What’s this, David?” Her fingertips traced the long puckered line on my right forearm that extended from my wrist to my elbow.
“There was a time when I didn’t want to live very bad,” I confessed easily. “It was a long time ago. I love myself now. Don’t worry.” I meant for her to laugh, but she didn’t.
“You cut yourself?” Her voice sounded sad. Not accusing. Just sad.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Was it hard?”
Her question surprised me. Most people asked why. They didn’t ask if hurting yourself was hard.
“Living was harder,” I said.
She didn’t fill the silence with words, and I found myself needing to explain. Not impress. Just explain.
“The first time I tried to kill myself, I held a gun to my head and counted backwards from seventeen; one count for every year of my life. My mother walked in when I reached five. The guns were locked away and the combination on the safe changed. So I resorted to a pocket-knife. It was sharp and shiny. Clean. And I wasn’t afraid. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t afraid at all.”
Her fingers traced the line as we walked, smoothing, as if she could rub the scar away. So I told her the rest.
“But fate intervened again, and they found me before it was too late. They kept finding me, saving me. But I couldn’t save my sister, see. And I felt helpless. Helpless and hopeless. After a week in the hospital I was transferred to a psych ward. My mother cried, my dad was stone-faced. They’d lost one child, and there I was, trying to take myself away too. They told me I was selfish. And I was. But I didn’t know how to be any different. They gave me everything and everything was never enough. And that is terrifying. Emptiness is terrifying.”
“That’s where you met Moses.” She remembered the conversation in the park.
“Yep. You’ll have to meet him sometime. His wife Georgia too. They are my favorite people in the whole world.”
“I’d like that.”
“They have horses. Georgia actually works with kids kind of like Henry. Equine therapy, she calls it. Henry would probably eat it up.” I found myself warming to the idea. Henry made everything easier. Henry made it okay to spend time with Millie beyond walking her home. He was a perfect buffer between biology and friendship.
Before I knew it, I’d set a date and I was bringing Millie to meet my best friend. And Henry too. Can’t forget Henry.
MOSES AND GEORGIA had leveled his grandmother’s old house and in its shoes built a sprawling, two-story with a huge wrap around porch and a private side entrance so Moses could paint and conduct his business without exposing his family or his clients to one another. It held no resemblance to the sad, little house with a tragic past that I’d first seen eighteen months before when Moses and I rolled into town looking for answers and trailing ghosts. Lots of ghosts. It hadn’t taken me long before I’d figured out I didn’t want to stay in Levan. It hadn’t taken Moses long to decide he wasn’t leaving. I wouldn’t have stayed if I were him. I would have taken Georgia and found a place to start over. But sometimes history can be magnetic, and Moses and Georgia, their story, their history, was there in that town.
And Moses wasn’t the only one who had a business to maintain. Georgia broke and trained horses and was an equine therapist, using her animals to connect with children and adults in a way that helped their bodies and their spirits. The land she’d grown up on butted up to Moses’s grandmother’s land, the land she’d left him, and I supposed it made a lot of sense to make it work. Moses always told me you can’t escape yourself. I guess I just felt protective of my friend. I wanted him to be safe and happy and accepted, and I worried that the people in that small, Utah town had already written him off. But what did I know? My friend was happy. So I kept my fears to myself.
The day couldn’t have been better. Utah was flirting shamelessly with spring, and it was sixty degrees out, even though it had no business being that warm. I’d told Moses and Georgia we were coming, and Georgia was ready for us. Before long we were in the round corral with Millie and Henry petting Georgia’s Palomino, Sackett, and a horse named Lucky who was as black as Georgia was fair, and who followed Georgia with his eyes wherever she went. She’d told me once she’d tamed him right alongside Moses, though neither of them had known she was actively breaking them.
Moses still wasn’t comfortable around most animals. He’d come a long way, but a life time of nervous energy was hard to corral, and animals, especially horses, tended to mirror his unease. He and I stayed out of the way, leaning against the fence, watching Georgia work her magic. I was holding baby Kathleen—who I insisted on calling Taglee just to bug her father—and making faces at her, trying to make her smile. When she started yawning widely, Moses reclaimed her and propped her on his shoulder where she promptly dozed off. We listened to her baby sighs in companionable silence until Moses eyed me over her downy head, his eyes narrowed, his hand stroking Kathleen’s tiny back.
“Say your piece, Mo,” I said, knowing it was coming.
When Georgia had greeted Millie with a hand shake and a sweet hello, she had smiled at me like she really wanted to tease me about my new “lady friend,” but she contained herself. Moses didn’t want to tease. He apparently wanted answers.
“What’s going on, man?” Moses didn’t mince words. He never had. You wanted to get to know Moses, you had to pay attention, because he didn’t give you much. You had to force your way into his space and refuse to go when he pushed you away. That was what I had done. That was my gift. Push, fight, cling, grapple, wear you down. It was what Georgia had done too, and she’d paid a price. The price for Moses’s love and devotion was a high one. But she’d paid it. And in return, Moses worshipped Georgia.