“What?”
“After we’d buried them—after we’d shoveled the dirt over their little bodies and stamped it hard—she bent down and put her face against the ground. The side of her face…her ear. Like she was waiting for something. Listening and waiting. Not for the dolls, but for something else.”
I thought of the way I’d left our mother in the hospital bed, only hours earlier: her obstinate ear pressed to the bed as the morphine rocked her back to sleep. I hadn’t revealed that moment to Alice; by coincidence, she’d conjured the image on her own. Now, when I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the cold wind in my face. I could smell the horses’ thick winter coats and hear their breathy apprehension. And yes, lying there on the ground: our mother, silent and smiling, her lashes sparkling with snow. Listening for that forbidden secret.
Together we turned our faces, daughter and son, aiming our ears against the rough canvas of the cot as though that secret lay below us, too. “Shh,” I said. “Shh,” Alice said. And we listened.
By morning, the snowstorms had subsided but the sky remained a greenish, cloud-crowded gray. As planned, Dolores met me in the hospital room. With equal parts sorrow and surprise, we noticed that Alice had left an uncharacteristic gift: before driving home, she’d bought a spray of red roses for the bedside table. Taped to the lip of the vase was a small pink envelope with Alice’s handwritten note. “You should open it and read to her,” Dolores suggested. But my mother was peacefully sleeping, and I couldn’t muster the nerve.
We decided to take the pickup. On the dashboard, her photographs and clippings had yellowed and curled. I drove, while Dolores took the passenger seat: a reversal of that night I’d arrived from New York, a night that seemed so erstwhile now. We agreed to avoid the highway or direct city streets, to try and recall my mother’s favorite route.
Dolores unfolded the map across her knees. For many miles, neither of us spoke. The muddied crests of roadside ice…the expressionless churches and houses…the flocks of coal-necked Canada geese. I kept expecting to see the scorched ditches or the lonesome oak from that day we’d encountered the boy—wasn’t this the road we took?—but that scenery never appeared, as though it hadn’t existed at all. I rolled my window down an inch, letting the wind rake my hair and clean the morning from my mouth. Dolores crossed her arms against the breeze but didn’t complain. Eventually, she reached into her purse and produced a fifth of Jim Beam: “Sure, it’s a little early for this. And yes, I really need a drink right now. And no, I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks.”
“I’m not exactly levelheaded either. Right before I left this morning, I did my very last bit of meth.”
She looked across the seat, half-smiled, and took a noisy sip. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”
“I guess so.”
“But we’ll stop when she needs us.”
“Of course we’ll stop. We don’t really have a choice, do we?”
The truck rattled and knocked along the frozen dirt roads. The noise reminded me of the shovels in Alice’s story, their incessant clang in that long-ago backseat. “Before she left last night,” I said, “Alice told me something strange.”
“About your mom?”
“I showed her the letter. As she was reading it, she remembered something. One night our mom brought her out to the riding stable, in the dark and in the snow, and they’d buried Alice’s dolls. She dug a big hole in the dirt, somewhere out in the horse pasture. They put all the dolls in the hole, and then they covered it up.”
“And you’d never heard that story before?”
“Alice says she told me about it, but really, I couldn’t remember.”
“Oh, Donna. All those secrets! Years and years of secrets!”
What thoughts had troubled my mother that night; whose faces had flared in her mind as she buried the dolls? Had she assigned them names, an Evan or an Abigail? Perhaps a Warren, a Donna?
“I know it sounds silly,” I told Dolores, “but when we get to the stables, I want to walk around and start digging. I’d like to try and find those dolls they buried all those years ago.”
“Hopefully the place stays open this time of year.”
“Guess we should have thought of that before we started driving.”
Dolores handed me the bottle. The alcohol would temper the speed of the meth, but I didn’t care, I put it to my lips and drank. Ahead, the roadside snowdrifts were soapy and dense; the route grew narrower and snakier than the route from my memory. I still couldn’t locate the sweep of land where we’d previously found Otis. Yet I knew I’d traveled these roads before. With my mother, on our missions; and with Alice, on past drives to small-town thrift stores and vintage shops.
