DUMMIES, SHAKERS, BARKERS, WANDERERS

THAT WINTER, MONA WAS IN THE HABIT OF RISING BEFORE DAWN. While Wright still slept, she went out to the barn to check on the Clydesdale mare. She liked stepping out into the cold, looked forward to those first breaths of icy air that stung her eyes and nose and stuck in her throat. She liked the sound of her boots squeaking over the packed snow, the glow of the pole light in the barnyard, the vapor of her breath hanging in the air. Most of all, she loved to hear the Clydes nickering in their stalls and to feel the solid bulk of them when she finally rubbed her hand over their withers and haunches and flanks.

Later, in the warmth of the kitchen, where by this time Wright would be drinking coffee, she would wait until he had heard the farm market reports on WVLN, and then, passing behind his chair, she would let her hand trail along his back, petting him, and she would tell him that the mare was fine.

“She’s a tough old gal,” he might say. “No quit in her.” Then he would gulp down the last of his coffee and hurry out to his truck.

Just before Thanksgiving, he had been hauling the mare, Lucy, back from a breeder in Texas when the hitch had come loose and the trailer had toppled and Lucy had come out the back and gone sliding on her side down a snow-covered I-57. It had been a miracle, Wright told Mona, that no one had hit her. “Everyone was driving careful,” he said. “Hell, I was barely doing forty, taking it extra slow, and then a thing like that had to happen. I could shoot myself.”

Their son, Gary, was still living with them then, and there was a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas when he was clean, the methamphetamine a nightmare fading. He talked about enrolling in some classes at the junior college, maybe even going to the U of I and getting a degree in landscape architecture, and Mona, caught up in his optimism, said yes, wouldn’t that be fine. She refused to consider how precarious this time of grace might be—indeed by New Year’s Gary would be using again. She preferred to watch him and Wright grooming the Clydes, the two of them paying particular attention to Lucy. Gary used the curry comb. He was tall and slender, and his long arms moved over Lucy with graceful sweeps and arcs that reminded Mona of a willow’s branches lifting and falling with the wind. Lucy swung her face around and nuzzled him, and it was as if Mona was seeing this for the first time. After all the years of raising Clydes, she thrilled again to how gentle they could be. Wright used the hoof pick. He was patient and fastidious. He sweet-talked Lucy as he cupped an ankle in his hand, and she stood there, a foot lifted like a lady about to test the temperature of her bath. “Lucy girl.” He flirted with her. “Who’s my girly-girl?” Mona watched Gary and Wright moving among the Clydes, pampering them, and she let the sweetness fill her.

Now when Wright left each morning and she was alone, she dreaded the long day ahead of her, the Clydes the only bright spot. At least she had them to care for. Where Wright went those winter mornings, he never said. Later, she heard from friends that they had seen him in town at Turnipseed’s Coffee Shop, or at the grain elevator, or at the city park slouched down in his truck, the engine running. It was clear to her that he really had nowhere to go those mornings and only left home so he would be away from her and their house, which was now a place filled with regret.

“Stop blaming yourself,” she told him once.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m the one who caused it.”

“It’s no one’s fault.” She repeated a line she could remember her mother saying. “Is just is.”

But she didn’t believe it, not in her heart of hearts. There she couldn’t stop wishing that Wright had the courage to put the blame where it truly belonged—on her.

She had been the one, after all, who had said to Gary, that day after New Year’s, “Either you get help or we put you out.”

They had all been in the kitchen on an afternoon when a cold rain was falling. Gary was at the sink, drinking a glass of water. He was always drinking water when he was using, gallons and gallons it seemed. The meth dried out his mouth, and he was always thirsty. He tipped back his head and his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat. When the glass was empty, he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He shook water drops from the glass and held it up to the light, turning it around with his long, narrow fingers.

“I bet I could eat this glass,” he finally said. He put one side of the rim into his mouth, and Mona heard his teeth click against it. When he was on a run, cranked on meth, he got the idea that he was invincible. He had been in and out of the hospital after trying all sorts of foolish stunts: he had gashed his forehead in a car wreck, broken his leg while trying to climb the water tower, burned his hand because he had been convinced he could reach into fire, shot a nail from a pneumatic gun into his scalp because he wanted to let some air in and relieve the pressure in his brain. He took the glass away from his mouth and winked at Mona. “Tell you what, Moma.” (He had always called her Moma, his mouth rounding with the long o sound, a pet name she was glad he had carried over from childhood.) “If I eat this glass—eat the whole damn thing—you and me, we’ll call things square. I’ll kick the meth. Go to that clinic in Champaign like you want. Otherwise, I’ll walk out that door and go away so you won’t ever have to be ashamed of me again.”

