White Horses Page 3

  Teresa got up and stood in front of her father; even sitting in the easy chair, he was taller than she was. His eyes were pale blue, like pieces of Canadian ice.

  “Take my advice,” King Connors said, “don’t ever bother with the past. I mean it,” he said as he drew in smoke and then exhaled. “It won’t do you any good. It doesn’t make your mother happy to look at those photographs—it only gets her all upset. Who wants to be reminded of everything you don’t have anymore?”

  Teresa tried to listen to King, but she could barely hear him, his words came from miles away. King Connors pulled the ottoman over, lifted up his workboots, and stretched out his long legs. “Don’t even think about what used to be,” he told his daughter.

  Teresa felt her eyes closing, she was dizzy, she could no longer stand. When she collapsed and fell to the floor, Teresa knew what was happening, but her spirit was retreating into itself leaving behind only a thin brown shell.

  “Get up,” King Connors said after Teresa fell. “One hysterical female is enough.”

  Dina looked up from her torn photographs. “You heard your father,” she said to Teresa. “Get up.”

  When Teresa didn’t move, Dina went over to her; she shook the girl’s shoulders, then put her ear to Teresa’s heart. After a while, Dina turned to her husband. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Something that could be evil.”

  “Evil?” King Connors said. “That’s right. Talk like the ignorant woman you are.”

  Dina rocked back and forth on her heels. “This is all your fault,” she told her husband.

  King Connors got up and pushed Dina away. “There’s nothing wrong with her,” he told her. He bent down and listened to Teresa’s slow breathing. He lifted her eyelids and saw the whites of her eyes. It was then he noticed that a bruise was already forming on the left side of his daughter’s face, and the uneven flow of blood that oozed from a thin gash on her head.

  “Put a blanket over her and clean up this mess,” King told his wife. He backed away from Teresa; the sight of her blood on the floor made him queasy.

  Dina went over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. “I’m calling a doctor,” she said, but before she could dial, King took the phone out of her hand. “You know what they think when you bring a kid in with bruises?” King whispered. “They’ll say we beat her. I could wind up in jail.”

  Dina looked over at Teresa, then turned back to King. “What do we do?” she whispered.

  “Put a blanket over her,” King said, and when Dina hesitated he took her arm roughly. “I’m telling you—she’s going to be fine.”

  When Silver came home, late in the afternoon, the house was so dark that he stumbled in the hallway; there was a disturbing scent of roses, the fragrance was everywhere, in every corner, in every room. Two candles were lit in the living room, and the first thing he saw was Teresa, asleep on the floor, a blanket wrapped around her like a cocoon. As he knelt down, the odor of roses was overpowering, as if bushes and trees had taken root in the wooden floor. He touched her forehead; her skin was like ice. And as Silver’s eyes adjusted to the candlelight he noticed Dina sitting on the couch.

  “What’s going on?” Silver asked his mother. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Dina shook her head; she had been crying all afternoon and her eyes were swollen and red. “We don’t know what’s wrong,” she admitted.

  “Did you call a doctor?” Silver asked, and when Dina shook her head no, Silver glared at her. He picked Teresa up and carried her into the kitchen; the blanket trailed behind them, catching on the floorboards and the furniture. King Connors was sitting at the kitchen table, and when Silver walked into the room he was drinking a beer, wishing that he was in any town but Santa Rosa—a town where there were lemon trees, hot nights, women who wanted to hold him tight, just as Dina had once done before everything he did started to go wrong. When he saw his sixteen-year-old son looking down at him with so much heat, so much contempt, King Connors cringed. If Silver had asked his father to explain his actions King wouldn’t have been able to answer: he was simply a man who was afraid, someone who was certain he was meant to be living another life. But the only thing Silver asked for that day were the keys to the pickup.

  “Don’t be a fool,” King said. “You don’t have a license. You can’t drive a truck.”

