Mercury (17 page)

D
O YOU REMEMBER HOW
Trina used to believe five ghosts shared our house? Month after month she drew pictures of Fred, Cowboy, Betty, Green Light, and Skirty Mom, and told us what they were doing. Fred was sweeping the floor; Betty was making pancakes. Then one day, when I asked about them, she frowned and said, “Oh, they don't live here anymore.” I thought that might happen with the gun; it would simply disappear. The next morning I woke in the dark, dressed, made my lunch, and drove to the stables, all the time telling myself nothing had changed. I parked in my usual place. As I approached the barn, the security lights came on; a horse neighed. I stopped, I turned, I went back, I opened the trunk of my car.

Yes, things had changed.

In the barn the horses were quiet. The ropes I had looped around the bars of Mercury's stall were untouched. I gave him a quick brush, saddled him, and led him past the other horses, across the yard, and into the arena. I rode him without stirrups for ten minutes. Then we did lateral work, something Garth recommended, which made him flick his ears. He cheered up when we approached the jumps. I reminded him to keep his hindquarters under him, myself to sit up in the saddle.

Riding Mercury, I never looked at my watch. Everything
was here, now, his stride, my seat, his mouth, my hands. He was my way to escape time. I think surgery used to be yours. Perhaps tennis is now. But we never escape for long. Much too soon the sparrows who lived in the rafters began to chirp, calling me to my duties.

The following week I went back to New Hampshire to watch another of Garth's classes. For him the ideal was a rounded frame where the horse's energy appears to arc up from his hindquarters, over his back, and into the rider's softly containing hands. When he mounted even the most ragged animal, it began to move more smoothly. Garth was paying so much attention to the horse, the horse couldn't not pay attention to him. And he was generous with his praise. “Tell her she's done well,” he said. “Let him know he's doing good.” The channels of communication were always open. “We're all students,” he said.

After the class, I followed Chance's advice. I parked as far from the entrance to the shooting range as possible, kept on my sunglasses and hat. In my daily life, apart from Rick, I was surrounded by people—friends, parents, students, you—who didn't own a gun, who spoke with horror of Binghamton and Blacksburg and Fort Hood. But as soon as I stepped through the doors of the range, I became part of another tribe, a tribe for whom gun ownership was the norm. I was ready to describe my imaginary sister and her lonely house, but no one expected an explanation. The only question was why it had taken me so long to join them.

The boy who set me up with a target and hearing protectors asked what I was firing.

“Nice,” he said when I handed him the gun. He made me practice pulling the trigger, showed me how to load the magazine. “Don't take the safety off until you're ready to shoot,” he
advised, “and take your time. You don't get better going bang, bang, bang.”

I slipped on the hearing protectors and stared at the target. I'd heard of ranges that used silhouettes of animals or, worse, people, but that first day even the dark circles of the traditional target looked menacing. I raised the gun, sighted along the barrel, and squeezed my finger. A white tear appeared in the outermost circle. I fired again. When at last a bullet pierced the bull's-eye, I found myself exclaiming, “Yes!”

On my second visit to the range I finished my session at the same time as a tall, gray-haired woman. As we headed to the exit she saw me notice the broccoli sticking out of her bag.

“Back to the kitchen sink,” she said. “Mustn't keep hubby waiting.”

“Does he mind you coming here?”

“I tell him it's cheaper than Keno.” She winked. “What about yours?”

I said I hadn't told you, and she said, “Uh-oh. Wife on the rampage.”

She was opening the door of a grimy black car when I asked where she kept her gun.

“In the hall closet,” she said briskly. “Locked in George's old tackle box. They go on and on about gun safety, but as long as it isn't loaded, what's the problem? Nothing magical about a gun.”

As I drove home I thought about her easy words: nothing magical about a gun. You and I, and everyone we knew, thought there was. Guns changed people; they made people do things they'd never normally do. From that first evening, I'd been moving it from place to place. I kept it in a locked box, which I moved from our garage to the back of the filing cabinet at the stables. I hid it in the hayloft for a night and in the back
shed for twenty minutes. Now I decided to leave the gun where it was, in the trunk of the car, separate from the ammunition. Two blocks from our house I pulled over between streetlights. I opened the locked box and put the ammunition at the bottom of a bag of clothes destined for Goodwill, the gun at the bottom of another bag full of shoes. I was closing the trunk when a car pulled up.

The police, I thought, my brain already jostling with half a dozen lies.

