discover only a small cow impassively chewing her cud (heifer not cow, Leah would’ve corrected her had she paused long enough to be informed). Brooke moved on to the next stall, then the next. At the fourth she paused, a big smile spreading across her face, and said something Leah couldn’t catch.
When Leah caught up and looked around the end of the stall, she saw an older boy—young man, really—sitting on a bale of straw oiling a harness. She recognized him as the boy that had been sitting on the hood of the pickup truck at the Dairy Queen last year. By then Brooke had moved into the stall, was standing in the narrow space between the cow (this was a cow, her udder swollen with milk where it rested on her lower leg like a white pillow with four pink teats sticking out) and the plank divider to the next stall. She was blabbering to the boy on the bale, her lips moving so fast Leah couldn’t understand what her sister was saying and realized suddenly she didn’t want to know. She focused on the cow’s unblinking brown eye gazing at her, so placid yet somehow familiar and knowing. She stared back at that eye.
A clump of straw fell across her face and broke the connection. She looked over at a frantically waving and animated Brooke.
“Earth to Leah,” Brooke said with shouting accentuation straight at her eyes.
Leah blushed.
“This is Danny Ashford,” Brooke said, gesturing toward the boy on the bale.
Danny Ashford stood up and extended his hand above the resting cow. Leah stepped forward far enough to grasp that hand lightly, staring at the boy’s simple white T-shirt, cleaner than she would’ve expected, a brilliant white lingering on her retinas after she dropped his strong hand.
“Danny’s farm is the biggest in the region,” Brooke said.
Leah nodded. She already knew that. Her class had visited Ashford Dairy on a fieldtrip several years ago, far out in the county north of town.
“Danny’s in charge of showing his father’s herd this year.”
Leah nodded.
“Leah loves the cows,” Brooke said to Danny, speaking slower now.
Leah blushed.
“She’s always telling me what kind they are and stroking their noses and talking to them with her touch and her eyes.”
Leah could kill her. She could just kill her sister!
Danny didn’t respond to Brooke but gazed at Leah across the cow and waited for her to look up.
Leah finally did glance at Danny, wondering what the stillness was about.
And Danny said to her, in a natural way she could understand but without exaggeration, as if speaking to a hearing person, “I talk to them with my touch all the time. It’s the only way they can hear me.”
Leah looked away quickly, not so much embarrassed as something worse—grateful for his kindness and understanding, and maybe embarrassed by her gratitude.
When she glanced up again, Danny was gesturing for her to approach the cow. “Her name is Annabelle. She could use some consoling after the trip here.”
Leah nodded, moved forward, and knelt by Annabelle’s head. Leah needed calming more than Annabelle did; and she was glad to brush the incredibly soft side of the cow’s face to the moist nubbly flesh of her nose, consolation being exchanged in one direction or another. The cow’s ear twitched. Leah itched behind it. The cow chewed its cud. Leah swallowed in a big gulp. Annabelle’s breath was strong and exotic, tinged with the scent of fermenting grain.
By the time Leah stood back up, Brooke was seated on the bale very close to Danny. She leaned forward, looking at the detailing of the harness he was holding, the shiny brass fittings against the supple brown leather. Danny smiled to Leah above Brooke’s head then winked. Leah blushed and looked away. She walked back out to the open aisle and on to view some of the other Holsteins that were part of the Ashford Farms herd. They were all beautiful animals.
A few minutes later Brooke hugged her from behind, then jumped in front. “Isn’t he dreamy!” she mouthed.
Leah knew she was mouthing the words so Danny couldn’t hear. Her lip-reading was very useful at times. She smiled and nodded agreement.
“He has to finish ‘feeding and bedding’ the cows,” Brooke said. She quoted Danny’s use of the verb “bedding” with a not so subtle glint in her eyes. “But I told him we’d stop by later.”
Leah nodded but was already trying to figure out what form stopping by would take with her deaf sister tagging along.
The next few hours unfolded in a manner defined by those wild rides. Brooke rode those rides almost nonstop, starting at one end of the row and riding each one in succession, then starting all over again. Leah watched from the ground with a heightened level of vicarious participation. Perhaps it was the unprecedented nighttime setting—those spinning lights backed by nothing except darkness seemed to take up residence in her head and stomach. She felt dizzy and queasy by turns. Brooke on the other hand seemed unfazed by her marathon of tumbling and whirling and inversion, each ride only increasing her enthusiasm for the next.
