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“Rose! I need you! Now!”
Dorothy is in a mood. We’re about to drive off with two of the horses and give tourists carriage rides at the nearby holiday central. Our landlord is in a bad mood, and it doesn’t help that our truck died in the barnyard just as we started our journey. Bill’s size nine mucking boots are the only thing we see of him while he works underneath the Chevy truck parked in the middle of the yard. I want to ask Rose if Bill is a mechanic of some sort, but Dorothy might hear me and get even more pissed off than she already is.
The two geldings munch hay inside the trailer, looking like they couldn’t care less if we stay or go. I attach the safety pins on the trailer stall bars and close the back door.
“Fucking finally!” Bill yells, and I hear a low humming sound from the truck engine. No one ever questions if Bill would be able to fix vehicles, machines or minor plumbing issues. It’s just a matter of how fast he’s able to succeed. Rose climbs into the back seat with me. Bill runs down the dirt road toward the log house to change his oily clothes and wash his scrubby face. Dorothy yanks the truck door open so hard for a second I think it might come off of its hinges. She jumps into the driver’s seat, wildly patting her coat pockets and then the sides of her well-fitting black jeans. One would never guess the woman is over fifty years old. If she would take her perfect bun down, letting her blonde curls run free, she’d easily pass as a model in her late twenties.
“Where are my gloves?” Dorothy asks sharply.
“Not sure, Dionyza. Where did you see them last?” Rose says in a friendly tone.
“On my fucking hands! That’s where!” Dorothy yells suddenly, opens the truck door and jumps down into the muddy yard. It rained last night and the barnyard turned into a muddy and flabby mess. Marching toward the barn, Dorothy kicks a few rocks out of her way and angrily mumbles something about lack of good help.
“Well, this will be a fun trip.” Rose sighs and looks at the log house longingly. I know it has been a while since she and Bill have been alone. They see each other every day and work side by side, but it must be hard for them to pretend like they are just “good pals” all this time. I’m not exactly sure how long my two best friends have been dating, but I sense their love isn’t in a puppy-love phase. I don’t care how good of a friend Rose is, she would have never let me stay in the same motel room with them during our Boston visit if she and Bill had recently fallen in love, taken over by raging honeymoon hormones.
Bill sits in the driver’s seat, approaching the holiday center at a steady speed. Dorothy sits on the passenger seat, wearing her black leather gloves she finally located in the barn’s grain room. Our landlord hasn’t said a word the whole thirty-minute drive over, and she seems to be deep in thought, oozing anger and frustration. Rose and I carefully exchange a worried look, and Bill peeks at his girlfriend through the rearview mirror so often it makes me worried his mother will notice. His handsome face is slightly frowned, making him look older than he really is. The tension inside the truck is nearly unbearable by the time we finally arrive at the holiday central.
Bill parks in a small parking lot right next to the park where we are supposed to drive around with the horses. The sun is out, making the wet park glimmer in its beams. The trees and the grass are so green it makes the scenery seem unreal, like a heavily edited postcard, or a painting of a fantasy world in one of those online games my ex used to play. Parked under a huge oak tree, the metal carriage waits for the horses. The oak tree provides much-needed shade for the holiday center staff, waiting for us with flyers and a money box. I wonder if Bill brought the carriage over, but I choose to remain quiet and not ask random questions. I’m glad Rose has done this “a million times” before, so she’d be able to tell me where to stand and what to say. I get extremely uncomfortable in a crowd full of strange Americans, speaking loudly and too fast for my slow foreign brain.
“Who has the blinkers?” Dorothy asks in a surprisingly calm tone.
All three of us look at one another with raised eyebrows. In a few seconds, it’s painfully obvious that no one remembered to bring the blinkers that attach to the horses’ bridles. Narrowing their eyesight makes them relax in a new, loud and crowded place. The horses barely ever get driven; they are dressage horses more than anything, although every single one of them knows how to pull a carriage.
“Sorry, Mother, I think we forgot the blinkers. I’m sure they’ll be fine without them.”
