Page 51 of The Reckless Rookie

Finn

Catalina and I are barely speaking, and it’s the quiet kind, which is worse than the loud kind because there’s nothing to push against.

Since the charity event she’s been all business with me. Clipped. Professional. She looks at me now the way she must have looked at me the first week, a placement to be managed, a risk to be tracked, and I did that, I put that look back on her face myself, and there’s no play I know that fixes it. So I do the only move I’ve got. I show up. I do my work. I keep my head down and I try to be, in my body, what I can’t seem to say in words, which is that I heard her, and she’s right, and I’m trying to be someone who deserves the version of her I got before I wrecked it.

I’m mucking the far stalls at dusk when I hear the sound.

I’ve never heard it before and I know instantly it’s wrong. It’s high, and it’s ragged and it comes out of a horse like something being torn, and it’s Bonita, and she’s two weeks from foaling, and a sound like that out of a pregnant mare means something has gone wrong fast. I drop the fork and I run.

I get to the stall and the picture stops my heart for a second because I can’t make it make sense.

Jason’s in the corner. Backed into it, flat against the boards, a feed bucket dropped and rolling at his feet and fresh hay scattered across the floor.

And Bonita has come apart.

She’s screaming, that torn high sound, ears flat back against her skull, tail whipping side to side like something with its own mind. She’s swung her hindquarters toward Jason and away, toward and away, a thousand pounds deciding, and she keeps snapping her head around to bite at her own flank, at her own side, like she’s trying to tear something out of herself. I don’t know what I’m looking at. I know it’s the worst I’ve ever seen her, that it’s nothing like the mare who leans on me at the rail, and that Jason is in the corner of it.

“Finn.” Jason’s voice is a thread. “Finn, man. I can’t get out. Every time I move she…”

“Don’t move.” I’m already at the stall door. “Don’t move, Jase. Look at me.”

I keep his eyes on me because it’s the only useful thing I can give him from the doorway while Vicente gets to us.

I go in like I belong there, because she’s mine and I’m hers and I have earned this a hundred nights at this rail. That’s what I’m telling myself. I know her.

“It’s the foal.” Vicente’s voice, low, behind me at the door. He’s read the whole thing in a heartbeat, the way I never could. “Bad position, got a foot down in her where it shouldn’t be. See that push on her ribs, low, there? Every time it kicks her it takes another piece of her mind.” There’s something in how he says it that stops me cold, worse than the scream did. Vicente doesn’t rattle. Twenty years, I’ve never heard him anything but flat. And right now, under the flat, there’s a thread of something that sounds a lot like fear, and if Vicente’s afraid then I am standing in the middle of something I have badly underestimated.

“She is not a horse right now, Finn.” Quiet. Careful. “She’s a thousand pounds of pain with no thought left in it. She’ll go through Jason to get away from a thing she can’t get away from, and she’ll go through you, and she will not know she did it.”

Behind me Jason makes a sound. Bonita’s head snaps toward it and she squares up and my whole body wants to lunge, to grab, to do something fast and big, and that is exactly the instinct that gets Jason killed.

“Don’t move,” Vicente says. “Either of you. Finn. You’re already in there, so you’re the one who does this. You do exactly what I say, when I say it, and you do not improvise. Jason comes out through you. You’re his door.”

“Don’t look at her head-on. You’re a wolf when you stare. Turn sideways to her. Make yourself small.”

I turn away from her. I collapse, my knees buckling and my chin tucking in, allowing the fear that usually makes me expand to shrink me down, a sensation akin to death, yet I embrace it.

“Smaller. Good. Now you’re not going to her. You go to Jason. Slow. Slower than that. You’ve got all night.”

I don’t have all night. Jason’s white and the mare is a storm and every cell I own is screaming to move. I move slow. One foot. Wait. The floor of the stall is a mile wide. Another foot.

“Talk to her. Don’t matter the words. Low. Kind. Like she’s already calm.”

And here’s what cracks something open in me right there in the worst moment: the voice that comes out of me is not a voice I’ve ever used. It’s low, and it’s easy and it’s got no fear in it that she can hear, and it’s loving, there’s no other word, I’m murmuring to a killing-scared animal like she’s the most precious thing in the world, easy now, easy, girl, I’ve got him, you’re alright, you’re alright, and I mean every syllable, and somewhere under the terror I understand that this is the voice that was in me the whole time, under all the noise, waiting for something worth using it on.

I reach Jason. I don’t grab him. I put my body between him and her, slow, still folded small, still not looking at her, and I say, “On my word, you slide along the boards to the door. You don’t stand up. You don’t run. You slide. Vicente’s right there.”

“Finn, I…”

“You slide, Jase. Now. Go.”

He goes. Along the wall, low, and Bonita’s head comes up and I feel the whole storm of her swing toward the movement and I step into it, small and sideways and murmuring, giving her the only thing I have to give, which is a body that isn’t a threat and a voice that isn’t afraid, and I hold there, right in the path of a thousand pounds that could end me, and I do not flinch and I do not stare and I do not stop talking to her. And Jason’s hands find the door. And Vicente pulls him through.

Now it’s just me and her.

And this is the part that takes a moment, the part you can’t rush or fake or force, and God knows I’ve tried to force everything in my life. I stay small. I stay sideways. I keep the low kind voice going into the space between us, there she is, there’s my girl, it’s just me, it’s just me, and I wait.

She watches me. She knows me, I think, somewhere down under it, but she isn’t herself, and knowing me isn’t the same as trusting me right now, so she keeps me fixed, one eye and then the other, waiting to see what I am. The foot pushes at her ribs and she flinches and swings and I hold, and I don’t move, and I keep talking low, and I let her watch me as long as she needs to watch me.