Author: Heidi Vanderbilt
Category: Other
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Billie reached for her phone.
By the time she hung up with Josie, she had a list of three pediatricians with practices nearby, and the phone numbers for a half dozen urgent care clinics as well as for most, if not all, of Tucson’s major hospitals. She handed it to Richard when he came back.
“That’s great. Thanks, and to your neighbors. I hope we won’t need these, but they’re good to have.”
“Josie raised her own kids,” Billie told him, gathering her things to leave. “She and Sam were outfitters up north, and they had foster kids. So she’s pretty organized about things like this.”
“I see that. You don’t have to go, you know.” He pulled another bottle of wine from the fridge. “I remember meeting Josie, but I don’t know her. Tell me about her.”
Billie hesitated then hopped up to sit on the counter as he filled her glass. “Great neighbors. She’s maybe a little critical of what I do and how I do it. She’s got a lot of her own experiences and a lot of opinions.”
Richard chuckled, setting out some little cakes on a plate and sitting opposite her. “But you do like her.”
“I do. I wish she’d been my foster mother.” It slipped out, and she was sorry the minute she said it.
“You were a foster kid?”
“It’s in the past,” Billie snapped. “I said no more questions. How about you, Richard? Tell me all the rough things from your childhood. Tell me the really, really bad stuff, the stuff that left you with scars.”
She saw that he was taken aback by her edginess, and she regretted it. Not so much because she’d made him uncomfortable, but because she had accidentally revealed too much about herself with her outburst.
“There isn’t any,” he said. “Really not. Just what I told you about my mother. That was one of the great things about living where we did. The walking horse world is pretty tight-knit. It’s a big family.”
“Of perverts.”
“What? No!” Richard said. “Listen to me. We looked out for each other and each other’s kids. We went to school together and to each other’s houses during the week. On weekends we all went to the Saturday night horse show and rode together. Sunday we went to the same churches, then to each other’s houses for a barbecue.”
“Sounds ideal,” Billie said. “Except for the part about what you all were doing to the horses you rode. And you do know that people who abuse animals tend to abuse children?”
That was a dirty shot, deliberately misrepresenting studies by flipping them to say that adults who hurt animals hurt children, when she knew it was abused children who were likely to hurt animals.
“When my mom got sick, Eudora and Dale took over for her so I was always taken care of. One of the big weekend shows got turned into a charity event to raise money for Mom’s care. That’s the way it is there.”
Billie rolled her glass between her palms, struggling with herself. Carefully, she exhaled. “I need to go,” she said.
“I wish you’d stay a while longer.”
“Believe me,” she snapped, “you don’t want that.”
“Billie, I don’t understand what this is about. I thought we were having a good time, but you seem furious about something. What aren’t I getting?”
“You really want to know?”
Richard nodded.
Billie emptied her glass. “Okay. This might not make sense to you, but here it goes. You and your friends had everything good…that’s what you’re telling me, right?”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
“You had—have—money and land and horses and each other. And all the good things that go with that. Right?”
“Pretty much right.”
“So, what have you done with all this good shit? You’ve tortured animals. What fucking sense does that make?”
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t know, Richard. But I know. To answer your earlier questions, yes, I was a foster kid. I was beaten and raped, and when I ran away I was brought back for more. But before all that happened to me, my father was a trainer. He despised other trainers who mistreated their animals. My parents were killed in a car crash…”
“Jesus, Billie.” He reached toward her, but she pulled away.
“Jesus yourself, Richard.”
“Is that why you cut yourself?”
She pushed her wine glass at him for a refill. She should just shut up. The wine was fueling her outburst, as it had that night at DT’s after the fire that killed her filly, but it felt so good to be angry. She felt clear and strong and right.
“Why I did that is my own business,” she said. “For now, you just need to know that I am going to do the best job I can writing about these horses of yours.” She set her glass on the counter and stood up, stumbled and caught herself. “Your friends have to be stopped. Someone has to speak up for the horses. Introduce me to people I can interview back in Tennessee. I’m asking for a guide through the whole mess there. Think about it. I’m going home.”