“You little shit! Of course they’ll be fine! Fine and fucking horrified!” Dorothy screams so loud I have to force my hands down so I wouldn’t plug my ears with my fingers. This kind of a gesture would surely make Dorothy even angrier than she already is.
“Jesus, Ma. It’s not a big deal!” Bill says and looks straight at his mother, trying to figure out what has set off the wild rage.
“You just can’t do anything right, can you?” Dorothy meets Bill’s gaze. Rose and I perk up in the back seat and open our mouths at the exact same time.
“It’s not Bill’s fault!” we say, sounding like twins.
Dorothy’s whole body freezes over, and I can nearly touch the poisonous vibes oozing from her tense body. She doesn’t turn around to look at us, but stares at Bill instead.
“I know you’re sleeping with her. You should know better. Young pretty whores like her cannot be trusted.”
Dorothy pushes the truck door open and jumps out. She yanks the trailer door open, pulls the safety bars off, and starts leading both of the horses at once toward the temporary stalls built for them by the oak tree. Bill’s face has gone pale and for a second I think he may throw up. Rose holds her head between her hands, slowly shaking it from side to side.
“She fucking knows,” Rose says so quietly I don’t think Bill is even able to hear her. I have never told them about Dorothy accusing me of sleeping with Bill, and for the longest time I had been sure she had realized how wrong she had been. Obviously I was mistaken.
“I’ll talk to her. We’ll talk to her,” Bill mumbles, but I can tell that he doesn’t have much faith in reasoning with his mentally unstable mother.
“She doesn’t know about you two. She thinks Bill is sleeping with me.” My voice sounds weak and I stutter the words out with a thick accent. My heart is racing and I’m horrified that my friends will get mad at me for holding such important information for so long. What will I do if they dump me altogether? Move in with Matt? We have only seen each other once, and even though the phone calls and constant messaging has made us even closer than before, I don’t think he’s willing to live with a person he has only met once.
Maybe Destiny would take me in. Although my middle-aged friend, a mother of five, must have her hands full without yet another mouth to feed. I have her phone number saved on my old Nokia, just in case I need to take her up on her offer to help me someday.
“How? Why?” Rose stares at me, her eyes rapidly moving back and forth between my left and right eye.
“She once confronted me about it, saying she knows that I’m sleeping with Bill. That she doesn’t have proof yet but once she does I wouldn’t have a job at the farm anymore.”
“Jesus Christ.” Bill sighs, dropping his head between his hands.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want you to worry about me. You have enough on your plates,” I say quietly, whispering in the end. The tears burn in the back of my eyes, and I’m too afraid to look at Rose. If she abandons me now, I will lose everything. At least everything that keeps me together, everything that makes my life worth living for. Rose has supported me and accepted me the way I am since the day we met. I rarely think about it, but she has become my whole existence. We spend nearly every moment together, working, hanging out, grocery shopping, watching bad TV, and sitting on the stairs at midnight, smoking cigarettes and suffering from our insomnia. We do it all together. I love her in a way I have never loved anyone else before. And now I’m going to lose her, because I lied about Dorothy’s mistaken threat.
“You should have fucking told me. But I get it. We never talk about her. And to be fair, I never told you about Bill either,” Rose says. She leans over and gives me a quick hug, but a dark shade remains on her worried face.
“Let me talk to her. This explains a lot. This is how she behaved back when she thought I was dating that girl Jane,” Bill says, and his usual cool and collected demeanor returns. “Why don’t you two start with the carriage drives? Rose knows what to do. I’ll get Dionyza and force her to talk with me.”
The carriage rides seem to go on forever. Rose drives the two black horses around the park, and even without their blinkers, they jog along, calmly ignoring the screaming children and the parents taking pictures of their precious little carriage riders, not bothering to turn the flash off. I have repeatedly asked our customers to “Please mind the flash,” but at some point I give up on trying to make them hear my careful requests. Rose smiles at me, but I can see that her mind is somewhere else. Bill has left with Dorothy, driving the truck off and we haven’t heard anything from them for hours.
