“The perfect ordinariness . . .” Georgia breathed, and she lifted her hand and followed the wet path my finger made, as if she, too, could paint. Then she looked at me solemnly.
“I’m a very ordinary girl, Moses. I know that I am. And I always will be. I can’t paint. I don’t know who Vermeer is, or Manet for that matter. But if you think ordinary can be beautiful, that gives me hope. And maybe sometime you’ll think about me when you need an escape from the hurt in your head.”
Her brown eyes looked black in the shadowed light, the same color as the water we were immersed in, and I reached blindly for something to hold onto, something to keep me from falling into them. Georgia’s right hand was still pressed to the wall beside mine, and I found myself tracing her fingers, like a child traces their hand with a crayon, up and down and around until I paused at the base of her thumb. And then I continued on, letting my fingers dance up her arm, feather light, until I reached her shoulder. I traced the fine bones at her collar as my fingers glided to the opposite side and back down her other arm. When I found her fingers, I slid mine in-between, interlocking them tightly. I waited for her to lean in, to press her mouth to mine, to lead, as she was prone to do. But she stayed still, holding my hand beneath the surface of the water, watching me. And I gave in. Anxiously.
Her lips were wet and cool against mine, and I imagine mine felt the same. But the heat inside her mouth welcomed me like a warm embrace, and I sank into the softness with a sigh that would have embarrassed me had she not matched it with one of her own.
Georgia
MOSES AND I WATCHED as my parents conducted a therapy session with a small group of addicts from a rehab center in Richfield, about an hour south of Levan. Every other week, the van would pull up and the young people would pile out—kids ranging from my age to their early twenties—and for two hours, my parents would bring them out to the round corral and let them interact with the horses in a series of activities designed to help the kids make connections to their own lives.
I helped with the sessions with autistic kids and the kids who rode horses for physical rehab, but when the clients were my age or older, my parents didn’t like me involved in the counseling, even if it was just to work with the horses. So I’d wandered over to Kathleen’s, knowing Moses should be done with work, and coaxed him to the backyard with a couple of Cokes and two pieces of lemon meringue pie Kathleen had been happy to part with. She liked me, and I knew it, and she was incredibly helpful in maneuvering Moses when he pretended to not want my company or lemon meringue pie when we both knew darn well he wanted both.
Moses and I couldn’t hear what was being said from where we sat, stretched out on Kathleen’s back lawn, but we had a decent view, and I knew we weren’t close enough to attract the attention of my parents, even though we could still see the class being conducted. Being my normal nosy self, I was trying to make out which kids were still hanging around and which ones had either graduated from the ninety day program or been released. I made a mental catalogue of the ones who looked like they were miserable and the ones who were making progress.
“What do you call them . . . the different colors? Aren’t there different names?” Moses asked suddenly, his eyes trained on the horses milling about the enclosure. He held a paint brush in his hands as if he’d grabbed it out of habit, and he wove it between his fingers like a drummer of a rock band twirls his drumsticks.
“There are so many colors and kinds. I mean, they’re all horses, obviously, but each color combination has a different name.” I pointed to a reddish horse in the corner. “That red one there? Merle? He’s a Sorrel, and Sackett is a Palomino. Dolly is a Bay, and Lucky is a Black.”
“A Black?”
“Yes. He’s solid black,” I answered easily.
“Well, that one’s easy enough.” Moses laughed a little.
“Yep. There are greys, blacks, browns, whites. Reba’s an Appaloosa, the greyish one with spots on her rump. We don’t like to label them by their colors in equine therapy though. And we don’t call the horses by their names. We don’t even tell the clients if the horses are male or female.”
“Why? Not politically correct?” Moses quipped. He laughed again, and I poked at him, liking that he seemed interested, even relaxed. Now if I could only get him inside the corral.
“Because you want the client to identify with the horse. You want the client to put their own labels on the horse. If a horse is exhibiting a certain behavior that you want the client to identify with, you don’t want the client to have any preconceived ideas about who or what that horse is. That horse needs to be whoever the client needs it to be.” I sounded just like my mother, and mentally patted myself on my back for being able to explain something that I’d grown up hearing but never had to put into words until now.
“That doesn’t really make any sense.”
“Okay. For instance, let’s say you have mother issues.”
Moses shot me a look that said, “Don’t go there!” So of course I did.
“Let’s say you are in a therapy session where you are discussing your feelings about your mother. And the horse starts exhibiting certain behaviors that suddenly clarify your behavior . . . or your mother’s behavior. If we’ve already labeled that horse as Gordie and said he’s a boy, you might not be able to identify your mother with that horse. In a therapy session, the only labels the horses get are the ones the client gives them.”