House Under Snow (7 page)

“For what?”

“For ignoring you at my party.”

I pushed away the image of him and Rita together, at least for the duration of the night. Instead, I felt the dark heat of him, of the wild and partly drunk boy beside me on the couch.

Austin propped his head against the sofa’s arm; he slouched so he was half lying down, his legs hanging over the cushion. He reached for me. I folded myself into his arms, felt the baby fluffs of hair at the back of his neck.

“I saw you talking to Brian Horrigan,” Austin said. “He’s got the hots for you.”

“Does that surprise you?” I tasted the salt of sweat on his skin.

“Fuck, no,” Austin said. “But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

I fit myself against him like the last piece to a puzzle, forgetting Lilly was upstairs. He was warm and damp. He opened my arms, and unbuttoned my blouse. I traced the blue vein up to the inside of his elbow with my finger and back down again; pressed my finger against his pulse. Again, the spatter of rain against the window. The caw of birds just before dawn.

“I know you. I know what I love about you,” he said. He rolled me off the couch with him, onto the carpeted floor. “Isn’t this enough?” Austin said, kissing me again. “Let’s not ever fight. Can’t we be happy?”

Happiness was a
word that had no meaning, I had decided, years before, without ever knowing it. I had watched, and felt, even when I wasn’t watching, how my mother’s dates fed her with scotch and sweet talk, and saw how the force of their presence for that short time made the rest of the world disappear. Happiness was not the issue. I simply wanted to vanish into the other misty and distant world, never wanting to be pulled back.

“I’ll make you feel better,” Austin said, as if he were comforting a child who had awakened in the middle of the night
from a nightmare. “Close your eyes.” He gently moved his fingers over my face, closing my lids as if they were a doll’s. Like a kind of sly sorcerer, with his soft breath, he had the power to make me disappear into his earth-cool dark room; possessing my body, the way men do.

I knew when something out of the ordinary was about to happen, just like Aunt Rose used to tell us she could sense a storm coming because her arthritis began to act up; I felt it hovering like a heat cloud. The sun seared bright with possibility, but inside our house my mother was cooped up, obsessing about the color of paint she wanted for each room.

In the days after Austin’s party, I played the night over in my head like a scene in a movie: the minute I heard his knock on the window of my house, the sandpapery feel of his lips against mine. It was as if a door had creaked open, just slightly, exposing the white crest of his soul. When the phone rang I practically leaped out of my skin.

One morning I awoke early and found blood splattered against the window. A bird had flown into the pane, broken its neck, and fallen onto the windowsill. It was a bad sign, I thought. I was like that then. If it was raining the day I was supposed to take a history test, I was sure that meant I would fail. I read my horoscope every morning and analyzed its meaning as if I were deconstructing the allusions in a Shakespeare play. I opened my underwear drawer and took out the robin’s egg wrapped in tissue that Austin and I had found one
day when we were getting high in the woods behind his house, rubbed it as if it had powers, and prayed.

Austin cleaned the stalls at the harness track a few days after school and on weekends. I knew when he’d been in the stables; the stench of the manure in his clothes and in his hair was a dead giveaway. But it was something besides his love of horses. The track life was different from the upper-class world he had grown up in. Most of the guys I knew were into sports and partying. Austin’s passion for horses made him different.

“When you first start training a horse, you can’t control her,” Austin said the first time he took me to the track and showed me the horses he cared for. “It’s like developing a relationship. She has to learn to trust you. Once you develop the trust, she’ll do anything you ask. It’s that strength and power in a horse’s body that gets to me,” he continued, as he reached out his hand and let one of the horses eat a handful of oats from his palm. “When a horse is in her rhythm, she’s on fire.”

He was employed by a man named Howard White, who owned a slew of racehorses. Once school ended Austin worked in the barns full-time. When he wasn’t at the track, he sometimes rode his own horse, which he boarded at a stable off County Line Road in Chagrin Falls. Austin rode with Jane Smart, one of the girl grooms who worked in the barns. Jane had dirty blond hair, greasy near the part, and a face cut like a diamond. Sexuality seeped from her pores.

One Saturday Austin was working at the track. Even though I had no interest in hanging out with Skippy Larsen and his entourage that night, I told Maria I’d go with her to Skippy’s party. Maria and I had the reputation at school as being joined at the hip. For my tenth birthday she had given me a friendship necklace, with one of those hearts perfectly
split in two. We each wore one half, tucked into our blouses, close to our skin. But since I’d begun seeing Austin, he became my heart’s cool and silent keeper.

Shortly after we arrived, the party spun out of control. Maria and I made our way to the keg, passing a joint back and forth between us. A neighbor called the police; the party broke up for a while, then resumed, full force, once the cops had left.

I went outside on the patio to smoke a cigarette. The night was mute, no hint of birds in the backyard, not a sound from a cricket; just the bare world at night gazing down on me like a loving father. My arms and legs had that pins-and-needles feeling, that numbness I got when I was buzzed.

Most of the evening Maria was perched on the top of the kitchen counter sucking up to Billy Fitzpatrick, who was one of six brothers. Three of the Fitzpatrick brothers played on our high school hockey team. Maria had lusted after Billy for as long as I could remember, but Billy was hanging out with Lucy Brownwein, who had thick red hair and perfectly sculpted breasts. Early that year we had learned that Billy’s brother Josh was diagnosed with leukemia and would not make it to Christmas. How could Josh, with his soft, curly brown hair and dark eyes, who at sixteen was already an amazing artist—his self-portraits bedecked our art room walls—wake up one morning and learn that he had months to live? While the rest of my friends seemed content to flirt and gossip, I stared at Billy wondering what it was like to know your brother was going to die.