“We’re not ashamed of you,” she said. “Tell him, Wright.”

But Wright wouldn’t answer. He just kept staring at Gary, who was still holding the glass.

“Well, Dad?” Again, Gary put his mouth around the rim of the glass.

That’s when Wright swung his arm, the back of his hand knocking the glass away from Gary. It hit the wall and shattered. A trickle of blood leaked from Gary’s lip. And Wright, something unleashed in him, hit Gary in the face with his fist. He caught him on the jaw, and Gary’s head snapped back. He covered his face with his arms, but still Wright kept punching, his fists beating against Gary’s wrists. Mona tried to pull Wright away, but he shook her off. He was grunting with the punches. Gary had started to whimper and squeal, the way he had as a boy when he had bad dreams. Mona was tugging at Wright’s sleeve, his collar, his neck, anything she could get hold of. Gary was sinking down to the floor, his arms still crossed over his face. Wright leaned over, still trying to reach him with his punches. Mona had him by the shoulders, and they were off balance. They toppled over, and then there they were, the three of them in a heap. Wright was breathing hard. Mona’s hair had fallen over her face. They untangled legs and arms. Gary uncovered his face and Mona saw the bruise on his jaw where Wright’s first punch had landed. She reached out her hand to touch it, but Gary turned away.

Outside, the rain had turned to sleet and was peppering the kitchen windows.

“Look at us,” Mona said. “Just look at us.”

Gary grabbed onto the kitchen counter and pulled himself to his feet. Wright slumped over and covered his face with his hands. Gary grabbed his jacket from the peg by the door and went out into the sleet. That was the last time they saw him. He got into his Firebird and drove away.

They had no idea where he was, whether he was alive or dead, whether they would ever see him again. All Mona could do to get through her guilt for not being more forgiving, more tolerant, was to focus on the solid, knowable things around her: the snow and ice and cold, the Clydes, particularly the mare, Lucy, who was now so close to foaling.

One morning, Mona stepped outside just as the sky was beginning to brighten in the east. The bare limbs of the beech and hickory and sweetgum in the woodlot beyond the pasture’s end were just starting to emerge from the darkness, and in the dim light they seemed to her a jumble of arms, frantically reaching.

More snow had fallen sometime in the night, and the wind had drifted the barn lot. She had to shovel snow away from the door before she could swing it open, and still the bottom scraped. She was thankful when she finally slipped into the feedway and breathed in its familiar aromas: straw and hay, oats and tack, manure and horse.

She went to the first stall and saw Lucy down on her side. The birth sac, its white balloon, sagged from between her hind legs, and Mona could see the foal’s front feet inside the sac and then its nose. Her first instinct was to run back to the house and wake Wright—she had never tended to a foaling by herself—but then she saw that the foal, its head and chest visible now, had stopped moving. She knew there was no time for her to run for Wright; she would have to tear the birth sac before the foal suffocated.

When she did, she could see that the foal wasn’t breathing. She tried to stay calm, to think what Wright would do. Then it came to her, the simplest thing: she took a piece of straw and tickled the foal’s nostrils until they flared. She felt warm breath on her hand.

The foal surged and its hindquarters emerged. Mona held the rope of the umbilical cord and felt the pulsing of blood. Each pulsation stretched the elastic cord and felt as large as pullet eggs in her hand.

Confident that everything was as it should be, she backed out of the stall, knowing she had to get out of the way so Lucy could finally stand and break the cord and find her foal.

Mona felt something tearing at her heart, and she knew, then, that what she feared most, now that Gary had gone, was that she and Wright would become strangers, each of them wandering inside their own circle of guilt, unable to reach through to the other. She imagined bringing him out to the barn and showing him the foal, bright-eyed, wobbly-legged, full of promise and hope. It would be a single good thing, this gift, and maybe it would start a healing.

When Lucy finally broke the cord, Mona went back into the stall and dipped the stump in an iodine solution so bacteria wouldn’t pass through it and leave the foal with navel ill or joint ill. “Good girl,” she said to Lucy, who was nuzzling the foal, licking it clean. “Good Lucy girl.”

Suddenly the foal’s head jerked, and then its legs, and it began to bark again and again, the yip of a small dog—a terrier or a Pekingese, and Mona, watching, felt a chill pass through her. She knew she would have to wake Wright and tell him the foal had come, and instead of a gift it would be a sad, troublesome thing, because something neither of them could have seen coming had gone wrong.

