Cold Springs(59)

“Whoa,” Olsen intervened. “Mallory, stop. Time out.”

Mallory counted silently back from twenty. A drop of rain hit her eye and made her blink.

“You want to finish your story now?” Olsen asked.

Mallory shook her head. She was mortified they'd think she was crying.

Olsen let the silence build, waiting for her to fill it, but she wouldn't.

“Anybody else, then?” Olsen asked.

But the possibility of openness had evaporated. Smart and Bridges and Morrison all stayed mute.

Mallory waited for Olsen to stop the session. She could've called over the instructors, told them the team wasn't cooperating, gotten them all put to bed with no fire, no dinner. Instead she said, “Let's move to the last activity. Break out, one-on-one.”

The other three black levels scrambled up and found their counselors. Mallory stayed where she was.

Olsen asked, “You sure you don't want to tell me anything?”

“I'm sure.”

“About Race?”

“Forget it. I was like digging for something to say, okay? It was stupid.”

Olsen let it pass. She pulled a postcard off her clipboard and gave it to Mallory. The computer-printed label read:

Mrs. Ann Zedman

200 Coit Dr.

San Francisco, CA 94611

The left half of the card was blank.

“This is your first chance to write home,” Olsen said. “It'll also be your last chance until you finish Black Level. You don't need to say much. Just tell her you're okay.”

Mallory stared at the blank half of the card.

Six square inches of white had never seemed so huge.

She pictured her mother the last time she'd seen her—eyes swollen from crying, hands over her temples to push back the headache, screaming at Mallory to stop. And Mallory, in a haze, taking the hammer from the kitchen cabinet, breaking dishes and coffee mugs, following her mother down the hallway, smashing her framed childhood pictures on the walls, turning pots into shrapnel, yelling that the last person her mother should be scared of was Race.

It was like something that had happened to another person, but the memory didn't make her feel sorry. All that anger was still inside her. Her mother was never there for her. She was always running away—from her father, from Mallory, from everything except her precious f**king school.

What did Olsen expect her to do? Dash off a quick note, Hi, Mom. I Love You. Smiley faces and little hearts on the i's—something that her mom could file away in the office, in that fat manila folder labeled Zedman, Mallory?

Over by the fire pit, Bridges was crying. Mallory would never have figured it—but there he was, bawling like a two-hundred-pound baby.

Smart was sitting at the edge of the cliff, hunched over his postcard, writing every word like it was part of his obituary.

Morrison sat stone still, her face pale, her pen frozen over the card.

Mallory handed Olsen back the postcard.

“I can't do it,” she said. “Lock me up.”

There was something in Olsen's eyes Mallory hadn't seen in so long she didn't recognize it at first—sympathy.

“Come on,” Olsen said, gentle but firm.

They walked back down the path in the growing dark, the rain sprinkling their clothes, until they got to the split-rail fence of the horse pasture.

Mallory knew there was a white level tailing them, ten or twenty feet behind—there was always an instructor on duty, keeping an eye on things—but somehow that didn't matter. It felt like she and Olsen were alone.

Olsen leaned against the rail, pulled a plastic bag out of her overcoat—apple slices. She pointed to one of the horses, the bay filly. “I bet that brown one would come over if you offered it something.”

Mallory felt her cheeks get hot.

One of the pictures Mallory had smashed at her mother's house had been a kindergarten drawing of a horse. The panel she'd done for the auction quilt that year—that had been a horse, too. She'd been obsessed as a little girl, and probably would've continued to be obsessed, if it hadn't been for Katherine's suicide.

After that night, Mallory was the girl-who'd-touched-a-dead-body. And girls who touch dead bodies don't get to play with toy horses. They sit in the corner of the classroom and draw dark pictures, while the teacher hovers over them with concern. Those girls grow up fast, learn bad habits, make bad friends with the kids everybody else snubs. They start dating early, and set things on fire. And of course their parents divorce. That goes without saying. Girls who touch dead bodies don't have time for horses.

“No thanks,” she said.

“Come on,” Olsen said. “These apples have been in my pocket for hours. Who else is going to eat them?”

Olsen plopped the bag on the fence, split the zip-lock, and the filly immediately pricked up its ears. Its mane and tail were silky black, its flank so velvety brown it was almost red.

“I'm not writing the postcard,” Mallory told Olsen, “if that's what you're thinking.”

But she dug her fingers into the bag and fished out an apple slice—warm, slippery, marbled with brown. She held it over the fence and the horse clopped toward her, its velvety nose snuffling.

The filly was huge, its shoulders higher than Mallory, its hooves the size of steam irons. It was nothing like the cute little drawings Mallory had made as a kid. The real horse was all muscle and twitch. Dangerous, powerful. The thing's snout was warm with mucus and saliva, and it breathed steam on Mallory's palm as it lipped up the apple. Mallory told herself it was disgusting.