Chosen by a Horse (21 page)

I didn’t know what else I could do. It might be hours before the sedative wore off and she was in any shape for a visit. I had been warned that meeting Dr. Rebhun was unlikely. I had to work the next day and so did Dorothy. There was nothing to do but go home and wait for a phone call.

This time we left by the designated door, stopping to tell Eva about Lay Me Down’s grain. She apologized and said she’d tell the girl who fed Lay Me Down herself.

Dorothy and I were quiet as we drove through the snowy landscape of dairy farms and hay fields scattered across open hills, stretching all the way to the horizon. Huge silos rose into the gray sky, some bearing a farm name in large letters across the top: Tillson, Kingsley, Hardwick. The highway wound before us, a dark path through the broad
white valley, almost empty except for the occasional car going in the other direction. I could feel the wind, like an invisible hand tugging at the steering wheel. Dorothy leaned against the headrest, looking straight ahead,
Moosewood’s Low-Fat Favorites
unopened in her lap.

It was three days before Christmas and I was thinking about death and dating. I was thinking I had no future with a man who was allergic to horses.

“Tell me again why it isn’t insane for me to be dating someone like Hank,” I said, glancing at Dorothy. As I turned my head, I felt a small shock in my lower back, like the snap of a rubber band. It was a feeling I knew well. “My back just went,” I said through clenched teeth. In another few seconds I could only hold myself upright with my arms, one hand pressed into my seat, the other gripping the top of the steering wheel. With every bump in the road, a sickening pain shot through my lower back and down my legs. Lifting my right foot from the accelerator to move it to the brake was excruciating as I eased the car onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped.

“Just tell me what to do,” Dorothy said. She was familiar with my back episodes and knew how debilitating they could be.

“I need to lie down,” I said, beginning to panic. I couldn’t imagine how I would get myself into the backseat, even with Dorothy’s help. A gust of wind rocked the car, triggering spasms of pain that made me nauseous. Sitting upright was unbearable. Dorothy got out of the car and began moving
our luggage so she could lower the backseat. I had to wait until she was finished before I could recline the driver’s seat as far as it would go, which wasn’t flat, but provided some relief.

I needed ibuprofen. “Four,” I told Dorothy. “They’re in my purse.” I swallowed the pills without water and asked Dorothy to pack the plastic bag from yesterday’s sandwiches with snow from the side of the road. I’d ice my back and wait twenty minutes for the ibuprofen to kick in and then, maybe, with Dorothy’s help, I’d be able to make it into the backseat.

We kept the car running with the heat on high, but I shivered anyway. It was all nerves. I was terrified to be that helpless, in the middle of nowhere. I glanced at the gas gauge, imagining a worse disaster. If we ran out of gas, we might freeze to death. The gauge showed three-quarters full. We were about two hours out of Ithaca with another four hours ahead of us. It seemed impossible that we’d ever make it home. But in the state I was in, it seemed that nothing good could happen. I was shivering so hard my teeth chattered.

Dorothy was the picture of calm, one hand resting on my arm while the other fished through my purse looking for my cell phone. “We’ll call your chiropractor to see if she can meet us at the office.”

I nodded my head. “Good idea.”

She pulled out my cell phone and flipped it open. There was no reception. Zero. We would die in a dead zone, one
of life’s little ironies. My brain careened through a list of people I’d heard of who’d frozen to death: Shackleton, Mallory, Doctor Zhivago—almost. Maybe we’d be asphyxiated first. I opened the window a crack, and a blast of frigid air swept across my face.

“There’s a police car behind us,” Dorothy announced.

“He’ll think I’m stoned,” I mumbled. Still, I was relieved. Maybe he’d help Dorothy get me into the backseat.

A face appeared at the driver’s window wearing wraparound sunglasses and one of those tan wide-brimmed state-trooper hats.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, opening my door and bending down to peer into the car. The car filled with cold air as the wind blew the door hard against his back. He reached behind him to hold it open with one hand while removing his sunglasses with the other. His eyes scanned the interior of the car before coming to a rest on mine. His face was pale and chubby; he couldn’t have been more than thirty.

I explained about my back. “I just need to lie flat.”

