Fractured Freedom(91)
“Free of yourself?” he whispered like he couldn’t believe I’d said it.
“Yes, from this stupid idea that I’m perfect here, when really I’d lost a baby, when really I’m struggling with depression, with expectations, with who I am.”
“You’ll never be free of those things, Lamb,” he murmured.
“Yes, I can be. I was getting there.”
His hand flexed on the handle of the door. “No, you were forgetting and suppressing, but that doesn’t work. You can’t be free of it because it lives with you … forever.”
“That isn’t freedom. This isn’t a life if I have to live with that, Dante.” Why did I feel like I was pleading with him, with the world, in that moment?
“That’s all life is, Lilah. You know that. It’s work and pain and suffering for the beauty of living. You think I tortured all those men and killed some in hopes I would forget? No, I took the ugly, and it chained me down, but the beauty of you and this world set me free. It’s not a complete freedom. It’s fractured and broken and wrecked.”
He opened the door to the barn stalls. I’d been there before, years ago, but they’d since redone everything with sleek treated oak. They had ten individual horse stalls, five on each side of the barn. In the middle was a lunging ring, an open area where they ran horses round and round. There was a high-end fan above us that cooled everything down without displacing even a straw of hay.
I didn’t respond to his viewpoint on life because my jaw had dropped at all the renovations. I walked over to one of the stalls. The beautiful wood was stained and treated so it was smooth to the touch. I ran my hand over it and gripped the gate where the wood ended and the iron began. It took me getting on my tiptoes to peer between the iron bars and to see into the horse stall.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“We redid some things a few years ago so that animals in distress could feel more comfortable. My mom and the workers will bring them in here if they’re pregnant, suffering from some ailment, or if it gets too hot out.”
I was already searching to see if there were any in here now, ready to comfort them. “I used to love coming over to see the animals with Dom.”
Dante smirked at me. “Woman, you didn’t only come with Dom. You were here every couple days, tending to a horse or a cow or a lamb.”
“Well, they needed someone,” I murmured, and then I saw a reddish horse in the corner stall. She shook her head and huffed a little as I walked toward her. “She’s hurt?”
“Physically?” He crossed his arms where he stood. “No. Emotionally, I think she might be dying of a broken heart. She lost her foal a week ago.”
I held out my hand for her to smell before running it along her neck. Staring into her kind eyes, rimmed with giant lashes, I smoothed the hair on the large bulge of her jaw. “Just a week ago?”
He nodded. “My mom’s kept me updated. Emmy hasn’t eaten since, and we had the vet come in to see if we should move her, but they think she should heal here for a month or so.”
“How did it happen?”
“It was stillborn. She was laboring, and they were sure it was alive, but the delivery didn’t go as planned, according to my mother.”
“Does Emmy pasture with the other horses?”
“She used to when I visited.”
I hummed. It felt safe here. Perfect temperature, perfect lighting, food right in front of her. Haystacks upon haystacks, and expectations upon expectations. Everyone expected her to heal perfectly here since the conditions were ideal. I faced Dante with determination. “She needs to go outside.”
He searched my eyes for answers. I knew he’d brought me here to see what this horse needed to heal and probably what I needed to heal too.
“You’re sure?” he asked. “Because it’s probably going to be painful out there for her.”
“She needs to feel free, even if she’s not, and she needs to do it on her own, even if it’s painful. She couldn’t have the baby on her own. So”—I went to the lock on her stall and wiggled it as I said the words I knew weren’t about the horse anymore—“let her do this on her own.”
He nodded and went to get the keys for the lock at the opposite side of the barn.
I whispered to her as I pet her soft mane. “It gets better. And worse. And I think you can live with it like maybe I’m living with it. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, except we’ll have more scars, right? And that’s not such a bad thing.”
Dante came up behind me and let me do the honors of unlocking the stall door. Then he placed a halter on her.
Together, we led her to the back of the barn where large sliding doors opened into a fenced-in pasture. As he removed the halter once more, I swear she stood taller, held her head higher, and her trot had more bounce.
I smiled when she didn’t even hesitate to take off galloping into the open field, the wind flying through her mane as she shook it.
With her went some of my pain, some of the failure, and some of the guilt. Other mommas went through what I had and made it out the other side, maybe broken, but probably wise enough to know themselves better. Our freedom may have been fractured, tainted by our pain and our growth, but we still had it. I could have it too. “We’ve all got to be okay in some way, right?”