Then Anne rolled down her window. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. There was a bottle loose in the trunk. It was driving me nuts, rolling around.”

I followed her home, trying to breathe as my Pilates instructor urged, from the diaphragm.

Later that evening I made an excuse to go to the stables. When I showed Mercury the gun, he bent to sniff, nostrils flaring.

“I got this because of you,” I told him. “Michael couldn't protect you, but I can.”

He gave a gentle snort—not something to eat—and turned away. Next month we would compete in our first show. Start small, I told myself. Find out his weak points. Don't ruin him like you did Nutmeg.

C
LAUDIA CLAIMED
I
WAS
different. So did the children. We were watching a nature show when Trina pointed at a cheetah bounding across the screen. “That's you, Mom.” And Marcus said he wondered if my brain was bigger since I cut my hair. But it wasn't the gun that changed me; it was Mercury. What the gun changed was the balance of power.

Do you remember that Sunday Marcus and Trina came home from their play dates, demanding hot chocolate? We were low on milk, and I drove to the 7-Eleven. The parking lot was empty except for a truck in one corner and a low rider, throbbing with music, in another. As I walked across the dirty snow, I remembered all the evenings in Ann Arbor I'd spent in parked cars, drinking, smoking a joint, always sure that somewhere nearby more sophisticated people were having more fun.

I was retracing my steps, a jug of milk in each hand, when the music stopped and the doors of the low rider opened. Two men, their faces hidden by hoods, got out and started walking toward the store, bracketing me. I could hear their footsteps on the packed ice. I pictured them punching me in the face, kicking me in the kidneys, not knowing I had only the change from $20. Then I remembered: I wasn't at their mercy. I pressed the key ring. The car lights flashed. But before I could dash for the trunk, the man on my left spoke.

“Doing the milk run?” he said.

At home you were settling Nabokov for the night. As I made the hot chocolate, I described my encounter. “I'm getting paranoid,” I said, “thinking every guy who drives a rackety car is a thug. I told you we'd become Republicans if we lived in the suburbs.”

You looked up from straightening Nabokov's cover. “Women have to be careful,” you said. “You never did find out who broke into the stables.”

Your eyebrows rose above your glasses, your lips tightened in concern. You understood, I thought: the stables were no longer safe. As I poured the hot chocolate, I imagined showing you the gun, offering it to you on my outstretched palm, the way I had to Mercury. But then all I could hear was you lecturing me, telling me to take it to the police.

A few days later I was alone at the stables at dusk, checking the water buckets, when I heard footsteps. A man's step, but not Matheus's; this person was walking quietly, stealthily. I crouched down in the stall, trying not to rustle the straw. What good did the gun do, shut in the trunk of my car? I was about to make a run for the back door when a voice called, “Claudia.”

In the corridor I found Rick wearing a Davy Crockett hat and a down jacket over his suit. He was halted mid-stride, as startled by my presence as I was by his. “Hi,” he said. “I was looking for Claudia. She isn't answering her phone.”

“She's gone home for the day. Maybe she's taking a nap. How are you?”

He swung his briefcase. “I've seen better days. How's Mercury the magnificent?”

“Great, though he could do with more exercise.”

“Well, I'll take my chances and see if she's receiving visitors.”

He stood there, his briefcase motionless, waiting for me to say something, but whatever was going to happen next could only be played out between him and Claudia. I walked over and put my arms around him. Through our bulky jackets something passed between us, a little flash. He was trying to leave behind the scared boy from Nebraska, and I was wishing him Godspeed.

I walked him to his car and watched him drive away. In the almost darkness my eyes played tricks. Something moved in the manure pile, someone slipped between the horse trailers. I went to my car, opened the trunk, and reached in among the shoes. I put the gun in the inside pocket of my jacket, ammunition in the other pocket. The two would never touch, but I felt safer. What had I spent $600 for, if not to feel that way?

I finished checking the stalls at top speed. I was almost certain Claudia was at home, almost certain this would be the night she told Rick. Christmas was past; his sons had returned to their lives; her pregnancy could no longer be concealed. Silently I said to Rick what I kept saying to myself. Don't give up on yourself. Don't settle for the second-rate.

At home I helped Trina with math and Marcus with English and fed Nabokov peanuts and made broccoli surprise and apple crisp. After supper I insisted we play Scrabble, and when the children went to bed, I persuaded you to watch a film. Anything to get through these hours.

