White Horses

  Just when he was beginning to look right to her again he was ruining it all, running back to Lee, running away from her, acting as if nothing more than an innocent kiss had been exchanged.

  “What am I supposed to tell her?” Silver asked. “The truth?”

  Teresa’s mouth was set in a thin line. “You’re afraid,” she told him.

  “Shit,” Silver said. “Afraid?”

  Out in the kitchen, Lee had begun to throw the contents of the refrigerator all over the floor; cartons of milk, bottles of mustard, containers of relish and salads and beer.

  “You listen to me,” Silver said to Teresa. “It is wrong, understand me? Understand what that word means? So don’t you look at me with those eyes of yours any more, don’t come after me with that little tongue of yours.”

  “Me!” Teresa said. “Me? You’re acting like it’s all my fault.”

  “Forget about it,” Silver said. “Forget about whose fault it was.”

  He buckled his belt, he walked to the door, he concentrated on all the possible excuses he might give to Lee.

  “Where are you going?” Teresa said.

  Silver opened the door a crack and looked out; he turned back to Teresa, put a finger to his lips to silence her, then nodded out to the kitchen.

  Teresa raised herself up on her knees. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here.”

  “Relax,” Silver said. “I’m going to take care of everything.”

  “Don’t go out there to her now,” Teresa said, her voice rising, and dangerously loud.

  Silver walked back to the bed and put his hand on her throat; his fingers touched her pulse and the shock of her skin made him pull his hand away, as though he’d been burned. “Shut up,” he whispered. “Keep your voice down,” he urged. “Everybody’s got to calm down. Everybody’s got to go to sleep.”

  Teresa nodded and backed up toward the wall; her palms and the soles of her feet were cold.

  “I mean, it’s almost morning, right?” Silver whispered.

  Teresa didn’t say a word.

  “Right?” Silver said.

  “It’s almost morning,” Teresa whispered.

  “It’s time to quiet down,” Silver said, gently, as if he were talking to a child. He reached for a blanket which had fallen onto the floor and put it around Teresa’s shoulders. “I’m going to take care of everything,” he promised.

  When he left the room Teresa pulled her knees up and stared at the closed door. By tomorrow Silver would be able to persuade Lee that she had not really seen him in bed with Teresa, he would blind her with kisses, convince her with lies, settle it easily because she wanted to believe him. Right now Teresa could hear Lee yelling in the kitchen, but by tomorrow Lee would be ready to believe anything Silver told her, and Teresa couldn’t blame her. Even now, alone in the bed, Teresa could still imagine his face; she fought to keep her eyes open, she couldn’t risk thinking about him, forgiving him, and she certainly couldn’t risk sleep. Teresa had decided that by morning, not long after Silver and Lee had finally stopped fighting and had gone to sleep in each other’s arms, she would already have left the house.

  Later, she packed her suitcases, she took everything she owned; she slipped out the front door, went around to let Atlas out of the yard, and then walked down the street as quickly as she could. And when Silver went to her room, later that day, he saw Teresa’s outline on the sheet, and he couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if he had let Lee break every glass in the house, if he had turned to Teresa instead of his wife, and had dared to stay with her all night long.

  Teresa’s first instinct was to head north; and because there was no way to get Atlas onto a bus, she hitched a ride to Sonoma with two women who were going all the way to Santa Rosa for a baby shower. Teresa and Atlas sat in the back, next to a bassinet trimmed with silk ribbons. There was a great deal of sunshine as they drove out of San Francisco, the sky shone like a looking glass; Teresa felt light-headed, the radio was switched on, and she and the other two women sang along with the songs they knew by heart. But the closer they came to the Santa Rosa exit, the clearer it became to Teresa that she couldn’t go home. The house on Divisadero Street was surely sold by now, and she hadn’t one relative or friend left in town. She surprised the two women by asking to be let off right there on the highway, and, because she still had no idea where she was going, Teresa didn’t mind waiting for an hour in the hot sun for another car to stop for her. And even then, after a station wagon had pulled over, and Teresa had opened the back door so that Atlas could climb in, she couldn’t imagine any destination other than home.

