Chosen by a Horse (18 page)

And always there was the question of pain. The vet said as long as the tumor had someplace to grow—in this case, into the eye cavity, pushing out the eye as it got bigger—there would be pressure but no pain. I didn’t think I believed this anymore. My guess was that she was adjusting to whatever pain there was. She wasn’t a complainer so we might never know how uncomfortable she really was.

I scratched her neck under her neck warmer, standing on her left side, well out of sight of the bad eye. Now that we were going to Cornell, I didn’t feel like I had to check it. I didn’t have to be the one to figure out if it was worse today, and if it was time to do something about it. I could just pet her and enjoy how cozy she looked buckled up in her winter blankets.

I wished I could have told her about the next day, told her where we were going and why. Horses experience a lot of anxiety when their routines are changed, and nothing in Lay Me Down’s routine included getting in a horse trailer and riding for six hours. Animal communicators claim you can convey reassurance to an animal telepathically. In Lay Me Down’s case, I could reassure her by visualizing the journey to Cornell and then visualizing her safe return. I don’t think I really believed this, but I tried anyway. It was hard because I didn’t know what the vet hospital at Cornell looked like, and I didn’t know how long she’d be there or even if she was coming back. Did that mean I was lying when I visualized her return?

Lay Me Down seemed unaffected by my mental efforts
to soothe her, looking perfectly relaxed regardless of what was going on in my head. So often this was the way it was with us. I’d look at her eye and become distressed and then feel better the longer I spent in her calm, unworried presence. Right now she was living in the moment, savoring her peppermint and enjoying having her neck scratched. I tried to do the same.

The next morning I woke up with butterflies in my stomach before I remembered why they were there. Then I rushed out of bed, fed the dog and cat, and went to the barn to do chores and to get Lay Me Down ready for her trip. I took her hood and neck warmer off but left her blanket on for the trailer trip. It was a cold morning, right around zero, and I assumed it would get colder the closer we got to Ithaca. Once we were at Cornell, she’d be in a heated stall so she wouldn’t need anything, including her blanket. I wrapped her legs in padded nylon shipping boots that covered her legs from hoof to knee and closed with Velcro straps. They’d protect her legs from bumps and bruises if she was jostled during the trailer ride.

I kept the horses shut in their stalls and piled everything I’d need to bring to Cornell just inside the barn entrance. Hotshot whinnied his objection to being separated from Lay Me Down, and Tempo protested his confinement by pounding his stall door with his front hoof. Georgia bobbed her head over her stall door, trying to nip me every time I walked by. The pile at the entrance included two bales of hay, a fifty-pound bag of feed, a feed bucket with peppermints
and alfalfa cubes, her halter, and a lead line. I wanted to keep Lay Me Down on the same diet, including the hay she was used to, in order to lessen the trauma of travel.

At ten minutes to seven, I heard Dorothy’s car pull into my driveway, and a few minutes later, Stan’s truck and trailer drove slowly toward the barn. I waved him up to the entrance, studying his face through the windshield, recognizing right away that this was a thoroughly decent human being. Carol, too. They were both plump with gray hair and glasses, and appeared to be in their midsixties. They had open, friendly faces, and Carol waved at me before Stan turned off the engine.

Carol stayed in the truck but Stan walked over to introduce himself. His hand felt thick and rough as we shook, and his grip was shy. He’d left his coat in the truck and wore a plaid wool shirt with a white T-shirt underneath, jeans, and work boots. He saw the supplies piled in the barn and suggested we put the hay in the space next to Lay Me Down and everything else in the small storage compartment in the very front of the trailer. I agreed, and we started loading. There was a hay net hanging in the front of the trailer on the side where we’d load Lay Me Down. I got some loose hay from the hayloft and filled it so she’d have something to eat during the trip.

When everything was loaded it was time to get Lay Me Down. I went to her stall and put on her halter. My hands were shaking when I snapped shut her cheek latch. I wasn’t sure why I felt so nervous already. Maybe it was the idea that
she’d be shut in a trailer for six hours. Or maybe sending her to Cornell signaled the end of whatever crazy hope I had that the growth on her eye would disappear overnight, like a pimple.

