Even though I just brought her home a few days ago, I am pleased to see the white mare waiting for me at the gate, her flea-bitten ears pricked forward. The sound of the rushing acequia overflowing with cold water from the the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is all stirred up with the words I can still hear spitting out of his mouth in pure, unadulterated spite. His thin lips twist into the smug smile I know all too well. He leans back in his chair, all-indolent with long legs sprawled, wearing the elephant cowboy boots of which he’s so proud, arms crossed over his empty chest. “You’re nothing,” he says, his words hitting me in the stomach like a sucker punch, “and you never will be anything, anything at all, without me.” Funny thing is, he believes every single word of it. And so do I. Almost. You can only poke so many holes into another person’s soul before it starts to look like a cross between Swiss cheese and rice paper. “I’m a very important person,” he says, in all seriousness. And then I know something’s even more messed up than I thought it was before. I shiver in the thin night air and glance up to not a sneering face filled with loathing for me and his self, but a full moon hanging heavy in the sky, brimming with tears that drop one by one into the acequia. I just don’t have a name for her yet.

Something small and insistent bumps against my leg in the dark, curls around my calf. I wipe my wet face, run the sleeve of my old shirt underneath my snotty nose, and pick up Augustus the cat. The young tom’s eyes glow like hard emerald stones in the moonlight. I see the sharp points of his tiny white canines as he smiles up at me, and I hug him close, which he tolerates for longer than he usually does, purring up a storm. Then he slinks from my arms like black ink from a fountain pen as I open the gate and ask Caprichosa to back up, please.

The horse barely gives me enough room to squeeze through. “We’re going to have to work on those ground manners,” I tell her. She tosses her head, paces in a circle, then halts and holds her head right against my body, the full length of my torso, breathing in and out, in and out, making enormous huffa huffa huffa sounds down deep in her chest like ivory bellows. This is what she used to do to me on the other side of the fence before that son-of-a-bitch bought her for me. She was the loneliest thing I’d ever know. Absolutely starved for affection when she stood alone every day in a good foot of her own manure in the full sun with no shade in an 8 x 10 pen where she could barely move, let alone breathe. Looking at her then—covered in so much filth and grease that I was truly surprised to find out once I gave her a bath that she’s snowy white underneath—was like looking at myself in the mirror. How many times was I snared by my own reflection in the horse’s eyes, wondering who exactly was that bedraggled and forlorn creature staring back at me?

The Andalusian is saying with her nostrils flaring,

“Remember. Remember. Remember.”

I don’t even think to be afraid as she rises up above me and sits back in a perfectly balanced levade.

“Who. You. Are.”

Looming over me, she rolls a dark eye. It glints in the moonlight.

“Who you were before,” she snorts. The words are not really words but wind up like letters and phrases and sentences in my mind. They rattle through my head like electricity.

Caprichosa is a bright angel with forelegs tucked neatly in front of my face. Hooves newly shod with iron. So close I can see the dark gray of her underbelly.

“Who you can be.”

I climb over the fence, jump across the acequia, and run as fast as I can go along its length to the mother ditch where the water gets diverted to the fields down below so we can have green grass in the desert. Two magpies with whom I have been well acquainted for years squawk and whistle at me with every step I take. They swoop from Cottonwood to Chinese Elm on their white-tipped wings, dive-bombing me without mercy, perching on the tip of a branch, reminding me that this is their territory, when it’s that goddamed cat, not me, who messes with your nest, I’m yelling. I stumble and choke on my own tears.

“You told me once about how Caprichosa saved your life.” J.’s speaking now. “About how she set you free.” It’s more of a question than a statement.

I am kneeling down next to the mare’s haunches, trying to see what’s got her down. I sit back in the shavings, hands on my knees, and stare at my daughter in wonder. “I can’t believe you remember that.” And she doesn’t know the details. They’re for me, and that’s where they’ll stay. For now. People can change. And a girl’s relationship with her biological dad is important. Whether I like him or not.

“Can you save Cap?”

I place my hand on the head of my child who thinks her world is crashing to an end. “Your horse is not dying, darling girl.”

Caprichosa rolls her head around and gazes at us over her shoulder.

“She’s hurt.”

J. nods solemnly.

“That hind leg is swollen bad. Looks like a good-sized haematoma under her tail. I’m thinking she’s been kicked or got caught in the fence. One of her front legs is cut up with little cris-crosses like she was in the wire.”

I tell J. to stand back. Put my hands under the horse’s big belly and push. “Come on, Cap, let’s get up.” The mare stares at me. I put the lead rope around her neck, jiggle it with meaning. “Come on, Big Momma, we can do this.” J. gets onto me for calling the mare Momma sometimes. She thinks its funny. But I think I started calling her that when I gave her to J. Because she takes such good care of her and everything. The middle-aged Andalusian tries, but she can’t get that leg to working. I ask her one more time. She gathers up all of her strength and groans, grunts, moans—pushing, pulling, until she scrambles up onto all fours, tail wringing against her hindquarters, somewhat unsteady, and we are eye to eye. Nostril to nostril. I smell Caprichosa’s sweet breath. Feel her big heart beating.

A lifetime ago. I am lying on my back in the sand by the ditch. Staring into a black sky full of stars for a good hour, wondering what is on the other side and can I jump that far without winding up in the abyss.

No one comes looking for me in the dark.

I speed dial the veterinarian.