I hadn't driven a car in so long, but my muscle memory took over. I found the Pontiac in the garage and hopped in, feeling a little nervous about driving such a nice car an hour away to a place I barely remembered how to get to.
Again, my muscle memory kicked in. It was a little rocky at first, with this car's gas and brakes being more sensitive, but I made it down the highway Jo had driven us on before. I made a few of the turns I remembered, not thinking anything about how impulsive this was or how easily Marty had just let me take his car to go see Jo in the middle of the night.
I was shocked at how much Marty trusted me. He had liked me from the very start of my internment and had goaded Jo and I to be friends from the get-go. Of course, Katie hated it for whatever reason, but Marty seemed to really like me. It made me feel warm inside, having that fatherly approval. It also made me feel guilty knowing what was between Jo and I, whatever it was between us. I didn't even know yet.
After a while, I started to think I was lost. It was so dark I could barely see anything even with the headlights, and it was coming upon an hour of driving, which went by incredibly fast. Finally, with a huge sigh of relief, I saw the sign that read Manor Farm and turned towards it, barreling up the dirt driveway where I saw the little cottage with its lights gleaming into the night darkness through the windows.
Richard heard the car coming and came out onto the porch right as I stopped in front of it. I nearly fell out of the car, looking up at him with wild breaths and wide eyes. He recognized me from the last couple of times I had came with Jo and the kids.
"Jo?" I asked, and his once worried face went solemn. He raised his hand and pointed to a barn across the field, tucked in a clove of trees. I could see one glimmering light coming from a window in the barn. "Thank you," I said as politely as I could as I started to run.
I ran so fast that my sandals rubbed blisters on my feet. It was a humid night, sweat forming on my forehead as I sprinted, dust kicking up behind my heels. The barn came closer into view, then closer, and I came through the parted barn doors.
I stopped. There were horses all around in their stalls inside the barn, munching on hay, some looking up at me. It was dark besides a golden lamplight glowing from one of the stalls down the row. Hay kicked around my feet as I jogged towards the light until I was standing in front of the stall.
Willow, the great big horse with a long black mane, was lying on her side on a thick bed of hay. Then there was Jo, on her knees, bent over the horse's stomach, her head laying on the horse's fur as her back tremored from silent cries.
"Jo," I breathed, covering my mouth with my hand.
This very image is still burned clearly in my mind to this day. Willow, the majestic big racing horse, greyed with age, laying down on her side, clearly given up on life. It was wrong, to see such a beautiful creature, so strong and powerful and alive, whom I had rode on the back of not long ago, lying dead in a stable. It was wrong to see Jo bent over her, head placed on Willow's motionless stomach. An unsettling sickness filled me as I stared at the sight. The horse's leg was bandaged, though that wasn't the main cause of her death. She was just old and tired.
I didn't want to intrude—I couldn't hear it, but I knew Jo was crying. Carefully, I stepped into the stable, kneeling down beside Jo and looking at Willow. She was such a beautiful horse, even in this state. Her legs were bent, and her mane was strewn behind her. Her eyes were still open, and so was her mouth, and I felt the urge to reach forward and close both of them.
It was obvious that Willow was already gone, but I gently asked, "Is she...?"
"An hour ago," Jo whispered, her voice cracking so delicately. I still could not see her face; she had turned it when I sat down and buried it in the horse's fur.
Exhaling, I wrung my hands together and looked at the horse again. I didn't want to look at it any longer. It scared me, seeing a dead body like that, even though it was just a horse. I wasn't a stranger to death. My childhood started and ended with it. But I never saw Greg's body because it was a closed casket—he had been in the water too long.
I don't think Jo had ever known death before. From what I knew about their family, the children's grandparents were still alive. No one spoke of any lost friends. Jo, with all her liveliness and heart-beating energy, the epitome of what it feels like to breathe, now knew what I had learned—that life was, in itself, a death.
