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Chapter Twenty-three 5 page

It was oddly sensual this new intimacy she had with her daughter. Not since Grace was a baby had Annie felt she knew this body so well. It was a revelation, like coming back to a land loved long ago. There were blemishes, moles and scars she had never known were there. The top of Grace's forearm was a firmament of tiny freckles and covered with a down so soft that Annie wanted to brush her cheek against it. She turned the arm over and studied the translucent skin of Grace's wrist and the delta of veins that coursed beneath it.

She moved on to the elbow, opening and closing the joint fifty times, then massaging the muscles. It was hard work and Annie's hands and arms ached at the end of every session. Soon it was time to move around to the other side. She laid Grace's arm gently down on the bed and was about to get up, when she noticed something.

It was so small and so quick that Annie thought she must have imagined it. But after she had put Grace's hand down, she thought she saw one of the fingers quiver. Annie sat there and watched to see if it happened again. It didn't. So she picked the hand up again and squeezed it.

'Grace?' she said, quietly. 'Gracie?'

Nothing. Grace's face was blank. The only movement was the top of her chest which rose and fell in time with the respirator. Maybe what she had seen was merely the hand settling under its own weight. Annie looked up from her daughter's face to the stack of machines that monitored her. Annie still hadn't learned as well as Robert how to read their screens. Perhaps she trusted their inbuilt alarm systems more than he did. But she knew pretty well what the most vital ones should be saying, the ones that watched Grace's heartbeat and her brain and blood pressure. The heartbeat screen had a little electronic orange heart on it, a motif Annie found quaint, sentimental almost. The rate had stayed a constant seventy for many days. But now, Annie noticed, it was higher.

Eighty-five, flicking to eighty-four as she watched. Annie frowned. She looked around. There wasn't a nurse to be seen. She wasn't going to panic, it was probably nothing. She looked back at Grace. 'Grace?'

This time she squeezed Grace's hand and, looking up, saw the heartbeat monitor go crazy. Ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten… 'Gracie?'

Annie stood up, holding the hand tightly in both of hers, and peering down into Grace's face. She turned to call for someone but didn't have to because two of them were there already, a nurse and a young intern. The change had been picked up on the screens at the central desk.

'I saw her move,' Annie said. 'Her hand…'

'Keep on squeezing,' said the intern. He took a penlight out of his breast pocket and opened one of Grace's eyes. He shone the light into it and watched for a reaction. The nurse was checking the monitors. The heartbeat had steadied out at a hundred and twenty. The intern took Grace's earphones off. 'Talk to her.'

Annie swallowed. For a moment, stupidly, she was lost for words. The intern looked up at her. 'Just talk. It doesn't matter what you say.'



'Gracie? It's me. Darling, it's time to wake up now. Please wake up now.'

'Look,' the intern said. He was still holding Grace's eye open and Annie looked and saw a flicker. The sight of it made her take a sudden, sharp breath.

'Her blood pressure's up to one-fifty,' said the nurse. 'What does that mean?'

'It means she's responding,' said the intern. 'May I?'

He took Grace's hand from Annie, still holding the eye open with his other hand.

'Grace,' he said. 'I'm going to squeeze your hand now and I want you to try and squeeze back if you can. Try as hard as you can now, okay?'

He squeezed, looking into the eye all the time.

'There,' he said. He passed the girl's hand to Annie. 'Now I want you to do it for your mother.'

Annie took a deep breath and squeezed… and felt it. It was like the first, faint, tentative touch of a fish on a line. Deep in those dark, still waters something shimmered and would surface.

Grace was in a tunnel. It was a little like the subway except that it was darker and flooded with water and she was swimming in it. The water wasn't cold though. In fact it didn't really feel like water at all. It was too warm and too thick. In the distance she could see a circle of light and somehow she knew she had the choice of going toward it or turning and going in the other direction where there was also light, but of a dimmer, less welcoming kind. She wasn't frightened. It was simply a matter of choice. Either way would be fine.

