Ears Forward

Chapter 1: A Puppy from Up the Coast

The fog came in off the Pacific most nights and was still there when Ishita woke, lying in the cypresses at the end of the street like wool caught on a fence. It beaded on the pickets and on every spiderweb in the hedge, so that the webs sagged silver, and on fog mornings the town between the hills and the sea shrank to whatever she could see: a mailbox, a pumpkin on a step, a neighbor walking a dog.

She was five that October, and she always saw the dog first. A dog across the street could stop her in the middle of a crosswalk, and Mama had learned to keep a firm hand on her hood.

The family house was four blocks from her own. It had a lemon tree by the kitchen door and a walnut tree out back with a long table under it, and it smelled of cardamom and floor wax. Nana and Nani lived there, and Rajiv Mama and Mami when they were home, and Gabriel Bhaiya, who was thirteen and growing out of every sleeve he owned. Nandini, who was fifteen and Ishita's real sister, her Didi, said the family house was the capital. On Sunday nights everyone sat around its dining table for Weekly Council, under a brass lamp that hummed, with Nana's fountain pen in its wooden tray and the minutes kept on a yellow pad.

Ishita sat under the table. Down there among the chair legs and the slippers, with her cheek on the cool floor, she could hear everything, and the stories came down to her through the wood.

In that family, a great many of the stories had dogs in them.

---

"When I was a young officer," Nana said one Sunday, after the business was done and Nani was pouring the tea, "the army sent me to the hills."

He told how the mist rose out of the valleys every afternoon and filled the cantonment until the barracks roofs disappeared and the bugle at sunset seemed to sound from inside a cloud. How the pines dripped all night and the whole station smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool.

"And the dogs," Nana said. "Big woolly mountain dogs, with tails like feather dusters. They came into every camp. They looked us over and chose. In the hills, a dog chooses you."

He had brought them home to the family farm on the plains, one at a time, over the years. He paid the railway clerk himself and rode with the crate in the guard van so the dog could hear his voice. Kalu, black as a cooking pot. Tiger, who had no stripes at all.

"Tiger slept across the doorway," said Mama from somewhere above. "In the holidays, home from his military school, your Rajiv Mama had to climb over him every morning, and so did I."

"He was guarding the warm spot," said Rajiv Mama, and everyone laughed.

"And Ruby," Nana said, and under the table Ishita went still.

Ruby had come in the second week on a high ridge in Sikkim, out of a snowstorm, to the edge of the cookfire. He was black and enormous and woolly, with amber eyes and soft ears that flopped, and Nana had soaked half a biscuit in broth and held it out, and after that Ruby belonged to him. The men named him for the red spark the cookfire lit in those amber eyes, and if a dog that size minded a jewel's name, he never let on.

"One morning," Nana said, "the men were going along the ridge in the snow to relieve the guard, and Ruby stopped. He planted his feet. His ears came up, as high as those soft ears could go, and he stared at the slope above us and growled, low, at nothing we could see. He would not move. So I stopped the men. Ten minutes later the slope came down. Ice and stones and snow, across the path where we would have been standing."

Ishita crawled out between Papa's shoes and stood up at Nana's knee, so that her eyes were level with the edge of the table and his tea glass.

"What did he hear?"

Nana looked down at her over his glasses. "That, beti, is the question I have asked myself for fifty years."

"But what did he *hear*?"

"Something we could not. A crack in the ice, far up. He knew first, and he told us the only way he had. With his ears, and his whole body." Nana put a finger on her nose. "A dog does not lie with his body. People do. Dogs do not."

Nani set down the teapot. "When I was twenty-two," she said, "your Nana was posted in the hills, so I lived at my parents' house with a baby on my hip. A little yellow dog in our lane belonged to nobody, so I decided she belonged to me. The month before, another stray had followed me for a week and then gone off with the milkman, and I had called that one Pup. So this one was Pup Two. P2." She smiled. "I saved half my roti for her every night and my mother scolded me about fleas. Every evening she was waiting under the neem tree with her tail going round like a fan."

"She slept under my cot at my Nana's house," said Rajiv Mama, and something in his voice changed, enough that Ishita heard it under the table. "Every summer. She let me pull her ears and never once complained."

"She let you do everything," said Nani. "After her there was always some dog at my door. A Chikoo, a Moti, one whose name nobody agreed on. Dogs know which houses keep a pot on the stove."

Even Didi had a dog story. When Nandini was little, small enough to need a stool to reach the sink, Rajiv Mama had two big dogs, Shaitan and Sheru, who were grown long before she was born and who decided the day they met her that she was their puppy. Didi called them her two puppies anyway. They followed her everywhere. To the bus stop and back. Under her desk while she did her spelling, one on each foot, so that she said she had grown up wearing dogs for slippers.

"They got old," Didi always finished. "That's what dogs do. Faster than us."

Gabriel Bhaiya claimed to remember them too, though all he could describe was a tail that knocked over his juice. They were gone before Ishita was born, and there had never been a dog at her own house, only a hook by the back door that Papa had put up for a leash nobody owned.

In the car going home, Mama asked what she was thinking about, and Ishita said, "Ears." Mama looked at Papa across the front seat. Ishita saw the look, and did not know yet what it meant.

---

The pumpkin farm was out on the highway that climbs east over the hills, where every October the fields between the eucalyptus windbreaks turned orange with heaps of pumpkins, some of them bigger than she was. There was a corn maze and a fiddler on a crate, and Ishita cared about none of it. At the very back, past the scarecrows, three ponies dozed in a dirt paddock, each with a hind leg cocked and a loose lower lip.

She ran to the rails and reached for the little gray one.

The pony's head flew up. Her ears went flat against her skull, her lip tightened, and her teeth snapped at the air an inch from Ishita's fingers.

"Nobody's bitten," said a quiet voice. Rajiv Mama had come with them that day, which was rare, because he traveled more than anybody she knew. He crouched beside her in the dirt in his good trousers. "Did you see what she told you first? Before the teeth?"

Ishita looked. The pony had gone back to dozing, one ear swiveled toward them like a little cup. "Her ears went flat."

"Flat back. She was asleep and a hand came at her face. Would you like that?"

She thought of Didi waking her with cold fingers on her neck. "No."

"So now we're going to be boring. We stand here. We don't reach. We look at the field, not at her, and we watch her ears, and we let her decide."

It was the hardest thing she had ever done. She copied him, hands in pockets, and looked at the field, where crows walked the stubble like men who had lost their keys. Then one gray ear turned toward her, and the other, and the pony sighed through her nostrils and came to the rails and blew a warm breath on her sleeve that smelled of hay and dust. Both ears pointed forward, soft and curious.

"That's a yes," Rajiv Mama said, very low. "Flat hand. Under her nose. Let her smell you."

The whiskers prickled across Ishita's palm. The muzzle was softer than Nani's shawl. She was crying, and when he asked why, she said, "Because she said yes," and he nodded as though that was the best reason there was.

That week she drew him a picture with the fat crayons on the back of one of Mama's school memos: his red car, the old low one he kept under a cover at the family house, on a road beside the ocean, with herself in the passenger seat wearing a crown and a yellow sun in the sky wearing sunglasses. He studied it without a word, then folded it carefully along the middle. "It goes in the glovebox," he said. "So the car knows who it belongs to." The next clear Sunday he drove her down the coast with the top down and let her play the snowman song four times, and when they topped a rise and saw the whole silver ocean she screamed for joy and he laughed out loud.

---

On the last Saturday of October, Mama and Papa put her in the car without saying where they were going.

They drove north. The road ran along the top of the cliffs, and below it the surf came in white and slow over black rocks, and a line of pelicans sailed past at the height of the car window without moving their wings. They passed artichoke fields gone silver-green in the mist. The air through Papa's open window smelled of salt and kelp and cold.

"A house up the coast," was all Mama would say. It sat back from the road behind a row of cypresses so bent by the wind they looked as though they were all leaning to hear something. Its shingles were driftwood gray. There were chickens in the yard and two goats on a heap of old tires, and on the porch, watching them get out of the car, lay a shaggy black-and-white sheepdog with a white ruff and a tired, patient face. She thumped her tail once and did not get up.

"That's Bess," said the woman who came out wiping her hands. "She's had enough of the lot of them. They're in the garage."

They were in a pen of straw under a bare bulb, six of them, eight weeks old, and they were the loudest small things Ishita had ever heard. They squeaked and growled and fell over one another.

Ishita wanted to climb straight in. Instead she remembered the gray pony. She stepped over the low board, sat down in the straw with her side to them, folded her hands, and studied the far wall.

Something bumped her knee. A puppy, brown as the skin of a chikoo fruit, with a darker muzzle and soft ears that flapped when she moved and stood halfway up when she listened, had come to investigate. She sniffed Ishita's shoe from end to end. She grabbed the shoelace in needle teeth and pulled, growling, braced on fat legs. Then she let go, climbed into Ishita's lap as if she had been invited, turned around twice, sighed a long sigh, and fell asleep.

"Well," said the woman. "That's that decided."

When Ishita finally stood to go and see the goats, the puppy woke, blinked, and came after her. At the car she sat on Ishita's foot.

"She'll do that now," the woman said. "They pick one person at this age and follow them like ducklings. You'll be stepping over her for years."

Nani cupped the warm brown head in both hands that evening. "I had a Chikoo once, this same brown," she said. "But look at the ears and the pointed face. This one is a little fox."

"Foxy," said Ishita, and that was that. Foxy licked Nani's thumb.

That first night Foxy cried in her crate, high and thin and endless, until Papa wrapped his old ticking alarm clock in a towel and tucked it in beside a hot-water bottle, and Mama let Ishita sleep on the floor with her fingers through the wire. Toward morning she woke to a small wet nose working along her knuckles.

After that, Foxy followed her everywhere. Under the dining table at the family house on Sunday, where she curled against Ishita's stomach among the chair legs and chewed the tassel of Nani's shawl. When Gabriel Bhaiya came through the door she was so happy to see him that she made a puddle on his shoes.

---

Landing Night came at the end of that October, the family's own holiday. Every year Nani told how one late October evening long ago she and Nana had come down out of a freezing sky into America with their three children and Nana's mother, six suitcases, eighty dollars and each other. So the family set small clay lamps along the steps and windowsills of the family house, and Nani cooked sweets for three days, and the neighbors came, and someone lit the sparklers too early.

