BREAKING IN by Joy Lanzendorfer
The ghost horses run at night. They’ve reverted to roaming the earth in troops, their gallop a rumble preceding trains and domestication. I heard them in the charred hills behind us, a cacophony fading to something primal, like ancient drum circles. It has been happening off and on throughout winter. They appear on barren, frosty nights where in years past it would have rained.
Last night John went up to the ridge to see them. He camped there like an ash-roasted potato and came back in the morning with his skin streaked black. Around 3AM, he heard something running through the valley below him. Animals were moving among the skeletons of oak trees.
“Did they sound like horses?” I said.
He crushed the can of La Croix and threw it at the garbage. It bounced on the edge and tumbled out of sight. “I don’t know what that sounds like, Avery, but it wasn’t as loud as you said it would be. It was probably deer.”
I heaved myself down beside John on the sofa. The baby moved like a frog in the pod of my belly. The fact that I’m the only one hearing the horses continues to be an issue. John went up to the ridge to humor me – and to keep me from going there myself.
“It sounds like thunder,” I said. “Every time I hear it, I think it’s starting to rain.”
I didn’t have to add that it hadn’t rained. We both knew as much. In the three months since the fire, there had been only one rainstorm, a weak drizzle for part of a December afternoon. The dirt was so dry that the rain rolled across the surface, leaving tear-shaped divots in the dust.
“That could be anything. Some kind of machine. Something falling. The earth settling,” John said.
“I want to see for myself,” I said, not for the first time.
“It’s a bad idea for you to go up on the ridge.”
“Moderate exercise is healthy for pregnancy.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t moderate. It’s a tough hike up there.”
Since pregnancy, people are always telling me what I can and can’t do. I let John see in my eyes what a betrayal this was, then I stood up and went to the kitchen.
The refrigerator was the only noise in the room, the hoarse whine of the compressor pitched slightly too high. The baby was kicking, an uncanny flutter inside me. I lost the ability to bend over a week ago. I have to squat to move the laundry from the washer to the overhead dryer, but I try to look at it as thigh toning. I try to be grateful. I try not to get angry when John is overprotective. After all, this baby is alive. The last one didn’t make it this far. We’re onto new territory now.
Out the kitchen window, I could see our fenced‑in yard and the neighbor’s house. Behind are the hills, yellow with dead grass that should be green this time of year. At the top of the ridge, I could see the curl of black from the fire.
The horse ranch had been the only thing in the valley for thirty years. Where once you could look down at red barns surrounded by oak trees, I now imagined looking into a witch’s cauldron.
The fire burned for three weeks. For the first week, we thought we might have to evacuate. The news kept repeating that the fire was only one percent contained. Eerie pink-orange patches of sunlight colored our walls and everyone at the supermarket was wearing masks. I packed, dismantling the baby’s room, all the yellow blankets and gender-neutral clothing still in their packaging. Then the wind changed, blowing the fire back on itself, and we didn’t have to evacuate after all.
Not like the horse owners. Not like the horses.
I studied the ridge.
None of it would be real to me until I saw it myself.
The news was trying to find the source of the fires. The leading culprit was a downed power line. PG&E had been lazy about trimming trees around the lines, so the branches broke in the wind and dropped the wires. Sparks ignited our dry November hills.
“An estimated eighty-five percent of forest fires are caused by humans,” the blonde newscaster said.
I chewed my eggs thoughtfully, considering this idea. Sometimes it feels like all disasters are manmade. The Dust Bowl. Chernobyl. The oil spills. Last year, my parent’s house in the Sierra Mountains was threatened by a forest fire started by teenagers goofing around with firecrackers. When John and I went up to visit, we sat on a picnic table outside and watched airplanes filled with water disappear into the smoke. They looked like passenger planes.
Still, in the case of our fire, there’s the wind to consider. Usually our winds come from the west, fresh off the ocean, but this wind was a trickster. It came from the east, sneaking behind everything and gathering allergens and chemicals as it went. It bent the trees the wrong way, snapping the brittle limbs so they crashed to the ground, crumbling our infrastructure. One perverse wind wrecking havoc on our delicate human balance.
The Diablo Winds, they’re called. Devil winds.
“Did you ever go to the horse ranch when you were a kid?” I asked John later that day.