She looked so pretty without her neck warmer and hood, so vulnerable, as though I were sending her off to joust without her armor. However, leaving it on in the trailer would have made her too warm. I wasn’t even sure she needed the blanket. We’d stop along the way to check her.

I hooked the lead line to her halter, and she followed me out of her stall with stiff, choppy steps. Her lameness was always worse after she’d been confined to her stall for any length of time. She also wasn’t used to wearing shipping boots, and I think it must have felt peculiar to have thick pads wrapped around her legs. The other three horses nickered as she passed their stalls, in the early stages of what would soon be full-throated calls of distress as they watched her walk up the ramp and disappear into the trailer.

I led Lay Me Down as far forward in the trailer as we could go, and then I ducked under the padded breast bar that kept her from going any farther, into the small storage space. I clipped a shorter lead line to her halter and snapped the other end to a hook at the front of the trailer. This would allow her enough room to move her head to eat and look around, but not enough to enable her to lie down or walk backward. Stan’s trailer had a clear window in the front,
which meant Lay Me Down could see the sky above the roof of the truck cab. It wasn’t much of a view, but it was better than the trailers that had opaque glass or no window at all.

She seemed relaxed. She was already eating from the hay net hanging in front of her at nose level. I stood right next to the hay net, separated from her by the padded steel breast bar. She looked enormous, filling her side of the trailer with only inches to spare around her. If she hadn’t been on a short lead line, she could have reached up and licked the ceiling. It made me claustrophobic so I only stayed long enough to see if she was OK and to check that there was good padding all around her. Just before I left, I hugged her neck and kissed the cheek on the good side of her face. She sighed with a mouthful of hay, misting me with the sweet smell of alfalfa.

Outside, Stan had latched shut the back of the trailer and stood with his hand on the door handle next to the driver’s seat, waiting for me to emerge. He’d be making the twelve-hour round-trip in one day so, understandably, he was anxious to get going.

It was difficult to ignore the chorus of frenzied whinnying coming from the barn, but there was nothing I could do about it. Lay Me Down didn’t respond, which I took to mean she wasn’t distressed to be leaving. When I rode Georgia and we left Tempo and Hotshot behind, running the fence and whinnying after her, Georgia always
responded, echoing their fear of separation. Either Lay Me Down didn’t mind, trusted it was temporary, or she just wasn’t vocalizing her feelings.

We’d agreed that I’d follow Stan because he’d been to Cornell and knew the way. By following I’d also be able to keep an eye on the trailer for the two disasters I feared the most. The first, the trailer and truck coming unhitched, had actually happened to a friend of mine while he was crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge on his way to a horse show on Long Island. He’d looked in the rearview mirror and seen nothing. Fortunately, it was dawn on a Saturday morning, and there was almost no traffic. The other miracle was that the trailer had kept rolling in a straight line and had come to a complete stop all by itself.

The other disaster had never happened to anyone I knew but seemed like something that would occur more often than trailers coming unhitched and that was being rocked over by the horse inside. I’d seen plenty of trailers rock as the horses inside swayed from side to side from boredom or fright, and it hadn’t looked like it would take much to tip a trailer right over. Why this had never happened was a mystery and a miracle. By following, I’d be able to tell if Lay Me Down was swaying and I could signal Stan to pull over and stop.

I followed Stan out of my driveway, pausing at the house to pick up Dorothy and the food. When I handed the basket through the truck window to Carol, she laughed in
happy surprise. Then she reached out the window and hugged me.

“I knew you were sweet the minute I heard your voice on the phone,” she said.

It was the first good feeling I’d had all day.

T
HE SIX-HOUR
trip went smoothly and at two-thirty Dorothy pointed to a sign with an arrow that read CORNELL UNIVERSITY. We turned and followed Stan up a steep two-mile drive and arrived at what felt like the summit, an alpine village of Ivy League architecture sprawled across an open plateau of blowing snow. He turned into the almost empty parking lot in front of a large stone-block building that looked like an airplane hangar but said
EQUINE CLINIC
over tall glass-fronted doors. He idled the truck while I pulled into a nearby space and parked.

