I hear the slam of the screen door from the living room and both of us turn toward the house. Nina is in the doorway, hugging her stuffed mole. She’s sleepy, so sleepy it doesn’t even scare her when she doesn’t see us anywhere. She takes a few steps, and without letting go of the stuffed animal she grabs the railing and concentrates on going down the three porch steps until she’s on the grass. Carla leans back in the seat and watches her in the rearview mirror, silent. Nina looks down at her feet. She has a new habit since we got here, and she’s doing it now: pulling up the grass by clenching it between her toes.
“David had knelt down in the stream, his shoes were soaked. He’d put his hands in the water and was sucking on his fingers. Then I saw the dead bird. It was very close to David, just a step away. I got scared and yelled at him, and then he got scared, too. He jumped up and fell backward onto his bottom from the fear. My poor David. I went over to him dragging the horse, who neighed and didn’t want to follow me, and somehow I picked him up with just one hand and I fought with both of them until we made it back up the hill. I didn’t tell Omar about any of it. What for? The screwup was over and done with, fixed. But the next morning the horse was lying down. ‘He’s not there,’ said Omar. ‘He escaped,’ and I was about to tell him that he’d already escaped once, but then he saw the horse lying in the pasture. ‘Shit,’ he said. The stallion’s eyelids were so swollen you couldn’t see his eyes. His lips, nostrils, and his whole mouth were so puffy he looked like a different animal, a monstrosity. He barely had the strength to whinny in pain, and Omar said his heart was pounding like a locomotive. He made an urgent call to the vet. Some neighbors came over, everyone was worried and running back and forth, but I went into the house, desperate, and I picked up David, who was still sleeping in his crib, and I locked myself in my room, in bed with him in my arms, to pray. To pray like a crazy woman, pray like I’d never prayed in my life. You’ll be wondering why I didn’t run to the clinic instead of locking myself in the bedroom, but sometimes there’s not enough time to confirm the disaster at hand. Whatever the horse had drunk my David had drunk too, and if the horse was dying then David didn’t have a chance. I knew it with utter clarity, because I had already heard and seen too many things in this town: I had a few hours, or maybe minutes, to find a solution that wasn’t waiting half an hour for some rural doctor who wouldn’t even make it to the clinic in time. I needed someone to save my son’s life, whatever the cost.”
I steal another look at Nina, who is now taking a few steps toward the pool.
“It’s just that sometimes the eyes you have aren’t enough, Amanda. I don’t know how I didn’t see it—why the hell was I worrying about a goddamn horse instead of my son?”
I’m wondering whether what happened to Carla could happen to me. I always imagine the worst-case scenario. Right now, for instance, I’m calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the “rescue distance”: that’s what I’ve named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should.
“Once I decided what I would do there was no going back. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the only possible way out. I picked up David, who was crying because he could sense my fear, and I left the house. Omar was standing over the horse and arguing with two men, and every once in a while he clutched his head. Two more neighbors were watching from the lot behind us and sometimes jumped into the conversation, shouting opinions from their field to ours. No one noticed when I left. I went out to the street,” said Carla, pointing toward the end of my yard and beyond the gate, “and I went to the green house.”
“What green house?”
The last ash of her cigarette falls between her breasts and she brushes it away, blowing a little, and then she sighs. I’m going to have to clean the car tomorrow, my husband is very meticulous about these things.
“The people who live around here go there sometimes, because we know that those doctors they call in to the clinic always take hours to arrive, and they don’t know anything and can’t do anything. If it’s serious, we go to the woman in the green house,” says Carla.
Nina leaves her stuffed mole on my lounge chair, on the beach towel. She takes some more steps toward the pool, and I sit up, alert, in my seat. Carla looks too, but the situation doesn’t seem to worry her. Nina crouches down, sits on the edge of the pool, and puts her feet into the water.
“She’s not a psychic. She always makes sure people understand that. But she can see people’s energy, she can read it.”
“What do you mean, she can read it?”
“She can tell if someone is sick, and where in the body the negative energy is coming from. She cures headaches, nausea, skin ulcers, and cases of vomiting blood. If you reach her in time, she can stop miscarriages.”
“Are there that many miscarriages?”
“She says that everything is energy.”