Then she heard voices. They were coming from the place where the light was dimmer. She couldn't see who it was but she knew one of the voices was her mother's. There was a man's voice too, but not her father's. It was some other man, someone she didn't know. She tried to move toward them along the tunnel but the water was too thick. It was like glue, she was swimming in glue and it wouldn't let her through. The glue won't let me through, the glue… She tried to call out for help but she couldn't find her voice.

They didn't seem to know she was there. Why couldn't they see her? They sounded such a long way off and she was suddenly worried they might go and leave her all alone. But now, yes, the man was calling her name. They had seen her. And although she still couldn't see them, she knew they were reaching out for her and if she could only make one final, great effort, maybe the glue would let her through and they could haul her out.

 

Chapter Four

 

Robert paid in the farm shop and by the time he came out, the two boys had tied the tree up with string and were loading it into the back of the Ford Lariat crew-cab he'd bought last summer to ferry Pilgrim up from Kentucky. It had been a surprise for both Grace and Annie when he drove it, with its matching silver trailer, up to the house early one Saturday morning. They came out onto the porch, Grace thrilled and Annie quite furious. But Robert had just shrugged and smiled and said come on, you couldn't put a new horse in an old box.

He thanked the two boys, wished them a Merry Christmas and pulled out of the muddy, potholed parking lot onto the road. He had never bought a Christmas tree so late before. Usually he and Grace would go out the weekend before and get one, though they always left it until Christmas Eve to bring it inside and decorate it. At least she would be there to do that, to decorate it. Christmas Eve was tomorrow and Grace was coming home.

The doctors weren't totally happy about it. It was only two weeks since she'd come out of the coma but he and Annie had argued forcefully that it would be good for her and finally sentiment had triumphed: Grace could go home, but for two days only. They were to collect her at noon tomorrow.

He pulled up outside the Chatham Bakery and went in to pick up some bread and muffins. Breakfast at the bakery had become a weekend ritual for them. The young woman behind the counter sometimes babysat Grace.

'How's your beautiful girl?' she asked.

'Coming home tomorrow.'

'Really? That's great!'

Robert saw others were listening too. Everyone seemed to know about the accident and people he had never talked to before asked after Grace. He noticed though how no one ever spoke about the leg.

'Well, you make sure you give her my love.'

'I sure will, thanks. Merry Christmas.' Robert saw them watching from the window as he got back into the Lariat. He drove past the animal feed plant, slowed to cross the railroad, and headed for home through Chatham Village. The store windows along Main Street were full of Christmas festoonery and the narrow sidewalks, strung above with colored lights, were busy with shoppers. Robert exchanged waves with those he knew as he drove by. The creche on the central square looked pretty - undoubtedly a violation of the First Amendment - but pretty nonetheless and hey, it was Christmas. Only the weather seemed not to know it.

Since the rain had stopped, on the day Grace mouthed her first words, it had been ludicrously warm. Fresh from pontificating about hurricane floods, media climatologists were having their most lucrative Christmas in years. The world was officially a greenhouse or at least upside down. When he got back to the house, Annie was in the den, on the phone to her office. She was giving someone, one of the senior editors he guessed, the usual hard time. From what Robert could gather, as he tidied the kitchen, the poor soul had agreed to run a profile piece on some actor Annie despised.

'A star?' she said, in disbelief. 'A star? He's the complete opposite of a star. The guy's a goddamned black hole!'

Robert might normally have smiled at this but the aggression in her voice was dispelling the seasonal glow he had come home with. He knew she found it frustrating trying to run a chic metropolitan magazine from an upstate farmhouse. But it was more than that. Since the accident, Annie had seemed possessed by an anger so intense it was almost frightening.

'What! You agreed to pay him that?' she howled. 'You must be out of your mind! Is he going to do it nude or something?'

Robert put the coffee on and laid the table for breakfast. The muffins were the ones Annie liked best.

'I'm sorry John, I'm not going with it. You'll have to call and cancel… I don't care… Yes, you can fax it to me. Okay.'

He heard her hang up. No goodbye, but then there rarely was with Annie. Her footsteps as she came through the hall sounded more resigned than angry. He looked up and smiled at her as she came into the kitchen. 'Hungry?'