Ishita carried her own lamp down the back steps with both hands while Gabriel Bhaiya held Foxy's leash and kept her nose away from the flames. In the fog the lamps made small gold rooms.

Afterward he took Ishita into the dining room and showed her an old yellow page in Nana's square capitals: MOTION: THAT THE FAMILY GET A DOG. Under it was a date from when Gabriel Bhaiya was small, and under that a long column of dates, each with the same word beside it.

"Tabled," he read, with the weariness of a thirteen-year-old who had fought a long war. "Tabled. Tabled. It means not now. You've got a dog, so you have to vote for the rest of us."

He gave her a crayon. At the bottom of the page, under the last TABLED, she drew two dogs: a big black one with his ears up at the edge of what was meant to be snow, and a small brown one sitting on somebody's foot. Under them she wrote the only letters she was sure of: ISH YES.

The next Sunday Nana studied it in silence. Then he uncapped his fountain pen and wrote beside it, small and careful: *Noted.*

"Noted is better than tabled," Gabriel Bhaiya whispered. "Noted is progress."

Nani, passing behind them with the teapot, bent down between their heads. "I voted for it too, years ago," she said. "Nobody wrote that down either."

Under the table, Foxy had fallen asleep across both of Ishita's feet, one soft ear inside out. Ishita thought about the gray pony and the yellow dog under the neem tree and the black dog on the ridge, and about how all of them had said what they meant before anybody asked, if anybody was watching.

She decided she would always be watching.

Chapter 2: Nutmeg

Lobitos Ridge Farm sat at the end of a gravel road that climbed out of the coastal flats between two creeks, through artichoke fields and then through a stand of eucalyptus so tall and so ragged that their bark hung off them in long peeling strips like old wallpaper. At the top the road opened onto a shelf of land with the ocean on one side, a mile off and far below, and the hills on the other, dark with oak and coyote brush. There was a long red barn with a tin roof that rang when it rained. There were two outdoor arenas with sand footing and white rails, a round pen, a hay barn with the bales stacked to the rafters, and a row of paddocks running down the slope, each with a horse in it, each horse with its rump turned to the wind.

Ishita was seven the first time Mama drove her up that road, on a Saturday in March. It was raining sideways. She had new paddock boots that were too stiff and a borrowed helmet that smelled of someone else's hair, and she had been awake since four.

"You don't have to love it," Mama said, parking by the hay barn. "You can try it and not love it. That's allowed."

Ishita was already out of the car.

The barn at that hour was a long dim tunnel of sound and smell. Rain drummed on the tin. Somewhere a radio was playing a song in Spanish with a trumpet in it, loud and sad and cheerful all at once. Horses shifted in their stalls, and the sound of them was a sound she would carry with her always: the thud of a hoof against a wall, the rustle of shavings, the long grinding of teeth on hay, a snort that blew out of a big chest like air from a bellows. And the smell: hay and leather and sweet feed and manure and wet horse, and under all of it something warm and animal that had no name.

A man with a gray mustache came out of the feed room pushing a wheelbarrow of grain. He wore a cowboy hat beaded with rain and a sweatshirt that said SALINAS RODEO 1998. He stopped when he saw her.

"New one," he said.

"New one," Ishita agreed.

He looked her up and down, boots to helmet. Then he took a carrot from his sweatshirt pocket and broke it in half and held out one piece.

"Flat hand," he said. "Always."

"I know," said Ishita, who had been waiting since the pumpkin farm to be told.

His name was Aurelio Soto, and he had come from a town in Jalisco where his family had kept horses for longer than anyone could say, and he ran the barn at Lobitos Ridge the way Nana ran Weekly Council: with order, with very few words, and with the radio on.

---

Yoli Fierro taught the Saturday beginners in the covered end of the small arena. She was not tall, but she stood the way people stand on a moving boat, with her weight low and her knees soft, and her voice could reach the far rail without being raised. She had grown up on her father's ranch in the hills outside Salinas, riding before she could read, and had spent her twenties as a working student for a big show barn down south, mucking stalls at five in the morning in exchange for lessons at night. Now she had her own barn, eighteen horses, and a waiting list.

"This is Nutmeg," Yoli said.

Nutmeg was a gray pony, thirteen hands, built like a coffee table, with a dark dappled rump and a pink snip on her nose and an expression of deep, ancient suspicion. When Ishita came near, Nutmeg put one ear toward her and one ear toward the barn door, where her hay was.

"She's twenty-two," Yoli said. "She has taught more children to ride than I have. She has opinions. Your first job is to find out what they are."

"How?"

"Same way you find out anybody's. Watch. Then ask."

Ishita watched. She watched Yoli run a hand down Nutmeg's neck and over her shoulder before picking up a foot, so the pony would not be surprised. She watched Nutmeg lower her head when the brush found the itchy place under her mane, and push into it, and work her lips. She watched Nutmeg's tail swish once, sharp, when the girth was tightened too fast, and her ears go back, and her head swing around with a look that said quite clearly that she knew who had done that.

"See the tail?" said Yoli. "That's a complaint. Fair one. We go one hole at a time."

On the first day Ishita did not ride at all. She brushed. She learned the parts of the bridle. She learned to lead Nutmeg in a circle at her shoulder, not out in front, not dragging, and to stop when Nutmeg stopped, and to wait. At the end of the hour Yoli had her stand at Nutmeg's head and do nothing for a whole minute.

At the end of the minute, Nutmeg's head dropped. Her lower lip went loose. She licked her lips twice and chewed nothing, a slow sideways working of the jaw.

"There," Yoli said quietly. "You see that? Licking, chewing. That's her thinking it over and deciding you're all right. That's a horse letting go of a worry."

Ishita kept silent. She did not want to break it. She stood there in the drumming of the rain on the tin roof with the pony's warm breath on her coat and Aurelio's radio playing a waltz with an accordion, and she thought: *I am going to do this for the rest of my life.*

---

Nutmeg had tricks.

She could tell a beginner from three stalls away. She could hold her breath while she was being girthed, so that her belly swelled up like a drum and the girth, when she let the breath out, hung loose and the saddle slid. She knew the exact spot in the arena, by the gate, where she could stop dead and drop her head to look for a blade of grass, and the exact speed she needed to do it at for a small rider to go sailing over her neck.

That was how Ishita fell off the first time, in May, two months after she began. She was trotting, posting, up and down and up and down, concentrating so hard on her heels that she forgot to look where she was going. Nutmeg reached the gate. Nutmeg stopped. Ishita did not.

She went over the pony's shoulder and landed on her back in the soft sand, and all the air went out of her at once. For a long, frightening second she could not breathe at all. Above her the sky was white and enormous, and Nutmeg's gray face appeared in it, looking down at her with her ears pricked, curious, mildly pleased.

Then Yoli's face appeared beside the pony's.

"Breathe," Yoli said. "It comes back. There it is. Wiggle your toes for me. Good. Fingers. Good. Anything hurt?"

"My pride," Ishita said, because that was what Papa always said, and Yoli laughed out loud.

"Okay. Pride heals. Up you get."

"Now?"

"Now. If you wait, the ground gets bigger." Yoli held out her hand. "She wasn't being mean, you know. Look at her ears. She's not angry. She's just a pony who knows where the grass is and found out you weren't paying attention. So now you pay attention. Next time you come past the gate, you look up, you put your leg on, and you tell her before she tells you."

Ishita got back on. Her back ached and there was sand in her collar and her ears. The next time they came around to the gate, she looked up, and sat deep, and closed her legs on Nutmeg's sides the way Yoli had shown her. Nutmeg's ear flicked back toward her, listening. The pony hesitated, the smallest hitch in her stride, and then went past the gate, past the grass, around the corner and down the long side.

"*Yes,*" said Yoli from the middle. "Did you feel that? She asked you. And you answered."

---

The barn dog was called Domino. He was an Australian cattle dog, blue-speckled, with a black patch over one eye and a white one over the other, and he was already gray around the muzzle by the time Ishita met him. He belonged to Aurelio, or Aurelio belonged to him; nobody was sure. He went everywhere Aurelio went, a foot behind his left boot, and at night he slept in the tack room on a horse blanket so old it had gone soft as flannel.

Domino did not like children at first. He had been herding horses for ten years and had views about small people who moved fast and shrieked. When Ishita came near him the first week, he got up from his blanket and walked away from her, stiff-legged, and lay down again on the far side of the tack room and turned his head away and yawned.

"He doesn't like me," she said to Aurelio.

Aurelio was oiling a saddle. "He is telling you something," he said. "Not that."

"What, then?"

"Look what he does. He turns away. He yawns. He's not tired. He is saying, *calma, calma,* slow down." Aurelio rubbed oil into the leather with his thumb. "Dogs, they have a whole language for this. They yawn, they lick their lips, they turn their head, they sniff the ground. It means, *I don't want trouble. Please, also, you don't make trouble.*"

At home Foxy had never needed to say any of that to her; she had chosen Ishita in the straw and that was that. By now her left ear stood up for good, and the right one had never made up its mind and folded at the tip. Domino was a different conversation. So Ishita stopped making trouble. She came into the tack room slowly and sat down on the floor with her side to Domino, not her front. She kept her eyes off him. She talked to Aurelio about the radio. She ate her snack, a paratha Nani had rolled around potato and wrapped in foil for her that morning, because Nani did not believe in sending anybody anywhere without food.

By the third Saturday, Domino came and sat beside her, near but not touching, and looked at the paratha.

By the fifth, he put his chin on her knee.

"Ah," said Aurelio, not looking up. "Now you are in trouble. Now he thinks you are his."

---

Nani came to watch one Saturday in the summer, when Ishita was eight and had graduated from Nutmeg's walk-trot class to the one where you cantered. Nana had a cold and stayed home under protest. Nani sat in a folding chair by the rail with her shawl around her shoulders and a thermos of chai and a stack of foil packets in her bag, and she watched the whole lesson without saying a word.

Afterward, while Ishita was hosing Nutmeg's legs in the wash rack, Nani came and stood beside her. The water ran brown off the pony's white socks into the drain, and Nutmeg stood with her eyes half shut, enjoying it.

"Have you eaten?" Nani asked.

"Nani, I'm working."

"Workers eat." Nani held out a foil packet. "And the horse. What does she eat?"

"Hay. And grain. And carrots if you're good."

