Callie drives faster than usual, she doesn’t look at things as we pass. We cross into Maryland, closer to home. There are fields of corn on either side. The empty horse trailer tows lightly behind us, it floats around the corners. She doesn’t talk about the horse drowning.
“What’ll you tell Mrs. Voumard?” I ask her.
“I’ll tell her he couldn’t swim,” she says.
The tide will be rising by now, picking the dead horse up from the seaweed and washing him back and forth against the foreshore wall. He’ll float again.
“I can’t swim either,” I tell her.
“You didn’t grow up around water,” she says.
“Neither did the horse,” I say. I put my foot up on the glove box and look at the trees.
“Do you ever think about dying?” I ask her.
“I’ll have time to think about that when I’m dead,” she says. She concentrates hard on the road. “My father’s had time to think about it,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask. She’s never mentioned him.
“He’s been dead six years,” she says.
I don’t ask her what happened, she’s already driving too fast. Out the side window there’s a field being harrowed, a man with a pipe on a tractor.
“I don’t know if mine’s still alive,” I say. When I think of him dead it’s dragged from a horse through a tussocky paddock, his foot twisted up in the stirrup, the side of his face bumped through the sand then draped in the dirt as the horse stands still at a trough. “He’s probably dead by now,” I say. “He had an infected eye.”
“You don’t die from an infected eye,” Callie says.
“People die from strange things there,” I say. I reach down and touch the jacket on the floor; the leather’s still wet. I wring out an arm but only get a drip. “I think my jacket shrunk,” I say. I imagine the horse reefing out into deeper water, Callie struggling free from the coat to swim in alone. I wonder if she stopped and looked back.
“Do you really not care about the horse?” I ask.
She doesn’t like being quizzed, I can tell by the set of her jaw and the way she stares at the road.
“There’s nothing I can do about the horse,” she says. She rubs the window with the back of her hand. The camber of the road drags us into a bend.
“It looked big on the beach,” I say. I watch her short, chaff-coloured hair, her eyes fixed on the asphalt.
“Haven’t you ever seen anything dead before?” she says.
“Not lately,” I say. Callie doesn’t speak. “My mother once tried to teach me to swim,” I say. I look at the bridle between us.
“People who can’t swim annoy me,” she says.
I hitch an arm of the jacket in the window and wind it shut, to let it dry outside. I listen to the wet leather flap against the car, the buckles banging on the paint. It feels like the horse trailer might get airborne.
“Why do you pretend you don’t care?” I ask.
“Because people like you pretend that you do.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say. I pull the coat back in the window and hold it in my lap. “Can you let me out?”
She puts her foot further down and goes even faster. “Let yourself out,” she says.