She took a staggering step, and he was at her elbow, supporting her. “Stay,” he said.
Suddenly she was exhausted and depressed. She didn’t want to drive home. She felt exposed by her self-revelations, stupidly, glaringly ugly. As if she’d covered herself with glow-in-the-dark paint and turned out the lights.
“You’ve had too much to drink. I have a guest room. No one will bother you, and you can drive home later. Whenever. Make yourself comfortable. I need to see to Alice Dean.”
She didn’t want to stay at Richard’s but it seemed the right thing to do. She nodded. “Fine. Where’s your guest room?”
He showed her to a small, tidy room off the kitchen with exposed log walls, a log bed, and its own bath. “You can lock the door if you want,” he told her. “I get up at six and make coffee, if you’d like it.”
As Billie murmured a thank you, they heard Alice Dean start to cry upstairs. Richard looked up, as if he could see through the ceiling. Sylvie’s voice joined her little sister’s, inquiring, then Bo’s, but Alice Dean’s sobs continued, rising to piercing shrieks.
“Dad!” Bo called. “Dad, hurry!”
He spun and bolted toward their voices. Billie followed.
Alice Dean stood in the hallway in a pink sleeveless nightie, her body rigid, her arms and hands held stiffly out from her sides. Her eyes and mouth were open, the screams coming from her blended into an unbearable siren. Her plastic horse lay at her feet, its legs wrapped in white ribbons or tissues. Beside it, on its side, spilling onto the floor, Billie saw a jar like ones she had seen in trailers at the show at her place and in the barn where she’d worked at Angel Hair Walkers, and in the stall of the filly she stole from the show.
“Mommy,” Alice Dean wailed. “I want Mommy!”
“Call 9-1-1!” Richard shouted. “NOW!”
Bo and Sylvie opened their phones as one, but Richard wrenched Sylvie’s from her hand and hurled it against the wall. “Where did she get it, Sylvie? There isn’t any in the barn, so where did she get it?”
As Bo started to give directions to the operator, Billie thought Richard was going to strike Sylvie. But he unclenched his fists and softened his tone. “Sylvie. I need to know so we can help her. Tell me!”
“My closet.”
Sirens sounded outside. Billie opened the door for the ambulance crew. Red emergency lights strobed the night. Voices, polite but insistent, seemed to be soft and shouting at the same time. She pressed her back against the wall while the response team clustered around Alice Dean and her father, questioning him, trying to soothe the shrieking child.
One of the EMTs called for a chopper to airlift Alice Dean to the hospital in Tucson.
“I want to go too, Dad,” Sylvie cried.
Richard grabbed her arm and dug his fingers in so hard Billie saw the skin turn white. “If you do come,” he said, “you will keep your mouth shut. We have to let them see what did this, but we will not say what it’s used for, understand? It’s just something
that was around the house that she got into, okay?”
Sylvie nodded.
“I’ll stay here,” Billie offered, “and feed the horses in the morning before I go home.”
“Good,” Richard said. “Thanks.”
And they were gone.
Alone in the house with Gulliver, Billie washed the dishes she found in the sink. Any feeling of being drunk had left her. She thought of having another glass but decided not to. She turned the television on then off. She stood in the door to Alice Dean’s room, its whitewashed log walls covered in win photos of champion walking horses. Billie stepped closer to look at the legends beneath the photos and saw that each bore the name of Richard’s family—his parents, his wife, Sylvie or Bo, or Richard himself. The biggest, matted in pink and framed in silver was of Alice Dean on a walking horse in a leadline class. Billie couldn’t tell if she had won the class or not, but she could see that the horses in the background were up on stacks and wore chains.
Billie went next to Sylvie’s room, its floor littered with Alice Dean’s toy horses. Billie looked into Sylvie’s closet, a girlish mess of shorts, riding pants, and T-shirts dumped on the floor, the poles laden with frilly bling things.
