Breakaway (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (24 page)

We both sipped; I was torn between looking at my new possession and looking at Nico. This surprised me. I simply wasn't used to feeling this degree of attraction to a woman. Of course, it wasn't sexual, I reassured myself.

Or was it?

This thought was even more startling. Was I perhaps going through a change of sexual orientation? About to become a lesbian at forty? I'd known other women who went this way.

I took another swallow of wine and asked Nico how her work was going. Seeming to sense my preoccupation, she talked easily of her painting. I watched her in relative silence, trying to gauge my own reactions.

The beauty and clarity of her face and words, the grace in her slim hands, the light in her eyes-these all appealed to me mightily, and yet the appeal wasn't sexual, I didn't think. I had no urge to reach out and caress her, no curiosity as to what it would feel like if she caressed me. That intense physical awareness that I felt when I was with Blue Winter was missing here.

What was here was a deep attraction of another kind. I delighted in her, in her way of being, in her appearance and her personality. I wanted to know her better. Though I felt no need to touch her, the thought of touching her was not unappealing. It was intimacy with her that drew me, a wish to feel close and connected, as the shrink had said.

I had no idea what she felt about me. As in all new relationships, I was uncertain where I was permitted to tread; I didn't know whether my attraction to her as a person was welcome or unwelcome.

"Do you enjoy being a veterinarian?" Nico asked me.

"A lot of the time I do. Not so much lately. To tell you the truth, I've been depressed, so I haven't been enjoying anything much lately." I found I had the impulse to be absolutely honest with Nico.

"I have been depressed once," she said. "I know how this can be."

"What happened with you?" I asked her.

"The depression came many years ago, when I lived in Spain. I do not know why it came. I could not eat, or read; I cried all the time. Nothing anyone said was any help."

"And what happened?"

"It passed, eventually. It took about a year. It left as it came; I did not know why. But I did come to believe it had a purpose."

"What was that?" I asked.

"It changed me. It softened me. I became more grounded in myself; I needed to struggle less." Nico spread her hands eloquently. "I cannot really explain it, but in the end, for me, it was a gift."

Now this was a different point of view.

"A gift?" I asked.

"Yes, a gift. It taught me to see things differently; I feel I am more aware. For me, it was like, how do they call it, the saint's dark night of the soul."

"Oh," I said.

"It is a common theme in spiritual writing," Nico went on. ''This dark time routinely comes to those who are ready to grow. It is the, what is the word, prelude to a time of great growth and fulfillment. The dark night before the dawn. Or so I have found."

Well, this was a new way of seeing things. Though at the moment I felt unable to regard my depression as anything other than a curse. Still, Nico's words were having a curious effect on me. I could feel myself opening up-a little-to the notion that depression might lead somewhere, that it might be something other than a complete negative.

"Did you do anything to help it go away?" I asked.

"Not really." She smiled. "Except that I accepted it. I accepted myself, and how I felt. I quit resisting the sadness. I allowed myself to be sad and to think that feeling sad was okay. And then it left of its own accord. Not all at once. Slowly. But it left."

An echo here of what the shrink had said. Accepting one's feelings seemed to be key. I simply had no idea how to accept feeling shitty as the status quo. It went against all my instincts.

Nico seemed to read my thoughts. "It sounds wrong, but it is true. It goes away much quicker when you stop fighting it."

I nodded, not knowing what to say.

She smiled understandingly. "And how do you like it?" she asked, indicating the painting. "Does it look as you had hoped?"

"Yes, it's perfect."

And the conversation drifted on to painting and houses, gardens and horses. I poured more wine; between us we polished off the food. I felt a deep sense of peace.

When she rose to leave I realized that I'd never brought up the subject of the horse rapist; it had never even come into my mind. And I couldn't bring myself to say anything about it now.

Instead I said, "Would you like to go out for a drink sometime? You said once that you missed going out to the cafes in the evening."

"I have to work," I told her, "so perhaps we'd better meet there." I gave her directions to Clouds, thinking she might enjoy Caroline, and we agreed to meet there at seven for drinks and dinner. I was being surprised by how elated I felt about it.

"I will see you then," Nico said, turning to say good-bye.

"Yes," I said. "And thank you." Impulsively I reached out to hug her.

She hugged me back with good grace; I had no sense of resistance or resentment. Her smile was as clear and pure as water, with something of its translucency, when she turned away.

As for me, I was surprised at myself. Everything about the way I related to Nico was unlike the Gail McCarthy I was used to. Maybe Nico was right. Maybe depression was a path to change.

TWENTY-THREE

Friday evening I had an emergency. I got the call just as I was leaving the office. "My mare foaled while I was gone," the unknown female voice said. "The foal's down and I think it's dying. Can you come?"

"Almost for sure," I said. "I'll call you if I can be earlier. See you then." Hanging up the phone with a renewed sense of expectancy, I headed out of the clinic and climbed in my truck.