“Sure you don’t want an ambulance?” he asked.

God, did I look that bad? “No, no,” I assured him, “if you could just help move me.”

“We’re not supposed to do anything medical, ma’am,” he said, sounding doubtful.

“It’s not really medical,” I pleaded, “it’s more in the category of helping an old lady cross the street.”

He smiled at my stab at humor and seemed to consider the options. He looked up and down the highway.

“We need to get you off the road,” he said. “This is a bad place to stop.”

“My friend can drive,” I told him,
“if we can just get me out of the way.”

Maybe he could tell I was the kind of person who wouldn’t sue even if he dropped me on my head, or maybe he just wanted to hurry us off a dangerous spot on the highway. Whatever it was, he finally agreed to help move me.

He opened the hatchback first so when they got me that far, they could just slide me in like a two-by-four. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled me out of my seat into a standing position. I teetered between him and Dorothy with my arms around their shoulders, letting them support all my weight so there would be no compression whatsoever of my spine. The pain was horrible anyway, as though someone were cutting me in half with dull scissors. Every time my back did this, I wondered if I’d ever be able to walk again. It seemed impossible that such pain wouldn’t cause permanent damage.

They lowered the top half of me into the car, letting my knees bend so my feet were still on the road. Then the trooper opened the back door and knelt inside, pulling me the rest of the way into the car by my armpits. Flat on my back, if I didn’t budge an inch, I was pain free. At the moment, it seemed like a miracle.

“Thank you,” I said, releasing a long sigh. Dorothy handed me the plastic bag with the snow and packed various things around me to prevent me from rolling. We thanked the trooper again and then we were on our way.

With every bump and jolt of the car, the pain returned, but I was so relieved to be moving in the direction of help, it no longer panicked me. When we got closer to home, we’d call my chiropractor again. I thought about Lay Me Down and how glad I was that this hadn’t happened before we’d gotten her to Cornell. However bad this felt, Lay Me Down’s problems were far worse, and I was grateful I’d been able to accompany her to the hospital.

On Christmas morning I woke up after an uncomfortable night’s sleep, knowing that I didn’t have to do anything. There was no way I could. There would be no barn chores, no counseling clients through the Christmas blues, no putting in an appearance at my neighbor’s annual Christmas party, and no meeting Hank and his daughter for Christmas dinner across the river. Hannah would take care of my horses, and, at noon, some angel from a home-help agency was coming to give me a bath. Aside from the possibility of a late-afternoon visit by one or two friends, that would be the highlight of the day. Maybe the home-health aide would even change my sheets!

My world had shrunk to the size of my king-sized bed, which was piled with books, magazines, and videos I had to hold in my teeth as I crawled on my hands and knees to insert them in the VCR across the room. Next to me,
spilling off the bedside table onto the floor, were water bottles, open boxes of crackers and rice cakes, a box of clementines, vitamins, a big bottle of ibuprofen, a couple of empty soup bowls, and a half-eaten box of Whitman’s chocolates. Every time I crawled to the bathroom I had to navigate through the clutter to get there.

As long as I didn’t move in certain ways, my pain was no longer excruciating. Though I was still unable to sit up or walk, I recognized subtle signs of progress. Things didn’t seem too bad.

A few hours later, I was lying back with my eyes shut, luxuriating in the warmth of a lavender-scented bath. Kneeling on the floor next to me was the home-health aide, a middle-aged woman with graying hair who’d brought along her knitting and a photograph of an orange kitten she’d gotten herself for Christmas. She had a southern accent and told me she’d been born in a log cabin in Missouri.

“I’m the oldest of eleven. I’ve been taking care of someone my whole life,” she said.

Did she mind? I couldn’t tell. She seemed easygoing, the kind of woman who never complained about anything.

“But I’m not here to talk about me,” she said. “Tell me how you’re doin’, honey?”

I opened my eyes and turned to look at her. Her glasses had slid to the middle of her nose and I could see how twinkly and blue her eyes still were. “I feel pretty good.” I smiled at the kind face. “I’ve managed to get out of Christmas.”