Nani considered Nutmeg. Then she unwrapped a corner of one of the packets and broke off a piece of the carrot halwa inside, sweet and orange and smelling of cardamom, and held it out on her flat palm the way she had seen Ishita do it. Nutmeg's nostrils widened. Her lip came out and swept up the halwa in one motion. She chewed with great seriousness, her ears going in two directions at once, and then she pushed her nose against Nani's bag for more.

"Nani! You can't give her sugar!"

"It is carrot," Nani said. "Mostly." She wiped her palm on a paper napkin from her bag. "She has a kind face. Are you being kind to her?"

"Yes."

"Good. That is the main thing. With horses, with people, with all of them." She looked down the long aisle of the barn, where Linh Tran, who was nine and rode the big chestnut lesson horse, was sitting on an upturned bucket eating a bánh mì her grandmother had packed, and where Aurelio's radio was playing a cumbia, and where Yoli was explaining something in Spanish to the farrier and then in English to a mother from Palo Alto. "This is a good place," Nani said. "Everybody is from somewhere. Everybody is here."

Ishita had never thought about it. She thought about it now, standing in the wash rack with the hose running, and found it was true. Aurelio was from Jalisco. Yoli's father had come from Michoacán and her mother from the Azores, and Yoli could curse at a horse in three languages. Linh's family had come from Vietnam by way of a camp in Malaysia, and her grandmother made the best bánh mì on the coast and would not tell anyone the secret. The farrier was a tall Irish-American man named Declan with forearms like loaves of bread, who sang old songs to the horses while he shaped their shoes. And she was here too, with her Nani's halwa and her Nana's stories, and the horses did not care where any of them were from. The horses cared whether your hands were soft and whether you were paying attention.

That evening at home Ishita wrote it down in the notebook Nana had given her for her birthday. She wrote: *Nutmeg likes halwa. Domino puts his chin on my knee now. Foxy sniffed my boots for an hour. Everybody is from somewhere.* Then, because Nana always said to write the weather, she added at the top: *Fog until noon. Then sun. Then fog again.*

Chapter 3: What Domino Knew

Gabriel Bhaiya left for the state university in the last week of August, the summer Ishita was ten.

It was not far. Everyone kept saying so. An hour, an hour and a bit if the traffic on the highway was bad, and he would be home most weekends, and he could come back on the train if his car gave out, which everyone agreed it would. Nandini had gone to university and lived at home the whole time, driving over the hill every morning with a thermos of Nani's chai in the cup holder, and she said college was mostly parking. Nobody in the family had ever gone farther than that. Still, on the Sunday before he left, the family house had the feeling of a house where something was being packed, even in the rooms where nothing was.

At Weekly Council that night Nana took out the old yellow pad.

Ishita had not seen it in years. The pages had gone soft and brown at the edges, and the column of TABLED ran down one sheet and onto the next and the next. Her own crayon dog was still there at the bottom of the first page, ISH YES, with Nana's *Noted* beside it in ink.

Nana read the motion aloud, all of it, in his parade-ground voice. Then he looked up over his glasses at Gabriel Bhaiya, who was nineteen and six feet tall and trying not to laugh.

He ruled, in the voice of a chairman, that although the member was at last old enough to walk a dog on his own, the member would shortly be living in a dormitory, and so the motion failed, on practical grounds.

Everyone groaned. Papa booed. Rajiv Mama, who was home that week, put his hand over his eyes.

Then Nana reached under his chair and brought out a flat package wrapped in brown paper, and gave it to Gabriel Bhaiya across the table. Inside was a framed photograph, old, black and white, a little out of focus: a big woolly black dog sitting where a snowfield began on a high ridge, with mountains behind him, and his soft ears lifted as high as they would go.

Nobody said anything. Gabriel Bhaiya held the frame in both hands and kept looking. Nani polished her glasses on the end of her shawl although they were perfectly clean.

Ishita, at the end of the table, looked at the dog's ears and thought: *He's listening to something.* She wanted to know what. She would always want to know what.

---

After he left, the family house was quieter, in a way that Ishita could feel in her ribs when she walked in. She went over more often that autumn, after the barn on Saturdays and after school when Mama had meetings. She did her homework at the dining table across from Nana, who was drawing something at his board in the back room, or reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass, or writing in a notebook in the careful hand that leaned slightly backward. Nani fed her. Mami, when she was home, taught her to make a proper soup from whatever was in the refrigerator and told her about the north coast, where she and Rajiv Mama kept a second house among the spruce, and where the fog was even thicker than here.

"Thicker than here?" Ishita said, looking out at the window, which was white.

"You could lose a horse in it," said Mami. "You could lose your own hand."

Then, in the spring, the schools closed.

It happened all at once, in a week in March, the week the plum tree in the family house's side yard was in full blossom. One Friday Ishita was in sixth grade, in a classroom that smelled of glue sticks and wet raincoats, and the next Monday she was at the kitchen table at home with a laptop and a headset, looking at twenty-three small squares with twenty-three faces in them, half of whom had forgotten to unmute. Mama ran her whole school from the dining room. Papa did taxes from the garage. Foxy, who was six and thought the whole arrangement was wonderful, lay across Ishita's feet under the kitchen table through every class. Nandini, who had a real job now and a lease on an apartment in the city that she could not go back to, came home and worked from her old bedroom with the door shut, and came out only to make coffee and to say, to nobody, "I am a software engineer, not a hostage."

They could not go to the family house. That was the worst part. Nana was eighty-three. Nani was not much younger. For weeks the whole family stood on the sidewalk outside the low fence on Sunday afternoons, waving and calling, while Nana and Nani sat on the front porch in their coats and waved back. Nani held up a plate of something she had cooked, to show them, and then set it on the gate post for them to take, and stood back six feet to watch them carry it to the car.

It was Nandini who set up the tablet for Nana, so that he could tell his stories into it every Sunday and the whole family could listen from their separate houses. The first one he told was Ruby. Ishita listened to it in bed with the light off, and when it got to the part about the ears, she said it along with him, under her breath.

The barn closed to everyone but the people who worked there. For six weeks Ishita did not see a horse. She drew them instead, on every piece of paper in the house, until Mama said she would have to start drawing on the walls and then, catching sight of Ishita's face, said she was joking, please do not draw on the walls.

---

When the barn opened again in May, it opened in shifts, one rider at a time on the property, masks on, hands washed in a bucket at the gate. Ishita went up on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Yoli had let her start riding a quiet bay lesson horse called Tico, and had begun to teach her to jump: little crossrails at first, then small verticals, the horse lifting under her like a wave lifting a boat, and her own body learning to fold and follow and come back, and the joy of it, which she had no words for, so she did not try.

And Domino was old.

He had been old when she met him. Now he was very old. He was fifteen, Aurelio said, maybe sixteen; nobody had written it down when he came. His blue speckles had faded nearly white. He walked a foot behind Aurelio's left boot as he always had, but slower, and when Aurelio stopped, Domino lay down at once, carefully, front end first and then the back, like a man lowering himself into a hot bath.

In September, a few days after she turned twelve, with seventh grade starting on a screen at the kitchen table, Ishita noticed that Domino was not eating.

She noticed it because she had started, without anyone asking, to watch him the way she watched the horses and Foxy: his ears, his tail, how he moved. For a month his food bowl outside the tack room door had been half full when she arrived and empty when she left. That Saturday it was full when she arrived and full when she left. He was not on his blanket. She found him under the bench in the wash rack, pressed into the corner where the wall met the concrete, a place he had never gone, with his chin on his paws.

She crouched down at a distance and looked at him.

His eyes were narrowed, almost squinting, the way Nana's went when his knee hurt in the cold. His ears were not up and not back; they were pulled out sideways and a little down, flat, as though they were too heavy. His breathing was shallow and fast. When she said his name, his tail moved once, the very tip of it, against the concrete. He did not get up.

"Aurelio," she said, not loudly. "Aurelio, come and look."

Aurelio came and looked. He crouched beside her, with his knees cracking, and studied the dog without a word. Then he put his hand very gently on the dog's side, and Domino turned his head toward the hand and licked it once and put his head back down.

"Sí," Aurelio said quietly. "I know, viejo. I know."

---

Dr. Adeyemi came that afternoon. He was the vet who looked after the horses at Lobitos Ridge, a big, gentle man from Ibadan who had trained at Davis and who drove a white truck with a vet box on the back full of drawers, each drawer full of things that clinked. He did not usually see dogs, but he had known Domino for a decade, and when Aurelio called, he came.

Ishita was not supposed to stay. She stayed anyway, sitting on an upturned bucket outside the wash rack, and nobody told her to go.

Dr. Adeyemi lay down on the wet concrete in his clean khakis, on his side, at Domino's level, and talked to him in a low voice for a full minute before he touched him. Then he ran his big hands over the dog slowly: along the ribs, under the belly, down each leg. When his fingers pressed under the ribs on the left side, Domino flinched and his lip lifted, just slightly, over one tooth. Dr. Adeyemi stopped at once and took his hand away.

"I'm sorry, old man," he said. "I'm sorry. I know."

He sat up and looked at Aurelio. Ishita could not hear what he said. She heard the word *mass* and the word *spleen* and she saw Aurelio's face, and that was enough.

Later, when Aurelio had gone into the feed room and shut the door, Dr. Adeyemi came and sat on the bucket next to hers.

"You noticed first," he said. "Aurelio told me."

"He wasn't eating."

"That's what most people notice, and they notice it late. What else did you see?"

She told him. The corner. The eyes squinting. The ears pulled out sideways. The fast breathing. The tail that only moved at the tip.

Dr. Adeyemi was quiet a moment.

"That," he said, "is what pain looks like in a face. Most people never learn to see it. Dogs, horses, cats, they can't tell us in words, so they tell us in the face and the body, and most of us are too busy talking to watch." He turned his hat in his hands. "You watch. Keep doing that. It's the most important thing I do all day, and they didn't teach me half of it in school."

"Can you fix him?"

He met her eyes and did not pretend.

"No," he said. "I can make sure it doesn't hurt anymore. That's what I can do. That's what he needs now."

---

Domino was put to sleep the next morning, on his old horse blanket in the tack room, with Aurelio's hand on his head and the radio off for the first time Ishita could remember. Ishita was not there; Mama said no, and for once Ishita did not argue. She sat in the car outside the barn with the window down and listened to the silence where the radio should have been, and that was worse than anything she could have seen.

Aurelio buried him at the top of the farthest paddock, under a coast live oak, where the land looked down over the eucalyptus to the sea. He put a flat stone on the place.

