The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (13 page)

I tried to stand up, but my legs were too weak. I sank down beside the road and passed out again.

Max was the one who found me. He was one of the military prisoners who worked in the stables during his parole, a skinny, dark-haired guy whom all of the girls loved to flirt with. He’d been in the barn when Ladybug came cantering home and dashed into her stall wearing her tack, followed shortly by the terrified teenager who had been riding ahead of me. She told Max where to find me. Unlike our parents, we all trusted the prisoners completely, because they talked to us as if we weren’t children.

Max had no access to a car, so he climbed onto the tractor he used to pull the hay wagon. He drove it as fast as he could to the jump, where he found me lying beside the road, barely conscious. Max picked me up and laid me gently down on top of the hay, then drove me back to the barn.

I
’D LOST
seven teeth, I’d broken my nose, and my face was so swollen that I could feel my cheeks on my shirt collar without turning my head. I’d been wearing a riding helmet, luckily, so my skull was intact. But nobody would give me a mirror.

Donald and my father drove to the jump and tried to find my teeth, but they were too smashed to be reset in my mouth. I came home from the hospital with nothing but stitches where the oral surgeon had removed the last tiny fragments of shattered teeth pressed into my gums by the fall. I lay on the couch, head pounding, sore and drowsy with pain medication.

I turned onto my side and pressed my throbbing face
against the pillows. “At least my snaggletooth is gone!” I yelled into the kitchen, but neither of my parents heard me. They were too busy arguing about Ladybug.

“I knew that horse was a bad idea from the start,” Dad insisted. “We should shoot it. I should personally load up my old Navy pistol and go down there and goddamn shoot that goddamn horse.”

“It’s not the horse’s fault,” Mom said. “I told Holly not to jump. She disobeyed. There’s nothing wrong with that horse. Nobody’s going to shoot it. It would break Holly’s heart, losing Ladybug. That horse is her only friend in the world.”

“Jesus Christ, Sally!” Dad yelled. “Look at Holly. Just look at her! Who’s going to marry her now?”

and you spend most of your life trying to rip them off. In ours, my father was stern, Mom was fun, I was smart, Donald was wild, and Gail was beautiful. Those labels defined our default modes, the roles we played over and over again, and made us think that we understood one another even when we were itching to escape our own skins.

My sister, Gail, like my mother, was born beautiful and had an air of expectation about her, an attitude that the world was there for her pleasure. I was too good a child to ever say that I hated her, but I seethed at times, staring in the mirror at my plain face topped by its boyish haircut. It was hardly fair that nature should grant Gail all of the goods.

I longed to have my sister’s heart-shaped face, those dimples, the blond ringlets, those bottomless dark eyes with their long black princess eyelashes. She was so beautiful, “such a cunning child, just like my little Sally,” as Grandmother Keach said, that even Donald didn’t tease her. In families with three children, there is usually an odd man out, and that was me.
Donald and Gail teamed up to play together in ways that I could never be with either of them.

Despite her princess-doll looks and forest-fairy grin, Gail was fearless, dogging Donald’s heels in Virginia whenever he went down to the lake to muck around for minnows and painted turtles and frogs. In that way, too, Gail was like my mother. Mom was so brave that she’d run away from home on the family pony, bareback and without a bridle, when she was just four years old. My mother made it two miles down the road before a neighbor spotted her trotting away and took her back home. Who knows how Mom mounted the pony? She probably charmed him the way Gail hypnotized our dogs, who always slept alongside Gail when she colored on the floor and let her do terrible things to their ears and tails. Even our old fox terrier, Tip the Terrible, never bit her.

For all of her childish beauty, energy, and mischief, though, Gail suffered infections frequently as a toddler and was often short of breath. She huffed and puffed when she ran down the hallway after us. She had to stop and gasp for air if she tried to keep up with Donald or the dogs, who always waited patiently for her to catch up.

Dad accepted this. “You know Gail’s just doing that to get attention,” he’d say whenever Mom worried aloud that something might be wrong. “The youngest kid always has to work hardest to get noticed.”