“It’s a dummy foal,” the vet said. Wright and Mona were kneeling in the straw, trying to hold the shaking foal steady while the vet sedated it with an injection of Diazepam. “Dummies, shakers, barkers, wanderers,” he said. “They’re all terms for what I’m afraid you’ve got here, folks—NMS, neonatal maladjustment syndrome.”

It was, he explained, a problem that came along from time to time. No one could predict when or even fully understand why. Some thought the condition resulted from sustained cerebral compression in utero or during delivery. Others blamed it on oxygen deprivation either during the latter part of pregnancy or during foaling.

“Darnedest thing,” the vet said. He wore half-glasses on a cord around his neck, and they sat on the end of his nose as he finished the injection. “A real mystery. We’ll do what we can and keep our fingers crossed. I’m sorry it’s happened to you.” He shook his head. “Here it is, one more thing for you to deal with.”

“One more?” Wright said, and Mona heard the anger in his voice.

“I only meant…”

“I know what you meant.”

The vet busied himself with inserting a feeding tube into the foal’s stomach. For a good while, neither he nor Wright spoke. Mona kept her head bowed. How easily the vet had acknowledged their trouble, had made it known that their misery with Gary was common talk. She laid her hand flat against the foal’s neck and felt the nerves twitching. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with a sense of how they were all connected, all the—what was it the vet had said? Dummies, shakers, barkers, wanderers. Maybe the best God could do was to align the universe so that all those who suffered could find one another.

“It’s just rotten luck,” she said, unable to bear the silence any longer. “Or maybe not.” She stroked the foal’s neck. “Maybe we’re lucky.”

She looked over at Wright and saw him staring at her with heat in his eyes. “How the hell to do you figure that?” he asked.

“Someone’s got to be here to know this.” The foal’s eyes weren’t moving. They set in a fixed stare as if they weren’t eyes at all, but marbles or ball bearings. The barking had fallen back to an occasional whimper. “You know what I think? God doesn’t…”

“Mona.” The vet interrupted her. “It’s all right to be angry. No one would blame you a bit.”

She knew he thought that she had meant to say, “God doesn’t give us more than we can bear,” but what she had really been thinking was how the hurts of people were nothing without someone else to witness them. They were just howls in the dark. “God can’t take in people’s pains the way we do,” she had meant to say. “That’s what he expects from us: to bear witness, to know how close any of us are to anguish. That’s our job.”

“Maybe I’m angry,” she told the vet. “Sure. Maybe a little. But I don’t have time to dwell on that. Now, what do we have to do to save this foal?”

It would require keeping the foal warm and hydrated, the vet said. He would set up an IV to drip sodium bicarbonate into the left jugular vein, and antibiotics as needed. The feeding tube would handle the necessary nutrition. The most important thing now was to get some colostrum into the foal. Mona knew that this first milk from the mare was high in protein and natural antibodies that the foal’s immune system would need. Since the foal couldn’t suck from the mare, the vet would have to give them some frozen colostrum. “Thaw it at room temperature,” he said. “If you microwave or heat it, you’ll destroy the antibodies.” He told them to turn Lucy out to the pasture so she wouldn’t disturb the foal and set it to shaking and barking. “We’ll keep it sedated and well-fed, and then hope for the best.”

“What are our chances?” Wright asked.

“Fifty-fifty,” said the vet.

Wright shook his head. “I’d like it if they were better.”

In the kitchen, while they waited for the colostrum to thaw, Wright shelled peanuts from a bag he had brought home just before Christmas from the Trading Post Antiques store in Olney.

He had bought sacks of chocolate drops and peanuts, horehound drops and peppermint sticks, rock candy and divinity, the way he had when Gary was a boy—all this because Gary was clean and they were celebrating. Now the holidays were over and Gary was gone and there was all this loot. Wright pressed the peanuts between his thumb and forefinger and emptied the nuts out onto his palm.

“It’s a hard thing,” he said. “That foal. The vet’s right. One more hard thing.”

For a moment, Mona felt closer to Wright than she had in a good long while. His voice was toil-worn as if his words were stones he had to shove against to move, and she ached to see the slump in his shoulders. She knew they were nowhere near the end of their misery. She went to him and took his hands in hers.

She had no words for what she wanted him to know, only the heat of her skin, the squeeze of her hands. She let herself lean forward, bowed her head until it rested against his chest, and for a while, they were all body, neither of them speaking, relying instead on the silence, on the rise and fall of their breathing.