On the first of November, Yoli set up a table in the barn aisle.

She covered it with a woven cloth in red and pink and orange, and she set on it photographs of the horses who had lived at Lobitos Ridge and died: an old pinto mare called Queenie who had carried Yoli's own children; a huge gray jumper called Thunder; ponies Ishita had never met. In the middle she put a photograph of Domino, young, blue-speckled, with his patch over one eye, running across the arena with his mouth open and his tongue out. She put out a bowl of his kibble and a horseshoe, and a loaf of sweet bread dusted with sugar, and around everything she laid marigolds, armfuls of them, so that the whole aisle smelled sharp and green and spicy.

"My father's mother did this every year in Michoacán," Yoli said, "for her people. So I do it for mine. It's not sad. Well, it's a little sad. It's mostly remembering. You put out the things they loved, and you tell the stories, and that way they're not gone. Not all the way."

Ishita stood in front of the table until the bar of sun from the aisle door had slid off the cloth and onto the concrete. Aurelio came and stood beside her. He was holding Domino's old collar, frayed at the buckle, and after a while he laid it down beside the photograph.

"He liked you," he said. "He did not like many people. You should be proud."

That night at home, Ishita took out her notebook. Nana had always told her that the things worth writing were not the things you did but the things you saw, so she did not write *Domino died.* She wrote the weather at the top, as always. Then she wrote about his patch, and the way he lay down front end first, and his chin on her knee the fifth Saturday, and the tip of his tail moving on the concrete when she said his name, which she understood now had been the last thing he had to say to her, and he had said it.

When she was finished, she read it over. It was not very good. But it was true, and it was his, and it was written down.

She turned off the light. Outside, the foghorn off the point was sounding, slow and low, every thirty seconds, like something very large that was patient and did not want to be forgotten.

Chapter 4: Five Kittens and a Shelter Dog

In the first week of eighth grade, a girl named Kavya told Ishita she was pretending.

They were in the lunch line, under the covered walkway, with the fog still sitting on the playing fields and the cafeteria smelling of tater tots. Kavya was new that year. Her family had moved down from Fremont, and on the second day of school she had told the whole table which festival was coming and what you ate for it and what it meant. Ishita had said she didn't really do all of that, not like that, her family had their own ways, and Kavya had looked at her with real curiosity, not meanness, and said, "So you're not really Indian, then. You're kind of just pretending."

Then another girl behind them in the line said Ishita didn't look Indian anyway, she'd thought Ishita was Mexican, and somebody laughed, and then several people laughed, and Ishita stood holding her tray and felt her face go hot from the collar up.

She did not cry. She carried the tray to an empty seat at the far end and ate her tater tots one by one without tasting them, trying to work out what she should have said. She was still trying on the Sunday of the family lunch, when Rajiv Mama came home.

---

It was the twelfth of September, and she had turned thirteen the week before. He had been away all summer, in Italy and other places, the way he usually was, and he came back thin. Everyone said so. Nani said so twice.

Ishita and Nandini were not there when he arrived. They were down the street at the Bettencourts', where the gray tabby had had kittens in the laundry room. There were five. They were two weeks old, eyes newly open and the color of slate, tumbling over one another in a towel-lined box. One of them, a tiny orange one, had been born with no tail at all, only a little round tuft where a tail should be, and it was the boldest of the five, climbing up the side of the box and falling back and climbing again.

Ishita held it. It weighed almost nothing. It put its needle claws into her sweatshirt and purred, a sound far too big for its body.

"Mama," she said, when they got back to the family house, "there are five. One has no tail."

"No," said Mama, who was slicing tomatoes from the beds along the fence.

"I didn't ask anything yet."

"I know what the question is. No."

Ishita knew why. Foxy was eight, gray coming in along her muzzle, and she had never met a cat she did not consider her personal business. The spring before, a neighbor's tom had strolled across their lawn, and Foxy had chased him up the plum tree and sat under it barking until dark, with her standing ear straight up and her folded one quivering, while the tom washed himself on a branch. Mama had said then, in front of witnesses, never in this house.

She went to find Rajiv Mama anyway, at full speed, with her braid coming out and the drawing she had made for him rolled up in her fist, and hit him so hard in the middle that he staggered back a step on the lawn. She asked him to talk to Mama. He said he had no authority in the matter. She said he was Mama's big brother. He said that was exactly why.

Then she gave him the drawing.

She had worked on it for two weeks, pressing so hard with the good colored pencils that the paper shone. It was the red car again, on a winding road beside a sea so blue it looked like it had been dyed, and Rajiv Mama in the driver's seat in a large hat, because Mami had shown everyone a photograph of him on a sailing trip that summer wearing a hat, which he never did. Above the sea, there was a dragon. It was the same dragon she had drawn chasing his car at the races in August, only bigger now, breathing something that she had meant as fire and that had come out more like a rainbow.

"He's following you," she said. "To keep you safe."

Rajiv Mama went over the drawing in the way he had, as if he were reading every line. Then he creased it along its old folds and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket, on the left side, and patted the pocket, so that she would see.

---

Lunch was in the backyard, under the walnut, as it always was when the weather held. Offshore the fog lay in a low gray bar on the water, and the light in the backyard was warm and gold. There was too much food. Papa told a story about a client of his who had tried to take a racehorse off his taxes as a medical expense, and laughed loudest. Nana, in the end chair, did the crossword in pencil between courses, slowly, and nobody hurried him.

Ishita watched Rajiv Mama watching Nana. She had always been able to tell when Rajiv Mama was sad, even though his face did not move. Something happened to his stillness. It got heavier, the way a horse's head gets heavy when it is tired.

After lunch she found him sitting alone on the back steps, and she sat down beside him.

She told him about Kavya and the lunch line. It came out all in a rush, not in the right order. She told him about the girl who had thought she was Mexican and about everybody laughing, and she asked him what she was supposed to say to that.

He did not answer right away. A hummingbird came to the feeder hanging by the steps, a tiny green shimmer, and hung there in the air and drank and was gone.

Then he asked her what she wanted to be.

"A vet," she said at once. "For horses, mostly."

He said that wasn't quite what he meant. He meant what kind of person.

She had to think about that. She said fair. She said brave. She said, after a while, the kind of person who helps.

And Rajiv Mama told her that was her heritage, then. Not the clothes or the festivals or the language, though those could be lovely, and she could learn as many of them as she liked, from as many places as she liked. Every family, he said, sorted through what it had been given, kept the good parts and let the rest go, and every person did the same. Kavya was doing it one way. Ishita would do it another. Neither of them got to mark the other's paper. People would always tell her what she was. They would hand her labels, too much of one thing, not enough of another. What they would really remember about her, in the end, was how she had treated them.

She pulled her knees up and put her chin on them and watched the feeder. The hummingbird came back.

"People think you're Persian," she told him. "Mama said. In restaurants."

"Sometimes," he said. "Sometimes Lebanese."

"What do you say?"

"Thank you." He almost smiled. "And then I tip well."

She laughed, and tipped her head against his sleeve, and the two of them stayed on the steps while the afternoon went gold on the walnut leaves, and she felt the hot place in her chest from the lunch line go cool, a little at a time, the way a horse's sweat dries in the sun.

The next week at school, Kavya asked her what her family did do, then, if they didn't do all of that. Ishita told her about Landing Night, the lamps on the steps, Nani cooking for three days, the neighbors coming, the sparklers somebody always lit too early. Kavya said her own grandmother lit lamps too, at another time of year. In October Kavya came to Landing Night and brought her grandmother's coconut barfi in a steel tin, and Nani said it was better than her own, which she had never said about anybody's.

---

The kittens all found homes. The one with no tail went to a family in Montara. Ishita mourned for a week, and then she began to think about all the animals that had nobody to find them homes, and on the first Sunday of October she brought a motion.

She did it properly, as Nana had taught her. She did not raise it at Weekly Council at the family house, where all motions about animals went to die. She brought it to her own kitchen table, where the only members were Mama and Papa, and Nandini by video from the city, eating cereal.

The motion was typed. It said: MOTION: THAT ISHITA VOLUNTEER AT THE COUNTY SHELTER ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS, WITH A PARENT, AS THE SHELTER'S RULES REQUIRE FOR ANYONE UNDER SIXTEEN. Under it were four pages. There was a budget: gas over the hill, closed-toe boots, the volunteer shirt, the fee for the shelter's training class. There was a weekly schedule showing who would drive her (Papa, who would be going over the hill for ice cream anyway), who would walk Foxy in the morning (Ishita), after school (Ishita), and at night (Ishita, or Papa, if Papa was already walking to the corner for ice cream, which he was). There was a section called WHAT I KNOW, three pages of everything she had learned since she was five, from books and from Foxy, about how dogs talked: the yawn that is not tiredness, the lick of the lips, the turned head, the sniff at the ground that means *I'm not a threat*, the whale eye, when a dog shows the white of the eye in a half-moon because it is uneasy; the loose wagging body of a happy dog and the stiff high tail of a worried one; the play bow, front end down and rump in the air.

Papa, who was a tax attorney and took budgets seriously, read it twice.

"You've underestimated the gas," he said.

"It's only over the hill."

"Every Saturday," said Papa. "For years. I know you." And Ishita looked up so fast that her neck hurt.

Mama was reading WHAT I KNOW. She read all three pages. Then she set her glasses on the table and studied her younger daughter across the kitchen table the way she looked at teachers who had done something surprising.

"When did you learn all this?"

"Always," said Ishita. "I've been watching."

Mama's mouth twitched at one corner.

"After the holidays," she said. "Some of those dogs won't leave, and you'll have to keep going back anyway, and I want you ready for that. Take the class first. And keep Foxy's schedule for a month, every walk, without being reminded."

Ishita kept it. She walked Foxy every morning at six-thirty, in the dark and the fog and the rain, down to the end of the street and back, with Papa watching from the window in his bathrobe. She walked her after school. She walked her at night. She read the shelter's training binder twice and took the class in a room that smelled of disinfectant. In December, Nandini came home for the holidays and walked Foxy with her once, solemnly, in matching hats, and said that Foxy was the best-supervised dog in the county.

---

The county shelter, when Ishita walked into it on the first Saturday in January, was a long low building on the bay side of the hills, with a row of kennels down a concrete corridor that echoed with barking. The noise hit Ishita like a wall when the door opened, and under it the smell of bleach and wet dog and fear.