Brian Horrigan passed me a joint. I took a toke. “Where’s Austin?” he asked.

I was glad word had leaked out that Austin and I were together.

Skippy and his entourage were doing shots of peppermint schnapps. Johnny and Daniella were practically having sex on
the living room couch. On the coffee table Robbie and Steve were doing lines of coke with a rolled-up dollar bill. Steve divvied it out from a vial’s worth that probably cost about as much as my family’s monthly grocery bill. The twins, Franny and Mindy Klinger, were describing their identical summer wardrobes, which they purchased on a shopping trip with their mother in Paris. I was in one of those moods where I questioned the point of existence.

I cornered Maria as she was coming out of the Larsens’ perfumed bathroom, and begged her to drive me to the track.

“Now? It’s after midnight.”

“You owe me,” I said, because I had come with her to the Larsen party so she could see Billy. Maria glanced into the kitchen. Lucy and Billy were making out against the refrigerator door.

We drove to the track in her father’s Lincoln.

“Do you think Austin will be pissed off that I’m showing up unannounced?” I asked, and lit up a cigarette.

“Does he have a reason to be?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” We were stopped at an intersection. I knew Maria wasn’t going to cut Austin any slack now that he was the focus of my attention. But, still, the remark got to me.

After we parked and walked back to the stables, we found Austin sitting on a hay bale across from Jane Smart, sharing a beer with her. Maria and I looked at each other. Jane’s cheeks were flushed. Turned out they had been riding together that afternoon. Austin had gotten someone to cover for him at the barn. Austin came toward me and lit up like a Christmas tree, half excited and half shocked to see me. But why hadn’t he tried to find me at Skippy Larsen’s party, where I’d told him I was going, instead of hanging out with Jane? He asked me to
go riding with him the next day, and there was no way I was going to say no and allow him to take Jane instead.

Austin saddled up
the horses, made a step with the interlocked fingers of both hands, and boosted me onto a horse called Night. Austin assured me that she was calm and gentle. He walked Night slowly around the fenced-in paddock by holding on to her bridle until I got used to the feel of the saddle, the weight of the reins in my hands. Austin showed me how to pull her back, how to coax, and cluck, and give the horse encouragement.

“They know if you’re afraid, Anna. They sense it,” he said, as if he was talking about himself, as if he and the horses were interchangeable. He promised we would take it slow. We left the paddock and walked the horses down the driveway behind the barns. We entered the field. I relaxed as the sun shone on my back, and gradually I fell into the up and down of the horse’s rhythm.

But Austin wasn’t satisfied.

“Not through the trees,” I said. I saw where he was headed. We were halfway across the field before we entered the narrow trail through the forest. The sky that day was as blue as I’d seen it.

“Trust me. Anna. Jane and I found this trail the other day.”

“I’m not ready for this.” My voice was quivering.

“Do you think I would let you get hurt? That I’d let anything happen to you?”

He kicked his horse with the heel of his boot, turned his horse around, and motioned for me to do the same. But it was too late. I was losing control of the horse. Austin pulled back on his own horse, slowed down, and waited for Night to pass.
Then he swatted Night’s rear end with his crop to get her moving.

The trail, parallel to a running creek, was muddy and thick with forest on each side. My hair caught the bottom branches of a tree. Burrs attached to my jeans. My heart throbbed in my chest and threatened to outsound the rhythm of the horse’s hooves knocking against the ground, spitting up dirt and dust. The trail took us farther into the thick of the woods, over a small ravine, until it seemed we had vanished far into the forest. My legs and buttocks were sore. My fingers, from clutching so tight on the reins, hurt if I opened them, but slowly I began to relax, until a splinter of sun burst through the trees. Light bloomed in front of us, and suddenly we moved into an open field like a beautiful dream, but when Night saw the treeless expanse of grass, she broke into a run. I heard the soft chunks of mud breaking underneath her hooves and felt deep roots below us loosening from the ground.

“Pull her back!” Austin shouted. “Anna, hold tight on the reins and get her under control. You take the lead, goddamn it,” he ordered. “Can’t you for once be in charge?”

The comment cut into me, but my mind and body were at odds. I wobbled to the side. I clutched my calves harder against the sides of the horse, pressed my buttocks firmer into the saddle, trying to regain my balance, as Night raced through the field.

When she threw me to the ground, the wind was knocked out of me, but I wasn’t in pain. I simply couldn’t move. It was like the time Lilly crashed into a car in front of us at a stoplight and I went flying back against the seat. For days I had heard the inside of my head rattle.

Austin hopped off his horse and whistled between his fingers for my horse.

Night ran back through the field and circled around us. I was flat on my back. When I tried to move, I couldn’t get up. The fall had happened so fast, it was hard to put the events together. I tried to raise my head and realized Night’s hoof was standing on a long lock of my hair. I was facing into the back side of her, my face between her two back legs.

“I can’t get up,” I said. If she moved an inch, that would be the end of it. My face was that close to her leg.

Austin coaxed the horse by stroking her mane and slowly moved her forward. I felt my hair come loose. Austin reached for my hand, and helped me up.

Against his chest, I felt his pulse race in his neck.

“Anna, you fucking scared me,” Austin said.

“I’m okay.”

“But what if . . .”

“I’m fine,” I said, quieting his lips with my own.

As day solidified into night, it grew quiet, except for the sound of the cicadas and the crickets. No one was there to hurry home to, no one but us, and in our shadow the heavy breathing of the horses, under the thick white summer clouds, where nocturnal animals were awakening. There were no compromises to be made, no one to please or take care of. The two horses put their necks down to feed in the grass, and Austin’s smell stuck to my clothes.