  “Just give me the keys,” Silver said softly, and for the first time in his life he felt what he was doing was absolutely right, he felt as though he had been made for this moment. “I’m taking her to the hospital,” he told his father.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” King insisted, but he was backing down; the glare in his son’s eyes burned a hundred holes in his skin.

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” Silver said, and in his heart he was an eagle, in his blood he was a renegade who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  King Connors reached into his pocket, he handed Silver the keys to the pickup, then watched his son kick open the screen door and carry Teresa outside. King went to the window, and as Silver lifted Teresa into the pickup and then got in and started the engine, King felt as though he had just given up his last remaining rights in his own house, and at that instant he began to think about packing his suitcase and leaving Santa Rosa for good.

  Out in the driveway Silver’s heart was racing; he had only driven a car a few times before, borrowed car which tore through the streets at top speed. But now Silver drove slowly. Beside him, Teresa slept deeply; her fists were clenched, her knees were drawn up, and her head rested on the seat so that her braids fell over Silver’s right leg. The scent of roses still made him dizzy, but the closer Silver came to the hospital, the more sure of himself he became. He felt as if he were centuries old; he had finally managed to join that race of men Dina had always talked about: men who could stare down an enemy with one glance, whose nerves were like steel, men whose hearts always belonged to the girl they had saved. By the time they had reached the emergency ward, Silver looked at Teresa with a new sort of tenderness, and he carried her through the parking lot and into the ward with great care, and with the sense that he carried the most delicate thing on earth.

  Although Silver was willing to wait, he had to leave Teresa in the hospital for testing. When she was examined there was no low blood sugar, no peculiar white blood count; Teresa’s brain scan was normal, her heartbeat regular. Still, even the bruises she had received from her fall shouldn’t have kept her from waking for eight hours while she was prodded by doctors and wheeled up and down corridors for more testing. When King went to pick up his daughter the following morning, he was sure that every nurse and aide could look right through him to see that he was the sort of father who hadn’t the courage to drive his own child to the emergency ward. When the doctors informed him that they could tell him nothing about Teresa’s illness he wondered if perhaps they just didn’t want him to know.

  They walked out to the pickup truck together. Teresa’s cheek was covered with a white bandage, and King Connors kept his distance from her, as if he expected her to collapse at any moment. But once they were inside the truck, heading home, King could no longer avoid her, and when Teresa asked how she had gotten to the hospital, he told her the truth. As soon as she heard that Silver had been the one to take her to the emergency ward, Teresa looked out the window; she didn’t want her father to see how thrilled she was that it had been Silver. What Teresa had always wanted, more than anything, was Silver’s attention, and finally on a day in July when she was fast asleep and didn’t even know it, he had noticed her, had even taken care of her, and all the way home Teresa thought more about her brother than she did about her mysterious disease.

  After they had pulled into the driveway, King Connors went inside the house, but Teresa stayed out on the front porch and watched the sky grow dark.

  “It might be psychological,” King was telling his wife. “And it might be neurological, whatever the hell that is. That’s all they told me.”

  “I know what’s wrong with Teresa,” Dina said, as she reached for a glass of iced coffee. “She’s under a spell that brings a special kind of fever, and no doctor at that hospital will be able to help her.”

  Out on the porch, Teresa was waiting for Silver. When the lights in all of the houses on Divisadero Street were switched on he came home. Teresa shivered when she heard his boots on the cement, and when he sat down next to her on the porch she felt light-headed.

  “So, how are you?” Silver said. He lit a cigarette and didn’t even bother to cup it in the palm of his hand so that King wouldn’t notice the smoke if he happened to look out the window or step outside for some air. Now that he had dared to talk back to his father, Silver could no longer allow himself any old fears of punishment.

  Teresa shrugged and watched the smoke spiral from between Silver’s fingers.

  “Didn’t they find out what was wrong with you?” he asked.

  “I’ve got some sort of sleeping sickness,” Teresa said.

  “I know that,” Silver drawled. “Tell me some new information for Christ’s sake.”