The volunteer who walked them down the corridor was an old man named Mr. Ohanian, who wore a hairy cardigan and spoke very softly, so that you had to lean close to hear him, which Ishita realized after a while was on purpose.

Most of the dogs rushed the front of their runs, jumping and spinning. Ishita looked at each one, not too long in the eyes. Then, at the end of the row, she stopped.

In the back corner of the last run, as far from the gate as it was possible to be, a dog was lying pressed against the cinderblock wall. He was tan, with a white blaze down his face and a white bib, and he had one ear that stood straight up and one that folded over at the tip, as if it had been creased. His tail was tucked tight. When Ishita stopped, he turned his head away from her and licked his lips, once, twice, quick, and she saw the white of his eye, the half-moon.

"That one doesn't show well," Mr. Ohanian said quietly. "Shepherd and cattle dog, we think. A year old, maybe. Picked up in a field off the highway. People walk past him. He doesn't come to the front."

"Can I go in?"

Mr. Ohanian looked at her, and at Mama, and then he opened the gate.

Ishita did not walk toward the dog. She went three steps into the run and sat down on the cold concrete with her side to him and looked at the opposite wall. She yawned, a big slow yawn, the way Aurelio had told her dogs did to say *calm, calm.* She did not say anything. She laid one palm on the concrete beside her and waited.

Mama stood outside the gate with her hand over her mouth.

It was four minutes, Mama said later. The dog's ears moved first: the standing one swiveled toward her, and the folded one twitched. Then he stood, low, his weight back on his hind legs, ready to run. He stretched his neck out as far as it would go. His nose worked. He took one step, then another, and then he was beside her, and his cold nose touched the back of her hand, and he sniffed it from the wrist to the fingertips, and sighed.

Then he sat down. He did not touch her. But he sat down next to her, facing the same wall.

Ishita kept perfectly still.

"Well," said Mr. Ohanian softly from the gate, and then said nothing else.

---

That Sunday Ishita told Nani about him. Nani said she had once had a Moti herself, long ago, the color of a ghee biscuit with a white streak down his face like a string of pearls, which was why she had called him pearl. When Ishita told her the tan dog was afraid of everything, Nani nodded as if that was what she expected.

"Do you know how a pearl is made?" she asked. "A little grain of grit gets into the oyster, and it hurts. And the oyster covers it, layer by layer, very slowly, for years, until the thing that hurt is the most beautiful thing in the shell." She scratched behind Foxy's folded ear, under the table, and Foxy leaned into her hand. "So. You will be slow with him. Layer by layer."

Ishita was slow. Every Saturday after that she went to the last run and sat on the concrete with her side to him and a hand laid open beside her. Some Saturdays he came and sat beside her again. Some he stayed against the far wall, watching, because a week in a shelter can undo a great deal.

On the sixth Saturday, with the barking all around them, she felt his chin settle on her palm.

Chapter 5: Second Place, Red

Calloway was a bay gelding, sixteen hands and one inch, with a white star the shape of a thumbprint and one white hind sock that he managed to get filthy within an hour of every bath. He was fourteen that autumn. He had been bred in Kentucky, sold to California as a five-year-old, and had carried the Hargroves' daughter, Wren, through six years of shows before she left for college in Colorado and her parents decided to lease him rather than sell. His barn name was Cal. He was honest, a little lazy, kind to children, and he had a habit that nobody at Lobitos Ridge except Ishita seemed to understand.

When he came through a corner of the arena, his ears went back.

Not pinned. Not flat. People said pinned, but they were wrong. Both ears turned back toward the saddle and stayed there, the openings facing her, like two small satellite dishes tuned to the same station. They stayed that way through the corner and came forward again as soon as he saw the next fence, sharp and pointed and eager, and went back again in the next corner.

"He's sour," said a girl from another barn at the first schooling show, watching from the rail. "Look at his ears."

"He's listening," Ishita said. "To me. He wants to know what I want."

The girl shrugged as if Ishita had said the sky was green.

The Hargroves agreed to a full lease in October, when Ishita was fourteen. Mama and Papa sat with Yoli at the picnic table outside the barn office with a stack of papers and a calculator, and Papa went pale and then went quiet, and then he signed, and afterward in the car he said that it was a good thing Ishita had not wanted a boat, because a boat at least you could sell. Ishita promised she would pay them back. Papa said she could pay them back by being the best rider in the county and by never, ever telling her sister what the lease cost, because Nandini would hold it over him for the rest of his natural life.

---

Shows began in the dark.

The horse park in Woodside lay in a bowl of hills an hour over the mountain from home, among old oaks hung with lace lichen, with cross-country fences scattered through the long grass like the furniture of a giant's garden: log piles, stone walls, a bank that dropped down into a water jump. In the winter months the schooling series ran there once a month, and Ishita's whole life began to arrange itself around those Sundays.

She was up at three-thirty. Mama drove her to the barn in the cold with the heater roaring and a thermos of Nani's chai between them, and neither of them said anything because neither of them was awake. By four Ishita was in Cal's stall under a single bulb with her fingers stiff, braiding his mane.

Aurelio had taught her. You dampened a section of mane, combed it, split it into three, braided it tight down to the end with a length of yarn worked in, then pulled the yarn up through the base with a latch hook and tied it off so the braid folded under itself into a neat little knob. Then the next one. A hunter's mane had thirty, thirty-five braids, small and even as buttons on a coat. The first time Ishita did it alone it took her two and a half hours and Cal fell asleep. By the end of that winter she could do it in fifty minutes, with the radio on, Aurelio's rancheras or Linh's mother's Vietnamese ballads, depending on whose truck was closer.

Foxy came too. The tan dog from the last run had gone home that spring with a retired couple from Pacifica who were willing to sit on the floor, and Ishita had walked him out to their car herself and then needed ten minutes before she could see to buckle her seat belt. Foxy, at nine, was gray around the muzzle and still afraid of garbage trucks and plastic bags blowing across a road. But at the barn she had found her place. She lay in the doorway of Cal's stall on a folded saddle pad, nose on her paws, her standing ear swiveling to every sound in the dark aisle, and she watched Ishita braid with an expression of deep and personal concern. Cal liked her. Cal would put his big head down over the stall guard and blow on Foxy's back, and Foxy would hold still and let him, her tail making slow sweeps on the saddle pad.

They loaded at five-thirty. Yoli drove the rig, a long silver trailer behind a truck that smelled of coffee and fly spray. They pulled into the horse park as the sky over the eastern hills was going from black to green to the palest gold, and the grass between the oaks was white with frost, and the breath of every horse unloading from every trailer went up in long plumes, and the whole show ground was full of the sounds Ishita had come to love: hooves on trailer ramps, generators humming, a loudspeaker crackling *Riders for the two-foot-six hunters, the course is posted*, a horse whinnying for its friend across the lot, and under it all the soft, constant clink of buckles.

---

Hunter rounds were not about speed. Ishita had to explain this to Papa four times.

"So you don't win by going fastest."

"No."

"And you don't win by jumping highest."

"No. Everybody jumps the same height."

"Then how do you *win*?"

"By making it look easy. The judge watches how the horse goes. If he's got a nice even rhythm, if he jumps round and square with his knees up, if he gets the right number of strides in the lines, if his lead changes are clean, if he looks like a horse you'd want to ride across country all day. It's about the horse. My job is to stay out of his way and not mess it up."

Papa thought about this. "So it's like a tax return."

"Papa."

"No, really. If you've done it right, nobody notices you were there."

The course was eight fences, set out in the main arena on the long sand under the oaks: a single fence on the diagonal, an outside line set for five strides, another line on the far side, a bending line that you had to ride with your eyes, and a final single fence home. Ishita walked it with Yoli in the early morning, counting her steps between fences, four of her steps to one of Cal's strides, while Yoli talked in a low voice about where to look and where to sit up and where Cal would want to drift toward the in-gate, because every horse in the world wanted to drift toward the in-gate.

"Ask him," Yoli said at the end. "Don't tell him. He knows his job. Ask him nicely, and stay out of his mouth."

---

The January show was the best round of her life, and it got second.

She knew while she was riding it. Sometimes you knew. Cal picked up his canter in the opening circle as if it had been his own idea, and the rhythm settled into her seat like a song she already knew the words to, *one*-two-three, *one*-two-three, and the first fence came up out of the rhythm without her doing anything at all, and he jumped it round and soft, his knees tucked up under his chin, and landed already looking for the next one. Five strides in the outside line, dead on. A flying change through the corner so smooth she barely felt it. In every corner his ears went back to her, listening, and on every straight they came forward to the fence. At the end, coming down to a trot, she was laughing out loud, and she put both arms around his neck in front of everyone, which you were not supposed to do.

Yoli was at the gate with her arms crossed and her face doing something unusual.

The ribbons were pinned up on the board by the show office at eleven. Ishita stood in front of it with Linh, who had ridden in the same division on her quarter horse and gotten fifth. Blue went to a girl from a big Portola Valley barn on a gray warmblood that had cost, Linh said, more than Linh's house. Red went to Ishita.

Second place. The best round of her life, and second.

The schooling series that winter gave out judge's cards, little white slips with scores and a few words on them, so the riders could learn something. Ishita's said, in tidy ballpoint: *Lovely pace, good lines. Ears back in corners. Attitude?*

She read it until the ink blurred. Then she went and found Cal, tied at the trailer eating hay out of his net, and she stood in front of him and read it aloud to him in a voice that shook.

"*Attitude,*" she said. "*Attitude.* You were *listening* to me."

Cal pulled another mouthful of hay from the net and chewed it, one ear toward her, one toward the trailer next door, where a pony was kicking the wall.

---

That evening, still in her show breeches, she took Foxy to the family house and told Mami.

She had not meant to tell Mami. She had meant to tell Nana, who would understand about precision. But Nana was napping, and Nani had gone with Mama to the Indian grocery over the hill, and Mami was in the kitchen making soup, with the windows steamed and the radio playing jazz, and when Ishita came in through the back door with the red ribbon still pinned to her jacket and Foxy at her heel, Mami took one look at her and turned the soup down to a simmer and said, "Tell me."

So Ishita told her. She told her for half an hour. She told her about the frost and the braids and the five strides and the flying change, and then she came to the ears, and how a horse's ears turned back toward you did not mean the same as ears pinned flat, any more than a person looking at you meant the same as a person glaring at you, and how anyone who had spent ten minutes with Cal would know that, and how a judge should be able to see the difference from across the arena, that was the whole *job*, and how it was not *fair*.