You were already in bed and I was brushing my teeth when I remembered the gun still in my jacket pocket, and my jacket in its usual place, on the hook nearest the back door. Quickly I rinsed my toothbrush and stepped into the bedroom.

“I've left something—,” I started to say.

But, from the bed, you held out your arms. Your first invitation in weeks. How could I refuse?

T
HE NEXT MORNING THE
gun was back in the trunk, and Mercury and I were carving out figure eights, when the door of the arena opened. A figure came running toward us. Mercury reared, and Claudia came to a standstill. As I struggled to keep my seat, I thought, Rick's ditched her; she's going to be a single mother. Mercury too seemed to sense bad news; he kept rearing and sidestepping. At last I got him settled, all four hooves on the ground. I jumped down and hurried toward Claudia. She was talking and sobbing, her words echoing in the empty arena.

“He's going to move in with me. We're going to have a daughter.”

Tears rose in my own eyes. I wrapped my arms around her.

“I couldn't wait to tell you,” she said. “I'm sorry I startled Mercury.”

I put him back in his stall and met her in the office. She showed me a photograph of the sonogram. “Our daughter,” she said. “Here's her head”—she indicated a dark mass in the galaxy—“and her foot.”

“I'm so happy for you.”

“And you're floored.” She laughed. “You never thought he'd do it. Nor did I. If I had three sons, a circle of friends, a wife, a nice house, I'm not sure I'd give them all up. But that's what
I asked him to do. When I showed him the sonogram, I said, Your daughter needs you. Your sons had you while they were growing up; your daughter deserves the same. Viv, he couldn't stop smiling. All the things I've been afraid of—he'd be scared, or angry—none of them happened. He said I'd been so distant, he was sure I was planning to break up with him.”

“I'm so happy,” I said again. “Have you told Helen?”

The thought of her alone in her large house gave me a pang, but Claudia said Helen was thrilled: she wasn't planning to move out. With alimony, Rick would need to economize, and there was plenty of room for the three of them, the four of them. “I want to thank you,” she added.

“Thank me?”

“Rick said he talked to you the day he came to photograph Mercury. You were very helpful.”

Suddenly I had the awful thought: What if he didn't keep his word? What if this was only the start of still more waiting? Hesitantly I asked if he had a plan.

“This is what's so amazing.” All her giddiness was abruptly gone. “Amazing and awful. After we talked, last night he drove straight home and told Nan he was moving out. Then he packed a suitcase and went to the Holiday Inn. And he phoned each of his kids.”

“He really did it.” The impossible was happening with impossible speed.

The snowy fields were starting to glow. Claudia and I were both silent, gazing at this view we knew so well: our paddocks, the land dipping down to the road, the hills fringed with trees rising beyond.

“I'm almost frightened,” she said quietly. “I have Rick, you, Helen, the stables. I have a family.” She knocked the table. “I have a home.”

“You deserve them,” I said, “more than anyone I know.”

She clasped her hands to her chest as if to hold on to all the things she'd just named. “But that's not how the world works. We don't necessarily get what we deserve. I worry Rick never told Nan how he felt. That from one day to the next her perfect marriage was a train wreck. And it's my fault. He wouldn't have left her without me. Without our daughter.”

“Maybe she'll meet someone at her church,” I said. “Maybe she'll be remarried in six months.” Then I asked if I could tell you about Rick and the baby, and she said yes. She wanted all her close friends to know.

On my way to the tack room I stopped at Mercury's stall. “Everything will be easier now,” I told him. Fate, once again, was sending me a message. If Claudia could change, if Rick could change, then I could change. I could become the champion I'd dreamed about being for so many years, and given up on for so many more.

T
HAT NIGHT AT DINNER
I broke the news about Claudia and Rick and the baby. I was happy to have one less secret, happy to celebrate Claudia's happiness. We all clapped and raised our glasses. But later, when the kids were in bed, you and I had an oddly stiff conversation.

“It never occurred to me,” you said, “that she wanted children.”

I couldn't see your face—you were at the computer—but you sounded as if I were somehow to blame for this misunderstanding. “How can you know what people want when they can't have it?” I said. “She didn't want them in her twenties. Then she wanted them more and more.”

I put my hand on your shoulder. You clicked the mouse. “You were like that too, weren't you?” you said.

“Until I met you.”

It was a cornerstone of our romance: you had made me want children. Now, even as I squeezed your shoulder, you kept clicking the mouse, opening various folders, filling the screen with spreadsheets.