Chapter 4
December came in hard and stayed.
The lane froze in ruts and the water buckets skinned over every night and the cottage windows ran with damp by morning. Mila got a second horse blanket, a pair of men’s wool socks from the feed store, and a routine, and out of those three things she built a life.
She had not expected to like any of it.
* * *
The clinic was in a strip mall outside Cockeysville, between a nail salon and a place that sold vacuum parts, and she paid for it herself out of her own account, which took three phone calls and a certain amount of quiet rage to arrange.
There was a woman there named Darlene who ran the afternoons.
“Shepard,” she said, reading the sheet on the first day. “Like the wing.”
“Like the wing.”
“You could go to the wing.”
“I could.”
Darlene looked at her over the top of the sheet for a second, then put it down and never mentioned it again, and Mila would have followed her into a burning building.
The work was what Yvonne had promised. It was boring. It was two hundred boring days, and December was the first stretch of them, and nothing dramatic happened in a single one.
She learned to stand up out of a chair without using her hands. That took nine days.
She learned to get up off the floor, which is a different skill and a worse one, and which she practiced alone in the cottage at night with the couch to hold, because she was not going to spend her life afraid of floors.
She learned the difference between the tired that means stop and the tired that means keep going, and she got it wrong twice and paid for it both times.
She used the walker until the fourteenth, and then a cane, and the day she put the walker in the back of Nikki’s truck to go back to the rental place she sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window the whole way so that no one would have to watch her face.
* * *
There was a man at the clinic called Vern.
He was somewhere past seventy and he came on the same afternoons she did, brought in by a daughter who always had her car keys already in her hand. He had had a stroke in August. His right side worked about as well as her legs did, and his speech did not work at all.
Not slurred. Gone. He would open his mouth and something would come out that was not a word, and his face would do a thing Mila found almost impossible to look at, which was not embarrassment. It was a man watching a door close from the inside.
Everybody at that clinic talked to Vern the way people talk to a dog they like.
How are we today, Vern. Let’s get those feet moving, Vern. There we go, good man. Bright, loud, slow. His daughter did it too, and she was doing her best, and she had been doing her best since August, and the cost of it showed on her from the parking lot.
Mila sat down beside him in the waiting area on the third afternoon and said, “The radio in here is terrible.”
Vern’s head came around.
“It’s the same six songs,” she said. “I’ve been counting. If they play the one about the truck again I’m going to walk into the road, and it’ll take me a while, so you’ll get to watch the whole thing.”
And Vern laughed.
It came out wrong, a hard bark with no shape to it, and his daughter looked up sharply from her phone, and then looked at Mila with an expression that was about to become a question.
Mila did not explain. She never explained it, that whole winter.
She just talked to him — about the weather, about horses, about how much she hated the exercise where you lie on your side — the way you talk to somebody who is in the room, because he was in the room, he had been in the room the entire time, and every single person in that building was standing outside the door being kind at him.
Some afternoons he got a word out. Mostly he did not.
It did not matter to her either way, and she thought he knew that, and that was probably the point.
* * *
Christmas was the only bad week.
It came at her from all sides and there was no defending against any of it.
Cards for Mr. and Mrs. Jason Shepard forwarded out from the house in a rubber-banded stack.
A wreath on the cottage door from Cecelia.
Her mother on the phone from Delaware, crying, asking again why she couldn’t come down, and Mila saying again, gently, that she couldn’t do the car yet, which was true, and not the reason.
On Christmas Eve, Nikki dragged her up to the house for dinner with the girls and two farriers and somebody’s boyfriend, and it was loud and greasy and completely without ceremony, and Mila laughed twice and ate a great deal and went back down to the cottage at nine.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with her coat still on.
Eight Christmases. The tree in the front hall at Greenspring that took two men to put up.
The party on the twenty-third that she planned and he attended.
The one year they went to the Delaware place alone, the second year they were married, when it snowed and the power went out and they ate crackers in bed and he told her — she could not remember what he had told her.
She remembered laughing. She remembered thinking, there he is, which was a thing she must have thought often in those days, because you only think there he is about a man who is mostly somewhere else.
At some point after eleven she went into the drawer by the bed and took the letter out and held it.
She turned it over twice. It was one page; she could tell by the weight of it.
She put it back under the woodstove manual and shut the drawer and slept badly.
* * *
In the last week of December she sat down at the barn office computer and worked out what she had.
It was not a pleasant hour. She had an account in her own name, opened when she was twenty-six, which had her own money in it and had been quietly fed for eight years by a habit she had never examined: she had kept putting things in it and never taking things out, the way a woman keeps a spare key somewhere even when she has no plans to be locked out.
She had that. She had the entries work, which was nine hours a week and came to almost nothing, and which Nikki was paying her too much for and would not discuss.
Against that she had a clinic that cost more per week than she wanted to think about, a cottage she was living in for free and had started fighting about, and a car she did not have.
She sat back and did the arithmetic twice and got the same answer twice.
She had until the first week of June.
June, and then she would have to take his money, or take a job, or take something. That was the whole shape of her freedom: it had a date on it, and the date was at the front end of the summer, and there was no version of the months in between where she also got to be a woman recovering gracefully.
Some people would have found that frightening.
Mila found it clarifying. She wrote the number on an index card and pinned it to the wall over the computer where she would see it every day, and she felt, for the first time since October, something that was almost identical to being at work.
* * *
Her mother came up on the second of January and stayed three nights.
Lorraine Kovacs was sixty-six and had run a boarding barn for twenty-two years with a bad back and no help, and she arrived with a cooler in the trunk and cleaned the cottage from the ceiling down before she would sit in it.
She did not ask what had happened. She waited, the whole first day, as she had waited for things out of Mila her entire life.
