The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Five

AT THAT POINT THE DAY WENT SURREAL.
Gabby’s face was tear streaked, her eyes red. Tyler stood behind her on the porch, looking like he wanted to be here at this moment even less than I did. Gabby still wore the black suit that made her look thirty. The auburn ringlets of her hair that were not swept up in a sophisticated twist slowly began to wilt in the drizzle. “Did you hurt him?”
“No, Gabby, of course not—” I suddenly didn’t believe I could remain standing.
Big, bald David Neumeister—built like a linebacker—seemed to sense this. He wrapped me in his arms, enveloping me with that yeasty aroma of fresh bread he carried with him. Big David owned the bakery, David’s Hot Buns, that supplied Bobby’s restaurant with all its bread. His hug infused me with strength even though it hurt my injured arm.
Davy kissed my cheek and said near my ear, so Gabby couldn’t hear it across the yard, “Whatever he did, sis, we’re gonna go hunt him down and kick his ass.”
I adored my brother for the sentiment but had trouble picturing the Davids beating anyone up. Not that they couldn’t—Davy was a sinewy, muscled marathon runner who only ever looked small next to Big David—but beating someone up was just so against their natures.
“But it looks like you already did,” Big David whispered, as they led me inside.
“Please don’t tell me you murdered him and dumped his body in the meth lab acres out back,” Davy said. “We need you for a reference for our adoption, remember? It won’t look good for us if you’re in prison.”
MY FIERCE, BALEFUL GABRIELLA SAT, ARMS CROSSED, AT the kitchen island. Tyler stood beside her, hand on her shoulder.
Tyler cleared his throat and said, “Dr. Anderson, I’m sorry, but . . .” he nodded toward the gory mess on the counter. “What happened?” He sounded almost scared.
I’d stopped bothering to tell him he could call me Cami. It was a sign of his good parenting that he’d always addressed Bobby and me as Mr. Binardi and Dr. Anderson. Tyler worked in my clinic (as did Gabby); he wanted to be a vet, and I thought he’d make a great one.
I quickly explained about the cat.
Gabriella’s big brown eyes softened.
“Did he make it?” Tyler asked.
I nodded. I saw the interest in his eyes, knew he would’ve loved to see that surgery.
Then they saw my arm. Everyone stared at the now almost-black purple welts. Blood blisters shone from the top of each one. “Like I said, it’s been a hell of a day.” My words ran out of my mouth, gathering momentum. “I’ve been bitten by a rescue horse—who’s in our barn right now if he hasn’t dismantled it—left by my husband, and forced to amputate the leg of a cat.”
A strange silence fell in the kitchen. Strange enough that it made me look up and into everyone’s faces. I saw wheels turning, information being shifted behind their eyes.
“Whatever Dad did, you’re going to let him come home, right?”
A slow dawning rose in me. “Babe . . . what did your dad tell you?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He . . . he left me a message.”
“A message?” For a second I wished the blood on the counter did belong to Bobby.
“He said he wanted me to know before I got back that he couldn’t be here and it looked like the two of you were splitting up.”
Wow. That sounded so . . . reciprocal. I pressed my fingers to the angry bumps on my arm.
“What happened, Mom? What did he do? He’ll be back, right?”
What did I say? Pretend it was just an argument? Would he come back?
I told the humiliating, scalding truth, then watched everyone reprocess this information.
Davy asked, as if sorting out complicated directions, “Wait. He left you?”
WHEN MY MOTHER’S CAR PULLED INTO THE DRIVE (GABBY had called her), I put my forehead on the kitchen island. My parents were professional stoics, and at the moment, I was too depleted to do the work to put on a brave face. I clutched my hands to my muddy hair. I couldn’t face my mother like this. My mother could stand in the dustbowl of a summer horse show, judging class after class of riders she’d allowed to remove their jackets in the savage heat—never removing her own jacket, of course—and look like she’d just stepped out of an air-conditioned room. Davy urged me upstairs to take a shower.
Bobby had taken his shaving mirror from the shower, but his razor stubble peppered the tub. This sight had greeted me nearly every morning of our life together.
Why hadn’t I told the truth to my friends? Who had I been kidding? At our Girls’ Nights Out (referred to by my friends as GNOs), Olive, Helen, and Aurora talked with equal passion of their love and irritation for their men. Nick wouldn’t stand up to his mother. Hank always forgot to ask before he committed them to plans as a couple. One of Aurora’s dates had never voted. Olive had turned to me: “So, your turn, Cami. Don’t hold back just because he’s my brother.”