Behind a rack of shoes and riding boots, Billie found a jumbo baggie lying on its side, spilling bottles, jars, and rags. Fumes stung her eyes and made her throat hurt. She backed away and closed the closet door after her.
She found black plastic trash bags on a shelf in the pantry and rubber gloves under the sink. As she approached the opened jars in the closet, her eyes began to water and she coughed. She pulled on the gloves and checked each bottle and jar, replacing and tightening the lids. Then she stacked them inside one of the trash bags, double bagged it, and tied off the top.
She didn’t know what to do with it. Leave it in the room? Put it back in the closet. Take it outside? Then what? She carried it outside and tossed it into her truck bed then went back inside; she didn’t know what for. Billie stood with her back pressed against the steel refrigerator door. The house was silent. Outside, an owl hooted, hooted again.
Her hands were sweaty inside the gloves. She peeled them off, careful not to touch the outside with her bare skin, using one to remove the other, and dropped them in the sink.
The house phone rang. The machine picked up. She heard a woman ask, “Richard? Sylvie? Bo? Where are y’all? Someone pick up, please?” Then she hung up.
A moment later, Billie heard the lively jingle of Richard’s iPhone coming from somewhere. She found it lying on the bureau in Alice Dean’s bedroom. He must have left it there when he carried her upstairs. It stopped ringing. In a minute, she heard the beep that indicated a voice mail.
She looked at the phone, her mind thick as sludge. Alice Dean’s screams still exploded in her head.
He would need his phone.
She drove to the hospital, parked her truck, and waited in the lobby beside the double glass front doors until she saw Richard approach. He stopped several feet away from her.
“What, Billie?”
“I have your phone.” She held it toward him. “You left it behind. Someone called.”
He took it from her and looked at the screen. “The kids’ mother. I have to tell her.”
“How’s Alice Dean?”
“She burned her face and hands. Chemical burns. She got the juice in her eyes. They don’t know yet.”
“Know what?”
He grabbed her arm and moved her to an alcove beside the restroom. “Stop asking questions! You have no right! If you hadn’t been there… If we hadn’t been… I can’t talk to you. We were out in the barn… I shouldn’t have left her alone.”
PART II
CHAPTER 20
AFTER A THREE-HOUR delay in Dallas caused by thunderstorms, Billie’s plane landed at the Nashville airport just after midnight. She picked up her rental car—a black Ford Focus—at the Nashville airport and drove the hour to Shelbyville. She took a room at the first motel she came to and fell asleep the instant she lay down, oblivious to the scratchy brown bedspread beneath her cheek and the sucking gasp and belch of the window air conditioner.
She woke shivering, her eyes burning with exhaustion. She rolled herself up in the bedspread and tried to drift off again, but there was too much to do. Closing her eyes brought visions of the day ahead, lists of where she wanted to go and who she might meet to interview for the article.
Sitting in bed, she called home. She’d hired Josie and Sam to care for the horses, and paid extra for them to keep Gulliver while she was away.
“All’s good,” Josie told her. “Your little dog’s snuggled up beside Sam in bed. They’re both asleep.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry! I forgot the time difference.”
“I’m up anyway,” Josie said. “I never sleep through a whole night. Old age. Just wait. You’ll have to get up to pee then you can’t get back to sleep. Add a snoring geezer…”
Billie laughed.
“Your horses are fine. I fed them at seven last night, and I’ll feed them at seven this morning. If you don’t hear from me, all is well.”
Billie thanked her, got up, and showered. She did her best with the package of instant coffee in its cheap wicker basket, the skinny packets of sugar and powdered creamer, and the fragile wooden stirrers. The result was weak and cold, as familiar and evocative to her as Proust’s madeleines. She had drunk coffee like this as a child with her parents, in other motels, and the weak flavor took her back to then. She didn’t want to remember now. She wanted to get going, hop into the rental with its new car smell, its odometer hovering around seven hundred miles, its power everything, and the screen that showed what was behind her when she backed up.