On those road trips, Alice and I had always bonded in a smug insouciance: our giggles at the tumbledown mobile homes or outlandishly souped-up cars; our winces at the homespun billboards (REGEHR’S GUN SALES or NEW HARNESSES! COLLARS! REPAIRS!). Now, with Dolores, the mood had changed. It seemed our only bonds were the liquor and our numbing, mystifying stories of my mother. But I realized, as I took another drink from the bottle, that these bonds were sufficient.
She asked if I’d started making preparations for my inevitable return to New York. My initial answer was a quick, dismissive “No,” but Dolores persisted, asking further questions as though the silence would wound us. So I said I hadn’t thought too much about it. I wasn’t certain how to persevere “after all this was over.” I’d made so many plans when I left the city, I told her: I’d wanted these last days with my mother to be pure. The countless little thrills we could have shared, the spontaneous trips, the whims and lucky luxuries. I wanted to cook for her, nourishing breakfasts and suppers, extravagant twenty-ingredient recipes we’d always planned to try but hadn’t. I wanted to take her to the circus, to rod-and-custom shows at the Hutchinson fairgrounds, maybe even a cookout at Kanopolis Lake. I wanted to pose for pictures, just my mother and I, at the downtown five-and-dime’s photo booth, two-buck-fifty for a strip of four. I imagined us laughing in each shot, laughing to show we were tougher than drugs or disease.
Dolores was nodding, making appreciative murmurs at the stops of my sentences. “Sorry I’ve been talking so much,” I said. “You only asked me about New York, and I’ve been chattering for the last five miles.”
“Don’t be sorry. I bet it feels good for you to say all that.”
“Yes, it does.” She offered the bourbon again; I eagerly took it. “You know what else I’m sorry about? I’m really sorry about Ernest.”
She turned to watch the flat fields through her window: the emptied grain silos; the stripped and broken cornstalks; the circular hay bales swelling like blond loaves of bread from the snow. After a tense minute of silence, she said, “I just can’t believe he took the dog. But I’m going to get a cat! One of those Manx cats—those ones without a tail. I want to name him Rascal. I think those cats are cute when they don’t have their tails.”
I could picture Dolores, jilted and reclusive, inside her house: drinking and smoking, watching the street from her window, her television droning and the tailless Rascal in her lap. Dolores without her husband Ernest, without her best friend Donna.
“I like those cats, too,” I said.
“And so did your mom.”
The narrow road began to straighten, and at last we saw the weathered Triple Crown sign. I turned into the driveway, pulled up to the office, and parked. The place was smaller, less significant, than the wobbly picture I’d always carried in my mind; it had all seemed so royal when I was a boy. We got out of the pickup and gingerly shut our doors. Once again, the snow was falling. To our left were the meager stables, the rickety gate and fence, and the barren trails that wound past the horse fields, along the roll of hills, through the distant windbreak of snow-tipped poplars and oaks. To our right stood a drab split-level house. And directly ahead was the office: a small white-pine log cabin, its gutters lined with pennants flapping blue and yellow and red.
Lamps were glowing in the windows. Side by side, we stepped to the door and knocked.
The woman who opened the cabin door looked nothing like the pleasant Patricia Claussen I’d imagined from the letter. She was hunchbacked and thin, surprisingly masculine, with a long silver pigtail, blocky lumberjack boots, and a flannel shirt the color of crumbling bricks. She had scarred, puckered cheeks; her mouth was downturned and bitter, like she’d never said I love you. “Hope you aren’t setting your sights on riding today,” she said as she led us inside the cabin’s single spacious room.
“You must be Mrs. Claussen,” said Dolores, brushing snow from her sleeves.
“Everybody just calls me Pat. But we aren’t scheduling rides right now. We just put the horses out to pasture.”
After a moment’s consideration, she thrust out her hand, and we shook. I heard the telltale creak of a rocking chair and looked to the opposite corner of the cabin, where a chubby teenage girl sat slouching beside a wood-burning stove, immersed in a geometry textbook, one hand busy in a family-size bag of cheese popcorn. The girl didn’t bother glancing up at us.
