Page 62 of The Reckless Rookie

That’s the second I’d have gone down into it. The guilt, the should-have. Except there’s a living thing screaming ten feet away that needs me more than the dead one does.

Catt moves first. Blood to her elbow, face wrung out, and she says the only thing there’s room for, fast and low, like she needs me to have it before I pick up the wrong thing and carry it out of here.

“There was nothing anyone could do. A foot turned wrong again after Salinas shifted the foal. Being here would not have changed one thing, Finn. Nobody failed her. Do you hear me?”

I hear her. I don’t believe it all the way yet, but I hear it, and I set it down, because the filly’s still screaming.

And God, she’s wild. Even through all of this I see it, because I’d know it anywhere. She’s her mother’s daughter down to the ground, all that same wire in her, the same can’t-stand-still already lit up in a body not even an hour old. She wheels off the dead mare and comes up short at the sight of me and freezes, one eye rolling white, deciding whether I’m one more thing here to hurt her tonight.

“Easy,” I tell her, low. And then out loud, to the barn, to nobody, because it’s the truest thing in here: “You’re wild. You’re wild like your mama.”

Vicente hasn’t moved from the boards. And that’s what stops me a second, because he’s got the master’s read on this and the master’s hands, and he’s standing here doing nothing, which is the one thing I have never in my life seen Vicente Reyes do in a crisis.

Then I get it.

I can’t tell whether the filly is starving or terrified. I look at the bottle, the tube, the blood on Catt’s sleeve. “Did she get the colostrum?”

“We tubed it,” Catt says. “She is covered for now. What she needs next is to come down enough to take the bottle.”

The emergency has changed. Her body is safe for the moment. What remains is fear.

That part I know without pretending I know horses.

Okay. Okay.

I get down.

Small. I fold down the way I folded the Jason night: shoulder turned, chin dropped, eyes off her and on the straw, everything in me that gets bigger when it’s scared going the other way instead. And I start talking, low, that voice that isn’t a voice I use anywhere else, easy and warm, not one thread of fear in it she can hear.

Easy. Easy, now. There you are. I’ve got you.

And she stops.

Not all at once. She’s got too much fear for all at once, and too much of her mother in her. But she quits wheeling and gets me fixed with one eye, this brand-new animal that’s known the world twenty minutes and already learned the worst it’s got, and she watches me the way her mother did at this rail a hundred times. She takes in what’s coming off me. And it isn’t the game I lost tonight or the mare I’m kneeling ten feet from or the woman whose heart I can feel breaking across the aisle. I put all of that down at the door. What’s coming off me is still, and low, and safe, and she can feel it, because a foal reads what’s real and there’s nothing to perform for an animal that can’t be lied to.

She takes a step toward me.

Vicente’s beside me without a sound, and he sets the bottle in my hand, warm. “Slow,” he breathes. “Let her come to it. Don’t reach.”

I don’t reach. I hold it low where she can find it and keep the voice going, and I wait, small and still and more patient than I have ever been in my whole sprinting life, and she comes the last two steps on her own. Her nose bumps my hand. She finds the nipple. She pulls.

And she drinks.

God, she drinks. The whole frantic engine of her pours down into that one thing, and I feel her legs quit shaking against mine, and her tail comes up and starts going, back and forth, fast and glad, the little flag that says fed, that says safe now. Vicente lets out a breath beside me I didn’t know he’d been holding.

“There,” he says. Just that. “There she is.”

She drains it and butts my hand for more, greedy, alive, and I look up and Catt’s already there with the next one, milk this time, warm, because she knew what was coming before I hit the bottom of the first. The two of us running the same rhythm we ran the day this mare colicked. No words. Her handing me what the filly needs the second she needs it.

We don’t talk. There’s nothing to say yet that’s smaller than everything, and everything won’t fit in a barn at midnight over a dead mare and a live foal. So we don’t try. She readies the bottles and I feed the filly, and we build the thing back the only way it’s ever going to get built. Not with words. With the work. Same as it started.

The second bottle goes slower. The third slower still, half-asleep on her feet by the end of it, and then she does the thing that finishes me.

She folds down.

Right into me, right at my feet, all those new legs giving out at once, and she drops against my shins and puts her head on my boot and goes out. Just like that. Into the dead-weight sleep of a thing that’s decided, in the deepest part of itself where there’s no lying, that it’s safe now. That the danger’s past. That the warm still thing it’s leaning on will keep it.

She picked me. Out of everyone. This night handed her the worst thing there is inside her first hour, and then it handed her me, and she took in what came off me and decided I was the one to sleep on.