When I smiled and shrugged, they insisted, “Oh, come on. Don’t make us hate you!”
Finally, I said, “He never rinses his damn stubble down the shower drain.”
Silence. Then, joking, “You suck. That’s all you’ve got?”
Now, with Bobby gone, I stepped into the shower—that stubble gritty under my feet—and wondered why I hadn’t told them about the burden of his unhappiness. Or the fact that he’d never dance. That a gift certificate for salsa classes died a quiet death in his dresser drawer. That the holidays I used to love became tense with his gloomy moods.
He hadn’t really left me, had he? He’d come back. He had to come back.
I washed my hair for a long time, partly because of my tender arm but also because I was stalling. I was too spent to talk to my mother. Oh, God. I didn’t want to be my mother. Just thinking that made me crouch down under the shower’s stream, my arms wrapped around my knees.
Suddenly I was eleven, scrunched down like that with Vijay, hiding in my parents’ hayloft, overhearing my parents argue.
Vijay and I had been walking on the ceiling beams that went over the indoor riding arena, from one loft to the other inside the barn, pretending to be tightrope walkers. When we heard my parents’ voices, we scampered off a beam and hid behind some bales of hay.
My parents never argued, but Dad’s word bitch rose to me and punched my stomach.
Beneath us, my father saddled Stormwatch, while my mother followed his every step.
“I’d do anything, Cleve,” Mom said.
Even at that age, my mother’s desperation and pleading tone sickened me. Her repeated “please” stung me as much as Dad’s rude insult.
“You ask a lot, Caroline,” my father said.
But as far as I could see, my mother hadn’t asked for anything. Ever. She toiled away behind the scenes. She wiped his boots. She wiped the horse’s mouth. She walked the course. She timed. She carried. She fetched.
My father mounted Stormwatch, clucked his tongue, and cantered out the open door.
“Don’t take it out on the horse!” Mom called.
When Dad rode away, Mom said, “That’s not who you want to hurt.” She stood, staring after him, hands on her head, frozen. When she finally left, Vijay and I climbed down and took off to report everything to Davy.
Terrified that our parents were going to split up, Davy and I spied on them both, recording observations and clues in black-and-white speckled notebooks. We witnessed more whispered arguments. Phone calls our father would end abruptly when we entered the room. I crept downstairs several nights to find Dad asleep on the couch, covered in our dogs and cats. Twice I found our parents’ bedroom empty, Dad’s truck gone, and Mom crying in the barn lot.
It didn’t take much for Davy and me to figure out our father was having an affair.
Davy feared Dad would leave us, forcing Mom to sell us—just like what happened to Seabiscuit’s jockey in a book we’d read. I, though, became scornful that my mother didn’t leave herself. I would never put up with that bullshit. I would never beg please.
In the shower, I leaned my forehead against the tile.
My dad still got all the glory, even though he was retired from competition now. He won four Olympic golds before a brutal fall injured his brain and spine five years ago. While Mom walked him up and down the hospital hallways and oversaw every physical therapy exercise, it was my father who got his picture on the cover of magazines even then.
Now my parents were only months away from their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifty years.
MY MOTHER’S GENTLENESS EMBARRASSED ME.
I sat on the edge of the tub, combing my hair, when Mom knocked. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, the words full of heartbreak. She sat beside me on the tub’s edge and put an arm around me. She smelled of wood smoke from their fireplace, with perfume faintly beneath it.
When she saw my arm, she stiffened. “What on earth happened? Did he hurt you?”
“No! No, no, one of the horses we removed this morning bit me.”
The coiled snake of my mother’s anger released a little. Mom knew Bobby’s father had been a violent man when alive. When Bobby and I first dated, Mom had seen Mimi once with a bruise-smudged lip. I’m not sure she ever truly believed that Bobby had purpled my own eye by accident, thrashing around during one of his nightmares.
I wished in that shameful instant that Bobby did beat me. I wanted to announce that Bobby and I split up because he hit me. I wanted a reason. Something as clean and sharp as an elbow cracking into a cheekbone in the dark.