“We know it’s too cold and snowy to ride,” I said. “We only drove out to ask some questions, if that’s okay.”
“You sound like those private detectives on those TV shows.”
Dolores and I exchanged a quick glance, then laughed artificially. I took the letter from my pocket, held it toward the light, and explained who we were. At the mention of my mother’s name, Pat Claussen brightened slightly. The girl in the chair glanced up from her homework to scrutinize us. The girl wore dark lipstick and thick, sky-blue shadow over her eyes; I remembered the photos of Lacey Wyler, that autumn morning in the Haven Café, the smells of coffee and coconut pie. I greeted the girl with a nod, but she turned back to her book.
“That’s our assistant Cindy,” Pat said. “She was here both times your mom visited. But didn’t your mom come out here with you today?”
“She’s in Hutchinson Hospital,” said Dolores. “Lymphoma.”
“Oh, dear. Oh, that’s terrible. You just never know! I’m so sorry. The past few months I’ve been flying back and forth to Colorado to take care of my brother…cancer too. You just never know.”
Dolores was nodding in tipsy agreement; soon she began sharing her own cancer story. Nothing like a good disease for making a new friend, I thought. I let them speak, stepping deeper inside to examine the room. Behind the file cabinets and the central registration desk were monochrome photographs of past and present horses, a display case filled with trophies, and hand-stenciled signs listing regulations and rates. But the dominant feature in the Triple Crown office was the collection of angel pictures. They covered the entire eastern wall, prints from old magazines and books, framed in huge baroque frames that seemed crafted from the same pine as the cabin. There were thirty, perhaps forty or more: solemn angels, rapturous angels, some with huge wings and others with small, angels with haloes of various diameters and heights. Weeks ago, my mother must have stood in this same spot, staring up at the pictures just as I stared now. Which angel had been her favorite? Which most resembled her Warren?
I turned back to Pat Claussen, interrupting Dolores’s story. “Quite an impressive collection you’ve got here,” I said.
“Oh, I had nothing to do with those. The angels were there when we moved in, so we didn’t bother taking them down. They’re a bit of a trademark now…some of our regulars even call us the ‘Angel Riding Stable.’ You know, sometimes I think I like that name even better.”
“Oh that would be a terrific name,” Cindy sarcastically said.
Dolores took her hands from her coat pockets; she raised her voice so everyone could hear. “We want to learn more about things like that,” she said. “Past things. I know that when Donna was here, she asked questions about Sterling, and the history of the stable, and the people who used to live around here. And I know you weren’t able to answer. But there are lots of things we need to know! It’s very important to us. Anything else you might be able to tell us about this place.”
Pat Claussen paused to contemplate, clasping her hands at her chest. She tilted her head toward the ceiling, its high exposed rafters and transverse beams. Ultimately, however, she could only provide a slight, one-shouldered shrug. “Honestly, I’m not the one you should ask. I think you should find a lady in town by the name of Pamela Sporn. She usually goes by Pammy. Works at the Sterling post office; she’s been there years and years.” She put one hand to the side of her mouth as though confessing a secret. Then she whispered, “Pammy’s what some people call the ‘town gossip.’”
“Could we go see her today?” I asked Dolores.
“It’s Sunday,” Cindy said through a mouthful of popcorn. “Post office is closed.”
“I’ve lost all track of the time,” Dolores said weakly. “Hours, days, weeks…things have been so difficult lately.” As she spoke, she seemed close to tears; I moved to stand beside her, placing a soothing hand on her back.
Pat went to the desk, found a Triple Crown business card, and scribbled Pamela Sporn’s name on its reverse. “Don’t know her number, but you’ll certainly find her at the post office. Oh, I just know she’ll have stories about Sterling and about this place. She’ll know all about the Bartons, and probably about the Lockridge family. Maybe she’ll know about anyone before them, too.”
“That hideous old busybody,” Cindy said. “No doubt she’ll also tell you every name of every single horse we’ve ever had out here. She’ll know about the original house and the cabins and that time they had the tornado and that time they had the fire—”
“Now, Cindy,” Pat Claussen said. “That poor woman is not a hideous old busybody.”