  Harper Ryan, the woman who drove the station wagon, had just driven to Petaluma to have a new carburetor put in her car; she didn’t usually stop for hitchhikers but she had the night off from Nina’s Lounge, the bar where she was a cocktail waitress, and the old Mercury station wagon was driving like a dream. As soon as Teresa got in and admitted that she didn’t know where she wanted to go, Harper knew that pulling over had been a mistake.

  “What do you mean?” she asked Teresa. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  Teresa leaned her head against the upholstery and shrugged; the car smelled like rosemary and mint and gasoline, and Teresa realized how tired she was.

  “I’m running away,” she told Harper. “I didn’t have time to figure out where I was going.”

  Harper herself had run away once; years earlier she had left the eastern shore of Maryland and a marriage she had known was all wrong from the start. Her husband’s name was Tim, and he liked deep-fried chicken on Friday nights, and though they had been married for three years Harper had never managed to fry the chicken long enough—the meat near the bone was always pink, and even now she couldn’t so much as eat chicken salad without feeling vaguely ill and thinking about Tim.

  “You’re running away from your husband,” Harper said. When Teresa shook her head no, Harper guessed again, “Some boyfriend who’s not treating you right?”

  From where the car was pulled over on the highway Teresa could almost see the Santa Rosa exit; she thought about blackberry jam and kisses and a boy who climbed out onto the roof to smoke marijuana and look at stars.

  “You can’t just wander around without knowing where you’re going, without a plan,” Harper told Teresa. “Take my advice. Go back to him.”

  “He’s married,” Teresa said.

  “Well, Christ,” Harper said. “I was married once too—it doesn’t necessarily mean a whole hell of a lot.” Harper turned and patted Atlas’s head; ten years ago she had left Salisbury, Maryland, with five hundred dollars and this same Mercury station wagon, having decided she couldn’t stand one more chicken dinner. “I’ll bet you don’t have any money,” she said to Teresa.

  “Just drop me off somewhere,” Teresa said.

  “Oh, sure,” Harper said. “Then if you get murdered in the middle of the night all I have to do is feel guilty for the rest of my life.”

  When they passed by Santa Rosa, Teresa closed her eyes and breathed as deeply as she could; she thought about Silver, she couldn’t quite catch her breath, and Harper reached over and pounded on her back.

  “Asthma?” Harper asked, when Teresa was breathing a little more easily. “If you’ve got asthma I’ve got something that can set you right—a tonic of ivy and garlic and blackthorn.”

  “I don’t have asthma,” Teresa said. They were heading toward the river now. Harper turned off at the exit that led to Guerneville, and once they were off the highway Teresa felt instantly more comfortable, she curled her feet up under her and leaned against the door. “I’m just tired,” Teresa said. “That’s all that’s wrong with me.”

  “If you ever do get asthma, let me know,” Harper was saying. She turned to Teresa, but Teresa had already fallen asleep, she was dreaming about Silver, but she was moving toward that labyrinth of sleep far too deep for dreams.

  Harper switched on the radio, but she kept it lo
w, and she drove on, toward Villa Lobo, a town that had grown up around a logging camp near the river and had somehow managed to continue after the logging camp had been deserted for years. All along the highway, and up in the hills, the grass had been burned, but when Harper turned the Mercury onto the River Road it was like another season—the temperature dropped ten degrees, sunflowers and ferns grew beneath the tallest trees, redwoods grew so high that in some gardens the sun was always blocked out, and even the nighttime snails were fooled into leaving their traces along the lettuce leaves till noon. The riverbed was nearly dry; in the center of the bed was a stream only a few feet wide that ran to the west; occasional pools had collected, sienna-colored pools that tempted children into trying dangerous dives: jackknives and twists. Harper’s house was only a few yards away from the river; but the riverbeds in Villa Lobo were notoriously dry in summer, guest houses that rented rooms to fishermen were never full, water frogs gathered in the sand as if they were already waiting for the winter rains and the green tides of November.

