Still Life with Elephant (5 page)

T
HE PHONE
rang, and I grabbed it without checking the caller ID. It had been over a month now, and I still didn't want to talk to Matt, or my mother, or my lawyer. Or, sometimes, even Alana.

“Hi, Neelie? It's Richie. How are you guys?” Richie Chiger and his wife, Jackie, were good friends of ours. Richie was general manager and vice-president of the Wycliff-Pennington Animal Sanctuary. Jackie painted humorous little animal watercolors and sold them on their Web site.

“Hey, Richie,” I said, trying to keep my voice normal. “Great to hear from you.”

“I figured Matt'd be at his office this time of day, but his secretary told me he was on vacation.”

Vacation? Matt was always in his office. Had he stopped going to work?

“How are you guys doing?” I asked.

“We're great!” Richie's voice contained a catch of excitement. “So—is Matt around?”

“Not today.” Which wasn't exactly a lie.

“I have to talk to him right away.” Richie said. “We got something going on—I tried to talk to Dr. Scarletta, but she blew me off. Apparently, she isn't interested in large animals.”

Ah yes, poor Holly-Golly didn't like the inconvenience of treating anything bigger than a breadbox.

“What kind of large animal?” I asked. I had always accompanied Matt to the sanctuary, because I liked visiting the animals. The place has almost everything, from alligators all the way through the alphabet to two cranky zebras. Animals saved from stupid people or
injured in the wild and unable to be returned, animals adopted from petting zoos that have no business owning animals. Matt had been their vet for years, even after he sold his equine practice, treating the animals for free, until the sanctuary got a wealthy sponsor and was able to pay him.

“I don't want to talk about it over the phone,” Richie said.

“Why not?”

“Security reasons. Can you have him call me as soon as he gets in?”

“Security? You're kidding,” I exclaimed. “Did something happen?”

“No, no,” Richie said. “I can't talk about it, just have him call me. Please.”

“It might be a while before he does,” I said. “Let me give you his pager, you can check with him directly.” I paused; it wasn't like Richie to be so mysterious. “Why can't you talk about it?”

I loved Richie and his wife. They were among our closest friends. Richie was short, and bearded with a wild halo of graying brown curls, and a certain childlike enthusiastic sweetness about him. He had spent most of his life traveling and rescuing exotic wildlife before working for the sanctuary. Jackie always wore her hair pulled back into a long dark-brown ponytail and wore Birkenstock sandals and cooked a lot of couscous with steamed vegetables and tofu.

“It's top secret. Honestly,” Richie continued. “Matt can tell you after I talk to him in person—I just hope he comes on board with this.”

“Sure,” I said.

After we hung up, I sat down on the kitchen floor to cry. Beethoven was playing, and I shut it off. Beethoven is too heavy when you are already bummed out. Not only had I lost Matt, I realized I was losing connections to all the things we had done together. The sanctuary and our best friends, and dinners and barbecues, and Halloween costume parties and summer vacations—every piece of my life was being unraveled, stitch by stitch, like an old scarf, and I couldn't stop it.

 

I wondered, a few days later, if Richie had been able to get in touch with Matt. Okay, I was really wondering what this vacation deal was all about. Had Matt run off somewhere to establish residency so he could get a quickie divorce?

Richie's cell phone was busy, busy, busy, and I had to search for the number of the sanctuary, since they always kept that phone number unlisted. They don't want to be bothered with people asking if they could walk through and stare at the animals. Richie takes the word “sanctuary” very seriously. I found the number, jotted down in Matt's handwriting, on a piece of paper hanging on the refrigerator, behind an old dental-appointment card. Matt's handwriting. I ran my fingers over the scrawled numbers. It was the only thing I had left of him.

After three or four tries, Richie answered the main phone. “Richie, it's Neelie.” I felt stupid calling him to find out where Matt was.

“Hey!” he said. “I'm so happy that Matt is going to help.”

So Matt had been to the sanctuary. He just wasn't going to work.

“I'm happy you're happy,” I said.

“Of course,” Richie said, “he has to get his shots and check his passport, make sure it's current. Oh, tell him I talked with Tom Pennington himself. We will have plenty of security. He gave his word.” He took a deep breath. “Incredible, eh?”

“Thomas Pennington himself?” Thomas Princeton Pennington was a multimillionaire who lived part-time in New York City and part-time all around the rest of the world, and funded animal rescues with his pocket change. He was a major supporter of the sanctuary. His name was always in the news.

