THADDEUS TAKES ME INSIDE one of the white trailers and plunks down behind a junky desk. He starts checking voice mails on a huge, blinking phone. He seems completely at home, whirling around on the rolling chair, taking notes, pressing buttons.
I slink to the window. The glass is warm from the sun. I can see them from here, inside the circular white ring, pacing and prancing.
The first time my mom stopped by the side of the road to show the horses to me, I was young and kind of scared. They seemed so big to me then. They liked my mom, letting her pet them and stroke their manes. Sometimes she’d lift me up so I could pet them, too. Their fur was warm from the sun, and velvety.
These horses, the ones in the ring, they seem a little volatile. Pent up. They kick around the pen, snort, flick their tails.
I feel a little more alive than this morning, watching them. They are ready to do something, to move.
Two men and a woman enter the ring. They’re wearing boots and hats and have ropes and something that looks kind of like a whip.
They work the horses, putting them through paces and exercises. Thaddeus makes phone calls and then fixes us coffee from a machine in the corner. He hands me a mug and stands next to me at the window.
“Awesome, right? I love it here. So much better than the grocery store where I was before. I know working inside a stupid trailer isn’t the coolest, but I talk to people from all over the world on the phone and stuff. Mr. Gonzalez is kind of famous. Some of the horses are Arabians, which are pretty special. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
He stretches and yawns.
“I’m gonna go to the main house and get a sandwich. You wanna come, or should I bring something back for you?”
“I’m not hungry. I’ll wait here.”
After he leaves, my phone buzzes. Cake.
What happened???
I guess I wasn’t ready, I text back. Thaddeus brought me to work with him. At the ranch. With the horses.
That’s cool. Hey, what’s your mom’s full name and her birth date? I’m gonna do some digging.
Last year, Mom and I made her birthday cake together, a lumpy, three-layered thing, each layer dyed a different color: red, green, blue. It was delicious and disgusting at the same time. She’d eaten two pieces, one after the other, and then sighed happily. “I’m so old,” she said, touching my cheek. “Will you take care of your old mom someday? Make my tea? Put the blanket on my decrepit legs?”
“Of course not,” I’d answered, cutting myself another piece of cake. “I’m going to be out with all my boyfriends, partying it up. I’m not gonna have time for old people like you.” I flipped my hair like Selfie Kelsey Cameron in zero p.
My mom laughed.
My mother’s birthday falls between Thanksgiving and Christmas and she likes to say, “I spend two months of the year gaining ten pounds and ten months trying to lose it.”
I tell Cake the date, and give her my mom’s full name, June Frances Tolliver.
And then I wonder: Is that even her real name? I mean, maybe it’s not.
I know nothing about her childhood, except that she rode horses, and that later she went to college, and her parents died, and she became a librarian.
I look back down at my phone. Cake is typing…
Cool. Gotta go. Band prac. I’ll call you later.
I sit at Thaddeus’s work desk and cruise the computer. His Facebook page pops open. Photos of boys, Thaddeus with them, making devil horns, playing guitars. A little girl with hair the same color as Thaddeus’s, in a yellow swimsuit in a pink baby pool. That must be his sister. The caption says, “Jax thins she’s a mermad.” I peer closer. In the background beyond the baby pool, beer cans are scattered in the dirt. A skinny black dog on a chain. Broken plastic toys.
In the search box, I type Shayna Lee Franklin.
Aloha, friends and lovers. It’s been real. About to fly into the great unknown. Adventure and new life await.
My heart skips a beat. Photos of puffy clouds taken from an airplane window. A selfie of my sister in her seat, the blue sky and clouds behind her, her eyes wide, smudged with black liner. Red bandanna over her dark hair. Pink gloss across her lips. A half smile. She’s so pretty.
You have a beetiful soul, Shay!!!! Love you!!!!!
The universe works in mysterious ways, babe, we’ll miss you on the beach!!!
Come back soon and tell us all about your adventure.
A beetiful soul. My sister has a beetiful soul.
I type, How long does it take to fly from Honolulu to Tucson?
Eight hours and ten minutes, one stop.
Shit.
Thaddeus slouches back into the room, holding a paper plate with a sandwich and some potato chips. He holds out the plate to me, but I shake my head. “Skin and bones,” he mutters. “You’re gonna turn into skin and bones soon, girl.”
He glances at his computer, sees that Facebook is open. “Oh, wow. Is that new?”
“Yeah, she’s on her way here. Pictures from the plane and everything.”
He blinks. “It’ll be okay.” He gnaws on a potato chip.
I look at the way he sits on the other chair, slowly and carefully. Think of his little sister, Jax, in her dirty backyard, in her pink baby pool.
“Thaddeus, what happened? I mean, like, after the thing. To your back.”
His voice is low and he keeps his eyes on his plate, pushing chips around with a finger. “My stepdad tried to say I fell down the stairs of the apartment building, but doctors can figure that stuff out, you know? They aren’t stupid. He was always, you know, like, hitting me and stuff. Mostly when my mom wasn’t there. He’d say I fell out of bed or something. He got sent to jail. He and my mom weren’t married then, anyway, and they sent her to rehab, because she was all strung out. They both were, all the time. And the state took me away. My mom gave me up. Then they got back together and had Jax.”
His voice is shaking.
“Like, when I said I had problems, earlier? I can’t be touched a lot, because my brain thinks somebody’s gonna hurt me again. Does that make any sense? It’s why school doesn’t work for me. Too much shit, and shouting, and calling me poor and all that crap, you know? Makes me mad, and then shit happens. Oh, no, please don’t,” he says, turning to me, pleading. “I’m sorry I said all that. Please don’t do that.”
I take big gulps to stop crying. “I was trying to be quiet about it,” I say. “I’ve gotten really good at the silent cry since…you know. I could probably win a silent crying contest.”
“Again with the jokes,” he says. “You don’t have to joke about sad stuff.”
I ignore what he said, wiping my face with the dirty sleeve of my dress. “How can you go back and see him, though? I mean, doesn’t that kind of kill you?”
He shrugs. “My little sister. I just go up, you know, keep an eye on things. My mom doesn’t make great life choices, is the only way I can put it.”
Thaddeus starts moving papers around the table. I look at the soft tangles of hair against his stooped back, the way his skinny legs are bent awkwardly. How am I only just now seeing that Thaddeus’s entire body is kind of twisted? No wonder he smokes pot. He must be in so much pain, inside and out.
Yeah, he’d get picked on in school, for sure. I know exactly which group he’d be in, and what would be done to him. The only reason I’m safe is Cake, and her coolness.
“Aren’t you afraid of him, Thaddeus? Aren’t you afraid he’ll do something again, like, to her? I don’t know if I’d be able to do that. See someone who’d done that to me.”
Thaddeus rolls his chair next to mine and scrolls around my sister’s Facebook page. Beaches with red-and-gold skies. Digging money from a stained and crinkled waitress apron, looking tired. Standing in a line of pretty girls with glossy faces and minidresses, bridesmaids holding colorful flowers.
When he finally speaks, his voice is mild. “I love my sister more than I’m afraid of him. Sometimes you’d do anything to protect your family. It’s just something you know, deep inside.”
Hundreds of Shayna Lee Franklins, scattered all over the blue-and-white page.
Legs stretched out, gritty with sand, toes buried. A selfie, her face sunburned and smiling. Tiny shells on a string around her neck.
A living, breathing, magical sister.