We were at the hardware store, walking among the plants. John pushed a cart full of orange and purple flowers for our garden box. Each flower came in a plastic tub with a sticker saying what kind of light it needed. Normally I would plant the garden, but I can’t this year because of that whole not-bending-over thing. Plus John doesn’t want me to dig in the dirt. Or walk on the ridge. Or do much of anything.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You?”
“I think I went there once as a kid. My sister begged my mom for lessons.”
I had a clear memory of going to the ranch – or a ranch, anyway. I remember riding up a gravel road with blueberry bushes flashing by the car window, and walking through a big barn, past stalls with horses leaning their heads out, looking at us. And later, hanging on a white metal fence while my sister rode in circles around the corral.
When we checked out, a woman in line was telling the clerk how her husband almost died while escaping the fire. A spark lit the mattress in the back of his truck and it burst into flames.
“He stopped in the middle of the street, jumped out and started running,” the woman said. “A neighbor saw him and picked him up.”
I moved away so I wouldn’t have to hear anymore. People have been trading in stories about our common tragedy all over town. Every time someone talks about the fire, it makes me think about the horses.
At the door, I studied the parking lot. The sky was smoke free, but they said the air was still poisonous. Something threatening lingered in the sky, unseen, but I can’t stop breathing.
I thought about the horses’ confusion and panic. A split-second decision and their lives irrevocably changed.
Two nights later, I heard it again: The rumble of hooves in the valley behind the ridge. Grabbing the remote, I muted the movie we were watching just as the gallop faded away.
“Listen,” I said.
“I don’t hear anything,” John said.
We looked at each other. To me, the horses were as loud as a freight truck. John pulled up the blinds, but the street was empty. A light shown down on our Subaru.
This is the thing that bothers me: Maybe the horses never stopped feeling the emotions from the moment before they died. Maybe they were suspended in panic, condemned to run back and forth in a fire that would never cease. I hated to think of them like that, always running the hills, looking for water and grass. Looking for relief.
“It’s only nine o’clock,” John said. “Don’t you usually hear them in the middle of the night?”
“Yeah. I wonder what’s wrong with them.”
“Well, they died, for one thing.”
“That’s not funny.”
He shut the blinds and slumped beside me. Outside, a car went by.
John turned the movie back on.
It’s strange to be haunted. It leads to self-doubt. Had I heard the horses at dinner the other night? Had there been a ghostly nicker outside my window, mixing with the birdcalls? Why hadn’t John heard the horses even once?
What did the horses want?
The day I learned how the horses died was also the day that the fire got so close, we thought we might have to evacuate. I was sitting on the porch swing in a facemask, smoothing my belly like I was rubbing the baby’s back and watching John put our suitcases in the car. The devil wind was blowing up the street and running against our windows. It sounded like it was scratching to come in.
Our elderly neighbor trapped John in the street, yammering on about how they were evacuating the college. The other neighbor was playing pop music on his truck radio while he hosed down his driveway. The song ended and a news bulletin came on. I stopped rocking to listen, hoping to learn whether the fire was moving in our direction.
Instead, I learned that the horse ranch had burned down and the horses had died. The owners had tried to load them into trucks, but they were panicked, rearing and bucking, the whites of their eyes showing. They wrenched their harnesses from human hands and bolted. In the smoke, they found each other and their instincts told them to band together in a herd. The men shouted and tried to stop them, but that only made them more determined to follow each other’s panic. As a team, they ran into the flames.
“At least eighteen horses died in the fire,” the newscaster said.
I got up and walked around the side of the house to get closer to the radio. At the end of the street, I could see the smoke rising over the ridge. It looked like pictures I’d seen of erupting volcanoes. I stood there, staring through the sprinklers at the ash until a Taylor Swift song came on the radio.
That night, after we didn’t evacuate, I heard the ghost horses for the first time. We were sleeping in our bedroom with the humidifier on. The rumble shook the window and my eyes flew open. I pressed my hands over my ears, but the sound of their hooves seemed to mix with my heartbeat. Even then, I wanted to help them.
This afternoon, I looked up wild horses and learned that they aren’t indigenous to the United States. Mustangs are ancestors of tame horses brought here by Spanish conquistadors. In California, wild horses are invasive. They eat up native grasses and destroy grazing land. Controlling the population is politically tricky because people love horses so much. Even neutering them is controversial, because it terrifies the wild horses to be caught.