“Yep—he even came up here, to check the big barn and get some work started on it. We have to bring in heating and reinforce the walls.”

“Reinforce the walls?” I exclaimed. “What on earth are you getting in?”

“Didn't Matt tell you?” Richie sounded puzzled.

“Matt hasn't discussed it with me yet,” I said. “He's—been so busy.”

“Oh?” He paused. “Are you guys okay? Matt seemed—distracted.”

“We have some things going on here,” I said. “What's the passport for?”

“I don't want to talk over the phone. Ask Matt,” Richie replied. “By the way, did he tell you we rescued two draft horses? Sisters. You're gonna love them—so bring peanut-butter cookies. Jackie says they like peanut-butter cookies.”

“Sure.”

“It's been too long since we've seen you,” he said affectionately, “and we miss you, so drop by soon.”

I hung up and decided I would go to the sanctuary and visit Richie and Jackie. Some things just can't be unraveled.

And then I worried. What if I ran into Matt up there? I couldn't bear the thought of running into Matt, and falling apart in front of him. Or him and Holly, because, in my mind's eye now, they were joined at the hip.

I decided I would have to change banks, change supermarkets, change gas stations, change everything. I was going to have to be more careful about where I put in appearances.

I would withdraw from the world and become a recluse and speak to no one and go nowhere, except out to my barn every day to ride, and then I'd return immediately to the house. I would allow myself nothing else. No contact with the outside world. Nothing.

I was, by turns, heartsick and angry and morose and angry and filled with despair. And angry.

And the stupid thing was, I couldn't see that I was doing most of it to myself.

H
OW LONG
can you sleepwalk through your life? A few weeks? A few years? Ten or twenty years, if you're not paying attention?

I had lost track of time. Were it not for the calendar hanging in the barn where I notate every ride, I wouldn't know what day of the week it was. I just didn't care.

I didn't open my mail. I avoided the phone. I deleted the answering-machine messages without listening to them.

My lawyer called half a dozen times, until, finally, I picked up the phone.

“Hello, Neelie,” he started. “I have to talk to you, bubbee.”

I took a deep breath, turned down my radio, and forced myself to listen. Bubbees could be breasts or Jewish grandmothers, and I knew I had to concentrate on the rest of the conversation, because context was going to make a big difference.

“Matt got a lawyer,” he said. “I have the papers on my desk. Matt said that he'll pay all the court costs. My fee, too.”

I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach by a horse.

“Neelie?”

“Yes.”

“You guys just have to come to an agreement over the house. Probably you'll have to sell it to straighten out all the finances. Matt's attorney says that Matt's still paying off his practice, so that money will be tied up for years.”

“I can't sell the house,” I said. “I need the barn. How am I going to be able to afford another place with a barn?”

“You live in an equitable-distribution state.”

“But he took all the money. The accounts, the DVDs—”

“That's music,” he said. “You mean the CDs. And selling the house is the only fair way to work things out.”

“As fair as him having a baby with his girlfriend?” I was shouting now. “Why am I the one who has to play fair?”

“I don't think Matt will pay if you start getting difficult,” he said. “A fight could get you buggy spandex.”

“Spandex?”

He sighed loudly. “Maybe you need a hearing aid? I said a fight could get ugly and expensive.”

He was right, but giving up the barn meant I had to give up my riding business, because I didn't make enough to pay for everything on my own. And it would kill me to give up the barn. It would be the coup de grâce.

I lay awake all that night and moped around the house all the next day. I would have to open my practice again. Rent an office. Fight over how many therapy sessions some insurance clerk felt my clients needed. I would have to listen to problems and suggest life-management strategies. And, of course, long hours of work meant there would be no time for a horse, so what was the purpose of keeping a house with a barn? Good old Matt had managed to screw two women at the same time.

 

I put on my boots and headed for the barn to ride Isis. Mousi watched me from over his paddock fence, his dark eyes following me and Isis as we trotted and halted and halted some more. Mousi didn't appear jealous—just curious. He was probably wondering why I would bother saddling up a horse if I spent the whole time just sitting on it, doing nothing. The good thing, though, was that Isis was actually halting. And the time we spent at it had been trimming down over the past few weeks, to ten minutes, then seven, then five, until this morning, when she finally just glided to an immediate soft halt and stood there quietly. Gloriously calm. And for that moment, I forgot everything that had been eating away at me. Isis was stand
ing perfectly still in the middle of the ring, trusting me, waiting for me to cue her, perfectly quiet and submissive. The sun fell on my shoulders like a warm hand, and splashed a bright patch across her neck. Time stopped. I held my breath, thinking I had become part of something greater, some odd place that connected the energy of people and animals, and somehow Isis and I had both found each other there. I hated to ask her to trot again, but I had to. I asked her to trot and then halt again, and each time she came to a full and quiet stop. It was a moment of exquisite joy.