The dawn moon hung over the tips of the pines at the far side of the parking lot, and the early Tennessee morning felt thick and sweet as custard. Predawn bird songs melted into each other as Billie stepped out of her motel room onto the sidewalk beneath the second-floor balcony.
She checked her cell phone to see if Richard had called. She knew he hadn’t, but she kept checking. He’ll call later, she told herself. It’s too early for him to visit Alice Dean in the hospital—if that’s where she still is. He’s busy with his horses. She blocked an image of him with his wife. Mother of his children. She was a resident of this very town, Shelbyville, as was Richard, whom she’d grown up with and married, who had now returned after leaving her. So they could take care of Alice Dean. Together.
An image of his ranch, the gate locked, the house and barns empty, flashed in her mind. She had gone back there once after Alice Dean got hurt. There was no one there, not even the horses. When Richard finally called her, it was to say that he was flying to Tennessee with his kids.
“How is Alice Dean?” Billie had asked.
“In pain.”
“Will she be all right?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“I’m so sorry.” It sounded trite, inadequate, but she didn’t know what else to say. She dropped her head into her hands, pressing the phone harder to her ear to catch his every breath. “I’m sorry, Richard.”
“Not your fault, really. I mean really, it’s mine. But we have to stop. I have to be at the hospital.”
“Can we be friends?” she asked. And you’ll still help me with my article? she didn’t ask.
After a pause, he said, “Sure.”
Hot air blasted from the room’s air conditioner behind her, and a steady stream of water spilled down the wall from the unit onto the pavement. She walked away from the building, out into the parking lot edged with magnolias and spongy wood mulch. The still un-risen sun had turned the tarmac and its puddles an oily pink. She heard sparse traffic on the two-lane highway that ran in front of the motel—wheels slipping past, indistinct voices far away, indecipherable words. Somewhere nearby a cow lowed, a horse whinnied, another answered.
In the lobby, a gaggle of teenage girls who each reminded her of Richard’s daughter Sylvie was lined up at
the breakfast buffet, loading paper plates with fruit salad, scrambled eggs, bacon, and donuts.
“Excuse me,” Billie said. “Can I get to the coffee, please?”
The line of long smooth legs and shiny hair parted for her. She took her cup to an empty table and sat looking out the picture window at a vast green stretch of lawn.
The girls were talking about a vampire movie they watched last night after they swam in the motel pool, comparing boyfriends to the movie’s lead teen actor, and each other to the heroine. Billie noticed a newspaper discarded on the table behind her and reached for it.
Local trainer expected to plead guilty to multiple counts of animal cruelty, read the headline. A grainy mug shot of Dale bore the caption: Dale Thornton, 71, accused of Horse Protection Act violations just days before the Walking Horse Big Show gets underway.
If Dale or Eudora would talk to her, grant her an interview, this could be a break for her. It was worth a try.
“He didn’t have a choice,” one of the girls said to her friend.
Billie glanced over and saw that they had another copy of the newspaper and were looking at the same headline.
“My daddy says Mr. Thornton was told that if he didn’t say he was guilty he’d be carted off to the pen and left there to rot.”
“Or get raped!” her friend exclaimed. “That’s what happens in jail!”
“Ewww! He’s too old for that!”
“My daddy says no way can the government tell us what we can and can’t do with our horses.”
Billie wondered who the girl’s daddy was but decided not to ask.
“They’re our property and we have rights!” the friend said. “We own them.”
“Anyway, they don’t feel pain. Not like we do. Animals don’t have the same kind of nervous system as us. They’re an-i-mals. Gee-duh, get it?”
The conversation veered to country music and musicians, and one of the girls sang a few bars of a current hit in an astonishingly lovely voice.
“You’ve got to audition for American Idol,” her friend said as Billie’s phone buzzed. “Or The Voice.”