Divisadero Read Free Page B

is a broken path in
both our memories towards this incident, even now. We are aware only that
something signi fi cant happened. Claire recalls herself whistling as she entered the
barn, but in what follows, in what we have tried to piece together, she is
still too close to the remembered evidence, as if she can see only grains of
colour. For a moment Claire had been staring at me, who had already been
knocked down by the attacking horse, and then the same horse had swerved out of
the darkness and turned on her, and her senses closed down. Or maybe she
remained like me, half awake on the concrete fl oor, unable to move, while everything
around us was vivid and nightmarish, hooves smashing against the fl oor — I felt I
could see sparks and fl ame to represent the loudness. The animal must have been crazed,
claustrophobic, for it raced up and down the passageway, slipping on straw and
concrete, banging into wood walls, charging the length of the barn, turning
once more at the blocked exit, its eyes and heart frantic. Was she, was I, conscious during this, or unconscious? Or in a world of spirits, uncertain if we were dead or alive.
    When Claire opened her
eyes, I was apparently sitting up six feet away and not moving, just looking at
her lazily. I didn’t have the strength to rise, uncertain as to what exactly
had happened. There were planks knocked loose all around us. No one had come
for us. It was suppertime, I could tell by the light against the dusty windows.
    Territorial was Claire’s
lovely name for that horse. I kept watching her. Later I told her it was
because of all the blood on her cheek, though she said it was just her hands
that hurt. We were both fi fteen years old then, when Coop fi nally entered the barn and crouched down
by me and called me ‘ Claire. ’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she
was. But she was Claire, with what would become a thin scar like the path of an
almost dried tear under her left eye, where all that blood had escaped.
    Something happened in the
horse barn, that early evening, between the two of us, in the confusion. We had
stepped suddenly into the large uncertain world of adults, and we would now
need to be distinctly Anna and distinctly Claire. It became important not to be
known as the sister of—or worse, mistaken for—the other. From then on we would
try to bring Coop into our fold. In the next few months we often slipped back
into this ‘incident,’ to talk about it. There was a border now between us,
something we had never achieved in the series of photographs that kept the two
of us arm in arm. The album, I suspect, is still with Claire, on one of her
bookshelves. If she studies it, she could parse more clearly how the two of us
evolved away from each other. The year Claire cut most of her hair and grew
more distant, the year I stared out, wild-eyed, everything in me a secret.
    Why was Coop never in our
father’s photographs? There were a few pictures taken of him, but these seemed
preoccupied with texture and light. And there were some abstract re fl ections of him in a window, or of his
shadow on the grass or on the fl ank of an animal. How many things could you throw your image
against?
    In any case, it was Coop
who had found us that evening in the barn and had mistaken our identities, who
had eventually come over to me and lifted me into his embrace and said, ‘Claire,
my god, Claire,’ and I had thought, Then I am not Anna, then that must be Anna
over there.
C
oop began living in the grandfather’s cabin. From there,
on the high ridge, he could look out onto black oaks and buckeye trees, where a
glacier of mist appeared caught for an hour or so each morning in the roughness
of the branches. He was nineteen now, in a desired solitude. He was rebuilding
the cabin, working alone. He bathed in the cold water of a hill pond. In the
evenings he slipped past the farmhouse and ended up in Nicasio or Glen Ellen,
listening to music.