I think: Evidence. I can almost hear your voice in my mind, telling the story of my own disappearance.
Sera Fleece arrived at the ranch at three thirty-seven p.m. on May 12. She immediately noticed the vultures circling overhead. But when she asked, her question was dismissed. Adelaide Bard told her it was normal, in the wilderness, for vultures to circle. And Sera believed her.
The audience groans. How stupid can you be?
“Off,” your mother says.
I climb down. Now that I am out of the car, now that I am no longer driving, the exhaustion creeps in, pleads with me, You want to go home. You want to put on a podcast and zone out. I have to remind myself that I am nowhere near home. I pull back the wings of my shoulders, trying to stretch, but lumps rise from either shoulder blade, tender and weak. I want to burst into tears, and it shocks me, the way my emotions always do. I have a feeling your mother wouldn’t be impressed.
The dogs have followed us, but they are mellow now. They stretch out on the overlong grass and gnaw at their tumors.
“What we need,” your mother says, standing in front of the barn with her hands on her hips, “is a new head wrangler, someone to look after the horses.”
My heart contracts. “Where’s the old head wrangler?”
She scowls. Her face has aged, but her eyes stayed young, lit like she’s swallowed a candle. “Don’t worry about the old wrangler.”
“I just mean, to teach me the job. It might help if I knew who they were?” My every sentence becomes a question around your mother. I feel like I’m at a disadvantage, and I don’t know if it’s exhaustion from the drive or if it is just a quality of hers, to make others feel weak, inferior.
“I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Suddenly I can’t hold you in any longer. “Do you have family here? Kids?” My voice curves in desperation. I am not good at this. I’m not good at going undercover. I’m not good at wearing my heart anyplace but my sleeve. Neither are you. We share this DNA.
She wheezes like the rasping dogs. “I have a son, and I have a daughter.”
“Where are they?”
Her eyes expand and contract. “I don’t like to talk about personal things.”
“Does anyone else work here? Is there anyone else here?” The quiet has set in, taut in my joints. A horse nickers, but I can’t trace the sound. We are in the bowl of the mountains, where sound curls and ricochets, so it could be right behind me; it could be a mile away. It comes from every and no direction.
“Jed,” your mother says. “But he’s on vacation. Been here six months and he’s already on vacation. That oughta tell you everything you need to know about him.”
With no preamble she moves toward a large barn. It’s painted light blue on one side, but they forgot to prime the wood, so it’s uneven, riddled with splinters and unfinished. I follow her inside, where alfalfa hay is piled high.
“How many horses do you have?”
“Twenty-one. They come and go. Mostly rescues.” Does she mean they come as rescues or they leave as rescues?
She plucks a rusted machete off a bale, then presses it into the baling twine. The twine snaps and the bale spreads. “This Jed came out here from Texas, moved up with his wife. They didn’t last a week!” I am momentarily lost, thinking she has just said they were here six months. “His wife just up and left in the middle of the night. Not a word to me, although this woman was supposed to work for me. She never worked for me. She just left and he stayed here.” As she speaks, she drops the machete, bends over and picks up sections of alfalfa, carries them into the tractor loader and slots them in tight. “That’s what happens out here. This place is a proving ground. You got any problems in your relationship—you’ll see! You can’t hide from anything out here.”
I come to life, gathering alfalfa, helping her load the tractor, trying to prove my worth. But the harder I try, the more I seem to fumble. I shiver and drop hay. I stagger with what she lifts easily. I stuff flakes in the wrong way, so she has to go back and fix them.
“I need someone who can work with the horses and get them ready for the summer. You can do that, right?” She talks like we have a long and storied history, like she goes from conversation to conversation with strangers, thinking they are all the same person following the same thread.
She breaks the twine on another bale and we load that too.
“That’s enough.” She claps her hands together. “You need gloves.” She indicates my arms, which are riddled with tiny, angry red scratches from the alfalfa stalks. I hadn’t even noticed. As I look at them, they start to burn.
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long.” She rushes toward the tractor seat. “You can stand here.” She pounds the step with her foot as she sits up tall in the driver’s seat. “I’ll introduce you to the horses.”
I scurry up onto the step and hold on tight. The tractor is a big green machine with grease in the creases. It throbs to life, and she drives it like she has something to prove.
She laughs at me when she sees how I grip the handles. “It only goes twelve miles an hour.”
I try to smile, but it’s not every day I scam a suspect, walk into a job that I’m not qualified for with a perfect stranger in the middle of nowhere. Lately I feel wrong everywhere. I feel wrong in the world. I laugh when I’m supposed to frown, and I cry when I’m supposed to smile. I’m wearing a mask all the time, and it should be easy to wear one now, for you, but I also feel shaky, listless and limitless. It’s like I’ve fallen into a fantasy world, like I’ve dropped into a podcast.
She should have known right from the start that something was off. She DID know. She knew but she ignored it. She was afraid, but she kept playing, closer and closer to the fire. There’s the threat you can’t see and the threat you CAN see and sometimes the threat you can see seems safer.
We pull up outside the first pasture. She stands and I hop to the ground to get out of her way.
“They each get one flake. Spread them far apart, or they’ll fight.”
Four horses approach the fence, snapping their teeth. They are all different shapes and sizes—a fine-boned Arabian, a sturdy draft mix, a pinto and a small Morgan pony with a flaxen mane and tail. She names them, but in such a jumble, it’s like she’s naming them on the spot.
“Angel Two, Jewel, Kevin and Belle Star.” She separates the flakes, hurling them over the fence so they spin, spitting stalks.
The horses fight for who will be fed first. I remember reading somewhere that horses have a pecking order so detailed that they know which horse is number six, number thirty-six, in any given herd. This pecking order comes out when they are fed. They take the flakes in turns. I hurry to help before she finishes without me. I throw the last flake at the fourth horse, which stays well away from the others, nervously prancing back and forth. This is the flaxen pony, Belle Star, and she paws and tosses her golden mane.