I walked across the room, toward the wood-burning stove and the softly creaking chair, to stare down at the girl. “Wait. This is the first we’ve heard of a tornado or a fire. Why didn’t you mention those to my mother?”
Cindy scowled, dunking her hand into the popcorn; when she pulled it out again, her fingertips were orange with powdery cheese. “Because she didn’t ask,” she said.
“Those things happened a long, long time ago,” said Pat. “Possibly even before the Lockridges were here. All we know is the land was severely damaged in the tornado, and then just the following year was the fire. Must have been terrible! The way I heard it, the fire destroyed all the papers for the horses, all their progeny records, almost everything. Destroyed the main house, and the farmhands’ cabins that used to be connected. Apparently a few people were killed, even, and nearly all the horses.”
In Dolores’s face, I could see a flustered tension; she was striving, just as I was striving, to make some connection, some link between these newly conjured images from the past and the impenetrable stories my mother had told. “Then that’s what we have to do,” I told Pat Claussen. “We’ll go find this Sporn woman. Hopefully we can get more information from her.”
After a long, uncomfortable minute, Dolores regained the strength to speak. I could hear the impatience in her thank-yous and good-byes. She zipped her coat, tightened the scarf around her throat, and began inching toward the door.
But I wasn’t satisfied yet. I knelt beside the chair, clamped my hand over Cindy’s fleshy wrist, and squeezed. “Just one last question,” I told her, so softly only she could hear. “And don’t lie to me. I want to know this: when my mother was here, either of the times you spoke to her, was she with someone else? Or was she completely alone?”
She didn’t try to pull away. “I don’t remember,” she said. “Alone, I think.”
“Think harder. Was there anyone at all? Maybe a boy who looked a lot like me?”
With our faces so close, surely Cindy could see the desperation in my eyes, my nose raw and runny from the meth. But she didn’t look away. She shut her geometry book; a log crackled inside the black stove. Then she blinked twice and said, “No. She was by herself.”
Across the room, Dolores had opened the do
or to leave. I loosened my grip from the girl’s wrist, stood again, and hurried away, following Dolores outside, back to the fluttering snow. Pat saw us to the entryway; I heard the squeak of her boots, the rustle of her red flannel shirt. She stood at the door, murmuring the standard well wishes: hopefully we’d get to enjoy the holidays with Donna; hopefully she could find peace. “And maybe you’ll still have enough time for researching that book of yours,” she said. I turned to look at Pat again, but it was too late, she was closing the door. Yet in that half-second before it slammed shut, I glimpsed the cabin wall with its multitude of angels: their haloes and deathless shine; their radiant gowns and lushly feathered wings.
Dolores marched to the truck, returning to her warm passenger seat, her remaining sips of Jim Beam. But I didn’t follow. Instead I moved toward the stables, the wooden fence crusted with snow. I was thinking of my mother. Thinking of the tornado and fire; thinking of Pammy Sporn. I placed both hands on the fence’s upper rail, and, with a surge of strength, pushed myself over and into the field.
Now I was alone. I surveyed the ground as if to see the battered, ancient heads of Alice’s dolls, emerging from their mass grave to greet me. But there was only the hoof-tracked snow. When I looked toward the windy western horizon, beside the trails and trees, I could see the crush of horses: austere and riderless, with their winter coats of sorrel and gold and steel-gray; their muscular haunches; their slowly heaved breaths. I wanted to run to them, but the snow was falling harder, hard and heavy and fast, so fast that soon I couldn’t see the horses at all.
TEN
KAUFMAN WAS BUSY all day, and assigned two interns the task of moving her home. The interns were boys from Hutchinson Community College. Both had a clumsy, apologetic charm; they’d attempted a polite formality with their khakis and button-down shirts. Yet I noticed they wore tennis shoes, they carried tins of snuff in their back pockets, and their haircuts showed impressions from their baseball caps. As we left the hospital, the boys waited as I thanked the nurses. They transferred my mother to a stretcher, then wheeled her down the halls. We passed the aisles of other patients’ rooms, both closed and open doors; we passed the disorganized gift shop where I’d bought cards that first hospital morning. Wishing you well. Here’s hoping you bounce back soon.