“My turn, my turn!” a knee-high boy with curly hair screams right next to the carriage. The horse closest to the boy looks at him and snorts once, spreading slobber all over the boy’s navy-blue polo shirt. The boy climbs up the carriage and his mother comes over, handing me a twenty-dollar bill.
“Keep the change, sweetheart. Is it okay to take some pictures?”
“Yes, ma’am, but please mind the fla—”
I nearly have time to finish my sentence when the flash goes off and the mother giggles in awe. Her son grins on the carriage, looking more like a maniac than an overly excited five-year-old riding a horse carriage for the first time in his life. I shove the twenty-dollar bill deep into my jeans pocket with the other twenties, and hope that they are not all covered with sweat. It’s so humid I sweat all of my make-up off hours ago. My fine blonde hair is soaked, and it makes me wish I had a baseball cap on like Rose does. She always seems to know exactly how to prepare for any and every situation at hand. Maybe that’s why she looks so nervous right now, driving the horses back to a wildly flashing camera and a giggling mother. Rose has no idea what’s going to happen with Dorothy. She can only hope that Bill is able to talk some sense into her, and that we can all go on with our peaceful and happy lives at the farm—together.
The drive back home is like sitting on burning coal. Dorothy stares out the window with her foggy eyes, never saying a word. I have never seen Bill so dead serious, and his silence is torture for Rose and me. There’s a pile of blue cooler blankets stacked between us on the back seat. Rose reaches her hand underneath the horse blankets to find mine, and grabs onto it so tight I’m sure I have at least two fractured bones on my left palm. She squeezes my hand all the way back to the house.
Chicken noodles and frozen vegetables have just started to boil on our tiny hot plate when we finally hear a careful knock on our front door. Rose jumps up and runs to open the door for Bill. He walks in and sits on the green couch, holding an envelope. He rubs his forehead with his free hand and takes a deep breath. Rose sits next to him and patiently waits for him to talk. I feel a tingling sensation in my stomach and this time it’s not out of excitement. I’m horrified to hear the news Bill brings us.
“My mother reported you to Homeland Security.”
I blink and chuckle once, not understanding what I’m hearing.
“She reported me? But I haven’t done anything.”
“She told them you don’t have a job here anymore. Without a job, your working visa is not eligible. You need to leave the country.”
“Motherfucker!” Rose jumps up from the couch and starts walking in small circles on the kitchen floor. “We need to tell her, Bill. She can’t go home. She needs to stay here with Matt and us.” Rose talks so quickly it’s hard for me to make sense of all the words. My ears hear “Matt” and a warm wave travels through my whole body. Today has been so crazy I haven’t had the time to call him.
“She reported her two weeks ago. The letter arrived the very next day, but she has kept it hidden. They’re deporting her in two days,” Bill says and hands the envelope to Rose.
I snap out of my Matt fantasy land when Bill mentions deporting. “Does that mean I need to leave the country? In two days?”
Rose sits down on the kitchen floor, still holding the letter in her hand and the envelope in the other. The letter is crinkled into a paper ball, that’s how tightly Rose holds onto it.
“She can’t go home,” Rose keeps saying.
Bill looks at me and his eyes are filled with sadness. He looks like a human again, reminding me of the first time I caught him grinning, looking almost too beautiful to be a man.
“I’m so, so sorry. I’ve talked to her and asked her to reconsider. There’s not much more I can do.” Bill buries his head in his hands.
“What would she do if we told her about us, Bill?” Rose asks, still sitting on the floor, holding the letter in a death grip.
“She would make you both leave. Maybe me as well. It’s really hard to say. I’ve never seen her like this. Not when she’s on her meds.”
The second Bill has ended his sentence, we hear the fridge on the other side of our kitchen wall open. The ice cubes find the bottom of a whisky glass, making a cheerful clinking sound as they settle. Rose peeks in my direction, and Bill’s head pops up so quickly I’m afraid that he might have pulled his neck.
“She’s drinking again?”