Of course, that meant my next challenge would be to teach her to piaffe, which was going to be tricky, but that was a problem for another day.

I had stopped riding Delaney. My plan was to let him observe me from his paddock. Let him watch me riding Isis. I think horses can sometimes learn from other horses—modeling, it's called in psychology—and I was hoping that he would learn from Isis that I was someone who was okay. Plus it gave me the advantage of being able to observe him without a rider.

He browsed through his hay like a normal horse. Every once in a while he would lift his head and grunt before bolting across his paddock, like demons were on his tail. It struck me as curious that this behavior seemed to have little to do with anyone's riding him, and I made a mental note of this. I put Isis away, pleased with her progress, and I decided to do a quick donut run before I rode Delaney later that afternoon. I headed for my car. My brother's car was parked behind it in the driveway.

Reese, my kid brother, was in the kitchen, his head in my refrigerator. He's really not a kid—he's thirty-three and has his own apartment near my parents. We share the same genes for height and brown hair and green eyes. He's good-looking. For a brother.

“How did you get in here?” I asked. I had taken to locking the door while I was in the barn now, in an effort to Matt-proof the house, just in case he and Holly-Sneaky wanted the furniture.

“I took the screen out of your kitchen window and climbed in,
over the sink,” he said. Sure enough, there was a sneaker print in the middle of the sink. Also a few across the floor. Luckily for him, Grace was with me in the barn, or he would have been dabbing at micro-bite wounds by now.

“I did knock,” he said, “but I thought you probably couldn't hear me over Metallica. Why do you keep music playing so loud when you're not home?”

“Because I will be coming home at some point, and it has to be there,” I said, watching him shuffle my one egg to another shelf. “If you're looking for food, I have none.”

“I saw.” He straightened up and shut the refrigerator door. “Actually, I was putting food in. Mom sent it over with me. She's worried.”

“I'm fine,” I said.

He sat himself down at the table. “Make coffee,” he said. “She also sent over some corn bread.”

I put up coffee. “How's teaching?” I asked. Reese teaches math in a junior college.

He shrugged. “Same old same-old.”

Grace came into the kitchen and raced over to him and, thinking it was Matt, almost wagged her tail loose from her back end. When she realized it was Reese, she lowered her head and growled.

“NO BITE,” I yelled at Grace. She looked disappointed.

“So—how's it going?” Reese asked, picking Grace up and plopping her onto his lap to rub her ears. She liked ear rubs more than she liked biting, and was admirably restraining herself. “Have you heard from Matt?”

I didn't answer him.

“Hey,” he said. “Don't tune me out.”

“I wasn't,” I said defensively. “If you have to know, everything sucks.”

“It may not be too late for you guys. Maybe you should talk things over with him. You know, find out what he wants and needs.”

“Like a layette?”

“Maybe it's not all his fault.”

“Oh?” I asked, my voice heavy with sarcasm. “Like,
I
used his penis to get her pregnant?”

“Maybe he was looking for someone to talk to, someone who could listen to him,” Reese said. “For a change.”

“I was always there for him!” I said, slamming his mug of coffee down onto the table. I turned my back on him on the pretense of getting a sponge to clean up the spill, but really to dab at the sudden tears in my eyes. “There's no milk,” I said hoarsely.

“Black is fine.” Reese took the mug. “Maybe if he didn't feel like he was married to a stone wall, things wouldn't have happened.”

I spun around. “Reese!”

“Oh, come on, Neelie.” His voice was soft, tentative. “It's time someone brought this up with you. So there was this big horrible accident,” he said. “You were sixteen, and you couldn't have done anything, for God's sake. So get over yourself already.”

I could hardly breathe. “Shut up,” I said, and put my hands over my ears. Reese got up and walked over to me and pulled my hands away and then put his arms around me.

“Everyone tiptoes around you,” he said, patting me on the back like he was burping a baby. “Come on. How long can you play the elephant card?”

I pulled away, tears running down my face now. “What are you talking about, elephant card?”

“You know,” he said. “You
know.
You carry it with you. All the time. It's like there's always an elephant in the room with you. It's time you let it go.”