“I think you missed the entrance.”
Shit. I sighed, went back through the fence, walked the long way around the ring, and pushed open the gate. “What’s up?”
The woman in the cowboy hat didn’t answer. Aubrey, whose glittery eyeshadow and high-heeled boots looked strange in the June sunshine, said, “We’re supposed to put this on that.” This was a tangle of leather straps and metal buckles. That was the horse.
“Why?”
“This is equine therapy,” Mary explained.
“How’s it supposed to help us?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure, dear.”
Aubrey handed me the straps and buckles. It was some kind of harness. At least that was my best guess. My experience with horses was limited to taking Ellie on pony rides at the zoo. “Excuse me,” I asked the woman in the cowboy hat. “Can you tell me what the point of this is?”
She didn’t answer. “I don’t think they’re allowed to talk to us,” Mary said.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. Aubrey shifted from foot to foot, rubbing her arms with her palms. “Do you have any idea what this has to do with anything?”
Aubrey shrugged, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s about working as a team? Or building confidence or something? I don’t know. Half the shit in rehab doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and the other half’s so boring you could die. Just wait till Ed McGreavey does the ‘Find Your Purpose’ lecture.”
“You didn’t like that?” Mary asked. “Oh, I’ve heard that it’s very inspiring.”
Aubrey began finger-combing her hair. “Yeah, I thought so, too, like, the first time I heard it. But after you’ve heard it, like, three or four times, and you’ve seen Big Ed cry at the exact same part . . .”
“When he talks about how his brother broke his leg when they were heli-skiing?”
“You know it.”
I looked at the harness, then looked at the horse. “So we just have to get the harness on the horse somehow?”
“And,” said Aubrey, “we have to be touching each other while we do it.”
“Huh?”
“Like a conga line,” Mary explained, and put her hands on my hips.
“Okay.” With Mary holding my hips and Aubrey holding hers, we inched across the ring and approached the horse. It lifted its head and gave us the equine equivalent of a raspberry. Aubrey squealed, and Mary flinched backward.
“He’s more afraid of us than we are of him,” I said. I found a vaguely loop-shaped opening in the complicated mess of straps and pushed it over the horse’s head. Then I tied the remaining dangling straps in a bow. “There. Done.”
Mary was frowning. “That doesn’t look right.”
“They said it had to be on. They didn’t say it had to be pretty.” I pulled on the straps. The horse didn’t move. I yanked harder. “Come on, you.” Finally, reluctantly, the horse lifted one foot, then another.
“It’s moving!” Aubrey cheered.
“We did it!” Mary cried. The stone-faced woman in the cowboy hat said nothing as she watched our progress. We were almost done with our second lap when a golf cart zipped up to the fence and a kid in khakis called my name. “Allison W.?”
I handed the reins to Mary and caught a ride in the cart, which dropped me at a single-story building that looked like it was made of wood but turned out to be covered in vinyl siding. The couch in the waiting room looked like leather, but wasn’t, and the Twelve Steps framed and hung on the wall were simplified: I Can’t, read Step One. God Can, said Step Two. Let Him, Step Three advised. God again, I thought, and collapsed onto the couch. The God thing was going to be a problem. I’d been raised Jewish, with a vague notion of God as a wrathful old guy with a long white beard who was big on testing and tormenting His followers: casting Adam and Eve out of the garden, punishing poor Job, drowning Egyptian soldiers. Was that God—a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in—actually supposed to keep me from taking too much OxyContin? Especially when He let kindergartners get shot in their classrooms and young mothers die of cancer and millions of people suffer and die because of their skin color or religion?
There were no magazines I recognized in the waiting area, just battered copies of something called Grapevine, which appeared to be a cross between True Confessions and MAD, only for drunks. In the hallway outside, I saw a constant flow of people, men and women, alone and in groups, slouchy dudes with shifty eyes, pretty girls in jeans so tight I wondered if they were actually leggings with pockets painted on. Finally, a door flew open and a willowy African-American man in a linen suit smiled at me.