Miracle Beach (2 page)

Gounda nickered at her, soft and low. It was his customary welcome whenever he heard her footsteps on the cement walkway. Most of the other horses “talked” only around feeding time, but not Gounda. At horse shows, people walked up and down the barn aisles throughout the day and night—but Gounda could pick out her footfall from all the others, his greeting unfailing every time.

Macy could see Gounda straining to catch a glimpse of her at the corner of his stall. He nickered again. The other horses’ noses were buried in their feed. Muzzles banged inside buckets, and buckets banged against walls. Macy loved those sounds: horses being well cared for. Fed. Happy. She didn’t quite know who had taken over chores at the barn, just that someone had, and for that she offered a silent thanks. There had been so many doctors to talk to, so many arrangements to make.

The mare’s stall stood empty. Someone had stripped the used bedding and replaced it with fresh, sweet-smelling shavings. The barn had been cleaned—it smelled faintly of bleach—and straightened. Pitchforks and brooms hung on their proper hooks. Nothing seemed amiss.

Too small, grimy windows distorted the lighting into hazy waves of gray, so that the stains common to any barn floor blended together—neat’s-foot oil, glycerine soap, thrush ointment. But because she knew what to look for, and where, Macy could still see the faint splatter of red on the stall across from where she stood. She could still follow a spotted trail winding down the walkway.

It surprised Macy that she could look at the stains. And not only look, but examine them so closely: That was where Nash must have been standing when he surprised the mare. (Or perhaps she had surprised him.) That was where he landed after the mare had thrown him with the strength of her head and neck against a wooden support, solid as steel. That was where he slumped over on the ground, a tiny stream of impossibly red blood coming from his ear.

Macy looked for another stain, this one across the aisle from Nash, where she had crawled after catching one of the mare’s flailing hooves in her stomach; where she had sat, waiting, every breath a knife, cramps rolling through her abdomen like waves. Compared to the bright trickle that ran from her husband, the blood that had spread beneath Macy was wine dark.

She had known what she was risking that night. She had known that going to the barn to help the writhing mare, her own unborn foal sitting up inside of her like an obedient dog, could be the undoing of the tiny bundle of expanding cells within Macy’s own belly. The fertility specialist had warned her: strict bed rest for two weeks, no riding, no strenuous activity. Yet she had gone anyway. She had gone willingly. And by the time Macy had come to, the mare lay on her side, stone still, while Macy’s mistake pooled wet and dark between her legs and onto the cement where she sat.

And then there was the imagined baby—hanging in the air and staring down at her. Tsk-tsking her. That goddamned ugly baby.

Macy marked each stain with her eyes, matter-of-factly. A detective without a case, examining the evidence only to assure herself that something had happened there, but not what or why—questions she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Not yet. They skirted around her thoughts, animals stalking a perimeter.

 

Nash never did wake up. Doctors had disconnected tubes and wires, and she sat with him until they couldn’t wait any longer. She wasn’t going to be the first to leave. Not then. She had been leaving him in the tiniest of ways, over and again, since they had first met. Not because she wanted to, but because she had known, even if he hadn’t, that he deserved better. And so, this one time—maybe the only time she ever had—Macy was going to stick.

Eventually, they wheeled him from the room, a sheet pulled over his face. Macy held his hand, then his fingers, and finally just the tip of one, until the motion of the rolling bed separated her skin from his. She had asked them not to do that with the sheet. She asked them to pull it up to Nash’s chin if necessary, but not over his head. She explained how her husband would have hated having a sheet over his face like that, thinking of how, when he dressed, Nash would bunch the bottom of the shirt as close to the collar as possible, the way women gather their panty hose in a bunch at the toe before unfolding them up the leg. Nash would pull a shirt on and let it hang around his neck before struggling his arms through their respective sleeves, never lingering with his head inside while the arms poked through, like so many other people did. And even though she knew it couldn’t matter to him then, it made Macy feel better when the attendants stopped to peel the gauzy fabric down to his shoulders.

After that she went about the business of gathering his things. Most of his stuff had been placed together in a small cupboard. Nash’s jeans, henley, and red fleece were in a plastic bag, though Macy didn’t know why anyone had saved them for her. They were unusable now, in awkward, scissored pieces and crusty with blood. She had wanted to pull the shirt to her face, to smell him, make him real for just a moment longer. But not there. Not then.

Someone had folded his socks, rolled one inside the other with sharp, neat corners. She unfolded them, balled each one separately, and stuck a sock into each shoe, just as Nash liked to do. That habit of his had always driven her crazy. She chalked it up to laziness; he claimed it helped his shoes hold their form. She thought of them, then—rows of shoes stacked in cubbies at the back of Nash’s closet that his feet would never slip into again. That thought, the stupid shoes, almost crushed her.

Almost. What actually did was stepping through the hospital’s sliding doors. Macy sucked in the fresh, bright air and choked on it. She felt her legs give way, like the bones in them had disintegrated right then and there. Because, she realized, Nash remained inside. Because he wouldn’t ever step through that front entrance designed only for the living. Because she would have to drive away from this place without him. Because she no longer had a reason to come back.

In the end, she didn’t drive away from there. She couldn’t. And so her sister, Regan, did. And when Macy told Regan that she couldn’t go home, Regan took Macy back to the hotel where they had been staying, across from the hospital, and tucked her into bed, still fully clothed. Macy couldn’t bear the thought of climbing into the bed she had shared with Nash for nine years, alone forevermore, yet she couldn’t stop herself from imagining how she would have to do just that. Soon.