As soon as I got out of the car I was blasted by a wind so cold it tore my breath away. Four-foot snowdrifts rimmed the parking lot, and the fields around the clinic were rippled in frozen white waves. I ducked my head into the icy needles of wind-driven snow and ran to Stan’s truck.

“I’ll find out where they want us,” I shouted through the window.

He nodded, and I turned and raced across the parking lot toward the front door, wondering how anyone survived four college years of Ithaca winters. The front door was locked and for a second I panicked, thinking we’d come all this way and no one was there. I was shivering as I squinted through the glass doors, gazing down a long, wide corridor. I rapped the back of my ring hand on the glass pane, but the place looked abandoned. There wasn’t a human or a horse in sight. Then I noticed a little note posted about waist level near the middle of the door:
USE SIDE ENTRANCE
.

It didn’t say which side, and it felt like I might die of exposure before I figured out how to get inside. I debated whether to go back to the car for my coat but couldn’t bear the thought of crossing the windy parking lot twice. Instead, I crept around the edge of the building, trying to stay out of the wind, hoping I’d bump into the right door.

I did. Another sign said
RING BELL
. I rang and waited. I didn’t have much tolerance for cold, and whatever I had was now depleted. I was ready to smash the glass and throw myself against the heat vent I saw in the entryway. Some of my reaction was nerves, but more was genetic. No one in my family liked cold. Movies like
Doctor Zhivago
and
Fargo
fell into the category of Weather Horror Films to me. When I was little and taken to the beach for the first time, I stood in the Atlantic Ocean up to my ankles and wept at the cold. And that was in Palm Beach, Florida, in summer.

No one came, and I pounded at the small red button, feeling frantic. Just when I was ready to give up, a shadow appeared at the far end of the corridor, and as it got closer, it turned into a young woman carrying a ring of keys. She unlocked the door, smiling and apologizing, as I rushed past her into the warmth and quiet.

“How can you stand it?” I blabbered through stiff blue lips.

She smiled again. “Come back in the summer and you’ll see.”

I shook my head: no, I’d never see. If I lived here, I’d spend July and August dreading December. I’d get cold remembering this cold. I’d move.

Still shivering, “I’ve brought a horse,” I told her. We were standing at one end of a corridor that must have had twenty-foot ceilings. Glass skylights extended the entire length, flooding the building with natural light. The floor was made of beige rubbery tiles with a raised dot pattern designed for good horse traction.

“We’ve been expecting you,” she said. “Lay Me Down?” We introduced ourselves; her name was Eva.

I nodded and followed her for a few feet. Then she turned right into a smaller corridor lined with offices on one side.

“You just need to sign a few things and then you can bring the horse right in,” Eva said.

I couldn’t quite believe I was doing this—bringing a horse to a veterinary hospital. It was like walking back into my childhood, back to the place where I had learned hopelessness,
where I had first connected the smell of floor wax and disinfectant with the feeling of being crushed. Then, just saying the word
hospital
had made me carsick. For me, the connection between a hospital and loss was intractable and vivid. It evoked the day my heart broke. I could not forget.

Yet part of me was excited and hopeful. It was like the first time I dove headfirst into a lake. I was six, standing with ten toes curled over the edge of the dock in a death grip. I arched over the water with my straight arms clamped so tightly against my ears, ready to lead on the way down, that I was deaf to the instructor standing right next to me. I was beyond listening and beyond reason. I was all adrenaline, ready with outstretched fingers and pointed toes to launch myself forward into oblivion. I didn’t understand death, but it was all around me and inside me, pressing against me, pulling me down like the cold lake water I was staring at. I would be pretty for death, like my emaciated mother, a vision I would always remember. I dove off that dock in pure terror, understanding it was the bravest thing I’d ever done.