'No. I had some cereal.'

He tried not to look disappointed. She saw the muffins on the table.

'Sorry.'

'No problem. All the more for me. Like some coffee?'

Annie nodded and sat down at the table. She looked, with no apparent interest, through the newspaper he'd bought. It was a while before either of them spoke.

'Get the tree?' she asked.

'You bet. Not as good as last year's, but it's pretty.'

There was another silence. He poured coffee for them both and sat down at the table. The muffins tasted good. It was so quiet he could hear himself chewing. Annie sighed.

'Well, I suppose we ought to get it done tonight,' she said. She took a sip of coffee.

'What?'

'The tree. Decorate it.'

Robert frowned. 'Without Grace? Why? She'd hate it if we did it without her.'

Annie put her coffee down with a clatter.

'Don't be stupid. How the hell is she going to decorate the tree on one leg?'

She stood up, making her chair grate on the floor, and went to the door. Shocked, Robert stared at her for a moment.

'I think she could manage it,' he said steadily.

'Of course she couldn't. What's she going to do, hop around? Christ, she can hardly manage to stand up with those crutches.'

Robert winced. 'Annie, come on…"

'No, you come on,' she said and she started to go then turned back to him. 'You want it all to be the same, but it can't be the same. Just try and realize that, will you?'

She stood for a moment, framed by the blue surround of the doorway. Then she said she had work to do and was gone. And with a dull turning, deep in his chest, Robert knew she was right. Things would never be the same.

It was clever the way they handled her finding out about the leg, Grace thought. Because looking back on it, she couldn't actually pinpoint the moment that she knew. She supposed they had it down to a fine art, these things, and knew exactly how much dope to pump into you so you didn't freak out. She was aware something had happened down there even before she could move or speak again. There was this strange feeling and she noticed how the nurses seemed busier there than anywhere else. And it just seemed to slip into her consciousness like many other facts as they hauled her out of that tunnel of glue.

'Going home?'

She looked up. Leaning in at the door was the woman who came each day to see what you wanted to eat. She was vast and friendly, with a booming laugh capable of passing through bricks and mortar. Grace smiled and nodded.

'Alright for some,' the woman said. 'Means you don't get to eat my Christmas dinner, mind.'

'You can save me some. I'm coming back the day after tomorrow.' Her voice sounded croaky. She still had a Band-Aid over the hole they had made in her neck for the respirator tube. The woman winked.

'Honey, I'll do just that.'

She went and Grace looked at her watch. It was still twenty minutes till her parents were due and she was sitting on her bed, dressed and ready to go. They had moved her into this room a week after she'd come out of the coma, freeing her at last from the respirator so she could speak rather than just mouth. The room was small, with a terrific view of the parking lot and painted that depressing shade of pale green they must make specially for hospitals. But at least there was a TV and with every surface cluttered with flowers, cards and presents, it was cheerful enough.

She looked down at her leg where the nurse had neatly pinned up the bottom half of her gray sweatpants. She'd once heard someone say that if you had an arm or a leg cut off, you could still feel it. And it was absolutely true. At night it itched so badly it drove her crazy. It itched right now. The weird thing was that even so, even as she looked at it, the funny half-leg they'd left her with didn't seem to belong to her at all. It was someone else's.

Her crutches were propped against the wall by a bedside table and peeping around them was the photograph of Pilgrim. It was one of the first things she'd seen when she came out of the coma. Her father had seen her looking at it and told her the horse was okay and that made her feel better.

Judith was dead. And Gully. They'd told her that too. And it was just like it was with the leg, the news wouldn't quite sink in. It wasn't that she didn't believe it - why after all would they lie? She had cried when her father broke it to her but, perhaps again because of the drugs she was on, it hadn't felt like real crying. It was almost like watching herself cry. And since then, whenever she'd thought about it (and it was amazing to her how she managed not to), the fact of Judith's death seemed somehow to be suspended in her head, protectively encased so that she couldn't inspect it too closely.