Macy willed the crying to start. She wanted to sob the body-racking moans that a good widow should. She thought that maybe that was the thing to help the hurt ebb even a little, the salve to apply to the gaping wound her life had become. But she couldn’t eke out a single drop. Instead, she lay in bed, tracing the neat beige lines of the hotel wallpaper with her eyes. Up and down, and down and up.

 

Now Macy ducked into Gounda’s stall and situated herself in the far front corner. He stood against the back wall, resting a massive hind foot. He craned his neck to look over at her. Then he took a step toward her and lowered his head.

He stared at her with big tar-pit eyes, cast soft and low, and Macy swore just then that he would have wept if able to. There seemed a sorrow reflected so deep in those eyes that it panged her. He snorted and sniffed. She wondered whether he made the connection that his own mother had died, too, that they had both lost someone. If nothing else, he had to know the agony the mare had gone through, screaming and bleeding to death in the next stall with a struggling-to-be-born foal inside of her.

Even if Gounda knew, Macy decided, he would likely have forgotten it all by now. Horses were supposed to have tiny little brains not designed for things like long-term memory. She felt both sorry for and jealous of him. What she wouldn’t give to be able to forget that night, yet Nash was the only thing she let herself think of. Standing around with a small group after the burial, she had found herself smiling—almost laughing—at a story one of Nash’s friends told, but it didn’t feel right. Like outgrowing a favorite pair of blue jeans, it seemed Macy had outgrown happiness in one short chain of events. Her. The mare. Nash. She had only to think back to the cacophony of thrashing and moaning and screaming to remind herself.

Other times, she tried to remember Nash as he had been, but in a cruel twist, those memories never came back as vividly as the ones of that night. Mere days after Nash died, there were times when it seemed the picture of him in Macy’s mind was quickly following suit. She would try to conjure him, but only his lips, or the color of his hair, or a certain splattering of freckles on his forearm would jell together. A portrait of disjointed parts. The rest of the picture lagged behind, faded or altogether blank. And she’d feel as if she were failing him all over again.

Times like those, panic set in. If she was forgetting parts of him already, when would her mind empty itself of his image completely? In a couple of years? One year? A few months? Just the other day, while walking across the hotel room en route to the bathroom, it had happened again. She got only his dimples, but no eyes. No smile. She stopped herself then, midstride, and flipped through old memories until she found one where his features were whole and intact. Only then did she let herself step forward.

But really, there was nothing the matter with her memory. She knew full well that her favorite mare—Gounda’s dam—was gone, that the tiny bundle of multiplying cells inside her was gone. Nash was gone.

“Just the two of us, bud,” she said to Gounda. She dragged a knuckle softly against his muzzle. He wasn’t the only horse in the barn, but he was the only one who had given himself wholly to her. And he was the only one to whom she had ever fully belonged.

Sitting on a pile of hay at the back of Gounda’s stall, her knees pulled up to her chin, Macy shook. She stuffed her hands deep inside the cuffs of her sweatshirt and raised one to either side of her neck, now slick with tears. Gounda edged closer to her, one cautious step at a time, until his boxy muzzle rested on one of her fists. He blew his breath across her ear in a slow, breezy lullaby. A sweet musk of molasses and grain.

Macy breathed with him.

In and out.

In and out.

MAGDA TURNED HER RING OVER AND OVER ON HER FINGER, staring at it instead of her husband.

“You need to pick up that phone and call her, Magda Allen,” Jack said. “Right now. Or today, at least. You need to call her today.”

It was a modest ring—a thin gold band with a tiny chip of princess-cut diamond fastened to it. For a while, after he had built up a successful business, Jack had insisted on getting her a bigger, flashier ring that would stand up against those of her friends, but Magda wanted to keep the original. She liked to say that it reminded her of where they had come from.

“Just check in, see how she’s doing. This is as hard for her as it is for us, you know,” Jack added.

Magda raised her eyes to him slowly, deliberately, and spoke to him in the same way. “What did you just say?” She pictured the words leaving her mouth like needle-sharp icicles.

“I’m not trying to make comparisons,” Jack said. “I’m just saying that Macy’s going through a lot, too. Nash was her husband.”

Magda felt a familiar rage start to boil deep within her, bitter and heavy. She had kept it in check since the incident at the funeral.

“But
I
was his
mother
,” she wanted to scream at Jack. She stood and walked to the other side of the kitchen table, where Jack stood with arms held open, waiting for Magda to fall into them so he could console and hold her. Instead, Magda lifted her right hand and struck him across the cheek. She didn’t see whether he held a hand to his face, or know whether he crumpled onto one of the chairs. She was already out the door.

 

The stench hit Magda as she walked toward the river. Green Bay stank in the months that stretched from spring to early summer. No matter which way the wind blew it assaulted the senses—from one direction, thawing cow manure; from the other, the acrid tang of surrounding paper mills.

Each time Magda drove or flew into Green Bay, the city’s ugliness struck her. Jack loved it, called it “charming.” But she saw only the sprawling factories spewing slow plumes of smoke, nestled in among warehouses and strip malls and the dingy gray smog that seemed to envelop it all. When Magda pictured whichever Egg—she could never remember if it was East or West—in
The Great Gatsby
, it looked a lot like Green Bay.

She and Jack had made their home outside of the city, in a suburb filled with old, historic homes—streets of miniature mansions with rows of massive oak trees that formed thick canopies over the neighborhoods. There was a river over which a private college and most of the houses, including theirs, stood watch, and though it had been designated a Superfund project, thanks to the carcinogens that local paper companies had dumped into the water, the river still made for a pretty picture.