  “You took me to the hospital,” Teresa whispered.

  “You keep telling me things I already know,” Silver said.

  “I’m scared,” Teresa admitted. “No one knows what’s wrong with me.”

  “Shit, don’t be scared,” Silver said. “I took care of you, didn’t I?”

  They sat together in the dark; through the open living-room window they could hear the TV that King had switched on, they could hear crickets in the garden, they could almost hear each other’s heartbeat.

  “Thank you,” Teresa said finally.

  “Just don’t make it a habit,” Silver told her. “Don’t think I can watch out for you every other minute. I’ve got other things on my mind.”

  “All right,” Teresa said.

  “Do you understand me?” Silver asked.

  “I said, all right.” Theresa got up and went inside, slamming the front door shut behind her. But up in her room, she could still see Silver out on the front porch. She could see the outline of his white shirt, and the smoke from another cigarette. Later that night, Silver would open her door, but Teresa would already have fallen asleep. And so Silver never got the chance to tell her he didn’t mean what he had said out on the porch—he would protect her—still Teresa dreamed of him that night, and in her dreams he rescued her a thousand times, and in return she thanked him a thousand times, she brought him gifts of chocolate, and rose-colored valentines on which his name was written over and over again.

  Soon after Teresa came home from the hospital, Dina tried to explain all that a mysterious illness could be. They drank lemonade in the kitchen, and Dina examined her daughter’s palm.

  “It all looks normal to me,” Dina said. “You’ve got a long life line and your love line is deeper than most. It could be brain fever.” Dina nodded. “It could also be evil spirits, or a spell someone’s put on you.”

  “Who would do that to me?” Teresa asked, wondering if she had committed some terrible wrongdoing.

  “Let’s just wait,” Dina suggested. “If it’s a fever it may come and go, but no fever lasts forever. Sooner or later we’ll figure out what’s wrong with you.”

  Teresa’s illness did come again—infrequently, unpredictably, sometimes lasting hours, sometimes minutes. That September, during the first week of school, Teresa had the fever while reciting a poem in class. Her eyes closed while her mouth was still open, the lines of poetry lingering on her tongue. The teacher panicked; she left another girl to watch over Teresa and then rushed to the principal’s office to call Teresa’s house. Silver answered that call; he was rarely in school these days. He counted the hours until he could drop all his classes and look for a full-time job, one that paid enough so that he could buy himself a car, so that he didn’t have to worry about money or continue to steal from his parents’ savings, which Dina kept in a coffee tin beneath the kitchen sink.

  When Teresa’s teacher called, Silver was quick. Lying was not difficult for him, and protecting Teresa was easy. “My sister has a mild form of epilepsy,” Silver said soothingly. “It’s nothing but a slight brain fever that comes and goes,” Silver went on. “It’s nothing to worry about,” Silver told the teacher. And sure enough when the teacher returned to the classroom Teresa was reciting the last stanza of the poem just as if she had never closed her eyes.

  But there were longer spells too; bouts of fever which lasted too many hours to be so easily explained. Once or twice Teresa simply did not wake up in the morning; she continued to sleep through the day and into the following night, and there were times when Silver found himself drawn to her closed bedroom door, unable to ignore the odor of roses that seemed to surround Teresa whenever she slept.

  During the longest spells, Dina lit candles around Teresa’s bed. She closed all the windows, no matter how hot the second-floor bedroom was, so that she could protect Teresa from spirits and moths. Dina watched, waiting for whatever had happened to Teresa to unhappen. Soon enough the spell that brought on Teresa’s sleeping sickness would evaporate into pools of evil that Dina could sweep under the bed. And Teresa was always relieved to find her mother watching over her whenever she woke up. She believed Dina when she promised that a fever could not last forever, that a spell could always be broken, and more than that—Teresa was certain that even though he sometimes acted like he didn’t care, Silver was also watching over her, and it was he who would save her.