Worried of Dorothy’s state of mind after we learn she is enjoying moonshine tonight, we decide to spend the night at the guest apartment above the barn. I shove most of my clothes and other stuff into one of my duffle bags and hand it over to Bill. Rose has changed into her pajamas and packs her backpack with barn clothes to wear tomorrow morning. Bill starts up the four-wheeler and drives our stuff up to the barn. Rose and I slowly walk up the hill and wait for our eyes to get used to the darkness.
“It’s not the end of the world if I need to go home. I can always come back,” I say to Rose.
She peeks at my direction. “But you can’t, love. The letter said that once someone is deported, they can never come back. Not even for visitation.”
My head starts to spin and I have to grab onto Rose’s arm to stay upright in the dark. I wonder which one I’m going to miss the most, Rose or Matt, once I’m back home, popping pills and dodging my ex-partners, friends, enemies, and other mistakes that I’ve made.
“Maybe I could run away... to California. I’ve always wanted to live in San Diego.”
“Now we’re talking!” Rose giggles and wraps her arm around me to keep me steady. “We can all come and visit! Just don’t forget to tell us which bridge you’re living under and we’ll bring housewarming gifts!”
I haven’t been to the guest apartment since my first night at the farm. It looks exactly as I remember it, and the king-sized bed looks just as tempting as it did last time I plunged onto it, shaken by excitement and jetlag. I open the window and let some late-night cool air flow into the guest bedroom. The humidity tends to take a break during the night, but makes a sweaty comeback first thing in the morning. Even two showers a day won’t stop me from sweating like a truck driver.
My duffle bag bursts open on the bed. I have tossed in all my belongings and clothes except for the laundry that waits to be folded in the laundry room in the log house. I dig for my pajamas, tossing my Discman to wait on the pillow. All the excitement would surely give me nightmares, or at least bad dreams. Music made it possible for me to fall asleep after waking up from a bad dream. I haven’t woken up screaming since my arrival to the farm. This made it possible for me never having to explain Rose my night terrors, or why I woke up in the middle of the night covered in sweat.
Thinking about my nightmares makes me automatically pat the duffle bag padding. The weekday pill organizer makes a faint clinking sound under my palm. I haven’t taken the pills for several weeks, and I still feel good, better than in years. The zipper gets stuck when I open the pocket holding the pills, my passport, and an envelope with a thick stack of cash. I have never taken any money out of my secret piggy bank. The money Dorothy pays me weekly is enough to cover all my expenses, mostly bagels, and then some.
The pill organizer hidden up in my pajama shirt sleeve, I walk into the bathroom where I had planned my own death the night I arrived to the country. The soaps and bottles don’t seem as giant anymore, and my toothbrush is now accompanied by a local branded toothpaste. Rose is in the guest apartment’s living room, sitting on a huge white armchair that could fit three Roses on it. On the bigger couch I see her lion-printed sheets and four king-sized pillows waiting for her vampire show to end.
I close the bathroom door and carefully push the lock so Rose wouldn’t hear me locking myself in. We never lock our doors in the log house. We barely close them even while taking a shower or using the toilet. Our roommate life has made it so there’s not much privacy in our everyday life. Neither of us is shy. We walk around naked after showering without thinking about it. The bathroom in the log house has no windows nor does the aisleway leading back to our kitchen and bedroom area. Rose would definitely wonder what I’m up to if she heard me suddenly locking the bathroom door.
The faucet makes a hissing sound when I turn it on. The running water is light brown for a while, telling me there hasn’t been any guests at the apartment for a long time. I pop open all seven of the small cells on the pill organizer. I carefully pick out my birth control pills and place them in a small plastic bag where my toothbrush and paste are. I shove the plastic bag with pills in it back to the make-up purse, and carefully flip over the pink organizer. Little white pills dance in the sink, taken over by the now clear and clean water, shooting out from the hissing faucet. The sigh I take is so deep, I feel like I exhale years of pain, anxiety, depression and sadness out of me in only a few seconds. I am free of my past. I’m ready to take on whatever the future holds, without leaning on anyone else; not Rose, not Dorothy, not even Matt. The only person I need to trust and lean on is me. And I’m stronger and more ready than I have ever been.