"She's been with me all my life," she sobbed, speaking into Willow's fur. "She—She's been my horse since I was little."
My God, how my heart shattered at the sound of her voice. She looked and sounded like a child, all crumpled up, sobbing, voice as thin as water and breaking like glass. Tears pricked my eyes just at the sight of her.
And then she turned her face to me. It was bright red like a fire was burning behind her skin. Her eyes were filled with tears that spilled in heavy streams down her wettened cheeks. Her eyebrows were sewn unnaturally, her lips swollen and trembling, curled into a tragic frown.
"I didn't know she was that old," she sobbed, her eyes glowing bright green from her tears. "I thought I had more time with her... y-years even..." She turned back to Willow, running her hand over her stomach and up to right under the horse's front leg, stopping there. She waited. She was looking for a heartbeat, in some sudden hope that maybe it wasn't true. But there was no heartbeat under Jo's hand, and her eyes closed and let more tears flood her face as it screwed up into a cry.
"I'm so sorry," I whispered, reaching a hand out to touch Jo's shoulder but stopping. She seemed as fragile as porcelain, and I did not want her to break. I don't think I could've handled it.
"She can't be dead," Jo sobbed, her body starting to tremble with the force of her sobs. She lost her breath, whimpering, and then caught it again. "She just can't," she said in the slightest, breaking voice.
"She was a good horse," I told her, though I knew it wouldn't help. It didn't help me when people told me Greg was a good boy. "She loved you so much—I could tell just the few times I saw her with you."
Jo's cries silenced themselves, but she was still shaking.
"She had such a happy life here on the farm," I continued. I felt like I was speaking to her like a child, but in this situation, she was. She was like a child who never knew that life ended, and she needed the delicacy with which I handled her. "She got to run around and eat all she wanted. She saw you all the time and got to take you all around the farm. She watched you grow up."
"I should have been here more," Jo sobbed, leaning forward and letting her head hit Willow's stomach, her hands grabbing at her fur. "If I had just been around more!" she screamed, causing some of the other horses to stir and huff. "I would have ridden her more, gotten her more exercise. She would've..." She trailed when I reached forward and put my hand on her back, right between her shoulder blades.
"Shhh," I shushed her, rubbing a circle into her back. "It's okay, Jo. Willow knows you loved her. You were here with her while she was sick, all the way up until the end. How much more could she have known that you loved her?"
Jo let go of Willow's fur and rose up again, looking down at the horse as her sobs finally stopped. "She was a good horse," she finally said after a few moments, letting her hands rake over her side. "But I don't want her to go."
"She doesn't feel pain anymore, Jo," I told her, hesitating before wrapping my arms around her. To my surprise, she folded into me, circling her arms around me and burying her face into my neck. "There," I cooed, letting her squeeze me as hard as she wanted. I would have let her squeeze me until I popped like a blueberry, if that was what it took to get this beautiful girl to stop crying.
"I loved her so much," she sobbed into my hair, and I could feel her hot, wet tears dripping onto my shoulder and sliding down my chest. I let them stay there. I would've turned myself into a rag if I could soak up all her tears.
"I know, Jo," I said, looking at Willow's body while Jo sobbed against me, her entire body sweaty and hot. It was humid in the stable, and it smelled horribly, but I stayed there. I stayed there because Jo never let me go, and even if she had, I still would've stayed and held her.
In a strange sense, it was therapeutic to me. I had always been the one stricken with grief, but I had never comforted someone else going through the same thing. It was the same thing because Willow was more than just a horse to Jo. She was Jo's best friend, and Jo hers. Feeling Jo cry into me, and staring at the fallen horse, turned something in me that I never thought would have shifted. From that day on, I never cried again about Greg. Of course, the grief was still there, and it stayed there for the rest of my life, but it didn't stab and cut me up inside every time I thought about it. It was just something sad that had happened, but it wasn't the end of everything.
I held Jo for the rest of the night.