Mami listened to all of it. She stirred the soup. She gave Foxy a piece of carrot from the cutting board, which she took delicately, from her fingertips. Once or twice she said, "Mm." When Ishita finally ran out of breath, Mami tasted the soup, added salt, and tasted it again.

"You're right," she said. "About the ears."

"I *know*."

"And you'll be right next time too, and maybe you'll get second again. Judges are people. People look at a thing for one minute and decide. You looked at that horse for four months." She put the lid on the pot. "The ribbon is the judge's. What you know about the ears is yours. Nobody gave you that, and nobody can take it away."

Ishita sat down at the kitchen table. Foxy came and leaned against her leg, the way she always had, her whole weight, as if she were holding her up.

"Mami," she said after a while, "can Rajiv Mama's plane carry a horse?"

Mami raised an eyebrow. Rajiv Mama was away again; he had been away since Christmas, somewhere warm, and he called home on Tuesdays.

"Why?" she said.

"So when he goes places, Cal can go too. And I can go."

"I'll ask him." Mami ladled soup into a bowl and set it in front of her, with a spoon, because she had learned from Nani that the answer to most things was soup. "But I already know what he'll say. He'll say, not comfortably."

"Then Cal can stay and Rajiv Mama can go." Ishita picked up the spoon. "A horse is better company than him anyway. Cal pays attention."

Mami looked at her over the steam, and her mouth went crooked. "I'm going to tell him you said that."

"Tell him."

Then they were both laughing, Ishita so suddenly that she snorted, and Foxy looked between them with both ears up, the folded one and the straight one, trying to work out what had happened.

---

The next Sunday was Lunar New Year, and Linh invited her to her grandmother's house in San Jose.

It was a small stucco house on a street of small stucco houses, with a persimmon tree in the front yard still holding a few orange fruits, and every window hung with red paper. There were firecracker strings made of red paper on the door and a bowl of mandarins with their leaves still on, and kumquat trees in pots on either side of the steps. Inside it was hot and crowded and loud, three generations talking at once, and the whole house smelled of pork and pepper and the sweet smoke of something on the stove.

Linh's grandmother was tiny and fierce and wore a red velvet jacket. She took Ishita's face in both her hands and looked at it, and said something in Vietnamese, and Linh translated: "She says you're too thin and you ride too much."

"Tell her my Nani says the same thing."

Linh told her. The grandmother laughed, a sudden high laugh, and patted Ishita's cheek, and steered her to the table, where there was a mountain of bánh tét, sticky rice rolled with mung bean and pork in banana leaves and sliced into rounds, and pickled shallots, and a pot of caramelized pork and eggs that had been cooking, Linh said, since Thursday. Linh's little cousins gave Ishita a red envelope by mistake and then took it back, and then the grandmother made them give it to her again.

Ishita ate until she could not move. She sat on the couch afterward between Linh and a great-aunt who spoke no English and who showed her photographs on her phone of a river town in the Mekong delta where she had grown up, boats crowded at a floating market, fruit piled in pyramids, a girl on the prow of a boat who was the great-aunt at fourteen. And Ishita showed the great-aunt photographs of Cal, and of Foxy, and of Nana's black-and-white picture of Ruby on the ridge, and the great-aunt looked at each one carefully and nodded and said one word, again and again, which Linh said meant *beautiful*.

Driving home over the mountain with Mama in the dark, the red envelope in her pocket and a foil package of bánh tét on her lap for Nani, Ishita thought about the great-aunt's river and Nana's ridge and Aurelio's town in Jalisco and Yoli's grandmother's marigolds, and about how none of it took anything away from anything else. It was more like the braids in Cal's mane. Every one separate, every one its own. And together they made something you could not have made with one.

Chapter 6: Saturdays and Sundays

The high school sat at the edge of town between a pumpkin field and a stand of cypress, with the hills rising green behind it and the ocean a mile off, invisible most mornings in the fog. It was not a big school. In her second year there, Ishita knew half the sophomore class from elementary school and the other half from the barn, the beach, the farmers' market, or the line at the taqueria by the gas station, where the carnitas came off the flat-top in a cloud of steam and the woman at the register called everybody *mija* or *mijo* regardless of who they were.

On the first day of tenth grade she sat down in biology next to a new girl with a thick black ponytail and silver rings on every finger, who was drawing a horse in the margin of her notebook. It was a bad horse. Its legs bent the wrong way at the knee.

"The knee goes the other way," Ishita said, before she could stop herself. "Forward. The front leg's like your arm. The thing that looks like a backward knee on the back leg is really the ankle. I mean the hock."

The girl looked at the drawing, then at Ishita.

"Show me," she said.

That was Layla Haddad. Her family had moved to the coast from Burlingame that summer, when her father opened a bakery on Main Street. Her father's family was from Lebanon and her mother's from Chile, and Layla spoke Spanish with her mother and Arabic with her grandmother and English with everybody else, and switched among them in the middle of a sentence when she was excited, which was often. She had never touched a horse. By October she had been to the barn three times, had fallen in love with Nutmeg, who was now twenty-nine and retired and still suspicious, and had decided that Foxy was the most dignified dog she had ever met.

"She's like a professor," Layla said, watching her lie in the barn doorway with her standing ear turning. "Like she's grading everybody."

"She is grading everybody."

"What's my grade?"

Ishita watched Foxy watch Layla. Her tail swept once across the dust. Her mouth was open, soft, relaxed, the tip of her tongue showing. Her eyes were half closed.

"A minus," she said. "You move your hands too fast."

---

Saturdays belonged to the bay.

In October, Ishita began giving her Saturdays to an environmental research institute up in the city. Mama had found it, through a parent at her own school; the institute ran bird surveys at the wetlands along the edge of the bay and took a few high school volunteers who could get up early and keep their mouths shut. Ishita could do both. Every Saturday, Papa drove her up the coast and over the hill and through the city in the half-dark, and dropped her at a marsh near the old shipyards where the bay came in among the cordgrass and the pickleweed and the mud.

The woman who ran the counts was Grace Liang. She had grown up in the Sunset District, the daughter of a seamstress and a cook, and she had been counting birds on that shoreline for nineteen years. She wore a fleece jacket faded to no color at all and carried a spotting scope on a tripod over her shoulder like a rifle, and she spoke to Ishita, from the first day, as though Ishita were a colleague.

"Tide's coming in," Grace said the first morning. "Watch what they do."

Ishita watched. The mudflats were covered with birds, more birds than she had known there were: long-legged ones with curved bills probing the mud, small gray ones running in tight flocks at the edge of the water, white egrets standing like lamps. As the tide rose, the water pushed across the flats, and the birds moved ahead of it, in waves, the little ones first, running and lifting and settling, all together, like a single animal breathing.

"Dunlin," said Grace, pointing. "Western sandpipers. Willets. That's a marbled godwit. See how they all moved at once? Something set them off. What?"

Ishita looked. She saw nothing. Then she saw, far out over the water, a dark shape, flying fast and low.

"That," she said.

Grace looked through her binoculars and nodded. "Peregrine. Good. Most people never see the hawk. They only see the birds flinch." She wrote something in her waterproof notebook. "The birds always know first. Our job is to notice what they noticed."

Ishita did not tell her about Ruby, Nana's black dog on the ridge. But she thought about him all the way home.

---

Sundays belonged to the barn.

Cal was fifteen that year and at his very best. Yoli said he had finally decided that Ishita was worth trying for. She moved up a division that winter, to the bigger fences, and he jumped them with the same round, careful, knees-up style, his ears going back to her in every corner and forward in every line. She stopped arguing with judges about it. Mami had been right. The ribbon was the judge's. What Ishita knew about the ears was hers.

They won their first blue in February, at the horse park, in the rain. Everybody else had scratched because of the mud. Ishita and Linh rode anyway, in rain jackets over their show coats, and Cal jumped through puddles like a horse foaled in a rainstorm, and the judge, a woman from Pebble Beach with a golf umbrella, gave him the blue and said in passing at the gate, "That horse listens to you. You can see it in his ears."

Ishita did not trust herself to speak. She nodded, and rode away, and cried in the trailer where nobody could see, except Foxy, who put her paws on her lap and licked the rain off her chin.

---

Gabriel Bhaiya was away that winter, on a field term for the last semester of his degree, somewhere so far north and so cold that when he called on Sunday nights the picture froze and his voice came through in pieces. He was recording the stories of old people in a river village, he said, with their permission, the way Nana's stories were kept. He asked about Cal. He asked about Foxy. He asked Ishita to hold the phone down so he could see Foxy, and Foxy, hearing his voice come out of the little rectangle, cocked her head so far to one side that her folded ear flopped over and her standing ear tipped sideways like a sail in a gust.

"She knows me," Gabriel Bhaiya said, delighted, from the other end of the world.

"She knows your voice," Ishita said. "Look at the head tilt. She's trying to find where it's coming from. Dogs tilt their heads to hear better. And to see past their own noses."

"You sound like Nana."

"Nana would say it slower."

He laughed, and the picture froze on his laughing face, and when it came back he was saying something about ice, and lights in the sky, and how quiet it was there, quieter than anywhere he had ever been. Then the call dropped, and Ishita sat on the kitchen floor with Foxy's head in her lap and thought about how quiet it must be, to be that far away from everybody, and could not imagine it. She could not imagine ever wanting to.

---

At school that spring, Mr. Fonoti's biology class did science fair projects.

Mr. Fonoti was a soft-spoken man whose parents had come from Samoa, who sang tenor in a community choir on Wednesday nights and kept a tank of axolotls on his desk. He said the project could be on anything, as long as it was a real question and you collected real data and you did not hurt anything. Most people did plants. Layla did bread, with her father: how long you had to proof the dough for manakish before the za'atar and oil went on, and why her grandmother's way, which took all night, made a better crust than the quick way.

Ishita did dogs.

She asked Mr. Ohanian at the shelter, and the shelter director, and her mother, and Mr. Fonoti, and they all said yes, as long as she only watched. So for six Saturday afternoons, after the bird counts, she sat outside the kennel runs at the shelter with a notebook and a stopwatch and a chart she had drawn up herself. She watched dogs as strangers walked past their runs. She counted: yawns, lip licks, head turns, whale eye, tail tucked, tail high, freezing, sniffing the ground. Then she watched them again when Mr. Ohanian walked past, slow, sideways, soft-voiced, not looking at them, and counted again.

