It all started with a cough. Then it evolved into a story about a runaway. And then betrayal and death. And then silence.
Always silence.
But first, the cough.
I had never seen a horse cough before. She would lean forward, stretch her head down towards the ground, and her entire body would convulse to produce a harsh, barking cough.
Sara. Then Miss Sara. Then Missy. She was my mother’s first horse, purchased when I was about 9, then given to me when I was 11. At 13, after caring for her every day for years, I felt I knew her well.
And something was wrong.
It was winter, so the horses weren’t as active anyway, but it was more noticeable with Missy. She didn’t even leave the shelter to stand in the sun with the others, but stayed in the back corner most of every day and night. Usually a voracious eater, she often left half of her grain untouched. Or more. Her head hung low, with occasional convulsing coughs. When I came into the enclosure to see her, she would look up at me and raise her head just enough to press her forehead against my chest.
Something was wrong.
I tried telling my mom for weeks. “Let’s just keep an eye on her. I’m sure she’s fine. It’s winter and she’s getting older; it might be harder on her this year.”
I started chewing on the insides of my lips again, until it hurt to eat or drink.
One night, Missy didn’t eat her grain at all, just sniffed at it and stood next to it.
I broke. I was desperate.
My father happened to be at the barns that evening. I could see his silhouette in front of the bright motion sensor lights on the front of the main storage shed. I ran to him and blurted, “Something’s wrong with Missy.” I paused to catch my breath before continuing, but he put up his hand for me to be quiet.
“Your mother told me your theory. The horse is fine. End of story. It’s cold, so she’s coughing more. It happens.”
“But…”
“But nothing. There’s nothing to discuss.” He turned and walked away.
Foolishly, I followed.
I don’t remember the words anymore, but I know I tried again. And I know he yelled. And swore. And told me to go home.
Anxiety built into frustration that exploded into anger, and then something snapped in my chest. I had to get out. The lights in the yard blurred. I turned away from the barns, but instead of walking the path back to the house, I ran for a faint opening in the trees to the left of the path.
Swearing and ranting and crying, I stomped through the crunchy, unbroken snow into the narrow naked trees, leaving the lights behind, only the nearly full moon showing the way. Thorns pulled at my sweatshirt and caught my skin underneath, but I didn’t notice until much later. I was too busy literally seeing red.
“He never listens to me! He never listens! He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t care about her. Fuck him! She’s sick! He doesn’t care he doesn’t care he doesn’t care.”
Impotent fear and rage. That’s all I knew in that initial rush from my father.
Long before cell phones and without a watch, I have no idea how long I crashed through the woods before I started calming down.
Whatever time it was, it was too late: I had no idea whatsoever where I was. We had only lived in the area a few months, and it was all farms and forests in rural Indiana. The property my parents were renting even backed onto a state park, so I could be on someone else’s land next door or already well into hundreds of acres of undeveloped state owned forest. In the dark. In February. In rubber boots, jeans, and a sweatshirt.
In the barns, I worked hard enough that I kept warm, but out here, walking cautiously through the trees, I was much more aware of how sharp the air was.
There was no way I could retrace my steps; the moonlight was far too dim and the terrain far too rough. So I chose a cluster of bright stars in the direction I was already facing and decided that if I kept walking in a straight line, I would have to come across something eventually. I had read enough books (and Readers’ Digests) about people surviving in harsh conditions to know that I needed to keep moving to stay warm, so I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and just kept trudging through the snow.
I wasn’t angry anymore. But I wasn’t scared, either. I was just numb. And tired.
So I kept going. Eventually, after climbing through a barbed-wire fence, I came to a road. 50-50 odds on going right or left. I could tell from the way the road was paved and the lack of street lights that I was in the state park. To the left seemed to angle even further away from home, while right felt like the correct direction, so I turned right and just kept walking, my loose rubber boots thunking loudly against the asphalt.
I was deeply cold now, the cold where it settles into your core and you feel weak and numb. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, or my face. I kept walking. In the moonlight, I could see a curve in the road and tried to walk faster, hoping to see the park entrance.
But rounding the curve, my heart sank. It was a cul de sac parking area, a deadend, the farthest reaches of the park, the farthest I could get from home via the road. I chose wrong.
For some reason, I still walked all the way to the far edge of the circle and just stood there, staring into the deeply shadowed underbrush until light flickered across it. A vehicle was coming down the road behind me. My heart jumped! I was found!
I turned quickly toward the headlights, but then froze halfway and jumped off the edge of the road instead, where it dropped a couple of feet down into snow, and ducked behind a wide tree. I had no conscious thoughts, but I was suddenly terrified. It was a truck, but it didn’t sound right. It was going too fast, and the engine kept revving. It wasn’t my family’s truck, and it wasn’t driving slowly, as though looking for a lost idiot.
Instead of slowing down to turn around, the driver floored it and started doing donuts in the loose gravel surface of the cul de sac, peppering the trees around me with shrapnel.
Then it stopped and the engine turned off. And I heard them. At least two men. They got out, took a piss off the edge of the road to my right, and then lit cigarettes and stood outside the truck taking long drags.
“You know, I thought I saw something when we came down the road.”
“You didn’t see shit.”
“Yeah, I did. Like a person standing on the road, over there.”
“Fuck off. You saw a deer or nothing.”
Gravel crunched behind me.
“Look, footprints. That ain’t no fucking deer.”
