Let's Play Horses

I fell in love with my uncle Danny the day I met him, when I was maybe two. I'm not making this up. That was in August, when we went to see the bird display at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum and my dad's little sister Leslie was there with Danny Oakleaf, and he was her boyfriend. For a while in the afternoon we were outside in the sculpture garden. I got to sit on Danny's lap while he shaded his eyes and talked to my parents. They called him Dan and Leslie called him Daniel.
            
That was in 1985. In 1993, in the winter, I saw Danny and Leslie's daughter Reese die of a broken appendix, in the back seat of a wrecked car, in the middle of the night. Then they made me read books like Bridge to Terabithia and Tuck Everlasting and A Taste of Blackberries, and they had me go to this lady to talk about the books and to talk about loss.
            
I wanted to talk about Danny. The lady I talked to said if I was only two I probably didn't remember that first day when I met him, and maybe my parents had told me stories about it and that was why I thought I remembered it. But I remember he had long hair and a blue bandanna, and a shirt with a fish and a picture of Canada on it. And he wore boots and he let me bounce rocks off of them, when he was sitting on a bench and I was hiding under it because it was so hot.
            
Leslie had long hair too, but hers was shiny and his was dark. I pulled her hair that day at the museum, because she made me jealous, even then. I remember that. On the day they got married, in June in 1986, I was the flower girl, and while she was getting dressed I tried to rip lace off of her dress, but they stopped me before I did it. In 1989 I got excited because my parents were talking about how my aunt was getting a divorce and that meant her and her husband wouldn't be married anymore, but then it was my mom's sister Karen, who lived in Michigan, who was getting a divorce and not Leslie.
            
We went to Danny and Leslie’s house every year at Christmas from 1987, the year Reese was born, until 1993. They lived up north, not that far from where my grandparents were in Minocqua. For the last two years they had me and Reese sleep together on a fold-out couch in the den, where there was a stove to keep us warm.
            
On December 22, 1993, Leslie made us these chocolate chip cookies, the kind from the frozen dough at Karau’s. That night before we went to bed they let me and Reese play on the fold-out couch in our pajamas, and eat chocolate chip cookies while Danny played Eagles records on this old RCA he had. He listened to the Eagles a lot. Sometimes I asked him what the songs were, just to have something to say. So I'd ask and he'd answer "well this is such-and-such by the Eagles," and I liked his voice and I liked the songs.
            
That night we went in there, into the den, at maybe eight in the evening. Me, Danny, Leslie, and Reese. I just ate my cookie, but Reese took one bite out of hers and then she started galloping it across the top of the fold-out couch and she said, "Let's play horses."
            
I pulled her hand off of the couch. "You can't play horses with cookies."
            
Danny grabbed her around the waist, the way he held me around the waist when I sat on his lap in the sculpture garden outside the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum. "The cookie will break, kiddo." He held her and he pulled her hair away from her face with his hand.
            
It was pretty hot in that room because of the stove and he wasn't wearing a shirt, so I could see this tattoo that he had on his shoulder that said "AIM." For a while I’d thought maybe it meant something like he liked to play darts, but then my mom told me once that it was because he was a member of the Menominee Nation, and I didn't know what that meant but I liked to say "Menominee Nation" to myself sometimes when I was alone, just like I liked to say "Danny Oakleaf."
            
That tattoo moved back and forth, back and forth, when he bounced Reese up and down on his knee. "I'll be your horse," he said, and he held onto her cookie. I just finished mine and I watched him, and finally he watched me back, and he smiled without really opening his lips. He never really showed his teeth. "You like horses too, Clarabee?"
            
Leslie and Danny both called me Clarabee, even though my parents never did. She sounded kind of like Elmo and he sounded kind of like Anthony Quinn in this movie that my parents made me watch when I was eight. I liked it when he called me Clarabee, but not her.
            
I nodded at him. He still had long hair but not as long as it used to be. He had it in a ponytail that night.
            
Leslie was putting mine and Reese's clothes for the next day in this set of drawers that they kept in there for when the den was used as a guest room. She looked over her shoulder at Danny and pushed her hair away from her eyes. "Honey, maybe tomorrow or something you can take the girls out to Brebender's, you know over by 51. They got some horses there."
            