Finally she stopped, exhaled a long sigh, and shook herself off like a dog. Then she nodded at the Ferris wheel, its lofty ring of white lights starting and stopping at the center of the fair as it loaded a new set of riders. The Ferris wheel was the most adventurous ride Leah would consent to board, and each year riding it together marked the crowning moment of their Fair experience. Leah’s stomach was still churning from watching the whirling rides, and she’d secretly hoped Brooke would forget about their tradition this year.
But no—Brooke’s eyes were alive with fire and insistence. “You’ve got to ride at least one ride, Leah.” She tugged on Leah’s arm.
Leah held her ground, her body taller and stronger.
“Come on, Sis.” Brooke only used that name when she was annoyed or in a hurry. “It’s getting late.”
Leah saw Brooke wouldn’t give in so finally accepted her fate and let her sister drag her through the crowds to the line waiting to board the Ferris wheel. It was long but not as long as on weekend afternoons, and it seemed to move more quickly. Maybe nighttime rides were shorter than daytime ones.
And when they were finally in the cushioned seat with the safety rail latched (Leah always wondered what good that single square bar would do if they had a sudden jolt or broken hinge) and moving backwards in measured intervals as the operator loaded more passengers—first level through the ride’s framing and over the motor and belts and pulleys then gradually upward into the sky—Leah felt a startling new calm as her mind—both inside her body in that swinging creaking seat but also somehow separate, safely watching from a distance in the dark—knew that she’d be O.K., that someone or something greater than any threat or peril, greater than all threats and perils, was watching her as she watched the world, was safeguarding her against all harm. And this sense of reassuring calm persisted, more or less intact, even as they paused at the pinnacle of the wheel’s circle and Brooke did her requisite rocking back and forth, persisted largely intact through the full-speed descent and ascent, descent and ascent when the operator completed his loading and threw his metal lever forward and locked it in place. Up and down, up and down—the whirl of those other rides became the whirl within herself, the flashing and spinning and blurred lights out there became the blur in here, inside herself: the thrill, the giddiness, the stomach lifted into her chest, her throat. Yet it was all O.K. Something out there in the night was watching over her. At one point she grabbed Brooke’s knee in excitement and wonder. Brooke grinned at her sister, nodded in understanding, laid a hand atop hers.
At the end of the Holstein row, Leah grabbed Brooke’s hand to pause her in mid-stride.
Brooke turned and glared at her impatiently. “What?”
Leah smiled at her sister’s single-mindedness. Had she even thought about the awkwardness she was rushing toward? Leah pointed to herself then made a single sweep with her arm, taking in the whole building, the fair beyond.
Brooke said, “You sure?” She’d never left Leah alone at the fair.
Ag
ain Leah smiled, recalling Brooke’s in case we get separated warning at the car. It was impossible for her to imagine how Brooke could simultaneously be so thoughtful and thoughtless. She pointed to her watch. It was five past ten. She made an emphatic circle with a vertical slash through it, then pointed to the concrete floor—ten-thirty here!
Brooke nodded, though with some distraction. She kept looking over her shoulder toward the stalls.
Leah put her hands on either side of Brooke’s face the way Brooke did to her when she was making an important point. She nodded to the floor, then toward Brooke’s watch on her left wrist.
“Ten-thirty, Lee! I hear you!”
Leah released her sister’s face and smiled. She brought her hands together then released them, palms open, up into the air, to the steel trusses and corrugated ceiling of the pavilion. It was a gesture they both used that meant either freedom or joy—or joy in freedom.
Brooke smiled her thanks then turned and rushed off down the aisle.
Leah herself turned, trying to figure out what she would do with the next twenty-five minutes.
But before she could begin her contemplations, Brooke grabbed her from behind and spun her around. She said, “Thank you,” then stood on her tiptoes and kissed Leah’s forehead.
Leah nodded and watched her sister run down the Holstein aisle toward the distant Ashford Farms block. Someone emerged from those