  Harper didn’t really decide to take Teresa home with her; she simply didn’t know what else to do, she would have done the same with a stray cat, a swan with a broken wing. Once she had parked the car, Harper let Atlas out, but she didn’t wake Teresa; for all she knew, the other woman might have already hitchhiked for hundreds of miles. And later, when it had begun to grow dark and there was a silver of a moon in the sky, Harper went back out to the station wagon to call Teresa inside. She opened the passenger door, she told Teresa it was late, and when Teresa still didn’t open her eyes, Harper snapped her fingers right next to Teresa’s ear.

  “Good lord,” Harper said finally to Teresa, “you’re not going to wake up, are you?”

  Someone else might have panicked, someone else might have telephoned the local police or sent for an ambulance. But Harper simply helped Teresa stretch out in the front seat so that her legs wouldn’t be all cramped when she woke up. If anyone was used to mysterious diseases it was Harper, she had had a lifetime of them. She had grown up in her grandmother’s house in Maryland and had lived for years with an old woman who believed in love potions and in lunacy caused by too bright nights, an old woman who could brew teas that chased away fevers and melancholy and headaches.

  At night, when there was a full moon in the eastern sky, Harper’s grandmother had taken her for walks that ranged far beyond the magnolias and the gardens and the places where lambs were tied to wooden posts so they wouldn’t wander away. Beside a stream not more than a mile away from their house, Harper’s grandmother had searched for mushrooms and yarrow, for milkwood and antelope sage and lavender, and Harper’s job was to keep all the herbs separate from each other. At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve she followed her grandmother and was careful not to slip in the mud and there, under the stars, she put the herbs into tin boxes.

  Days later there would be something boiling on the stove—wood avens or juniper berries—and some women from town would always stop by. They would say they had come just for a visit, for a slice of poppyseed cake or a cup of lemonade on a hot day, but when they left they always left a dollar on the kitchen table, and they always took something back to town—a cure for fever, an aphrodisiac, fig juice in a paper cup to cure a sore throat. In spite of herself, Harper had learned her grandmother’s remedies; although when she was a teen-ager she suddenly refused to accompany the old woman to the stream, she refused to drink peppermint tea, choosing to drink gallons of black coffee instead. She was embarrassed that her grandmother believed in cures. At high school she whispered to her friends that she was forced to live with an insane woman, she began to stay out late every night, choosing her boyfriends because of their cars, spending those nights when there were full moons at drive-in movies instead of at the stream where wild lavender grew.

  It wasn’t until Harper was eighteen, already married and out of her grandmother’s house for nearly a year, that she went back home and asked her grandmother for one of her remedies. In less than a year Harper had discovered that the last thing she wanted was to stay married, and that included having a child. Harper’s grandmother was a very old woman by then, in less than six months she would die in her sleep and Harper would be amazed at how many people from town attended the funeral. But on that night when Harper went home for a cure, there were only the two of them in the house, only their shadows on the walls.

  “I know what you’re here for,” her grandmother had said right away. “Your period’s late. Don’t even think to try and tell me I’m wrong, ’cause I’m right.”

  Harper waited in her grandmother’s kitchen while the old woman went out; she didn’t have far to go, just over to the neighboring fields, where she dug out a cotton plant, saving only the root. Later that night, she gave Harper the extract of the bark to drink and made up a packet of pennyroyal tea. For three nights Harper drank pennyroyal tea mixed with brewer’s yeast; she boiled the water while her husband watched a baseball game on TV, she sipped the tea when he was already fast asleep in their bed. One week later Harper had a miscarriage, and it was then she decided that whenever she got the hell out of Salisbury, and out of her husband’s house, she’d set aside a place in her garden for herbs, she’d make certain to try to write down all of her grandmother’s remedies she hadn’t already forgotten.