The numbers were not subtle. When strangers walked straight at the runs, staring, talking loudly, the frightened dogs licked their lips and turned their heads and yawned three and four times as often. When Mr. Ohanian walked past his way, the signals dropped by more than half.

"They're telling us," she wrote in her conclusion, "all the time, before anything goes wrong. They are saying *please slow down* and *I'm not a threat* and *I'm scared.* Most people don't see it, because nobody taught them the language. If more people learned it, fewer dogs would be returned to the shelter for being *difficult*, because they would not be difficult. They would just be understood."

She presented it in the school gym on a Thursday night in March, standing in front of her trifold board, in a clean shirt, with her hair pulled back tight, in the careful, even voice she used when something mattered and she did not want to cry or laugh in the middle of it. Nandini, who had driven down from the city, called it her science-fair voice, and the name stuck in the family forever after.

The judge was a retired veterinarian from Pescadero. He heard her out with his arms folded, and asked her three questions, and at the end he unfolded his arms and asked her what she wanted to be.

"A vet," she said. "For horses, mostly. And dogs."

"Good," he said. "We need ones who watch."

She got second. Layla's bread got first. Layla's father brought manakish for the whole gym, still warm from the oven, the za'atar green and fragrant and the oil soaking into the paper, and Nani, who had come with Nana in his good jacket, ate three and asked Layla's father for the recipe in a tone that did not allow refusal. He gave it to her. She gave him her recipe for methi paratha in return. Within a month there was a methi manakish on the board at the bakery on Main Street, and Layla's grandmother was coming over to the family house on Thursday mornings to cook with Nani, two old women at the stove with no language in common except food and complaints about their knees, which turned out to be enough.

---

Ishita thought about it a great deal that spring. She thought about it at the bird counts and at the barn and in the car with Papa on the way back over the hill, with the radio on.

It was in the car with Layla's father, actually, one Saturday when he picked them both up from the city, that she understood it all the way. He had Fairuz on the stereo, a woman's voice from long ago, singing in Arabic over strings in a way that made you feel the morning was a sad and beautiful thing. Layla rolled her eyes and said her father played Fairuz every single morning of his life. Her father said that in Beirut every morning of everyone's life began with Fairuz, and that it was the law. Then he switched to a cumbia station, because Layla's mother had made him promise to give the cumbia equal time, and then, at a red light in the Excelsior, he switched to an old Hindi film song he had heard Nani humming in the family house kitchen and had gone home and found.

"This one," he said. "What's it about?"

Ishita didn't know. She called Nani from the back seat. Nani listened to three seconds through the phone and said it was a song about a girl waiting at a window for someone to come home, and that she had sung it to Rajiv Mama and Mama and Sanjay when they were babies, years before they ever came to this country.

Layla's father listened, nodding, his eyes wet behind his sunglasses. "Every country," he said, "has a song about a girl at a window."

And Ishita sat in the back seat, with the fog coming in over the hill and the three songs from three places all playing in her head at once, and thought that this was what Rajiv Mama had meant on the back steps, though he had not said it this way. You did not have less of your own because you learned someone else's. Layla's father had not stopped loving Fairuz because he had found Nani's song. Nani's paratha had not lost anything because it lived beside a manakish. Kavya's lamps and Linh's grandmother's red envelopes and Yoli's marigolds and the Landing Night sparklers were not taking turns, with only one allowed in the room at a time. They were all in the room. And the room got bigger every time someone new walked in.

That night she wrote it in her notebook, under the weather. *Every country has a song about a girl at a window.*

Then, after a minute, she added: *And every dog has a yawn that isn't tiredness. And every bird flinches at the hawk before anyone sees it.* She did not know yet what the three things had to do with each other. She only knew that they did.

Chapter 7: Sold

*27 August 2026. First night. Hot and thick here, like a kitchen with the lid on; Mama says fog at home.*

*I said I would write one true thing a day, the way Nana does, and the first true thing that came was Cal's trailer. I don't know why. Maybe because tonight, walking back from the dining hall, I passed the teaching barn with its doors open, and a horse turned his ears back toward me, exactly the way Cal used to, and I had to stand by the fence until my hands stopped shaking.*

---

Gabriel Bhaiya was still up north when summer came, finishing the last work for his degree at a fish camp on a river where, he said, the sun went down for about an hour and then thought better of it. So on the Fourth of July the family set his place at the walnut-shaded table anyway, a plate and a fork and a phone propped against the water jug, and passed him around between the samosas and the corn on the cob. The picture kept freezing. Nana leaned close to the screen and told him to wear a hat. Nani asked if he had eaten. He held up a strip of smoked salmon the color of a sunset and said he had eaten nothing else for a week, and Nani said that was not eating, that was a punishment.

Papa grilled. Layla's father sent a tray of baklava and a tray of manakish. Linh's grandmother sent spring rolls by way of Linh. The little cousins, Ryan and Ananya, ran in circles around the table with Foxy, who did not run in circles, but who walked very fast after them with her ears up, trying to herd them into a group, because she was half sheepdog and the circles offended her.

"She's herding them," Nandini said, watching.

"She thinks they're lambs," Ishita said. "She's trying to keep them together. Look, she's going wide around the outside, then cutting in. And look, she never touches them. That's a good dog."

"Can we have her?" Ananya shouted, flying past.

"No," said everybody at once, including Gabriel Bhaiya from the water jug.

That was the last easy day of the summer.

---

The Hargroves called Yoli in July. They were moving to Southern California, to Ojai, for Mr. Hargrove's work, and they had decided it was time. Wren was not coming back to ride. Cal was sixteen. A family in Santa Barbara had a twelve-year-old daughter who needed a safe, honest horse to learn on, and they had made an offer, and it was a fair offer, and the Hargroves had accepted.

Yoli told Ishita in the tack room. She sat her down on the trunk and told her straight, the way she told everything, and then she stopped, because she knew there was nothing else to say.

Ishita did not cry. She sat on the trunk and looked at Cal's bridle hanging on its hook, the leather dark where her hands had held the reins for two years, and she felt something in her chest go hard and cold, like a stone in a winter creek.

"We could buy him," she said.

"Honey."

"We could. I'll ask Papa. I'll work. I'll muck stalls. I'll do anything."

Yoli looked at her. "I already asked the Hargroves about that," she said gently. "Before I told you. I thought you might ask. The Santa Barbara family has a contract. It's done."

Ishita went home and asked Papa anyway. She asked Mama. She asked them together at the kitchen table, and she knew while she was asking that it was not possible, that a horse like Cal cost more than Papa made in many months, that the lease had been a stretch already. She watched Papa's face, and she saw that he was trying to find a way and that there was not one, and that it was hurting him that there was not, and so she stopped asking.

Then Nandini, who had driven down for the weekend, said quietly that Rajiv Mama could buy him, easily, if they called him.

"No," said Ishita.

"Ish—"

"*No.*" She did not know why she was so sure. She only knew that she was. "He's sold. There's a girl in Santa Barbara who needs him. It's not fair to take him from her because we have an uncle with money. That's not—" She could not find the word. "That's not how you do it."

Mama looked at her across the table, and then got up and came around and put her arms around her from behind, and held on without a word, and that was when Ishita cried.

---

The trailer came on a Thursday at six in the morning. It was gray and cold, the way July mornings on the coast are, with the fog so thick on the ridge that the paddocks below the barn disappeared into it after the second fence post. Ishita had been there since five. She had brushed Cal until he shone. She had wrapped his legs in shipping boots and buckled on his halter, the leather one with the brass plate that said CALLOWAY, which the Hargroves said she could keep. She had braided his forelock, a single braid with a red yarn tie, though there was nobody to see it.

Foxy lay in the aisle and watched her with her chin on her paws, her eyebrows moving.

When the trailer backed up to the barn, Cal lifted his head and his ears went forward, both of them, to the trailer. He had been on a hundred trailers. He knew what they meant. He went up the ramp without hesitating, honest to the last, the way he had gone at every fence she had ever pointed him at, and the driver clipped his trailer tie, and he twisted his neck around to look back at her with his ears turned back, toward her, listening.

*What do you want?* the ears said.

She did not know what she wanted. She wanted to say thank you. She wanted to say *you were right about every fence.* She wanted to say *I'm sorry about the judges.* She put her hand flat on his nose, the way she had been taught at five, and he blew on it, warm and sweet with hay.

Then the driver closed the ramp, and the trailer pulled away down the gravel road into the fog, and she stood and listened to it until the sound of the engine was gone and there was nothing but the drip of the fog off the eucalyptus and Aurelio's radio, turned down low, playing something in Spanish about a train.

Foxy came and stood against her leg, her whole weight, the way she did.

---

She did not ride for three weeks.

She went to the barn. She did chores. She mucked stalls and cleaned tack and helped Aurelio with the hay. She did not ride. Yoli did not push her. Yoli had lost horses too, more than Ishita knew about, and she said only, the second week, "When you're ready, there's someone you should meet. No hurry."

The someone was a chestnut mare called Lark.

The old racetrack on the east shore of the bay had closed for good that June, after more than eighty years, and dozens of racehorses had needed somewhere to go. Yoli had driven over in July with the trailer and come back with a five-year-old Thoroughbred who had raced twenty-two times and won once and had, the trainer said, *a lot of opinions.* She was a bright copper chestnut with a narrow blaze and a microchip under the skin of her neck that told her whole racing history to anyone with a scanner. She was thin, all ribs and hip bones and long nervous legs. She lived in the end paddock by herself, because she kicked at the other horses over the fence.

"Go and look at her," Yoli said. "Don't ride her. Just look."

Ishita went and looked. She leaned on the fence. Lark, in the far corner, swung her head up and stared at her, nostrils wide, and then wheeled and trotted away along the far fence line, head high, tail clamped, and stopped at the other corner and stared again.

Ishita went home.

---

Rajiv Mama came back from a trip in August. He had been away since the winter, the way he always seemed to be away somewhere, and he came home thin and windburned and tired around the eyes. Mami said he looked like a piece of driftwood. He said driftwood had a peaceful life. Mami said, not with him, it didn't.

He came to the barn on a Sunday. He had never been to the barn before. He stood at the gate in his good trousers and a sweater, looking at the long red building and the arenas and the hills, and then he looked at Ishita, mucking out an empty stall, and said, "Show me the one Yoli wants you to meet."

