Chapter 14
Nikki Brenner came down to the cottage at nine at night with a bottle of something and her jaw set, which in fifteen years had only ever meant one thing, which was that she had decided to do something she had been putting off.
It was four days before the second of May.
“Sit down,” she said.
“I am sitting down.”
“Right.” Nikki put the bottle on the table and did not open it. “I’ve been carrying something since February and I’ve come to the end of being able to.”
Mila set the headphones aside.
“Ivy’s alive,” Nikki said.
* * *
The cottage did what rooms do, which is nothing at all.
“She’s at a rehab yard outside Kennett Square,” Nikki said. “Aqua treadmill, the whole business. They had her in a sling for three weeks in October and she’s been walking sound since about January and they’re bringing her back into work now. That’s where she went that morning.”
Mila did not move.
“I found out in February. A guy from the yard called here looking for a farrier reference and said a name he shouldn’t have, and I got the rest of it out of him in about two minutes because he was young and I am not nice.
” Nikki’s voice was completely steady and her hands were not.
“He said the instruction on the file was that nobody was to contact you. Not the yard, not the vet, not anybody. He said the man paying for it was extremely clear about that and had put it in writing.”
“Nikki.”
“I’ve sat on it for ten weeks. I want that on the record, because you’re going to be angry and you’re entitled.
” She finally sat down. “I sat on it because in February you were a woman who’d got up off a floor and you were holding the whole thing together with terms and rules, and if I’d walked in here and told you that the man you’d cut off had been quietly keeping your horse alive since October — Mila, it would have taken you apart.
It would have gone through all of it like a hot wire. ”
“So you decided.”
“Yes,” Nikki said. “I decided. Like everybody else in your life has been deciding things about you since October, and I’m the one who’s been sitting here calling them all out for it, and I did it anyway, and I’ve felt like a hypocrite for ten weeks.
” She pushed the bottle an inch toward Mila.
“So there it is. Be as angry as you want. I’d do it again. ”
Mila sat in the chair with her hands flat on her knees.
“Say the last bit,” she said. “The bit you’re still holding.”
Nikki looked at the table.
“He called the yard every Friday,” she said. “Every single Friday since October. He doesn’t go. He’s never once been to see her. He calls on Fridays and asks how she is and tells them to send him the bill.”
* * *
She drove up on the Tuesday, which was the twenty-ninth of April, and did not tell anybody she was going.
It was an hour and forty minutes. Her back was screaming by Conowingo and she did not stop. The yard turned out to be five barns and a hill and a sand track and a woman named Cathy in a puffer coat who took one look at the truck coming up the drive and said, “Oh, hell.”
“I’m not angry with you,” Mila said.
“Everybody who’s ever said that sentence to me has been furious.”
“I’m not. I promise. I’d just like to see my horse.”
Cathy looked at her for a moment — at the cane, and the scar, and the face of a woman who had driven an hour and forty minutes on a Tuesday — and then she said, “Come on, then,” and took her down to the third barn.
* * *
Ivy was in the fourth box on the left with her head over the door.
She was fat. That was the first thing and it was ridiculous and it went through Mila like a shot: the mare was fat and glossy and standing square on four legs with her ears up, and there was a long white line of scar tissue down the near hind where something had come apart and been put back together again.
She had her head over the door because she had heard the door of the barn.
Mila got about three strides in and stopped, because her legs had gone, and put a hand on a stall front.
“Take your time,” Cathy said, from somewhere behind her.
Ivy watched her come. She did the thing she had always done, the thing that had made Mila buy her at thirty-four with her own money out of her own account — the long look, the ears going back and forward, the decision — and then she put her nose out, and blew, and dropped her head into Mila’s chest the way she had done every morning for four years.
Mila stood in a strange barn a hundred miles from home with her arms around a horse’s neck and made a sound she had not made since the hospital.
She stayed there a long time. Cathy went away and did something noisy with a wheelbarrow two boxes down for about ten minutes, which was the single most tactful thing anybody did for Mila Shepard that spring.
* * *
“She’ll do everything,” Cathy said afterward, in the office, with tea. “I’d have her hacking now. She’s not going to jump a wall again and I wouldn’t ask her to, but she’ll do everything else and she’ll do it happy.”