  And so on the night when Teresa wouldn’t wake up, Harper knew enough to mix juniper berries, camomile, and birch leaves. She took the mixture out to the car and spooned some of the liquid in between Teresa’s lips, but it did no good at all and Harper had no choice but to let Teresa spend the night in the Mercury. And while Teresa slept, curled up on the upholstery that was still streaked red with Maryland dust, Harper wondered if her grandmother had known about a sleep so strong it couldn’t be broken by home remedies, a sleep stronger than any herbs gathered under the stars. And late that night Harper found herself wishing that she hadn’t left her grandmother’s house as soon as she had; she boiled water for peppermint tea, poured herself some, and then tried to see the future in the murky leaves that settled to the bottom of her cup, managing only to see the past, a recurring pattern of a flock of birds in flight.

  The path to Harper’s house was marked by broken stones. Out in the backyard there were lawn chairs that had been painted blue and raspberry bushes that grew wild. A low fence surrounded the herb garden; a scarecrow made of a mop handle and a wide-brimmed hat scared the jays away from the dill and mint and sweet marjoram and kept their beaks from picking through the heather and blood root and sweet wild onions. After her first night of sleeping in the car, Teresa began to sleep on the living-room couch, and she liked to look through the window into the garden as she drank tea in the morning. In the afternoons Teresa walked through town, and because Villa Lobo was made up of nothing more than a post office, a laundromat, and a general store that also sold bait, she was back at Harper’s in time to clean the house.

  Teresa imagined that the way she could earn her room and board at Harper’s was to scrub the floors, wash all of the dishes in the sink, and take Harper’s clothes to the laundromat where she washed, dried, and folded each blouse and pair of jeans carefully.

  “Don’t clean up my house,” Harper told her when she woke late in the afternoon. Harper worked nights at Nina’s, and often wasn’t home until four in the morning; she slept all day and in the afternoons had time to climb over the fence in the backyard and pick dill and mint before she painted her eyes with kohl and put on her black and white uniform and returned to Nina’s by six. “This is ridiculous,” Harper said when Teresa had been at her house for nearly two weeks. “The fact is you’re either going to have to get yourself a job and get your own place, or go back to him.”

  “I’ll get a job,” Teresa assured Harper.

  Teresa had begun to borrow Harper’s clothes, she had begun to know where every pot and pan was stored in the kitchen. Having someone else live in her house was not as awful as Harper would have imagined, but what worried her were
the days when Teresa didn’t wake up.

  “Plus, you’re sick,” Harper went on. “You’re sick and you don’t have any money, and if I were you I’d think twice about going back to that man you left behind.”

  There was another reason why Harper wanted Teresa to move out, to take her dog who shed all over the living-room rug and disappear down the River Road: she had a lover, one she didn’t want Teresa to meet. Harper had called Joey the day after Teresa came to stay with her, had told him that she was tired from working a six-day shift at Nina’s, and had advised him not to stop by her house; when she could make time she would come by the trailer park where he was the caretaker. Her call wasn’t unexpected, they had been seeing less of each other, arguing each time they spent the night together. Joey didn’t like her working as a cocktail waitress, he didn’t like the hours she kept, the herbs growing in the yard made him nervous, the fact that she insisted that she didn’t believe in marriage just because she’d been burned once drove him up a wall. Even though they had been spending more time fighting than making love, Harper didn’t quite want to give Joey up; after all the energy she had put into trying to make him understand who she was she didn’t want to lose him to a stranger who just happened to pass by, and she was certain that if Joey met Teresa that was exactly what would happen.

  Eventually it did happen, on a Tuesday night in late July when Harper was at work, taking an order for two whiskey sours and a tequila sunrise. Joey had had it with Harper—she was avoiding him, ignoring him, and what did they really have in common anyway? He had decided to go to her house and wait for her to come home from Nina’s. By the time Harper opened the front door Joey would be sitting on the couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him, he’d be ready for a fight. When Joey got to Harper’s house that night, all the lights were on; when he looked in the front window it made sense for him to assume that the woman dressed in Harper’s clothes who played solitaire was Harper, that she had taken a night off and not even bothered to tell him. He watched through the window as a woman set out diamonds and hearts in a neat row on the tabletop. The night was clear, and the Milky Way seemed only inches above the roof of the house.