A police officer had come to see her last week and had asked her questions and taken notes about what had happened. The poor guy had looked so nervous and Robert and Annie had hovered anxiously in case she got upset. They needn't have worried. She told him she could only remember things up to the point when they slid down the bank. It wasn't true. She knew that if she wanted to, she could remember much, much more. But she didn't want to.

Robert had already explained that she would have to make some other statement later, a deposition or something, for the insurance people, but only when she was better. Whatever that meant.

Grace was still staring at the picture of Pilgrim. She had already decided what she was going to do. She knew they'd try and get her to ride him again. But she wasn't going to, ever. She would tell her parents to give him back to the people in Kentucky. She couldn't bear the idea of selling him locally where she might come across him one day being ridden by someone else. She would go and see him one more time, to say goodbye. But that was all.

Pilgrim came home for Christmas too, a week earlier than Grace, and no one at Cornell was sad to see the back of him. He left tokens of his appreciation with several of the students. One now had her arm in plaster and half a dozen others had cuts and bruises. Dorothy Chen, who had devised a kind of matador technique to give him his daily shots, was rewarded by a perfect set of teeth marks on her shoulder.

'I can only see them in the bathroom mirror,' she told Harry Logan. 'They've gone through every shade of purple you can imagine.'

Logan could imagine. Dorothy Chen, examining her naked shoulder in her bathroom mirror. Oh boy.

Joan Dyer and Liz Hammond came with him to pick the horse up. He and Liz had always got on well, despite having rival practices. She was a big, hearty woman of about his age and Logan was glad to have her along because he always found Joan Dyer, on her own, a little heavy going.

Joan, he guessed, was in her mid-fifties and had that sort of stern, weathered face that always made you feel you were being judged. It was she who drove, apparently content to listen while Logan and Liz chatted about business. When they got to Cornell, she backed the trailer expertly right up to Pilgrim's stall. Dorothy got a shot of sedatives into him, but it still took them an hour to get him loaded in.

These past weeks Liz had been helpful and generous. When she got back from her conference she'd come over to Cornell, at the Macleans' request. It was obvious they wanted her to take over from him - a sacrifice Logan would have been all too happy to make. But Liz reported back that Logan had done a great job and should be left to it. The compromise was that she was to keep a kind of watching brief. Logan didn't feel threatened. It was a relief to share notes about a difficult case like this.

Joan Dyer, who hadn't seen Pilgrim since the accident, was shocked. The scars on his face and chest were bad enough. But this savage, demented hostility was something she'd never before seen in a horse. All the way back, for four long hours, they could hear him crashing his hooves against the sides of his box. They could feel the whole trailer shake. Joan looked worried.

'Where am I going to put him?'

'What do you mean?' said Liz.

'Well, I can't put him back in the barn like this. It wouldn't be safe.'

When they got back to the stables, they kept him in the trailer while Joan and her two sons cleared one of a row of small stalls behind the barn that hadn't been used in years. The boys, Eric and Tim, were in their late teens and helped their mother run the place. Both, Logan noted as he watched them work, had inherited her long face and economy with words. When the stall was ready Eric, the older and more sullen of the two, backed the trailer up to it. But the horse wouldn't come out.

In the end Joan sent the boys in through the front door of the trailer with sticks and Logan watched them whacking the horse and saw him rear up against them, as terrified as they were. It didn't seem right and Logan was worried about that chest wound bursting open, but he couldn't come up with a better idea and at last the horse backed off down into the stall and they slammed the door on him.

As he was driving home that night to his wife and children, Harry Logan felt depressed. He remembered the hunter, that little guy in the fur hat, grinning down at him from the railroad bridge. The little creep was right, he thought. The horse should have been put down.

Christmas at the Macleans' started badly and got worse. They drove home from the hospital with Grace carefully bolstered across the back seat of Robert's car. They hadn't got halfway when she asked about the tree.

'Can we decorate it soon as we get back?' Annie looked straight ahead and left it to Robert to say they'd already done it, though not how it was done, in a joyless silence late the night before with the air between them bristling.

'Baby, I thought you wouldn't feel up to it,' he said. Annie knew she should feel touched or grateful for this selfless shouldering of blame and it bothered her that she didn't. She waited, almost irritated, for Robert to leaven things with the inevitable joke.

