The job at the real estate office is like a band-aid on a bullet wound. I took it to slow the bleeding, so to speak. Every morning I wake, dress, get in the car, and drive. Arrive here with a smile on my face and sit at a desk to answer phones. This is all meant to distract me from my failures. My inability to sell my paintings, and also to save my mother. People say I could still make it, in spite of everything, but that ship has sailed. Or the train has left the station. Choose a metaphor you like for “never gonna happen” and insert it into a sentence about me and my life.
Every time the phone rings, it’s for Danny. Everybody in town wants him to sell their house or find them a property. His face is plastered on the side of buses, and I think he thinks I enjoy the scent of his cologne because he leans in closer than he needs to when I relay his messages. Pale blue dress shirt, thin striped tie. Hair sufficiently tousled to look boyish while simultaneously coming off as put together. The other girl who works here, Annie, stares at him longingly, but I find the hunger in his eyes disconcerting. The boss says Danny is a go-getter, which is a nice way of saying materialistic or shallow or obsessed with making money.
I am so tired of ringing telephones and beeping pagers that I cannot drive in traffic, so I take the back way home. A long winding road that curves through fields of corn and cows, past farmhouses with wraparound porches. People call it Snake Road, and it killed my mother.
Three horses in a field give me a moment of relief, a feeling something like joy. They graze in the center of a square of green, penned in by an old split-rail fence. One is dappled gray, just like in the nursery rhyme, with a swishing black tail. The other two are brown, one a gleaming mass of chestnut and the other graced with a diamond of white on the forehead, little white cuffs at the ankles.
On the fifth day of passing the horses, I pull over to the side of the road and lean against the cedar posts. This spot is quite near where my mother crashed her Toyota Corolla into the ditch on a rainy night in February. They said it was black ice, that she died instantly. That she couldn’t have suffered because it was over before she knew it.
Danny has mentioned a party tonight and insinuated that he’d be happy to see me there. The gray horse, Elsa I decide her name is, lowers her slender neck to nuzzle the long grass. The air is heavy with farm smells, manure, wildflowers, damp earth. Something compels me to climb through the gap in the fence and I stand there wondering who owns these horses and how close I can get to them. I scan the horizon and spot a barn in the distance, but no one is here and so I hold out my hand to Lady Jane, the diamond horse, and my heart pounds as she canters toward me. As the sun infuses my skin, she lets me stroke her mane and run my hand over her back. I’ve never been this close to a creature this size, and I am awestruck. Soon Elsa approaches, wanting her share of attention but Buttercup ignores me, too proud to acknowledge my presence. I laugh at her haughtiness. A loud pickup truck drives by on the road and startles me back to reality, so I say goodbye and slowly retreat, walking backward to face the horses as long as I can.
On Monday Danny says he missed me at the party, while Annie glares at me with cold blue eyes. I make an excuse and pretend I’m busy working on a client list but really, I’m searching the internet for what to feed horses. After work, I park in my usual spot and hop the fence with a bag of grain from the farm supply store out on Highway 8. The clerk told me if I hold my hand flat the horses will bend their heads to take the food from my palm. I make soft clicking noises with my tongue and speak gently. Elsa accepts my offer first, followed quickly by Lady Jane. I am determined to win over Buttercup and I approach slowly, my hand held out as a gesture of goodwill. She neighs and looks away, but then turns in my direction and, before I know it, she takes the treat and remains beside me. “Good girl,” I whisper, delighted with my conquest.
I hear a rustle in the dense forest that lines the clearing and check quickly to see if someone is there. I’m sure I glimpse a fleeting plaid jacket, but it’s gone so fast I doubt myself. Perhaps I’m paranoid about being caught trespassing on private property, inventing an angry owner out of thin air. Still, I pat my beauties and say my farewells, then get back in my car and drive home.
That night, I dig out a brand-new sketchbook with clean pages. I have never drawn animals; my specialty had been oil paintings of dark, impressionistic figures. My studio in the city is overflowing with huge canvases too strange to be purchased by the masses, and not beautiful enough to catch the eye of the rich people who could afford them. After my mother died, I couldn’t bring myself to waste another minute following my stupid dreams. All my so-called talent ever did was lead me away from home, away from her, such that I wasn’t here to stop her from getting into the car that night. I almost toss the sketchbook to the floor in frustration, but when I close my eyes and picture the three horses, a sense of calm settles over me. I pick up a pencil, and I draw.
I fill page after page, night after night until I need to start another book. I visit my horses day after day, as the summer fades and the air turns brisk, as the cold begins to pinch my cheeks and turn my breath to steam.