But my mother persisted. In Virginia, she began taking Gail to every military doctor who agreed to see her. Most shook their heads and called my sister’s mysterious condition “a failure to thrive.” Finally, Mom defied them all, and my
father, too, by paying to see an outside doctor, a specialist who finally gave her an answer. It wasn’t one she wanted. The last year we lived in Virginia, Gail was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. She was three years old.

The body of someone with cystic fibrosis produces too much mucus. Children with the disease suffer chronic infections because the mucus in their lungs is so thick that it clogs the respiratory system and allows bacteria to grow. The extra sticky mucus also clogs the pancreas, undermining digestion.

In this country, cystic fibrosis is the most common fatal hereditary disease among Caucasian children; one out of every twenty Caucasians carries the recessive gene for it. Probability dictates that one out of every four children born to carrier parents will have the disease. Medical treatments have come a long way since my sister was diagnosed; today, people with cystic fibrosis can live into their thirties, or even their forties.

We were stunned. None of us had ever heard of cystic fibrosis, and there had never been a case of it on either side of the family. There followed several brief but hostile volleys between my parents, each furiously accusing the other of having a bum gene in the family tree. Then Dad went to sea again, leaving Mom to cope alone with finding Gail whatever treatments were available.

Gail was a stoic, though, and Donald and I often forgot that she was sick at all. In Virginia, and even during our first year in Kansas, she was able to cheerfully run after us and chattered incessantly whenever she could catch her breath.

“Can you eat chocolate, Grandmother?” Gail asked Grandmother Keach one day.

“Yes,” said Grandmother. “I love chocolate.”

Gail beamed. “Me too!” She wrinkled her nose. “Do you wheeze and cough sometimes, too, Grandmother?”

Grandmother nodded. “I have asthma,” she said. “It’s not always easy for me to breathe.”

“You know what? I can’t breathe sometimes, either! Look what happens!” Gail crowed, and ran up and down the hallway to make herself cough and wheeze, skidding in her socks just the way Donald and I had taught her.

B
Y THE
time we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Gail was almost four years old. Despite having occasional bouts of pneumonia and even being hospitalized for it, she was a terror. She poked straw into my horse’s nostril to see what Ladybug would do, tore up Donald’s homework when he wouldn’t play with her, and got into my Barbies, cutting their hair with nail scissors and tearing apart their clothes. I was almost too old to play with Barbies, but I resented the fact that Gail could do anything she liked and still be praised for her beauty by everyone who saw her.

Just before leaving Virginia for Kansas, Gail had started sleeping in an oxygen tent, a pale blue sheet of plastic draped over her bed and attached to a humming metal tank. The tent collected droplets of moisture inside it, and Gail crawled out of her mist tent each morning with her fine hair in tight curls about her scalp, making her look more like a pale, ethereal fairy than ever. Sometimes I fantasized that I could sleep in her tent and wake up looking like that. Most of the time, though, I ignored my sister, glad that my legs and lungs could carry me out of our apartment and off to the stables.

Mom was becoming increasingly consumed with Gail’s care. She gave Gail physical therapy exercises and medication, and tried to protect my sister from the infectious diseases that other children in the neighborhood might bring into the house; Donald and I were seldom allowed to bring friends to the apartment. The most I saw of my mother during that time was at the stables, for she continued to ride despite being pregnant again. Our last rides together were in late spring, when the violets were starting to bloom along our favorite bridle trail, a narrow, tree-canopied path so lush with giant ferns that it was easy to imagine dinosaurs roaming there at night. Not surprisingly, my mother seemed depressed, overwhelmed by both her unexpected pregnancy and taking care of Gail.

Once, Mom grew so exasperated with my nitwit chatter that she scolded me as we headed out on one of our favorite trails. “You’re going to kill yourself on that horse one of these days, because you never pay attention when you’re riding,” she said as I swiveled in my saddle to start talking to her.

“I am not!” I protested, still facing backward. Just then, Ladybug darted beneath a steel guy wire that ran from a telephone pole to the ground, knocking me clear out of the saddle. My mother laughed, so the fall was worth it.