Danny looked up, and his eyelashes twinkled and his mouth narrowed. "They have some horses there."  Then Danny said his horse was tired, and he gave Reese back her cookie and put her on the couch.
            
Leslie gave him a nice smile when he got up and walked out into the hall. But he was already leaving, grabbing a sweater from a chair and pulling it on, and I don’t think he saw her.
            
Reese didn't finish her cookie because she got one of her bad tummy aches. See, we didn’t know anything was really wrong because she'd been having those every so often for maybe two and a half years, and Danny and Leslie took her to the hospital once but they didn't find anything really and just gave her some medicines.
            
"We’ll just give her these medicines," Leslie told me that night. "This'll pass soon enough, right love?"
            
So we just went to bed like we usually did.
 
            
The next night I was in bed, but not asleep, on a different couch, the one in Danny and Leslie's room. My parents slept there during Christmas, on Danny and Leslie's king-size bed. Danny and Leslie slept on a blow-up mattress in Reese's room. My parents were sleeping when the door downstairs opened. They didn’t hear it, but I did.
            
It was the night before the night before Christmas. My parents sat at the edge of the king-size bed until late at night, whispering and crying. I pretended to be asleep but I wasn't. I thought about Reese and about ghosts and I got very scared, and I cuddled under the covers and started feeling kind of sick. I cried too. My mom came over and rubbed my back until I pretended to sleep again.
            
But when they fell asleep for real I got very, very scared. I started to think I had a tummy ache and was going to die. Then I was shaking and I needed to go to the bathroom but I didn't want to get up and I didn't want to walk down the hall in the dark.
            
That was why I was awake and why I heard the door. And I knew it was Danny going outside, so I took my blanket with me and I went out into the hall. I turned on the light in the hall closet. I was shaking all over while I put my layers on. I remembered how Danny looked at me when we first got there and said the layers made me look like a big Nerf ball. Leslie laughed and pinched my coat. I glared at her and my face got hot against the cold. While I pulled my snowpants on I thought about that, and I started to cry very hard.
            
They had this shed out back where Leslie kept her garden things, and there was a light above it and he was standing under it, all bundled up like I was. But he did not look like a big Nerf ball. I remember my dad told me once that women are beautiful and men are handsome. But my uncle Danny was very, very beautiful. And I think he was more beautiful that night than he had ever been before, with his winter boots in the snow and his long hair in the light. He looked like an angel.
           
 He only sort of looked at me. His eyes were glittering. And he sort of looked at me and he said, "Clara."
           
 I stood in front of him. We weren’t close enough to touch each other unless we both reached out our hands at the same time. But it was so cold, and we both kept our hands in mittens and in our pockets.
            
"You know Leslie has never liked drinking milk," my uncle Danny said. "She isn't lactose intolerant or anything. She just doesn't like it. Doesn't like cheese either. When she went for a physical three years ago her doctor said she should be taking a calcium supplement. Every morning since then, every morning, she eats two pieces of toast with jelly and drinks one cup of decaffeinated coffee and then she says 'Whoop! I need to take my cassium supplement.' She says it just like that, every morning. Cassium. As if there weren't even an l in calcium."
            
He looked at me for a second again, and then he blinked his big eyes against the cold.
            
"You know, Clara, when I was my daughter's age, and when I was your age, and when I was older than both of you, I never imagined not-- I never imagined not being—great. You know?
            
"When I met Leslie I started to tell her how I sometimes tortured myself, worrying that I'd never make it. And she told me that was funny, because she never really had dreams as a little kid, she just read comic books with her brothers and played in the lake and was mostly happy most of the time, and she never worried. About anything.
            
"And, for a little while, I thought that was great."
            
He clunked his head against the shed, and he looked up to the light. I looked up too. There were no stars, and no snow fell but the wind sometimes blew snow off of the roof of the shed, down past the light and down past my uncle Danny.
            
I couldn't tell if he was crying or not. I didn’t even know men cried, until I heard my dad crying on the phone that morning, when we called from the hospital and told them about how the car got wrecked. How we hadn’t known how Reese was real sick.
            
I watched Danny's puffs of breath floating up to Heaven.
            
