I could not forget the sight of my mother standing there on the other side of security, watching me head away. Her arms straight at her sides, purse on the floor. Her neck pulsing. Her reflection in the linoleum.

Oh, my mother. I should have hugged her.

I wanted to make my mother happy but I knew there was something more for me than college.

I was fleeing toward the something more. Once, alone by the Eno, I’d found two bucks with their antlers wedged together. I’d approached them as they lay panting and I’d jostled their antlers till they separated. I remember kneeling on the dead mauve leaves, watching the bucks stagger to their feet. I remember feeling all of the forest moving through me. School, college, my mother were a dam on the river of a vivid life; out of doors the dam would break and I would tumble in the current.

* * *

The Ash Family rose from the breakfast table to begin their chores. I sat alone at the enormous table, worried I’d been forgotten. But soon the woman I’d met at breakfast—Sara—came to find me.

She hugged me as though we had not seen one another for a very long time. “Little one,” she said. She looked ethereal, but she stank like a tramp. She led me across the yard. I kept stumbling on the ridged ground. I felt clumsy, delirious. Four days ago I’d been college-bound and now no one in the world knew where I was.

Sara opened the stable door. “Good morning, horses,” she said. The sun came in behind us and the barn was filled with whirling gold chaff. I inhaled the warm sleepy scent of the animals and felt the quickening of an uncommon happiness. It was a moment of apprehension of all the forms life could take—it felt like remembering, but I’d never been so close to horses. Two of the horses were white with black pinpoint spots, and two were red, with white blazes splitting down their long heads. I’d later learn that the red ones were Suffolk mares and they pulled our plow.

“Dice is dynamite,” Sara said. A red horse pressed its nose into her temple and she laughed. “Found me when I was seventeen, when he was feeding all the people. I was the first to join him. I knew I’d been saved.” I thought about the man outside my high school who once handed me a comic book he said would save me. Then he tried the girl next to me, and she said, No thank you, I have already been saved. I wanted to be saved—then and now.

“How did you know?” I said.