IN BOBBY’S IMMACULATE KITCHEN—SOMEONE HAD cleaned up the cat’s blood—whatever Big David was baking filled the air with rosemary. Gabby had changed clothes, and polite Tyler had left for home. The evening blurred together with their comforts and conversations.
I turned to Gabriella. “Babe, you know this has nothing to do with you, right? This is between your father and—”
“If one more person says that to me I’m going to scream!” she said. “What am I? Six?”
I looked at the others, who shrugged sheepishly. Good. Good for them. I’d rather she heard it too often than not at all.
They asked me questions. I told the story. They talked. My mind drifted, hearing fragments.
I sat down at the tiled kitchen island with an ice-filled dish towel across my forearm. I traced the blue-and-yellow designs in the Portuguese tile we’d selected on one of our last trips together. It hit me—if he really was gone, that would have been our last vacation. The first of a series of lasts: the last Christmas, the last party, the last birthday dinner. Bobby’s birthday was just a week away.
As angry and hurt as I was, I mostly felt fear—fear for Bobby. What was he doing?
Once Gabby left the room, Mom was brave enough to ask. “Is there someone else?”
Even though I’d asked Bobby the same question, my mother bringing it up rankled me. “He said there wasn’t.”
“Of course he’s going to say that, right?” Davy said. “He’s too big of a coward to admit it to your face. But who would leave you for no reason?”
I loved my brother fiercely at that moment even though I didn’t want him to be right.
“That’s the first thing my mom asked, too,” Big David said. His sixty-seven-year-old mother, Ava, lived with them.
“You told your mom?” I was mortified.
Big David nodded. “While you were in the shower.”
“Not that she’ll remember it,” Davy said. Ava had Alzheimer’s.
Big David said, “She’s with Carol”—his sister—“and when I told her, Mom asked me, ‘Who did he leave her for? A man or a woman?’ ”
The floor seemed to tilt slightly. What? Bobby had talked often lately of “reinventing” himself. Well. That would certainly do the trick.
“Please,” Davy said, seeing me consider this. “He left Gabby a message. A gay man would never have been that insensitive.”
Even I laughed at that, grateful to Davy for breaking the grim mood.
“You should call Mimi,” Mom said of Bobby’s mother. “But otherwise, be discreet. He may realize he’s made a mistake and want to come back. And when he does, you don’t want to have dragged your dirty laundry through everyone else’s backyard.”
I wanted to say, I’m not you, Mom! But I didn’t. I didn’t like who I became in her presence—reduced to my eleven-year-old self. I did say, “Maybe I wouldn’t take him back.”
My mother’s face flushed. She wiped nonexistent crumbs from the Portuguese tile.
I hated myself. Hadn’t I just been thinking what she suggested—that he might return before anyone else had to know? Why was I so awful to her?
“You should eat,” Big David said, always the peacemaker. “I’m baking you some rosemary bread. It’ll be out in ten minutes. But we can rustle up a meal, too.”
The rosemary bread was one of my favorites from David’s bakery. We called it “funeral bread,” because Ava always made it for friends when someone died. It seemed all too fitting.
A wave of memory crashed against me—the way Bobby held my face in his hands and bent his head to mine. How his fingers always carried a scent of citrus, or of basil.
“Don’t tell anyone yet, okay?” I asked the Davids. That was as close to an apology to my mother as I could muster.
I HAD NO IDEA WHAT THEY HEATED UP FOR DINNER. Whatever it was tasted like sawdust, but I sat with them and forced myself to bring spoonfuls to my mouth to chew and swallow.
I was relieved when everyone went home and it was just me and Gabby. I showed her the new horse. We stood outside, since the kicker still refused to enter the barn. Gabby slid next to me, putting her arm around my waist, her head on my shoulder.
I was so sorry this was happening to her this way. A message? Really? I watched the horse scarf his new pile of hay. “You didn’t really think I’d attacked your dad, did you?”
“Well,” she said. “You can be pretty kick-ass, you know.”
I kissed her forehead. I didn’t feel very kick-ass at the moment, but the compliment warmed me. I loved this person with every rational thought (and plenty of irrational ones) that passed through my brain. Her opinion mattered more than almost anyone’s to me.
I’d give my moody, morose husband time. I’d give him space. I’d get him back here and we’d make it better.
Because even though I’d never wanted to be married, there’s no way in hell I wanted to be divorced.