He was not saying anything, but I kept hearing his voice the way I sometimes heard the songs he played on his RCA, even though I was alone in the quiet. I felt like my mind was broken.
            
"I stopped sleeping well, and I started coming outside at night, sometime this summer. Just to think. I just kept thinking about how I never-- I never wanted to grow up to raise whiny daughters in Bumfuck, Wisconsin and I never wanted to do the same things every day of my goddamn life and I never wanted to think visiting state parks on a long weekend was a vacation— My God. You know every night, Clara. Every night it's can we get a horse, I don't like all this other expensive shit that I have, can we get a horse. And no I can't eat anything decent, I only have room in my tummy for packaged crap, and why do I have to drink melk when Mommy doesn't have to drink melk, and no I can't speak decent English why should I speak decent English when Mommy doesn't."
            
My teeth were starting to dry up and freeze, because I had my lips open a little. And the wind kept sucking tears out of my eyes and I kept seeing my toes turning to little blocks of ice in my mind. I was so cold and I wanted him to hug me.
            
The light blinked a few times and went out then. And just before it did I thought he heaved a little, like he was going to drop down into the snow.
            
And then he said, "Lord. What a hell of a human being I am."
 
            
I told the lady I talk to how he was also outside the night before, the night Reese wanted to play horses with a cookie and the night she got the tummy ache and the night we lost her, even though she was only six years old. It was late at night, and I'd been asleep for a while, when I heard her throwing up and I went to get Leslie. Leslie opened the door like she'd been waiting on the other side, and that was when I knew she was awake and alone in there and I felt funny. But Leslie just smiled at me and said, "Well no more of them cookies before bedtime, that's for sure."
            
But a little while later she was at the kitchen door, leaning out and letting the cold in and calling "Daniel! Daniel!"
            
They let me come along to the hospital because Danny said it might make Reese feel better if I was along. When we got in their SUV Leslie sat in the back holding Reese, and I got to sit in the front next to Danny.
            
I stared at him all the way down that empty county road. There was nothing else to look at. No snow falling, no snow blowing around, no stars. Nothing in the trees.
            
The song on the radio was not the Eagles, but it made me feel the same way. It made me feel like I was a hero, like I was in a movie. I asked Danny what it was, and he told me.
            
Then he looked at me, and his slow smile gave me chills under all my layers. "You like this one, Clarabee? This came out about the time I was a freshman in college. It was one of my favorites for a while."
            
I smiled and I said, "I like it a lot." I wished me and Danny could drive in the SUV and listen to that song for the rest of our lives.
            
I only heard the song, because Reese stopped crying. And then Leslie's voice sounded different, more like Danny than like Elmo. She said, "Oh my God, Daniel, I think she's passing out."
            
His teeth were bared like an animal's when he turned and looked over his shoulder. And I saw this deer hop into the road, and I thought it looked kind of like my aunt Karen's rat terrier.
 
            
It was very late at night, and very cold, and almost Christmas, and we didn't see anyone on the road that night except that deer. When the car was in the ditch we all got out, and Leslie was holding Reese even though Reese looked too big to be held, and Leslie was maybe crying but I couldn't tell. And she said, "Daniel, for God's sake it's fifteen miles to town, you can't go," and he kept saying he had to, the way they do in movies.
            
He would just walk until he found a house, he said. Or until a car passed. Hopefully a car would pass and we could flag it down and get in it, and then if he hadn't found a house yet we would see him walking and we would pick him up and we would all go to the hospital.
            
Then he kissed Leslie, not like the way my parents sometimes kissed each other quickly, but a long kiss that made me feel sort of sick. Then he kissed Reese again and again even though she was passed out.
            
He patted my shoulder and he said he needed my help, that he needed me to help Leslie and keep Reese warm, and also make sure I didn't just stand still, because it was very cold. I looked over my other shoulder at the little deer lying smashed in the road, and when I looked back to Danny he turned his collar up toward his ears and went away.
            
She was gone before he made it back.
 

Once I started to tell the lady I talk to how for almost my whole life I had wished something bad would happen to Leslie. But the lady just gave me a Kleenex and a hug and said, "Clara, honey, it wasn't your fault."