“When did you know she’d make it?”
“January-ish.” Cathy shrugged. “October she was fifty-fifty. Honestly? October I’d have told most owners to stop.
She was a bad break, she was down for three weeks, and she was a horse that had just put a woman in a coma, which — I’ll be straight with you — is usually the end of the conversation, because people can’t look at them. ”
Mila held the cup.
“Who told you to keep going?”
“Your husband.” Cathy said it with no weight at all, which made it worse.
“He asked what it would take. I gave him the honest number and he said do it, and he said if it goes wrong at any point I want her put down the same day and I don’t want her suffering for my benefit.
Which, I have to say, is not what people usually say.
” She drank her tea. “He’s called every Friday since. Never been up. Not once.”
“Did he say why not?”
“I asked him, about a month in.” Cathy put her cup down. “He said, she’s not mine.”
* * *
Mila sat in the truck in that yard for twenty minutes before she could drive.
The thing going through her was not gratitude and it was not even quite love, and she made herself sit in it and name it properly, because she had gotten very good that winter at making herself name things.
It was this: for six months, while she had been standing in a cottage building a good case that her husband did nothing except arrange her life without asking, that same man had been paying to keep a horse alive a hundred miles away and instructing everybody involved that she was never to be told.
And he had never gone to see it. Because the day he walked into that barn it became a thing he had done for her, and he had worked out — he had worked it out, by himself, with nobody helping him — that the one thing he could not afford to do was give her something and stand there.
She put her forehead on the steering wheel.
“God damn it,” she said, to the inside of a truck, in a yard in Pennsylvania.
* * *
She called Nikki from the yard office before she left, with Cathy tactfully out in the barn.
“Well?”
“She’s fat,” Mila said. “She’s disgracefully fat and she’s sound and there’s a scar down the near hind you could land a plane on.”
There was a silence on the line, and then a sound like somebody putting a hand over a phone.
“Nik.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to.” Mila leaned on the desk. “You were wrong. In February you should have told me, and you knew it at the time, which is why you’ve been carrying it around for ten weeks like a stone in your boot.”
“I know that.”
“And you’re the only person in my entire life who has ever come and put a thing on my table and said be as angry as you like.” Her voice went. “Everybody else waited to get caught. You didn’t. So I’m not angry with you, and I’d like you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing with that phone.”
Nikki came back on sounding like a woman who had blown her nose on a sleeve.
“Right,” she said. “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mila.”
“I genuinely don’t know,” Mila said, and found she was almost smiling. “That’s not a dodge. That’s the actual answer, and it’s the first time I’ve been able to give it since November.”
* * *
She called him from the pull-off on 272 with the light going.
“Where are you?”
“The house. Why?”
“I’m about an hour and a half out. I’m coming there.” Her voice was doing something and she let it. “Not the second of May. Tonight. I need to — Jason, I’m coming tonight.”
A pause.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Are you hurt? Just tell me that bit.”
“I’m not hurt.”
“Okay.” She could hear him deciding not to ask the next question. “I’ll be here.”
* * *
He was on the steps when she came up the drive at half past nine.
She got out of the truck and he came down and stopped about six feet short, the way he had been stopping six feet short since February, and she stood in the gravel in front of her own house and said:
“I went to Kennett Square.”
Everything went out of his face.
“Mila—”
“Don’t.” She held a hand up. “Don’t explain it and don’t apologize for it. I’ve had an hour and a half in the truck. I know exactly why you did it that way and you were right, and if you’d told me in February I’d have thrown it back at you and you knew that too.”
He stood there.
“I want to ask you one thing and I want the true answer,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Every Friday. Six months. Why didn’t you ever go?”
And Jason Shepard stood in the gravel outside his grandmother’s house and said, “Because if I’d gone, I’d have wanted to tell you I’d gone.”
* * *
They went inside. Larry was asleep with the hiss going. She sat down at the kitchen table, which she had not done since March, and he made tea without asking, in her mug, and this time she let him.
And then she told him about the intercom.
She did it flatly and in order, because that was the only way she was going to get through it. The Tuesday night. The headphones. The front door at half past eleven. The box on the table, hissing, four feet away. How long she had stood there with her thumb on it.