Then Mona heard the door open. She felt the icy air across her back and legs. When she turned, she saw Gary standing in the doorway, waiting, she imagined, for someone to tell him it was all right to come in. He was wearing an oversized flannel shirt, the tails hanging down to his knees. His eyelids were fluttering, and he was moving his head about, his eyes looking right, left, up, down like a bird on guard, ready to lift from the ground and fly at the first sign of danger. Mona knew right away that he was using.

“Man, it’s cold.” He wrapped his arms across his chest. “Man, I’m almost froze to death.”

“You don’t have a coat,” Wright said. “Where’s your goddamn coat?”

Gary unfolded his arms and held them away from his sides as if he were trying to carry something very large. He looked himself over, genuinely surprised that he had no coat. Then he looked up and grinned, that smile of pure amazement Mona remembered so well from when he was a boy and something surprised him. “No coat,” he said. “How about that?”

“You’d think you were twelve,” Wright said, and Mona, hearing the anger in his voice, knew they were at a point of danger.

“Better go out and check on the foal,” she said to Wright. “Go on. I’ll bring the colostrum out when it’s thawed.” She felt herself taking charge, knowing it was better to keep Wright and Gary apart until Wright had the chance to get comfortable with the fact that Gary had come home and that he was still in trouble with the meth. She touched Wright’s arm. “Go on,” she said. “Please.”

Wright did what she asked. Without a word, he put on his insulated coveralls and went out to the barn.

Whatever happened from that point on, Mona knew that she would always be grateful that he had paid her this favor, the chance to be alone with Gary, to try one more time to say how much she loved him. She would speak kindly, not foolishly like she had that night when Wright had beaten Gary with his fists. She would start at the beginning—already the details were coming to her: the way he followed her though her flower beds when he was a boy, and she taught him the names, salvia, coreopsis, zinnia; the way Wright swung him up on his shoulders and galloped across the yard, neighing, while Gary shouted, “Heigh-ho, Silver,” and the dog, Penny, a black lab, chased after them, her barks echoing. She would remind Gary of the time she had taken a snapshot of him and Penny sitting on the front steps. It was Easter morning, and he had on his first suit and a bow tie. His hair was combed off his forehead and held in place with some of Wright’s Vitalis. He had his arm around Penny’s neck and he was grinning, showing off the gap where he had lost a tooth. They had sent the photo away to a place that enlarged it and then made it into a jigsaw puzzle. Mona still had it, and sometimes she got it out of the closet and put the pieces together, recalling that Easter morning when the sun had been bright and the grass green and there had been just enough of a breeze to ruffle the yellow cups of the daffodils atop their stems.

She would offer up all this, their simple story which, at its heart, was a story of love, as evidence that there had been a time—and could be again—when the three of them were happy. She would remind Gary of the way he had curried Lucy, his arms moving with such grace that anyone who watched him would know he still felt himself connected to the world. He hadn’t drifted so far way that it would be impossible to save him.

All this she meant to say, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was a plea: “Let us help you. Gary, please.”

She knew right away that she had made a mistake; her request was too urgent, too pressing, more of a command than an offer. It was the sort of finger-wagging, no matter how well-intentioned, that Gary had always bridled at.

“Help me?” He lifted his chin and his nostrils flared. “What makes you think you can help me?”

“I’m your mother.” She said it plainly, trusting in the simple hope that flesh would answer to flesh.

“And you think you can fix me?”

She told him about the dummy foal and how it twitched and barked as if it were a thing lost to itself. She tried to tell the story without passing judgment on him and the way he was letting his life slip away to nothing.

“You were a good boy,” she said. “You were my good boy.”

“And now?”

“Here you are. The world gives us chances, opportunities. You came back for a reason.”

“I came back because I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble, Moma. More than you know.” He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “They’re on to me.”

“They?”

“The aliens. They’re on my tail.”

He told the story in a whisper, afraid, he said, that they might be listening. His hushed voice soothed her. It was the sound of wind stirring leaves, of water lapping at stones, and because he was so forthright, so earnest, there was a nobility to his telling that would seduce anyone, Mona thought, no matter how doubting. Listening to him, no one could deny that he was in the midst of something extraordinary and yet completely human, and he was trying his best to explain it, to say it simply and directly and make it something that belonged to anyone who heard it.

“Do you know why they want me?” he said. “Because I’m magic. I can do magic things.”