On the second night, after the dishes, she said, “Your father would have liked this place.”
“It’s a bit small for him.”
“He’d have liked the stove.” Lorraine sat down. “I’m not going to ask.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to say one thing and then I’m not going to say it again.
” She folded the dishtowel into a square and set it on her knee.
“When we lost the barn, your father wanted to tell everybody it was the bank. And it was partly the bank. But it was also him, and he knew it was also him, and he spent about four years making sure nobody ever put it to him in a room.” She smoothed the towel.
“It cost us more than the barn did, in the end. Him not being able to hear it said out loud.”
Mila looked at the stove.
“So whatever it is,” Lorraine said, “when you do say it, say it to his face. Don’t spend four years on it. That’s all.”
“I said it to his face.”
Her mother looked up.
“Good,” she said, and after a moment, “Was he sorry?”
“He was on his knees on the floor.”
Lorraine made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “That’s not the same question.”
She left on the fifth with the cooler empty and the cottage smelling like bleach, and Mila stood in the yard and waved her down the lane and then had to sit on the mounting block for a while.
* * *
In the first week of January she got on a horse.
She had been working toward it for a month and had told nobody, including Nikki, who knew anyway, because the entire barn knew and had been taking it in turns to leave things where she would find them: a mounting block moved to the good wall, a neck strap someone had cleaned.
Nikki brought out a bay gelding called Monty who was nineteen years old and had taught a dozen children to ride and had not done anything sudden since the Clinton administration.
“He’s an armchair,” she said. “If he moves faster than a walk I’ll eat the saddle.”
Mila got up the mounting block fine. Three steps, both hands. Then she stood on the top of it with her right hand in Monty’s mane and could not make her left leg go over.
Not would not. Could not. The signal went down and came back marked undeliverable, and she stood up there in the January cold with the whole barn watching and her jaw working and her face going hot.
“Okay,” Nikki said. “Down.”
“Give me a second.”
“Mila.”
“Give me a second.”
She stood on the block for the length of about twenty breaths. The gelding sighed and cocked a hip and waited, because he had been waiting his whole life and was in no hurry.
Then she came down the steps backward, and she said, “Thursday,” and Nikki said, “Thursday,” and that was all either of them ever said about it.
* * *
Thursday she got her leg over.
It was not graceful. Nikki had to take her ankle and put it where it needed to go, which Mila had sworn she would not allow and allowed. She came down into the saddle harder than she meant to and Monty did not so much as flick an ear.
And then she was up.
The whole world came back at once. That was the thing no one who does not ride will ever understand — that it is not a height, it is an address.
She had been living on the ground for three months like everybody else and she had forgotten what it was to be up here, where the mountains sat differently and the barn roof was below her and the world arranged itself around her knees.
Her eyes went. She let them. There was nobody in the yard but Nikki, and Nikki was busy doing something with a buckle.
They walked. That was all they did, for twelve minutes, around and around the sand ring in the cold with the steam coming off the horse, and it hurt in places Mila had not known were involved in anything, and she did not care at all.
“Same time Saturday,” Nikki said, when they were done.
“Same time Saturday.”
* * *
By the middle of January she could do twenty minutes.
She rode Monty and then she rode a mare called Tansy who had opinions, which was better, and on the sixteenth, which was clear and hard and blue, she asked to go out.
“Out out?” Nikki said.
“Up the hill.”
Nikki looked at the sky and then at her. “You want company?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Nikki said, and did not say a single one of the things she was obviously thinking, and Mila loved her so much in that moment that she had to look away.
* * *
The hill field was the hill field.
She had not been up there since October the sixth. She went the back way, along the fence line, at a walk, with the cold coming through her gloves and Tansy’s breath going up in front of them in clouds.
The ground was iron. The grass was flattened and yellow and the hedge at the top was black and bare, and there was nothing in that field at all — no fog, no mark, no dent in the earth, nothing that said a thing had happened here. Fields do not keep score. That is one of the great mercies of them.
She stopped at the top and let the mare blow.
She waited to feel something and she felt a great deal, all of it at once and none of it useful: the mare’s ears, the fog burning off, the sound of her own laugh at the Ridgely place before any of this, and then nothing, and then a chair dragged over tile.
She sat with it. That was the whole of it. She sat with it for a few minutes in the cold on the top of the hill and did not fall apart and did not run, and when she had had enough she turned Tansy’s head and rode back down the way she had come.
Halfway down she realized she was going to be all right.
Not happy. Not finished. But all right, in the specific sense that she was a person who could take a horse up a hill and bring it back, and no part of that had anything to do with anybody but her.
* * *
That evening she got in late, cold through, and sat on the floor in front of the stove with her boots off and her hands around a mug.
She had done the entries. She had done ninety minutes at the clinic with Darlene and twenty-two minutes on a horse. She had eaten a bowl of soup standing up at the counter, which she could now do, standing up, at the counter.
She was working out whether she could manage two rides a day by the end of the week when the thing happened.
She sat up.
She had not thought about him all day.
Not once. Not at six when the pain got her up, not in the truck, not on the block, not at the top of the hill field where her whole life had come apart. She had gone through an entire day of her own life and her husband had not been in it.
Mila sat still on the floor of the cottage with the mug going cold in her hands.
She had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that this was what she was working toward. That there would come a day when he was not in the room behind her eyes, and that when it came it would feel like setting down something heavy.
It did not feel like that.
It felt like the first small, quiet, irreversible piece of a marriage going out of the world — and the terrible part, the part she sat with for a long time while the stove ticked and the wind came up the valley, was that nobody had taken it from her.
She had done it herself. On purpose. Twelve minutes at a time, twenty-two minutes at a time, two hundred boring days of it.
And she was going to keep going.
She put the mug down and got up off the floor, on her own, without the couch.