The Field Below

She met me at the airport. I found this offensive, as if she thought I couldn’t even be trusted to make it thirty miles northeast in a rideshare and somehow arrive in one uninjured piece. I had once dived out of a rideshare in the middle of one of LA's infamous traffic jams and then? Then, I didn’t even break a sweat, a nail, a heel, nothing. I could obviously navigate small-town Indiana. Kelly had always been like this though, overbearing and mildly infringing. Instead of scoffing or rolling my eyes or saying I can’t believe you didn’t trust me, Lee, I hoisted my bag further up my shoulder and gestured for her to lead the way. (I had not always been like this.)

Our thirty-mile northeast ride was punctuated by talk radio, and not even good talk radio. Nothing about politics or social justice or anything featuring some kind of celebrity. Just some man talking about some train and whether somebody was going to save it someday. Kelly ran one fingernail across the top edge of the steering wheel every few words as she drove. I saw her do it the first two times and then, as I leaned my head back and closed my eyes and tried to will myself back to Santa Monica, I could hear the quick rasp of it, chh chh, over and over until we got to May’s house. I didn’t fall asleep, but I pretended to awaken when the car stopped anyway.

It turned out that I probably should have fallen asleep then and stayed asleep. The next three days were my own personal brand of Hell. May rushed around asking me questions in his floral-patterned nightmare house and I was short of anything but one-word answers. No, not hungry. No, I hadn’t seen her yet. No, I hadn’t seen the horses on the way up. No, no, no. Not that there would’ve been time to answer his questions with depth anyway. It seemed like every fifteen minutes someone was dropping by with another ugly casserole and a hand on their heart and some story on how they met me once when I was just the cutest thing. Kelly took it in stride. I couldn’t sleep.

My therapist texted me the second night and I felt a small amount of vindication in telling her that the sleeping thing wasn’t really my fault. May’s rooster was broken. It crowed every hour or every half hour or every four minutes and just about scared the life out of me every time. Kept me up in fear of it just about scaring the life out of me again. It wasn’t, I explained to Dr. Prentiss, the latent processing of childhood trauma, the turmoil of witnessing this backend of my father’s life, or my general fears of inadequacy. It was that goddamn broken rooster. Thank you very much.

It was definitely not my mother, who arrived Saturday morning in a whuff of jangly bracelets and lavender perfume. Her skirt caught at her ankles as she leaned toward me, and she toppled into the hug with all the force of six years. She did not say you don’t call, you don’t write, but she did say and say and say “Oh Brellis, my knees and my hips and my liver,” which meant the same thing but was more effective. She did not acknowledge May. Kelly and I did not acknowledge her not acknowledging May. We took her bags and her alleged aches and pains and shuttled them all to the last spare bedroom. Kelly stayed in the room looking like a small thing as she sat on the muted green coverlet and its fabricked mass threatened to swallow her. Or maybe it was our mother’s mouth, moving and moving with whatever new ailments that might bring both her daughters home. I closed the door behind me, but I could still hear her talking.

The doorbell rang and May, somehow knowing I stood on this side of Mom’s door, hollered for me to get that for me, wouldya?

I did. Another ugly casserole.

May, for all the world, looked as touched as he would if it were the first casserole he’d ever received. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and took the Tupperware from me, his big brown palms enclosing mine for one too-long second. I looked up at him suspiciously. If he was trying to make me cry, it wasn’t going to work.

“Did you see the horses yet?”

“No.”

Once, when I was six or five or maybe four but that felt too young, Dad took us riding for the first time. Horses had always been generally terrifying, what with their height, hard hooves, and tendency to startle. Let’s not even get into their big, watery human eyes. At six, five, four, you couldn’t keep me far enough away. But then Dad took us riding. Mom had congenital heart failure, or whatever it was that year, so he took us one after the other, to make sure it was a safe ride. I went first, probably because I was more liable to run off and hide if left to my own concerns. Dad locked his arms around me, shifted his knees, said ahh or ehh or yee and the horse, named Clementine, understood this language and took off. In the end, my butt was sore, my thighs were rashed, but it was the closest I had ever come to being bird-like, weightless and in love. When I got home, I made my mom go out and buy all the Saddle Club books, but Dad was already living with May by then, so it wasn’t like he knew it.

This was how I found myself sleeping in the barn that night. Barn could be construed as a loose term, as it was more of an overgrown shed that just happened to house a couple horses and a whole lot of hay. I found out pretty quickly that it was too dark to see into the horse stalls, but this discovery came on the heels of another ill-timed rooster crow. The rooster was outside by the chicken coop and to my surprise, the raw edges of its squawk were muffled. Whether by the hay, the horses, the wooden paint-flecked walls, I was unsure. But the hay suddenly beckoned me with the promise of one quiet night’s sleep and I could not resist its call. With barely a thought, I collapsed onto a few loose bales. I closed my eyes. I slept.

