From "Airs Above the Ground"

On the morning of Belltello’s death, Lydia and Peter had made early morning love between the warm sheets of her bed. Right before she climaxed, Miranda remembered thinking that she was leading a successful life. Thirty-seven years old and making love with a world champion rider, a prize-winning love of a horse across the way. Uncharacteristically, she’d fallen back asleep and woken to a glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice on top of a note. I’ve gone to get the mail, it read. Be back in three years.
This was a private joke between them, the absurd length of her driveway. It was so long, Peter took his coffee with him on their walks to get the paper. When Lydia went out to join him that morning, she found his blue mug lying on the ground with a crack down the middle.
Peter was in the pasture, on his knees beside his horse. For one horrendous instant, Lydia felt relieved. She was aware that the tableau before her spelled out the downfall of it all. She’d never felt certain that she deserved to be so happy. And then the reality of the situation hit her. A prize horse doesn’t heal.
The words still felt foreign when she rolled them through her mind: break; cannon bone; marrow; how innocuous. With a sinking stomach, Lydia remembered the calls to the insurance company that morning in the kitchen; the sound of the veterinarian’s tires crunching to a stop. The Doctor’s accusatory questions and inadequate response: a break in the cannon bone, it happened all the time. Peter’s profile as he stared out the window at the empty field.
When the results came back—Belltello was developing laminitis in the opposite leg, and the coffin bone was pushing through the soft connection between the hoof wall and foot bone—they both knew what it meant. They couldn’t try to save him, no good vet would let them. Treatment would only prolong the horse’s pain.
Lydia tossed Judith’s CD case onto the passenger seat. Euthanasia was another word that sounded like something from a rock concert. My Utopian Euthanasia Zoophilic Fantasy. They’d been one week away from the Grand Prix in Kentucky. Two weeks away, Peter admitted later, from a marriage proposal he’d planned for their weekend in Lexington. Lydia still had the ring in her desk drawer.
Lydia got out of the car and opened up the trunk where Judith said the Christmas gift would be. It was huge and unwrapped: a plastic barbecue grill complete with plastic grill tools, a plastic T-bone, and two plastic ears of corn. Maybe after the shock has passed, they would still get married. But probably, they wouldn’t. No one understood their inability to move on. Her mother had tried to comfort Lydia with the assurance that Peter loved her as much as he’d loved his horse. It was a clumsy sentiment, and probably, not true.
In the weeks after Belltello’s death, after they’d held each other and cried and went for long walks in opposite directions and blamed each other and held each other again and wept, they found that they had little left to say. Every moment in their future had been crafted around the potential victories of their bright and joyful stallion; every competition, every vacation, every weekend away. Lydia fell in love with Peter because he was able to coax something eternal and magnificent out of a beast, and he loved her because she understood the complex nature of his gift. That horse had been a vase of promise, and now Lydia was too frightened to look forward to things again.
After much discussion about what they should do, they agreed that Peter should accept an offer to teach a semester at the Club Hipico del Norte school in San Isidro. And afterwards, they’d see. It would be summer in Argentina, winter in Connecticut. Peter could distract himself with teaching, which he loved.
Lydia would photograph the World Equestrian Games in Melbourne, and after that, the Brentina Cup in California. And she’d busy herself with commissioned portraits of riding ponies, a popular gift in New Canaan around Christmastime. And she’d go to parties and drink seltzer because alcohol made her feel melancholy and vulnerable and completely void of hope. And she’d watch other people sing. And when she’d done enough watching and non-drinking and waking up alone to realize that her heart missed something more than Peter, she’d have to make a decision about what it looked like to move on. But right then at the bottom of the Crawford’s snowy driveway with her hand in her friend’s trunk, that moment was out of reach to her, like a twinkling star that looks like a plane, and turns out to be a plane.