“Where’s Squid?” Mona shouted.
“She’s in there,” Gideon called back. “They’re both still in there.”
The other horses had disappeared into the pasture, but Ginger still paced the paddock, waiting for Squid and Aleira to come out. She reared up and then galloped in circles, the fire flashing in her eyes. She and Squid were friends.
Gideon sprinted toward the barn. He was too far away to hear Mona shout for him to be careful. Of course, he wouldn’t be careful. This was Gideon. He loved the horses as much as a man could love anything. Mona had learned, only recently, that he sometimes woke in the middle of the night to walk with them in the pasture.
Perhaps Mona had left the little Coleman lantern burning or had failed to notice a chewed-up electrical cord. Unlikely, but not impossible. She would have suspected lightning, but there were no clouds, only a Kansas sky so certain and infinite it was the closest thing she’d ever known to God.
Now, down Sanctuary Road, blue and red lights disco-flashed against the horizon.
It was then her German shepherd Katydid spotted a figure moving behind the barn. Katydid went after the shadow, one streak of darkness chasing another.
“Fuck off!” came a man’s voice from the shadow. Then, a cry of pain and the sound of Katydid growling.
When the figure emerged from behind the barn, Katydid’s mouth locked on his wrist, Mona saw who it was. Sydney Fuller, Big John’s little brother. He was wearing all black and had shaved his head clean down to the skin.
In the strobe of the police sedan’s headlights, Sydney met her gaze. She remembered the little boy who’d played clarinet with Ariel—his round face, the painful-looking acne on his chin. How he’d once kicked dust into a dog’s eyes and laughed as the dog ran away, sneezing. He was older now, his jaw lean and angular. It disturbed her, suddenly, the fact that children transform so completely. For a moment, she thought he was winking at her—a knowing, malicious wink—but suddenly both of his eyes were fluttering. He was not winking, but crying.
* * *
After the firefighters had doused the last flame, after Doc Powell had declared Squid and Aleira dead from smoke inhalation, after a deep, eerie silence settled over the sanctuary, Mona sat with Gideon in the living room, where they took turns looking out the window at the smoldering barn.
A saying had entered Mona’s head and wouldn’t leave. My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon. It was an old samurai poem her ex-husband, Daniel, used to recite whenever he wanted to look on the bright side. At first, he’d used it in earnest—like when Mona’s father died and left her the money she needed to buy the sanctuary. The poem had, in fact, been the inspiration for the sanctuary’s name—but, over the years, he’d begun to use it ironically. His toast would fall on the ground, butter-side down, and he’d say, My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon. Meaning I’m going to eat a doughnut.
Now there was no triumphant moon, just the milk-white glow of dawn. A charred roof. A black hole yawning above the stall where Squid and Aleira had taken their grain. Soon the barn would not even belong to her—none of it would belong to her. The night felt like a dream. Her entire life, sometimes, felt like a dream.
Gideon made strong coffee and opened a sleeve of Ritz crackers neither he nor Mona touched. Like sitting shiva, Mona thought. After her mom died, when she’d asked her father about sitting shiva, he’d told her, With your mom gone, there’s no sense doing all that Jewy stuff. By this he meant Mona would no longer attend the synagogue in Wichita where she and her mother had gone every Saturday morning for as long as Mona could remember. In the sanctuary, she and her mother would listen as the rabbi filled the room with his booming voice. All the songs were in Hebrew, but still Mona understood, through the sheer tenor and urgency of the rabbi’s voice, that he sang about the power, love, and rage of God, about how terrifying and lovely it was to be alive. What Mona liked best about these mornings was that it was just her mother and her—Mona’s father, raised Catholic, never came along. Afterward, they would get lunch at a restaurant called Piccadilly, where Mona would order spaghetti and her mother would order a salad with tuna fish and cottage cheese. This was the Jewy stuff to which her father referred—those sacred mornings with her mother. To Mona, Judaism had little to do with God and everything to do with her mom.
As far as Mona knew, it was sacrilegious to sit shiva for a horse, but this was the least she and Gideon could do, these hours of quiet reflection. They had loved that foal, sweet as anything. And Squid. There wasn’t a mom in the world as good as Squid.
She felt dizzy thinking about everything she needed to do—call Coreen about borrowing a backhoe to dig the graves, tarp the roof of the barn, contact her homeowner’s insurance. All this, in addition to the regular chores. All this, in addition to the fear that now roiled in her gut and the sadness that gripped her each time she imagined what it must have been like for Squid and Aleira, trapped in the barn as smoke rushed in. Despite everything, she was grateful the barn’s structure remained. The firefighters had worked quickly. How they’d come so fast, Mona couldn’t figure, but she was not about to question this particular miracle. That she was nearly out of hay had been a great source of stress but now seemed like incredible fortune—if her hay guy, Artie, hadn’t gotten a bad flu, delaying her order of one hundred bales, the barn would be gone.
When the dogs started whimpering for their breakfast, Gideon turned to her and asked, “What is it we’re supposed to do now?”
Mona took a sip of her coffee, which had grown tepid. Go to sleep and never wake up? Let the animals do as they please? Eventually she said, “Same as we always do. Start feeding everyone their breakfast.”
* * *
She saw the swastikas on her way to feed the sheep: one on the garage door, one on the shed, one on the windshield of Old Baby. Later, she would find a miniature one on the FOR SALE sign.
She discovered the mangled spray paint can in the pigpen, where her Yorkshire, Lady Madonna, had acquired the bright red mouth of a circus clown—she’d tried to eat the can. Also in red was the word JEW, painted hastily across Lady Madonna’s mud-crusted back. There was a sick look to the pig’s eyes and a puddle of vomit at her feet. As Mona washed Lady Madonna’s snout with a warm rag, her barn still sending up thin ribbons of smoke into the morning’s blue sky, she felt her anger bloom into something darker, more dangerous.
After this, life on the Bright Side seemed cracked—that was the only way she could put it, as if a container had splintered and all the light was now pouring out. For the past six years, she’d been fine living alone—a touch lonesome, but fine. Now she woke in the middle of the night, her sheets damp with sweat, a ringing in her ears. She would hold her breath and listen, an unwise habit to develop on an animal sanctuary, where strange sounds could be heard at all hours of the night. Even in silence, she could pull out a thread of sound—an owl hooting, a dog snoring, the metallic screech of a cat fight—and stitch it into a nightmare. How angry she was that Sydney had taken from her the one thing she’d always had: courage.