The rooster crowed. I startled awake, shocked to find it screeching mere feet from my resting place. The horses went wild, apparently startling awake every day as well. I lost it. I was screaming, the horses were screaming, the goddamn broken rooster was screaming and that’s how Kelly found us, all of us losing our minds and all of us shouting about it without a care.

“Yeah, that bird’s been driving me crazy, too.”

“Goddamn broken rooster.”

“Yeah. Here.” Kelly sat down on my makeshift bed and handed me a warm plate of ugly casserole. The chunks of beef and carrot looked uninspiring. “Mom thinks you’ve been kidnapped and murdered. May talked her out of calling the cops.”

I raised an eyebrow and Kelly’s mouth hitched slightly. “Well, May told me to talk Mom out of calling the cops,” she amended.

The casserole tasted about as good as it looked. I didn’t ask how May knew where I was. He’d been trying to get me in here for days. “The only two people in the world who loved Dad and you’d think they’d get along better.”

Instead of saying what? Or why? Or well, her husband left her for another man or really anything pragmatic that Kelly would normally opt for, she frowned and said simply, “I loved Dad.”

My face scrunched up tight as I tried, really tried, not to snort or laugh or do that thing I used to do that would make Kelly huff and look at me like I was the world’s worst sister.

“I’m happy for you,” I managed in the end. “I don’t share the sentiment.” This, at least, was true.

“Just because he was gay—”

“It wasn’t because he was gay—” I interrupted, offended yet again.

“—doesn’t make him a bad father. He wasn’t a bad father.”

I looked her square in the eye, stunned. “He left us.”

“He left Mom,” Kelly retorted, picking up my abandoned spoon and scooping a gravied carrot onto it. “And I don’t blame him, Lissy. You know what she’s like. If I weren’t related to her, I would try to carve every second of happiness out of life that I could.”

This was the most damning condemnation I’d ever heard Kelly make. It was a simple thing and an obvious one, too, but it surprised me all the same. Maybe Kelly had changed after all.

“I don’t understand why you stayed. I’ve never understood it.” A question, without exactly being one.

She shrugged. “Because I am. Related to her, I mean. She’s Mom. I can’t run away from her just because I don’t like her.”

Like you did. The censure was there, even if Kelly was too tactful to say it aloud. I felt something prick at the back of my throat but swallowed, swallowed, swallowed it down until it stayed.

“He loved you best.”

I had always felt that, too, but I was too tactful to say that aloud.

“Well, he’s dead.” Not too tactful for that, though.

Kelly gave me The Look and it still, after all these years, made me feel like grime. She ate at my breakfast for another few moments before thoughtlessly confessing, “I’m dating the train guy.”

I squinted my eyes at her, my head suddenly throbbing. “What?” I said. Even though I knew.

“The guy from the podcast who talks about the train? We listened to it on the way up here? I’m dating him.”

I didn’t know what to say. Settled on, “Well, Lee, it’s clearly a love connection.”

Kelly smiled softly. “I don’t think anyone who didn’t love him would listen to that podcast. It’s really quite boring, isn’t it?”

I smiled back. My first one in days. Kelly grabbed my hand and squeezed and I kept mine right where it was without second guessing. Kelly’s ability to stay in the pot hadn’t been one I thought I’d envy but suddenly I thought of my dad, alive and steady and strong against my back as we galloped through his field.

“Funeral’s in two hours, Lissy. We should go get ready.”

I nodded. Swallowed. Said the only thing I could. “I don’t care that he was gay.”

Kelly spooned the last bite of ugly casserole into her mouth and chewed slowly. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Yeah, I know.”

If my mom was surprised to find me alive and unabducted, she didn’t say so. Instead she bustled around with teary eyes and said things like Oh Brellis, your father would’ve wanted and Oh Brellis, do you think I’ll need a special accommodation and where I normally would’ve escaped to my room for a small moment of peace, wished myself into the palm trees, I sat instead. Held my mother’s slight hand for the first time in years. Let Kelly sneak off to her room and firmly shut the door for as long as she wanted. And when the four of us left for the church, Train Boyfriend droning hopelessly on in the radio background, I looked back at the house my father used to share with May. At its chipped yellow paint and off-kilter porch swing and derelict but surprisingly tranquil barn.

Just beyond, grazing peacefully in the field below, were the horses. Finally, the horses.