A funny little laugh escaped from her throat and she bent over slightly, feeling for the cameo pinned at the neck of her blouse, as though checking to see if she was still properly covered. “Me, too!” She rocked on her heels, trying to contain her laughter. “Don’t you just
hate
Christmas!”

After my bath, she changed my sheets and then sat in a chair knitting while we watched a video. As we said our good-byes later that afternoon, we agreed that, without question, it was the best Christmas we’d ever had.

A
WEEK LATER
I was up and walking but not ready for the twelve-hour round-trip car ride to bring Lay Me Down home, so Stan and Carol agreed to get her without me. The day they left, I spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Dr. Rebhun, who described the tests, the results, and the options. The tumor was large, invasive, and inoperable. Because of its location in her brain, it had been inoperable from the day it had formed. Horses bled to death on the operating table when they tried to remove tumors that near the eye. For Lay Me Down, the only “options” were when to euthanize her, now or later.

“You’ll know when the time is right,” Dr. Rebhun said.

“How?” I gripped the phone with both hands. “How
will I know?” What I really meant was,
I don’t trust myself to know
.

Dr. Rebhun was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

His voice was kind, apologetic. We were no longer talking about medicine. On the subject of euthanizing, my judgment was as good as his. That’s what he was telling me. He couldn’t save her and he couldn’t tell me when to kill her. She was out of his reach.

When Lay Me Down returned from Cornell, I called Dr. Grice. I asked her how I would know when it was time to euthanize Lay Me Down, but what I was hoping was that she’d make the decision. She didn’t. Her answer was just as vague as Dr. Rebhun’s.

“It wouldn’t be wrong if you did it now, and it wouldn’t be wrong if you didn’t,” she said.

I was sitting at the kitchen counter, looking out the window while I was talking to her on the phone. The horses were eating the morning hay I’d scattered on top of the snow in the pasture. Lay Me Down was wearing her blue coat and standing next to Hotshot. Georgia and Tempo were together, several yards away. All four of them were in the sun. The thermometer on the tree near the window read thirty.

Suddenly I knew what I wanted, what I wished for Lay Me Down before she died. A spring day full of the smell of moist earth and sweet new grass when she could stand in the sun without her coat. If I was to play God, I wanted to give her a sunbath. It meant keeping her alive for four
more months, until April. I had no idea if that was possible, but it was my goal. I told Dr. Grice.

“Yes,” she said, “horses love the sun.”

I didn’t really know what facing death meant. I knew more about avoiding it, about drinking and sleeping around to blot out the memory of death and, later, about choosing loneliness over the possibility of facing more grief. Being with Hank was more of the same, a relationship with a built-in ending. If you didn’t care much, there was nothing much to lose. It was a lifestyle.

It was a lifestyle I’d had to relinquish because of a sick horse. Cornell was our last hope and now that that hope was gone, there I was, facing the thing I’d tried to avoid all my life. Loss. This one felt as big to me as losing a dear friend, a relative, anyone I’d ever loved deeply and unconditionally. Maybe loving a horse was like that because they were big, or because you expected them to live so long. Maybe because having a horse meant your life had been touched by a beautiful mystery.

After Cornell, Lay Me Down was different. She moved to the edge of the herd and dozed standing up while the others ate hay. She didn’t sigh as much and her eye contact was less sustained. Before Cornell there had been an exuberant quality to her affection, an intensity. She used to lock me in her gaze as soon as I appeared on the horizon, and I’d feel pulled toward her by that stare. Now when she saw me, she looked briefly, then looked away. That was normal for horses but not for Lay Me Down.

At first I thought her distance was because she was recovering from her ordeal, her journey and everything she’d been through. But weeks later she still seemed aloof.

“I think she’s depressed,” I told Allie in my barn one January night as I turned on the light.

We watched Lay Me Down’s breath billow over her hay in long white puffs. Hotshot stood outside her stall door, blinking at the sudden illumination. Georgia and Tempo were eating hay across the aisle in Tempo’s stall. Lay Me Down was royal blue from head to tail, dressed in her full winter gear: hood, neck cover, and blanket. I slipped my hand under her blanket and checked along her side for shivering. She felt warm and fuzzy.