  The first summer Teresa became ill was the last the family spent all together. The next year Silver began to smoke marijuana in his room; Reuben, with his earnings from the supermarket, bought an old Ford which he hadn’t yet managed to get in running condition; and King Connors disappeared.

  It had been a bad year for construction work, and all that spring King Connors was unemployed. He had sat around the house, sending Reuben or Silver down to the corner store for six-packs of beer. Sometimes he would go into the garden, which had become overgrown with early flowers and wild grass and leeks.

  “What we need are lemon trees,” he told Teresa, surprising her in the backyard when she went out to leave old loaves of white bread for the jays. “We could have lemon meringue pie,” King said wistfully. “We would never have to go to the Safeway again.”

  But the climate in Santa Rosa was best for eucalyptus and pine, and lemon trees would have to be carefully watched, and King Connors must have known, even then, when he stood in the garden with his daughter, that he wouldn’t be in Santa Rosa much longer.

  Everyone thought King’s presence would weigh down the house when he stopped working, but there were days when he was so quiet they all forgot that he was there, and when he finally left, it took some time before anyone noticed he was missing. One morning, before anyone was awake, King went out to the driveway. He got in the truck, clicked the emergency brake off, and slid out of the driveway. He didn’t start the engine until he had silently rolled halfway down Divisadero Street. Later they discovered that the only things he took with him were a suitcase full of work clothes, a map of California, and the diamond ring he had given to Dina when they were first married.

  When King had been gone for over a week, Teresa began to wonder if her sleeping spells were catching; she worried that her father had fallen asleep behind the wheel of the pickup, or that he had gone fishing and was dreaming in the bottom of a rented canoe. She longed to ask someone what had happened to King Connors, but nobody mentioned him, no one seemed to care. Dina cleaned the house with a new passion, singing to herself as she vacuumed and scrubbed. Silver and Reuben now brought home six-packs of beer for themselves instead of for King. A place was still set at the end of the table, just in case King Connors reappeared, just in case he swung his long legs over the back of a kitchen chair, and reached for potatoes or lamb. And then one night, with no warning, Dina told them they would all be going home. Her home—New Mexico. She told them all to pack, and before anyone had time to complain, they were on the bus to Oakland and then on the train to Los Angeles, where they would make their final connection.

  Teresa looked out the window of the train, caught up in the motion and the open space. It was only when Reuben noisily crossed his legs that Teresa remembered there was an inside of the train as well as an outside. And the farther they traveled the noisier Reuben was. He was eighteen, he had plans which didn’t include being on a train with his family, he ignored the dust that flew up from the train wheels and the stations they passed through without slowing down. But Teresa couldn’t get enough of traveling; the sky was so bright, the fields so golden that Teresa had to blink and shade her eyes; still she didn’t turn away from the window, she pressed her nose against the glass.

  Dina had dressed in black for the trip; she refused to speak to the porters or to any other passengers. And Silver was bored, nothing more. He propped his boots up on the seat across from him; and after less than an hour on the train, he lit a cigarette. When he inhaled, Dina shook her head sadly; Silver stared back at her, amused, and he smiled when his mother whispered, urging him not to smoke.

  “What are you going to do about it?” he said.

  When he exhaled smoke, Silver fogged up the window. Teresa cleaned the glass with the cuff of her cotton dress; soot stuck to her sleeve. Although she felt as though she could ride the train forever, Teresa, like her brothers, didn’t want to go to Santa Fe. She was afraid of the grandmother she had never met before. She wondered if she might be forced to visit her grandfather’s grave, taken to the cemetery on a night when there was no moon, when there wasn’t a star in the sky. Teresa felt better when she imagined that the train ride would last forever. She concentrated on the odor of oranges when they passed by long, green groves outside of Salinas, on the absolutely perfect color of the sky.

  When Dina fell asleep, Silver took out a plastic bag filled with marijuana. He rolled a thin cigarette that he lit and passed to Reuben.