The Spanish also brought the grass that covers the hills of the state. For eons, California was blanketed with lush perennials more suited to the wet winters and dry summers. Then the Spanish brought in sheep and let them graze on the hills. After they mowed the grasses down to the nub, they imported hay from Europe to supplement their diets. The sheep shitted out the grass seeds that now cover the state. That’s why our hills look like they belong in Spain or Italy. Similar grasses cover hills in part of Africa, for similar reasons. The European footprint is a carpet of filaree, wild oats, rye grass, mallow, wild mustard, and dandelion.
Sometimes I hardly recognize myself. I never used to believe in ghosts. When I was younger, I wanted to be a botanist. I was thinking of applying to grad school before I got pregnant. Now, with the baby, all that seems impossible – going to classes, arranging babysitting, taking on an enormous debt – and for what? So I can study plants?
Instead of a student, I’m an incubator. I’m a professional worrier. I’m a ghost hunter.
Pushing back from the computer, I fished my binoculars from the camping supplies and went to the living room, where high on the wall was a round window like you’d see on a ship. I hung the binoculars around my neck and dragged a dining chair to the window. Standing on it, I peered over the neighbor’s roof to the hills beyond. All I could make out was more black singe from the fire. Not much else. The sky was too blue for February. My neighbor’s magnolia tree was in full bloom.
“What are you doing?” John said from behind me, his voice an overreaction of terror. “Get down from there.”
“I’m fine. I’m not going to fall.”
He was beside the chair, looking up at me. I think he would have physically pulled me down if I didn’t outweigh him.
“Look,” he said. “Why don’t we drive out to the valley and see if they’ve opened the roads yet? That way we can go to the horse ranch and you can stop climbing on chairs.”
I considered this. It seemed simple enough. All I had to do was drive to the ranch and look for the ruins. I could walk the remains of horse stalls and search for blueberry roots and scalded fencing.
“Okay,” I said, squatting down and swinging my feet to the floor. “I’ll get my coat.”
But I didn’t need it. It was 75 degrees outside. As we entered town, we saw the damage from the fire. The wind had hopped around like a goblin and left a visual representation of its path. The Kmart was a snarl of wood and plaster, but the Applebee’s in front of it was fine. Instead, the wind carried the sparks a block away and touched down on a bridal shop. Then it jumped two more blocks and ignited a gun store, the ammunition popping like corn. After that, it lighted a bodega. Then a wine bar. A park. A vineyard. An entire neighborhood of houses.
The hills on the outskirts of town were red, like they were covered in powdered rust – the remains of fire retardant. Only one road leads to the valley where the horse ranch stood. When we turned to go down it, a barricade stood in the way. I couldn’t believe the road was still blocked after three months. It was like they’d forgotten about it.
“I guess that’s it,” John said, stopping the car. “You’ll have to wait to see the damage.”
“But I don’t want to wait.”
“Well, they won’t let us drive in, and you’re not climbing the ridge.”
Again, that feeling of betrayal. Before the miscarriage, John never told me what to do.
“Let’s go around it,” I said. “We’ll move the barrier and drive in.”
“No way. Cops are patrolling this area.”
“Fine. I’ll walk.”
I opened the door and marched toward the road. Around the time I reached the barricade, John caught up with me. His shoulders were tense in the way they get when he hates what I’m doing.
“Avery, this has to stop,” he said. “There’s no such thing as ghost horses.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear him say that. I knew he didn’t believe me. Still, it hurt. This is what marriage is about, carrying the other person’s nonsense around. He was setting mine down right when I most needed him to humor me.
“I just want to walk up the road,” I said.
“No you don’t. It’s at least five miles to the ranch, maybe more.”
“I’ve walked five miles plenty of times.”
“Not while pregnant, in the sun.”
He had a point there. The sun was shining down with persistent brightness. I didn’t think to bring a water bottle.
“And say you get there, what do you think you’ll find?” John went on. “There’s nothing there. The ranch is gone.”
But I started walking up the road again. “You don’t have to come with me.”
He put a restraining hand on my arm. “No, Avery. This time we’re taking care of the baby. Get back in the car.”
His face was set hard. This time echoed in my ears as if he’d boxed them.
I wanted to explain, then, why it was important for me to see the ranch. I know how it feels to have something terrible happen to your body. I remember the night I lost the baby, how the cramps were like solar winds, and how so much blood flowed out of me that we had to throw out the bathroom towel we used to mop it up. But the worst part was that emptiness in my gut afterwards. It was a gaping biological loneliness that couldn’t be satiated. For months, I grieved the loss of a ghost that had pushed inside me without my permission, and then, just as mysteriously, had disappeared.