My heart pounded in my ears so loudly I could barely hear them. I got ready to run away, deeper into the forest, feeling the edge of wild panic.
“Come on. I’m hungry and we need more beer. Just some hiker out here earlier and your drunk ass. Let’s go.”
The moment he stood at the edge of the road behind me before turning back to the truck is still stretching on to eternity. A part of me is stuck there, waiting for him to walk six more feet and find me, waiting for hands to grab me.
But he did go back. And they sped off again. And I sat in the snow and shook.
Again, for how long, I don’t know.
I don’t know that they would have hurt me. Maybe they would have been lovely people and been happy to drive me home. Maybe I would have ended up dead in a ditch after days of torture. But in that moment, I was terrified to have them discover me. When the sounds of the truck died away, I was flooded with adrenaline that made me shake from head to toe, yet I still sat with my back pressed against the tree, paralyzed.
Eventually, I saw light flicker on the trees again. But this was dimmer and flicked from side to side. And no engine noises.
A flashlight.
“Lin?”
My father. How he found me, I will never know. And he will never tell me.
I came out from behind the tree and scrambled back up to the road. I stood there, waiting. I was relieved and yet not. I waited for hell.
“Your mother is worried. Come on.” He turned and started walking back the way he came without waiting to see if I followed.
We followed the road out of the park in silence, turned left onto the country road that would eventually lead to the gravel driveway. I don’t remember anything else about the walk home. Either too cold, too scared, in shock, I don’t know. Just long, cold silence.
The lights of the house hurt my eyes as we walked up. We went inside, I took off my boots, and my father pointed up the stairs to their room. I didn’t even register the warmth of the house.
I walked into my parents’ room. It was dark, but I could see a shape under the blankets on her side. I sat on the floor next to her. In the dim light from the open door, I saw her open her eyes. She just looked at me, eyes glittery.
“You scared me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re getting fitted for your ball and chain first thing tomorrow.”
“Ok.”
“Go to bed.”
10:40 pm. The clock by the bed told me so. Best estimate, I left the barns around 5:30. It gets dark early in the winter. More than five hours gone. I suppose I was lucky; I didn’t even get frostbite.
I took a shower to try to warm up, though, and finally discovered the deep scratches from my initial plunge into the trees. I went to bed without eating, wearing thick sweats and extra socks, an extra blanket on top. Exhausted, I laid there, numb, unthinking, until I finally fell asleep.
Nothing was ever said. I’m not sure my brother even knows I was gone. And I never told anyone about the men. Or why I left.
The worst of it was, I was right. By the summer, Missy was barely eating at all, so when I was away for two weeks at camp, my mom finally had a vet come check her. The vet took blood samples and discovered that Missy was suffering from a rare equine cancer.
I didn’t learn this until my mother came to pick me up from camp. She told me on the five hour drive home. I was angry, so angry, but I tried hard to control it; I didn’t want her to see how upset I was. I didn’t want to care. But I told her I couldn’t wait to get home to Missy. She didn’t respond.
In the silence that followed, a fear exploded in my brain and I blurted, “Missy is still alive, right?”
More silence. My heart started racing, and my face felt hot.
“The vet said it’s really rare. They’re studying it in the equine sciences program at Purdue University. She said Missy could really help other horses, if they could study her.”
A dull weight sat on my chest and filled my throat. I knew. “When does she go?”
“They came yesterday.”
“They couldn’t wait a day?!” I’m pretty sure I was shouting.
“Dad said it was best to do it before you came home.”
She was gone. But not just gone. A lab rat. A science experiment. Gone without me saying goodbye, without scratching her favourite spots around her ears, tracing the white star on her forehead, her pressing her long face against my chest while I scratched her neck. Gone.
Rage crawled up my throat and screamed around inside my head, clawing wildly, violently at the inside of my skull, desperate to get out. I was filled with chaos, and yet numb, wooden, dead.
My mother spoke three more times in the remaining four and a half hours of the drive.
“Are you hungry?”
Silence.
“Are you thirsty?”
Silence.
“Do you need a rest stop?”
Silence.
We got home after dark. I went straight to bed, but the next morning, I went out to the barns, gathered up the special tack I had bought for Missy and packed it in a box, threw away her grooming brushes, and added her blue grain bucket to the stack of general use buckets.
Then I went to the barn, crawled up in the giant pile of hay bales, and stared at nothing, chest aching, wishing I could cry, surrounded by confused barn cats meowing and rubbing against me.
And that was it.
It’s not like I was talking much to my father at that point anyway. And I rarely saw him. I rarely saw anyone. We were four depressed people living separately in the same house. We weren’t drawn to each other, but like magnetic poles repelling, we pushed each other out of each room we walked into.
I was homeschooled, old enough to be left alone, too young to work or drive. My brother kept finding short term farm work and was rarely home. My father went to swim laps at dawn and often came home from work after supper. I knew my mother was trying to find a property for them to buy, but somehow that meant she was gone almost all the time.
I was homeschooled, but we did nothing. We had some textbooks, but we did nothing.
So I got up in the morning, ate some cereal, walked to the barns, and did chores. I went home. Showered. Ate again. Read a book in my room. Walked back to the barns and did evening chores. Microwaved a frozen meal for supper. Went back into my room to eat and read until I was tired enough to sleep. I went entire days without seeing anyone else. And just in case, I always listened for the sounds of someone coming home so I could run to my room unseen, one like magnetic pole pushing the other away.