It was the meth talking; Mona knew that. Still she couldn’t help thinking that a long way back she had prepared the way for Gary’s fantasies. She had made his delusions possible. When he was a boy, she told him stories—goodness, where had they come from—stories about an octopus who played four violins at once, or a man so tall that when he walked his head bumped the stars and shook them from the sky. She painted a mural on his bedroom wall, the emerald city of Oz rising up beyond a field of poppies. In the backyard, she hooked an old playground slide to the branch of an oak tree, fashioned oversized bird’s claws from Styrofoam and left them sticking out of the leaves at the slide’s top so it looked like a giant bird, at any second, might come whooshing into view.

Had she made Gary’s world too large and bright, led him to expect so much that the ordinary, even after he had become a grown man, was never enough? “Meth jazzes things up,” he had told her once. “It makes everything king-sized.” She remembered the names he had for it: Mr. Crystal, crank, tweak, go-fast. There had been times—she had to admit this now—when the drug’s effects had seduced her, too, had brought her into Gary’s euphoria, a small part of her charmed when he was just high enough to be jaunty and full of spirit. Of course, she felt guilty later, but there it was, a true thing.

“Come over here,” he told her now, and, when she hesitated, he gave her a shy grin. He crooked his finger and motioned for her. “Come on.” He ducked his head, and she felt herself lean toward him. “Moma,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

She never for a moment thought he would. She remembered how on Christmas Eve she had got out of bed for a drink of water and had come upon Gary in the kitchen, standing in the dark at the back door watching the snow drift down past the pole light in the barn lot. There was no wind, and the snow came straight down at a steady, lulling pace. “Waiting for Santa Claus?” she asked him, and he gave her a sheepish grin and told her no, he was just watching it snow. She stayed with him awhile, watching everything outside turn white, and she felt there was no need for words ever again; Gary had kicked the meth and they had put behind them the pleas and threats and desperate attempts. She was content to stand there with him in the middle of the quiet night.

That was the feeling that was coming over her now. She thought that if she went to him and did what he asked, everything would be all right.

He had picked up a juice glass from the counter and was holding it out to her. It was a slender, fluted glass with a dainty etching of fruit along its rim: grapes, an apple, an orange, a pear. “Take it,” Gary said, and she held it in her hand, feeling its delicate design. It was the last glass left from a set that had been a wedding present; its mates had been cracked and chipped and broken over the years. Mona hadn’t realized how much this last one meant to her until she held it now, and Gary looked at her and said, “I want you to drop it.”

“Drop it?” she said. “Are you joking?”

“I’m magic, Moma. Remember? I’m your good boy.”

She heard in his voice a mix of plea and challenge, begging her to accommodate him if she dared, and she sensed that if she turned away from him, he would think it the final betrayal, and she would lose him forever. She remembered what, just a few minutes before, she had told him about opportunities, chances. All they had to do was take them. “Drop it,” she said, trying to get used to the idea. “All right.”

He would close his eyes, he told her. “Here, hold it close,” he said. “Right here. Right in front of my face.” He pressed his elbows against his rib cage and held his hands apart. “Put the glass directly above my hands, and prepare yourself to be amazed.” He closed his eyes. “Whenever you’re ready. Don’t tell me when you’re going to drop it.”

For a good while, she watched the way his eyelids quivered—just the slightest tremor, as if he could barely keep them closed, and she thought of all the times she had watched him sleep when he was a boy and given thanks for the mere fact of him. Now she could feel how eager he was for her to drop that glass, how badly he wanted her to do it. She held the glass by its rim, the raised lines of its etching—the roughness of them—her only tether to common sense. Drop the glass? How could she? But there was that flutter in Gary’s eyelids urging her on. “Trust me,” he finally whispered. “Just trust me.” And she let the glass go.

She couldn’t know, then, what was happening in the barn, that the foal had come out of the Diazepam and had begun to shake. She would know it in just a moment when Wright would run out into the barn lot and call her name. “Mona,” he would say. “Mona, come quick.”

For the time being, though everything happened in less than a second, she was fascinated with the feeling of there being nothing in her hands; the glass had been there, and then it wasn’t, and she was completely powerless to stop whatever was going to happen next.

Later, she would consider with amazement how much could be held in a fraction of a second, how many journeys the mind could take. She imagined Lucy sliding down the highway on her side, her legs pawing at the air as she tried to right herself, the white feathering around her hooves blowing back in the wind. That and the way Wright had beaten his fists against Gary’s slender arms, and the way the blood had felt pulsing through Lucy’s umbilical cord, and the sound of the foal barking, and the delicate cups of daffodils on that long-ago Easter morning, and snow falling.

