s sitting on an overturned bucket by the tack room, still gray, and as I pass, he catches my sleeve.
“You didn’t even look scared,” he says, like it’s the strangest part.
“I was dying in there and you walked in like…” He shakes his head. “How are you not scared?”
I was. I’m not going to lie to him about it; I’ve done enough of that.
“I was scared the whole time,” I tell him. “That’s not the same as letting it drive.”
He nods like I’ve handed him something, and I keep walking, and I don’t tell him I only learned the difference tonight, in the worst ten minutes of my life, from a horse.
It hits me once I’m clear of them. The shakes. My hands go, then my knees, everything I held down for ten minutes cashing out at once, and I have to put a palm flat on the barn wall and breathe through it.
“Fuck,” I say, to nobody, to the wall. And then, because the only way I know how to carry a thing this big is to make it small: “First properly grown-up thing I’ve done in my whole life, and the one person I’d want to see it is the one person who isn’t here.”
Vicente huffs something that’s almost a laugh, already turning back to his mare. Jason’s glad to be breathing. Neither of them is who I meant, and neither of them asks who I did.
I get to the dark between the barn and the bunkhouse and I stop and I stand there a second, wrung out, and it lands on me quiet.
She wouldn’t let me near her, once, because I came in carrying a storm. Tonight I walked into hers and brought the calm with me, and it held.
I turned into what she needed. I didn’t know I had it.
And the only person in the world I want to tell is the one who isn’t speaking to me, an hour of silence away across a dark ranch, and I don’t have the first idea how to cross it.