on breakfast.
“I’m glad you like it, Mom.”
“Paula,” my mother orders. “Give her a piece of your toast.”
While I’m biting into a piece smothered in strawberry jam, I hold another one out to her, one that is only buttered, fewer calories. Rhea ignores it and leans down near my face. Instantly I raise my hands, expecting her to pinch or smack me like she usually does when she’s in a good mood and wants to give me a hard time.
Instead, she kisses my cheek.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, forgetting my mouth is full. “Are you on your period or something? You’re acting weird.”
Rhea laughs as she pulls away, a laugh that doesn’t sound like it comes from her, no trademark snort that leaves the rest of us going in her wake.
After school I break out the bareback pad and the bridle and put them on Boo Boo. Going on Tomoko’s advice, this is my prime opportunity to catch Cheech’s attention.
He’s outside swinging the bat at his own pop-ups, knocking the homers into the neighbor’s backyard nursery on the other side. His father and little brother are nowhere in sight, probably at Rigo’s Little League game.
Leading Boo Boo to the side of his corral, I climb up and keep him steady as I ease onto his back. The pad feels puffy and soft under my bare legs. If my mother were home she’d kill me, knowing I was riding this way, in nothing but a pair of shorts and my Vans. When she gives me lessons, I’m forced to wear jeans and riding boots, sometimes even gloves.
Right now, though, I’ve lucked out because she’s not around. All I found after my father’s secretary, Nora, dropped me off from school was a note she left on the fridge, instructing me to stay put and wait for my father. Nora wasn’t much help either except she did stop off at McDonald’s and buy me a Happy Meal before depositing me curbside.
The oleander bushes are abuzz, the hard shells of the flies reflecting in the sunlight, and I make sure and steer Boo Boo as far away as possible while still making a ring in our backyard of pure dirt. First I make kissing sounds, the cue for him to trot, keeping my back straight, squeezing with my thighs, so I won’t slip around on the pad.
With each lap, I become more and more tense as I no longer hear Cheech swinging at anything. He’s watching me, and I think twice if I should head back into the house and change into a pair of long pants. He’s doing exactly what I wanted him to do, checking out the summer tan on my bare legs.
But there is no wave, no cat calling, not even a two-fingered whistle, and the rhythmic sound of bat connecting with ball resumes. Being ignored frustrates me into kicking it up a notch, and I touch Boo Boo’s flank with my heel, feeling the slide and pull underneath me as his front legs extend into a gallop. I shorten my reins and somehow this accidentally brings Boo Boo too close to the oleander bushes. This is when I feel it land, as light as a barrette: a horse fly right on the side of my head.
Although I stop from screaming, I can’t stop my hands from striking and slapping at my head like a lunatic. Maybe it is the commotion that startles my horse, or maybe it is the fact I drop the reins. In a matter of seconds Boo Boo lunges one way, and I slide off in another. The number one lesson my mother has drilled into my head is that if I’m going to fall, I need to drop, then roll away fast, so I won’t get hoofed in the face.
I roll more smoothly and farther than perhaps a stunt double even could, stopping face down near the lower steps that lead up to the house. Dust is thick and powdery on my tongue, and I’m afraid to see if Cheech has just gotten a front row view of me eating dirt. Boo Boo grazes nearby, weeds poking out from the steel bit in his mouth, the seat of the bareback pad now hanging under his belly.
“Man, that’s some wipeout,” Cheech hollers from across the fences. “You okay?”
As I climb up to my knees, what feels like a relatively safe landing turns out to be anything but. I open my mouth to breathe, to answer Cheech, yet nothing comes in or out. The air is pounded from my lungs, and it seems with every gasp that they’re clamping tighter and tighter. Breathing feels like an act I’ve never tried before, and I wonder if this is how Nicholas felt when he was first pulled out from the womb. I’m convinced that at age twelve, I’m dying of a heart attack.
Suddenly the back door opens and my father stands at the top of the stairs. From this angle, he strikes an imposing figure, blocking the sunlight.
“Paula, stop screwing around.” My name explodes from his mouth in that same voice I’ve heard Moses use on his kids, his Vietnam voice. Though my father never served, it’s as if he, too, is threatened and shell shocked by the sound of his own fear. Apparently me on all fours, all scuffed up on the ground doesn’t seem to faze him. He comes down the steps. “Get up. We need to go. Your sister,” he says. “She’s tried to kill herself.”
RIDE
There is no time for me to clean up and I’m forced to ride with my father to the hospital in a pair of denim shorts ripped at the side seam and a dirty navy blue T-shirt with white lettering that reads, Jesus is a Greek—a gift from my yia yia. In the car, my father briefly tells me what happened. Instead of raiding the fridge for food like most teens, this morning my sister raided the medicine cabinet of our bathroom, popping every pill out of its sealed packet or pour from its bottle—Benadryl, Tylenol, and the rest of her prescribed antidepressant, Prozac. Some she chewed so they’d take effect sooner while others she swallowed.
However, somewhere along the twenty-minute drive to La Verne, she had a change of heart and before losing consciousness right there in first period Latin, she requested a pass to see the nurse. An ambulance was called and she was taken to the nearest hospital in Pomona where they forced liquid coal down her throat to dilute the drugs before inserting the tubes that would reach into her stomach and pump out the contents.
My face holds as hard as my father’s, yet just below my right knee I feel the blood like a tear from a fresh cut when I fell off Boo Boo. Quickly, I take off both of my socks, curl up in the passenger seat, and press one against my shin.
The ride to the hospital is long, practically a hundred miles away in Long Beach and my father talks nearly non-stop, detailing his plans for Rhea.
“We need to get your sister involved in something.”
“I think it’s a little too late for a hobby.”
“Of course it isn’t. She needs something to distract her from herself. This is all about boredom.”
If my mother were riding shotgun, she’d fire off at the mouth at him, and she’d be right. What he’s saying doesn’t make any sense. Still, I’m curious to hear what he has in mind.
“What exactly?”
“Horses.”
“We already have two in the backyard.”
“No,” my father says. He lets up on the gas as if he must slow the car down in order to better explain things to me.
Behind us a pick-up honks and swerves into the fast lane to avoid hitting our bumper. Normally my father would react. Even if it was his fault,