The boss schedules a dinner at a restaurant to celebrate Danny and his sales. We eat appetizers and sip at wine glasses and congratulate him on his success. When his hand settles on my waist and begins to creep up and down my back, I pivot to face him. “Who owns the big piece of land halfway down Snake Road? The one with the field of horses and the cedar split rail fence?” Danny’s eyes regain focus, like I’ve activated his real estate senses. “That belongs to Wyatt Smith. They used to breed racehorses, back when his brothers were alive, but now it’s just him and he’s like a hundred years old. Why?”
“No reason. I like his horses, that’s all.” I decide to make the most of Danny’s moment of clarity and mention how beautiful Annie looks. Tell him I’d kill to have the body to wear a dress like that. Tell him now that I think of it, the two of them would look great together, a perfect photo op for the firm. He takes the bait and moves in her direction like a fish to water.
I leave after the main course, and drive to Snake Road again. The field is empty and dark, the moon shining down on the barn in the distance. It’s difficult to walk in high heels but I trek across the enclosure anyway, trying to get as close as I can to where I imagine Elsa, Lady Jane, and Buttercup are spending the night. I hide behind a tree when the house comes into view and curse myself for being so foolish. Wyatt Smith is on the porch, rocking back and forth on the swing with a bottle of beer in his hand. He could have me arrested, or he could shoot me. He could chase me off his property calling me every name in the book, and he’d be right to do it.
Weeks pass. Danny and Annie are dating and have become so involved that they are joining forces to create a real estate duo, like two local superheroes. They are buying up all the old mills and schoolhouses, abandoned churches and factories within a two-hour radius so they can turn them into breweries or hotels. I have filled all my sketchbooks and moved on to painting canvases, my apartment filled with half-finished pieces, the horses floating behind my eyelids when I try to sleep, haunting my dreams like the ghost of my mother.
I overhear Danny and Annie chattering excitedly about a dying man, a property up for grabs. I am appalled by the glee I see in their eyes and ask them what the hell is going on. “Remember that property you asked me about?” Danny asks. “The horse farm? Turns out old man Smith is about to bite the dust. I’d love to get my hands on the deed to that property.”
I return to my desk to answer the phone that won’t stop ringing, my stomach full of lead. I don’t have time to register the weight of this news because a kind voice on the other end of the line is asking to speak to me. Not Danny or Annie, but me. “Mr. Smith has asked to see you. It’s really quite urgent.”
In the hospital room he is propped up on white pillows, a frail arm hooked up to an IV. He smiles when he senses my fear, and points at the chair beside the bed. “I watched you with them,” he says, and I am unable to speak. I can’t explain myself, can’t reconcile my behavior to this man who raised the three horses and took care of them for years. “What did you name them?” he asks.
Elsa, I tell him, because her gray color makes her look fancy, like a rich traveler. And Lady Jane because of the diamond shape between her eyes. Buttercup because her beauty is simple but stunning, like a wildflower.
A man in a suit enters the room with a large manilla envelope in his hands. Wyatt leans forward and takes my hand in his. “I have nobody to take care of them,” he says. “Would you consider it?”
The lawyer hands me the documents and explains that Mr. Wyatt Smith is leaving his farm and its contents to me. I don’t know what to say or do, so I just listen while Wyatt tells me he followed me home, looked me up. That he found out my name and realized who I am. “I knew your mother,” he says, “I felt terrible that she got killed on the edge of my place. And I know what it’s like to be alone in the world.”
Now it is morning in early spring. Buttercup trots over to a bale of hay to graze. I color in the outline of Elsa with my pencil, leaning in hard against my easel set up in the field. Paintings of my mother lean in the narrow hallway of the farmhouse. I see her here, in the woods, in the clearing. Inside the rooms of the house. The transition has been surreal, ferrying my things from the small apartment to this rambling old place. Allowing time to adapt to the ghosts that dwell here. First her, and now Wyatt.
A red Ferrari pulls up by the fence bordering Snake Road, right where I used to park. It’s Danny and Annie, beckoning to me. I humor them and walk over to say hello. “We’re getting married,” Annie says. I congratulate them. Danny launches into a rehearsed lecture on how the farm is too big for me, on how I can’t possibly take care of it myself. How I don’t know the first thing about horses. “Do you know how much this is all worth?” he asks me, waving his hands frantically to indicate the fields, the barn, the house. He insists I consider selling.
I check to see that the three horses are all right. Look out at the road that changed my life forever, edged in beautiful weeds, Queen Anne’s lace, purple loosestrife. I do understand, more than Danny and Annie ever will, what this place is worth. I put my hands on my hips and remind them firmly that I will never sell. They hem and haw and I shake my head. “Over my dead body,” I say, and I mean it.
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