Then Gary’s hands moved—she felt the air stir—and there he was, holding the glass.

For a moment, he kept his eyes closed. He held the glass in front of him, two hands grasping it as if he were a child and the glass was full and he was being careful to hold it steady. Mona thought it the most wonderful, the most frightening thing—the blind sense of motion, the quick movement of hands, the glass now safe.

She felt the way she had when she had tickled the foal’s nostrils and it had begun to breathe—lucky, thankful to be free from disaster. “You caught it,” she said.

Gary opened his eyes and looked down at the glass. “Magic,” he said. Then he laughed, and Mona was glad for his laughing, for the risk they had taken and then come away clean. He laughed until his shoulders shook and his face was wet with tears, and he wasn’t a man laughing at all, but a misery sounding, something raw and horrible just beyond ecstasy.

Mona held out her hands to him, wishing there were some way she could take it from him, all the terror. He lifted his arms—in a moment he would collapse against her, sobbing, his arms around her neck, and she would hold him up—but now he was only moving toward her, and the glass was falling from his hands to the floor where it shattered at their feet.

Months later, in summer, she would tell the story of the foal again and again. “It was the darnedest thing,” she would say. “Yip, yip, yip. Just like a dog.” But she wouldn’t tell the part about Gary; that, she would hold to herself, considering it too precious to let out into the world. She would think of it all through the long months of his visits to the rehab clinic. “I can quit,” he would say. “I just can’t stay quit.”

She would remember how he went out to the barn with her that winter morning, where they saw the foal shaking on the straw.

“Would you look at it?” Wright said, and he seemed so helpless. “Would you just look? Poor thing.”

But Mona was seeing something different, something rich and unexpected—a blessing where she hadn’t thought to find one.

For Gary had got down on his knees behind the foal and had laid his hands on it. He stroked its face and throat, rubbed his fingers over its lips and gums. He took his time, his hands slow and unhurried. He caressed the foal’s ears, and Mona imagined the way they would feel—as sleek as the beards of irises, the blades of lamb’s ears, the petals of roses. When she saw that the foal was beginning to relax—its head still now, its legs not twitching as badly—she felt something open inside her, some mercy. She felt so small in the presence of this astonishing thing, her ruined boy petting this dummy foal.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Wright asked.

“Loving it,” Gary said in a whisper. “Letting it know it isn’t alone.”

He moved his hand over the foal’s mane, combing his fingers through the hair. He stroked its withers and back. He rubbed its belly, taking care around the vet’s incision for the feeding tube. The foal tipped back its head and nuzzled Gary’s arm. Over the days to come, the sucking reflex would finally come to it, and it would nurse from Lucy. But now it was enchanted with Gary; his touch was the most wonderful thing.

All Mona could do was watch. Then, in a quiet voice, she asked Wright to please go to the house and fetch the colostrum, and he did.

While Gary held the foal against him, Mona squeezed the colostrum from its bag and into the feeding tube.

“There’s broken glass all over the kitchen floor,” Wright said, catching Mona’s eye, asking her with his stare what had happened. She sensed an accusation in that stare, an unspoken belief that whatever followed would be her doing.

She wanted to say everything she was feeling, but she was dumbstruck. How could she begin to explain that moment in the kitchen when she had dropped the glass and Gary had caught it? How could she tell Wright what she now knew: love was nothing without surrender. She imagined Gary standing there, his eyes closed, his hands at the ready, listening for the faint, almost imperceptible sound of her fingers lifting from the glass and letting go.

“An accident,” she said to Wright. “Just one of those things.”

He didn’t press her for anything more, and she was thankful for the fact that the three of them were together, gathered around the foal. They were kneeling in the straw the way the Clydes did sometimes in open pasture when they sensed a dip in air pressure, a rising of the wind, and they braced themselves for changing weather. The foal laid its head across Gary’s legs and closed its eyes. Mona watched the rise and fall of its chest, its measured breathing responding to the gentle motion of Gary’s hand. It was all so simple, she thought—this touching—and she wished they could stay there, never have to move, never have to rise up and face the rest of their lives.

She told herself there were days and days ahead of them—days and weeks and months and years—time enough for anything to happen. Anything, she thought, and a shiver passed over her. The word was so lovely, and yet so frightening. It lay against her, weighty and splendid, a promise alive and trembling at the heart of ruin, waiting for her to claim it.