This call was up in Zayante-an odd little hollow in the coastal mountains. Thick with redwoods, Zayante had been a major hangout for acid-dropping hippies in the wild old days of the sixties and early seventies. A legacy of shack-like houses (known to no building inspector or tax collector) and many long-haired and bearded denizens had resulted-a legacy that persisted, despite the steady urbanization of the county. These days Zayante was a somewhat unsettled mixture of old hippies and young yuppies, the latter drawn by the low housing prices in the area.

Driving up into the mountains, I followed winding narrow roads toward Lompico, the backwoods heart of steep, shadowy Zayante. My client lived near Lompico.

The place, when I found it, was disheartening. Unadulterated redwood forest, by the look of it, it had been cluttered up by a collection of junk. The classic rusting car bodies were augmented by several sagging shacks-roofs patched with plastic tarps-and piles of rotting lumber and other debris. Nowhere could I see anything that looked like a barn or a horse.

A woman emerged from the largest building, a somewhat derelict cabin, and walked to meet me. She wore a dress of some faded material and had long graying hair and oddly serene eyes.

I collected the things I thought I'd need, including a tranquilizer for the attack-prone mare, and requested that the woman bring a halter and a bucket of grain. These objects assembled, we moved off into the forest, the woman in the lead, and two shaggy pony-tailed and bearded men, who had emerged from the cabin in the meantime, in our wake.

We walked perhaps a quarter of a mile; on the way I elicited the information that the woman had no idea when the mare was due to foal, thus no idea if the foal was premature or not. The mare, it seemed, ran loose in this piece of forest in the company of two other mares and a stallion, all doing just as they saw fit. "She usually has a foal about this time of the year," the woman said.

It was rapidly dawning on me that I was-not for the first time-in the less than desirable situation of dealing with non-horsemen who had horses. Horses that were in all probability never caught or handled, thus never taught any respect for or confidence in humans. Such horses could be almost as difficult and dangerous to work on as their undomesticated brethren.

"She's down there," the woman pointed down into a gully; at the bottom I could see the red back of a sorrel mare, standing near the bank of a small creek. About fifty feet from the mare, a man with a long gray ponytail and black cowboy hat rose from a crouch to stand and waved us over.

I looked, but could still see no sign of the foal. The mare, however, stood over the creek-a series of potholes connected by trickles, this time of year-her ears pointed sharply forward, nickering anxiously from time to time.

"Can you catch and handle the mare normally, when she doesn't have a foal?" I asked the company at large.

"Yes," the woman said doubtfully. "She's friendly. She likes to be petted. I don't catch her very often though."

Great. Just great. I had no doubt that the "free" mare never had her feet trimmed, either. Or got her shots. Or got wormed. Probably this woman meant well, but it was not doing her horse a favor to neglect those services that a civilized society can provide for its creatures, including its animals. More or less like raising your child without benefit of a balanced diet or health or dental care, in the interests of having him or her grow up naturally.

However, this wasn't the time or place for a lecture. Not that it would have helped, anyway. It's been my experience that people do what they want and/or need to do; telling them they ought to do otherwise rarely has any effect.

"Why don't you try offering her some grain and we'll see if we can get the halter on her. We'll approach her from the far side, so she's between us and the foal, that way she won't feel threatened."

"I don't think she'll let me catch her," the woman said simply.

"Well, see if you can get her to eat grain," I said. "If she has her nose down in the bucket I can probably get this tranquilizer in her neck. Then we should be all right."

"Okay."

The woman approached the mare slowly from the uphill side. I followed a few paces behind, palming the shot in my hand. From her spot by the creek, the mare regarded us with some degree of agitation, tossing her head and stomping her front feet, but didn't appear unduly frantic. We both talked soothingly; the woman proffered the bucket, shaking it gently so the mare could hear the grain inside.

I could see the foal now, down on its side, his hindquarters submerged in one of the potholes. The bank was quite steep here; I had no doubt the baby had been unable to climb out. He looked ominously still.

The mare's ears came forward at the rattle of grain: I noticed she was very thin, every rib showing. She stuck her nose in the bucket willingly enough and I slipped the shot into her neck with no trouble. In a few minutes she was swaying slightly, a glazed look in her eyes. The woman put the halter on her. I made my way down to the foal.

Once I managed to drag him out of the water and up on the bank, I examined him carefully. He appeared normal and undamaged, looked as if he were full-term. But his skin was cold to the touch, his gums very pale, his pulse almost undetectable. During the five minutes or so it took me to check him over, he took only one breath.

At a guess, this baby was almost dead of exposure; I was pretty sure he had slipped into the creek bed shortly after he was born and been unable to get out. The combination of cold water, too much struggle, and the inability to get to his mother and the life-giving milk had killed him. Or almost killed him.

"Is he alive?" the woman asked.

"Barely," I said. "I'm afraid we're too late. But we can still try. We need to take him to the house where we can get him warm."