'And hey young lady,' he went on, 'you're going to have enough work to do when we get home. There's firewood to cut, all the cleaning, food to prepare…'

Grace dutifully laughed and Annie ignored Robert's sidelong look in the silence that followed.

Once home, they managed to summon some little cheer. Grace said the tree in the hall looked lovely. She spent some time alone in her room, playing Nirvana loudly to reassure them she was alright. She was good on the crutches and could even handle the stairs, falling only once when she tried to bring down a bag of little presents she'd had the nurses go out and buy for her to give her parents.

'I'm okay,' she said when Robert ran to her. She had banged her head sharply on the wall and Annie, emerging from the kitchen, could see she was in pain.

'Are you sure?' Robert tried to offer help but she accepted as little as she could. 'Yes. Dad, really I'm fine.' Annie saw Robert's eyes fill as Grace went over and put the presents under the tree and the sight made her so angry she had to turn and go quickly back into the kitchen.

They always gave each other Christmas stockings. Annie and Robert did Grace's together and then one for each other. In the morning, Grace would bring hers into their room and sit on the bed and they would take turns unwrapping presents, making jokes about how clever Santa Glaus had been or how he'd forgotten to remove a price tag. Now, as with the tree, the ritual seemed to Annie almost unbearable.

Grace went to bed early and when they were sure she was asleep, Robert tiptoed to her room with the stocking. Annie undressed and listened to the hall clock ticking away the silence. She was in the bathroom when Robert came back and she heard a rustling and knew he was pushing her stocking under her side of the bed. She had just done the same with his. What a farce it was.

He came in as she was brushing her teeth. He was wearing his striped English pajamas and smiled at her in the mirror. Annie spat out and rinsed her mouth.

'You've got to stop this crying,' she said without looking at him.

'What?'

'I saw you, when she fell. You've got to stop feeling sorry for her. Pity won't help her at all.'

He stood looking at her and as she turned to go back into the bedroom their eyes met. He was frowning at her, shaking his head.

'You're unbelievable, Annie.'

'Thanks.'

'What's happening to you?'

She didn't reply, just walked past him back into the bedroom. She got into bed and switched off her light and after he'd finished in the bathroom he did the same. They lay with their backs to each other and Annie stared at the sharp quadrant of yellow light that jutted in from the landing onto the bedroom floor. It wasn't anger that had stopped her answering him, she simply had no idea what the answer was. How could she have said such a thing to him? Perhaps his tears enraged her because she was jealous of them. She hadn't wept once since the accident.

She turned and slipped her arms guiltily around him, putting her body to his back.

'I'm sorry,' she murmured and kissed the side of his neck. For a moment Robert didn't move. Then slowly he rolled onto his back and put an arm around her and she nestled in with her head on his chest. She felt him give a deep sigh and for a long time they lay still. Then she slid her hand slowly down his belly and gently took hold of him and felt him stir. Then she rose up and knelt above him, pulling her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to the floor. And he reached up, as he always did, and put his hands on her breasts as she worked herself on him. He was hard now and she guided him into her and felt him shudder. Neither of them uttered a sound. And she looked down through the darkness at this good man who had known her for so long and saw in his eyes, unobscured by desire, an awful, irretrievable sadness.

The weather turned colder on Christmas Day. Metallic clouds whipped over the woods like a film in fast-forward and the wind shifted to the north and brought arctic air spiraling down the valley. Inside, they listened to it howling in the chimney as they sat playing Scrabble by the big log fire.

That morning, opening presents around the tree, they had all tried hard. Never in her life, not even when very young, had Grace had so many presents. Almost everyone they knew had sent her something and Annie had realized, too late, that they should have kept some back. Grace, she could see, sensed charity and left many gifts unopened.

Annie and Robert hadn't known what to buy her. In recent years it had always been something to do with riding. Now everything they could think of carried an implication simply through not being to do with riding. In the end Robert had bought her a tank of tropical fish. They knew she wanted one but Annie feared even this had a message tagged to it: Sit and watch, it seemed to say. This now is all you can do.

