Love Story(34)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Just like your career as a Hollywood actress worked out,” said a voice in her head. But if she had listened to the voice in her head, she never would have pursued her dreams. Granted, her dreams had not worked out, either, but better to pursue them than to have stayed here when she was eighteen, and to have hung her dreams in a black barn alongside stalks of tobacco to cure and age and dry.

Her mother’s huge house was surrounded by large grassy hills, like a ship rocking in thirty-foot seas. At the bottom of one hill she could see nothing but stars above her in the black sky. Climbing this hill, gradually she saw more and more of the long, low horse barn. No features of the ancient building were visible in the night. It was only a black block obliterating the starlight, one open doorway filled with brilliant light, and the smell of cigarette smoke.

He was waiting for her.

She was shocked by the intense wave of desire that swept through her. She had felt this way a hundred times in high school, a thousand times during that shining year in Hollywood when she’d still thought the world was hers. So seldom had she felt this way since—perhaps a few times with the father of her child. Every time he struck her, and apologized the next day, calling up that desire became harder. She picked up speed through the dewy grass until she ran toward that feeling.

The man had seen her coming and had ground his cigarette under his riding boot. Now he laughed and caught her in his arms and swung her in a circle outside the barn. He had not grown up here like she had. He had grown up somewhere far away but similar, and she felt as if she had known him longer than a month.

“You haven’t changed your mind.” He set his forehead against hers and chuckled these words to her. He was a tall, strong man with a lightness about him, always laughing as he spoke. He did not judge her for wanting him.

“I haven’t changed my mind.” She took his rough hand and led him through the labyrinth she knew so well: past the barn office, down the dark main corridor with horse stalls on either side, to the bunk room in back.

She’d had men here before, when she was a teenager with no business here. She hadn’t regretted her actions then. Now, looking back, perhaps those wild transgressions and her mother’s reaction when she found out had been the hottest fire lit under her feet and had sent her two thousand miles away. She dreaded her mother’s reaction still. But with any luck her mother would not find out until her relationship with this man, exactly her age, was stable and happy.

“You are a beautiful woman.” He smiled down at her, running his rough fingers through her curls. “Here I thought I’d found a job in paradise, and then from out of nowhere comes an angel.”

“Not from out of nowhere,” she teased him. “Out of the two thirty Greyhound from Glendale.”

She bit her bottom lip, wishing she hadn’t made this silly joke. As a teen she would have made dozens of jokes like this in quick succession, daring a boy to keep up with her. The father of her child had taken these jokes to mean she thought she was smarter than he was, and twice this had been the reason he punched her. Exactly twice. She kept score.

But her new man grinned and lightly touched his fingertip to her nose. Gently he eased her backward onto the sagging mattress covered with a clean quilt faded to pastels. With surprising force he took her mouth with his. She tasted cigarette and mint and comfort.

Later they dressed. “Put it on,” he joked from the mattress, and she donned her clothes while pretending to move in reverse. She stepped outside the barn with him while he smoked a cigarette. She didn’t smoke, and any other time the smell and the habit would have annoyed her, but they seemed a part of this man, an imperfect but honest part.

He offered her a cigarette and she should have taken it, and one more. Then they would have remained outside with room to run when the father of her child stormed through the front door of her mother’s grand house and out the side door.

But she declined, and in the few more minutes she thought she could spare before her mother finally turned in for the night and perhaps looked in on her to make sure she hadn’t escaped again, she asked this kind man to show her the horses. She had seen them all when she’d first arrived home. She had run her hands over them to meet them and had exercised a few of them, but she wanted to see them through his eyes.

They went into a stall with a massive brown stallion. They moved one stall down to discuss a white colt, then a black filly. The man said he’d heard the filly’s dam had looked exactly like this filly and had been at the farm when the woman left fourteen years before. The woman thought he must be mistaken. She did not want him to be mistaken, but she did not recognize this horse.

She removed her hand from the filly’s withers and placed it on the man’s chest—with measured speed, so the filly would not be startled. “Did you hear something?”

The man eyed her in disbelief, then looked in the direction of the barn door. There was a crash, a curse, the woman’s name called gruffly by the father of her child, and more faintly by her mother, in the distance. And then his silhouette filled the open doorway of the stall.

There was no time to explain to her lover that the interloper was the father of her child, who must have suspected she would run back to her mother and had finally tracked her down.

There was no time to explain to the father of her child that one should never, ever shout around a horse.

The filly reared. The woman tried to duck, but her lover was close behind her. The filly’s horseshoe with a thousand pounds behind it struck her in the temple.

She died instantly, or so they told me. Perhaps they told me that to comfort me, and her painless death was the biggest lie of all. I will never know for sure. I was in the closet with my earbuds in, reading Pride and Prejudice for the fifth time.

But if she remained conscious for a little while, I know what she was thinking. When you’re starting over and anything is possible, “anything” includes an early death.

10

“It’s your first story’s troubled older sister, on crack and in rehab,” Manohar said.

I was accustomed to the class bursting into laughter when Manohar commented on my stories. This burst was more of an explosion, as if all my classmates had been holding their breath for two weeks, waiting for my next turn to write a story, and Manohar’s next turn to unwrite it.

“I guess it’s better than your first one,” he said after the titters died down, “but it’s still so unbelievable.”

Now I understood. Hunter had read my story in the library, run straight to Manohar, and told him what I’d written. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they teased me in class by saying my story was unbelievable, when it was the truest thing I’d written yet? At the beginning of class, I had thought Hunter looked ill at his end of the table, and I had wondered again whether I’d affected him with my story. Now I knew I hadn’t, and I hated him.