Behind us, a cop car turned up the road. It slowed, and the officer stared pointedly at me through the windshield. I wouldn’t be able to outwait him, not with John set against me like this. Turning, I slunk back to the car.
As John turned on the engine, I looked at the hills around us and tried to imagine them covered with perennial grasses. It might not look lush and rich after all. It might look even more barren, like the rough, hardened plants that grow in deserts. There’s no way to know.
John reached out and touched my arm, but I moved it away. In silence, we drove back to the house.
He and I never fight. We’re not the types.
That night was warm enough that I took off our winter blanket. I had a hard time sleeping. The baby pressed on my back and I couldn’t breathe, so I had to sleep on my side, which made my arm go numb. It felt disconnected from my body, and I flopped it around until it came back to life. Still, I must have drifted off because it was late when I heard the ghost horses again. They were louder than ever, echoing over the top of our neighborhood like the shaking of sheet metal.
For the first time, I was calm. You can get used to anything, even being haunted. I went to the kitchen and opened the window. The smell of alyssum floated in from outside. I could hear the horses gallop from one end of the valley to the other, then turn and go back again.
“I’m coming,” I said.
In the bedroom, John snored as I slipped on my maternity jeans and socks. It was 4AM. I thought of writing a note, but when I considered all the times John had ordered me not to go to the ridge, I decided against it. Instead I put on my coat, got a water bottle and flashlight, and went to the car.
It was a fifteen-minute drive to the ridge. I parked beside the trailhead and got out. The horses had stopped running and it was quiet again. No one was around. No blockade was on the path. No cops were there to tell me I couldn’t pass. No John, either.
The ridge wasn’t a mountain. I wasn’t rock climbing or running a marathon, just walking up a trail that I’d gone up many times. Still, I was nervous as I started up the path. Maybe I was being arrogant, thinking I knew better than everyone else. I didn’t want to risk the baby, or myself.
But it wasn’t hard to walk up the ridge, even though I had to stop a few times to catch my breath. The path was exposed to the sky and stars were vibrant above me. I could see Orion, the perpetual hunter. By the time I got to the top, it was light enough that I could make out the line of residue from the fire. Below was the valley of blackness, clothed in night.
As I drank water from the thermos, my daughter kicked inside me.
Still alive, then.
I crept to the edge of the ridge and sat down. It was silent up there. Not even a cricket chirping. A protein bar was in my pocket, so I gnawed on it as more details emerged in the valley with the lightening sky.
As I suspected, the ground was black. The oak trees were a gnarled mass of soot. The horse ranch had vanished altogether.
I kept looking for the ghost horses, but nothing was moving below and I began to feel a little stupid. Did I think the horses would be waiting for me? Was I planning to put them in ghostly bridles and lead them to still water to drink? No, and yes. Maybe I needed to see a doctor – the head kind, not the baby-having kind.
In the spare morning light, everything seems black and gray, but gradually you see more color. First dark blues, then reds, then the lighter spectrum. After awhile I noticed a change in the valley as it grew brighter with each new ray of sunlight.
Something was mixing with the charred earth below.
I leaned forward, thinking that it was impossible. It had only rained once that I knew of, a bare misting that had lasted for only an hour. Yet there it was, bursting up through the ash: New grass.
I touched it, the supple blade bending in my fingers. It wasn’t just one or two patches, either. The spears were poking through the hard netting of cinders everywhere I looked.
The entire valley was coated in a tinge of grass.
As morning broke, nature stirred around me. The valley was black, but it was also green. Blackbirds rose into the sky and flew over the oak trees, flashing scarlet tuffs on their shoulders. Vultures circled in the distance, and behind me, there was traffic on the road. John would wake to find me gone, but still, I sat on the ridge.
I was waiting for the ghost horses to come. I knew now that they didn’t need me. They were something else, having turned back into whatever they should have been all along. I’d misunderstood everything. It had never been about me.
Still, I hoped to see them. Maybe, if I sat there quietly enough, they would pass through the valley once more. I could imagine them running through the new grass, manes and tails flowing behind them. Their bodies would grow longer too, dissipating in the burned branches of the oak trees, until at last, they would hang in one long streak under the rosy dawn.
I would sit there while the early spring morning pushed aside the destruction of winter. I would wait for them to come.
In my belly, my child kicked, and I thought it was with joy.
Joy Lanzendorfer’s fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Guardian, Raritan, and Poetry Foundation.