Robert had rigged it all up in the little back parlor and put Christmas wrapping paper on it. They led Grace to it and watched her face light up as she undid it.

'Oh my God!' she said. 'That is just fabulous.'

In the evening, when Annie finished tidying away the supper things, she found Grace and Robert in front of it, lying on the sofa in the dark. The tank was illuminated and bubbling and the two of them had been watching it and fallen asleep in each other's arms. The swaying plants and the gliding shadows of the fish made ghostly patterns on their faces.

At breakfast the next morning, Grace looked very pale. Robert put his hand on hers.

'Are you okay, baby?'

She nodded. Annie came back to the table with a jug of orange juice and Robert took his hand away.

Annie could see Grace had something difficult to say.

'I've been thinking about Pilgrim,' she said in a level voice. It was the first time the horse had been mentioned. Annie and Robert sat very still. Annie felt ashamed neither of them had been to see him since the accident or at least since he had come back to Mrs Dyer's.

'Uh-huh,' said Robert. 'And?'

'And I think we should send him back to Kentucky.'

There was a pause.

'Gracie,' Robert began. 'We don't need to make decisions right now. It may be that—' Grace cut him off.

'I know what you're going to say, that people who've had injuries like mine do ride again, but I don't…' She broke off for a moment, composing herself. 'I don't want to. Please.'

Annie looked at Robert and she could tell he felt her eyes on him, daring him to show even a hint of tears.

'I don't know if they'll take him back,' Grace went on. 'But I don't want anyone around here to have him.'

Robert nodded slowly, showing he understood even if he didn't yet agree. Grace latched on to this.

'I want to say goodbye to him, Daddy. Could we go see him this morning? Before I go back to the hospital?'

Annie had spoken just once to Harry Logan. It had been an awkward call and though neither mentioned her threat to sue him, it had hung heavily over their every word. Logan had been charming and, in her tone at least, Annie got as near to an apology as she ever got. But since then, her news of Pilgrim had come only through Liz Hammond. Not wanting to add unduly to their worries over Grace, Liz had given Annie a picture of the horse's recovery that was as reassuring as it was false.

The wounds were healing well, she said. The skin grafts over the cannon bone had taken. The nasal bone repair looked better than they had ever dared hope. None of these was a lie. And none of them prepared Annie, Robert and Grace for what they were about to see as they came up the long drive and parked in front of Joan Dyer's house.

Mrs Dyer came out of the stable and crossed the yard toward them, wiping her hands on the sides of the old blue quilt jacket she always wore. The wind whipped strands of gray hair across her face and she smiled as she tidied them away. The smile was so odd and out of character that Annie was puzzled. It was probably just awkwardness at the sight of Grace being helped out onto her crutches by Robert.

'Hello Grace,' Mrs Dyer said. 'How are you dear?'

'She's doing just great, aren't you baby?' Robert said. Why can't he let her answer for herself? thought Annie. Grace smiled bravely.

'Yes, I'm fine.'

'Did you have a good Christmas? Lots of presents?'

'Zillions,' said Grace. 'We had a fabulous time, didn't we?' She looked at Annie.

'Fabulous,' Annie endorsed.

No one seemed to know what to say next and for a moment they all stood there in the cold wind, embarrassed. Clouds barreled furiously overhead and the red walls of the barn were suddenly set ablaze by a burst of sun.

'Grace wants to see Pilgrim,' said Robert. 'Is he in the barn?'

Mrs Dyer's face flickered.

'No. He's out back.'

Annie sensed something was wrong and could see Grace did too.

'Great,' said Robert. 'Can we go see him?'

Mrs Dyer hesitated but only for an instant.

'Of course.'

She turned and walked off. They followed her out of the yard and around to the old row of stalls at the back of the barn.

'Mind how you go. It's pretty muddy back here.'

She looked over her shoulder at Grace on her crutches then darted a look at Annie. It felt like a warning.

'She's pretty darn good on these things, don't you think Joan?' Robert said. 'I can't keep up.'


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 664


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