So she took him to the end paddock.

Lark was grazing in the middle. When they came to the fence, her head shot up. Rajiv Mama leaned his forearms on the top rail and did not look at the mare. He looked at the hills.

"I'm going to stand here twenty minutes," he said. "I'm not going to say anything. You're not going to say anything. You're going to watch her. And then you're going to tell me what she said."

"I know how to watch a horse, Rajiv Mama."

"I know you do. That's why I'm asking you." He glanced at her sideways. "You've been looking at the one that left. Look at this one."

So she watched. It was harder than at the pumpkin farm, eleven years ago, when she was five, because now she knew more, and knowing more made it harder to see only what was there. The fog was burning off the ridge, and the light came and went in patches across the paddock. A red-tailed hawk circled over the far hills. Behind them, in the barn, Aurelio's radio was playing.

Lark stood with her head high, staring at them. Her nostrils fluttered. Her tail was clamped tight. After a minute she walked to the far fence and stood there with her back half turned, one ear on them, one ear on the barn. After three minutes she put her head down and grazed, but in quick, snatching bites, lifting her head between each one to look. Every time a car went by on the gravel road, she jumped. Every time a horse called from the barn, she called back, high and shrill. Once she went to the fence nearest the other paddocks, where a big gray gelding was grazing, and put her nose toward him, and when he lifted his head and looked at her, she squealed and struck at the air with a front foot and spun away.

Somewhere around fifteen minutes, she yawned. It was a huge yawn, jaw stretched wide, teeth showing, her head twisting with it. Then she licked her lips. Then she chewed nothing. Then her head dropped, just a few inches, and her lower lip went loose for a second before she caught herself and snapped her head up again.

At twenty minutes, Rajiv Mama looked at his watch.

"Well?"

Ishita took a breath. "She's scared," she said. "Of everything. She's never been anywhere where nobody wanted anything from her. At the track, every time somebody came to her it was to do something. Gallop. Race. Ship. She doesn't know what a field is for. She doesn't know how to be with other horses, because she was always alone in a stall. She wants to be with the gray. She doesn't know how to ask. So she squeals." She stopped. "And she's tired. She's so tired of being scared. That yawn, and the licking. She almost let go. She almost did. And then she caught herself."

Rajiv Mama nodded. He did not say she was right. He said nothing at all.

"And what does she need?"

"Time," Ishita said. "Somebody who comes to the fence every day and doesn't want anything. For a long time. Until she believes it."

"Then that's the job," Rajiv Mama said.

He pushed off the fence and stood up straight, and looked at her, and his face showed, briefly, something she did not see often, something open, almost sad.

"You'll lose others," he said. "Horses. Dogs. People. That's the price of loving things that don't live as long as you do, or that go where you can't follow. The ones who are worth anything keep paying it." He put his hand on her shoulder, briefly, and took it away. "You were right about Cal. Not buying him back. I heard."

"Who told you?"

"Your mother. She was proud of you. She didn't know how to say it, so she told me." He looked at the mare. "I'd have bought him in a minute if you'd asked. I'm glad you didn't."

Then he walked back to his car, and drove away, and Ishita stood alone at the fence.

She came back the next day. She leaned on the fence and did not look at the mare and did not want anything. She came back the next day too, and the day after that.

On the ninth day, Lark walked across the paddock, slowly, with her head low and her ears soft and pointed forward, and stood a few feet from the fence, and sighed, a long rubbery breath through her nostrils, and stayed.

Chapter 8: The Fall at the Fairgrounds

*9 September 2026. Thunderstorm in the afternoon, the first I've seen in years. Fog at home.*

*My left collarbone aches when the weather turns. It never did on the coast, because the weather there doesn't turn, it only arrives and leaves. Here it turns all at once, and I feel the place where the bone knit, a small hard bump I can find with two fingers. I'm going to write down how I got it, because I've told it as a funny story so many times that I've almost forgotten it wasn't.*

---

In the autumn Ishita turned sixteen, Nana began to talk into a microphone.

It was her idea. He had always kept up with the family by hand, notes slipped under the sugar bowl, letters to Gabriel Bhaiya whenever he was away, lists on the backs of envelopes, but his hand had begun to tremble in the evenings, and the writing slowed, and he grew frustrated, and when Nana was frustrated he went silent in a way that worried everyone. So one Sunday after Weekly Council, Ishita brought a small microphone, no bigger than her thumb, clipped to a little stand, and set it on the dining table in front of him.

"Hold it if you want," she said. "Or don't. Just talk. Like you're telling me."

Nana looked at the microphone over his glasses as if it were a junior officer who had reported late.

"A voice," Ishita said, "carries what a keyboard leaves out. You told me that. About your father's letters, that you could hear him in them."

He considered it a while longer. Then he picked the microphone up off its stand and held it close to his mouth, the way you hold a cup of tea on a cold morning, and pressed the button. The first thing he recorded was a message of eleven words for Gabriel Bhaiya, telling him to put the date and the weather at the top of every page, and he forgot to let go of the button at the end, so that the message carried on into the sound of the pressure cooker in the kitchen and Nani calling from the stove to know who he was talking to.

The second was a story. "In Rampur, before the border, there was a well."

She sat across from him and listened, and did not interrupt, and the little light on the microphone glowed green. After that the messages went out most evenings, to whoever in the family needed one, each with its words typed out underneath, a little wrong wherever Nana's accent outran the machine. Nani said it was the most he had talked in forty years. Nana said he had been saving it up.

---

Lark, all that autumn and winter, was learning to be a horse.

Ishita did not ride her at first. For six weeks she did only ground work. She led the mare in and out of the paddock, stopping and starting, backing up, standing still. She taught her to lower her head to a hand on the poll. She walked her past everything on the property that might be frightening, which for Lark was everything: the tractor, the hose, the wheelbarrow, the blue tarp on the hay barn that flapped in the wind, Foxy. She let Lark stop and stare and snort and decide. She never hurried her. Every time the mare yawned and licked her lips and chewed, Ishita stopped whatever they were doing and let her stand, so the mare would learn that letting go of a worry was always rewarded with rest.

In November she got on. In December they trotted poles on the ground, four of them, evenly spaced, and Lark lifted her long legs over them with her ears going back and forth, back and forth, half worried and half interested. In January, they jumped a crossrail eighteen inches high, and the mare jumped it as though it were a five-foot wall, a huge leap with her back round and her ears pricked, and landed and bolted three strides before Ishita could sit up and bring her back, and then stood shaking at the end of the arena, blowing hard.

Yoli came over and stood at the mare's shoulder.

"She scared herself," Yoli said.

"I know."

"So we jump it again. Smaller. Right now. So the last thing she remembers is that it was fine."

They jumped it again, a little cross no higher than a curb. Lark trotted over it and landed and kept trotting, and her ears flicked back to Ishita, and the trot settled, and she blew out a long breath through her nose. Ishita patted her neck, and Lark lowered her head and stretched, long and low, and Yoli said, "*There.* That's the whole lesson. Put her away."

---

In April the answer came from the institute.

She had applied for the summer research internship in January. It was a paid position, for high school students who had volunteered there, working on the shorebird data every day for ten weeks. Grace Liang had written her a recommendation. Ishita had gone to the bird counts every Saturday for going on two years, in rain and wind and the dark, and she knew every bird on that shore by its walk, and she had been certain, privately, that the position was hers.

It was not. It went to a boy from a private school in the city who had already published something.

She read the email on her phone at a family dinner at the family house, between the dal and the rice, and then she slipped out and sat on the porch step, where it was quiet, and put her face in her hands.

Nana found her there. He came out slowly with his cane in one hand and two cups of tea in the other, which should not have been possible, and lowered himself onto the step beside her, which took a long time, and handed her one of the cups. He told her a story about a staff posting he had once wanted, when he was a young officer, and had not got, and about a letter his father sent him from the farm, and about the snows of Kangchenjunga at sunrise, which he would never have seen from a desk.

She already knew the story. She had heard it at the dining table. But she had never heard it on a porch step on a day when it was hers, and that made it a different story.

By the time the tea was gone she was smiling, a little, through the wet on her face, and asking him whatever became of the other officer, the one with the uncle.

---

The show in May was at the fairgrounds in Pleasanton, across the bay and over the hills, where the summer heat started early and the big show rings lay out under the old grandstand and the sycamores, with the horse barns in long rows of white-painted stalls. It was Lark's first real show. They had entered the smallest division, two-foot fences, for green horses, eight fences in a ring she had never seen.

Lark was nervous from the moment she came off the trailer. She stood in her borrowed stall with her head high, calling to the horses in the next row. In the warm-up ring she was electric, every muscle humming. But she was listening. Every time Ishita sat deep and breathed out, Lark's ears came back to her. By the time they went into the ring, the mare had settled into a long, swinging canter, a racehorse's canter, ground-covering and smooth, and Ishita felt in her seat that they could do it.

The first five fences were beautiful. The sixth was a little white gate with a box of red geraniums at its base.

Ishita had walked the course. She had seen the flower box. She had thought about it and decided it was fine, because Lark had seen flower boxes at home. But not this one, and not here, and not with the sun coming through the sycamores and lighting the red flowers up like something on fire.

Three strides out, Lark's ears went forward and locked onto the flowers. Ishita felt the mare's body change beneath her, a tightening, the back hollowing, the canter shortening. She closed her legs and sat down and said, "*Go on,*" and the mare went on, two strides, one stride, and then, at the base of the fence, she stopped dead and dropped her shoulder and spun to the left, all at once, faster than thought.

Ishita went over her right shoulder, the way she had gone over Nutmeg's shoulder at seven, except that at seven it had been sand and slow, and now it was a hard-packed ring and a horse moving at fourteen miles an hour. She hit the ground on her left shoulder. She heard it, a small dry crack, like a pencil snapping inside a sweater.

Then the sky, and dust, and a loud ringing.

She was aware of Lark, loose, galloping around the ring with her stirrups flapping and her head high and her tail up, whinnying. She was aware of people running. She was aware, mostly, of the fact that she could not lift her left arm, and that when she tried, the world went white at the edges.

The EMT was a young woman with a long braid and a calm voice who knelt in the dirt beside her and asked her what day it was, and who the president was, and how many fingers, and then gently ran her hands along the collarbone and said, "Yep. That's broken. You're going to be fine. You're done for today, though."

Yoli caught Lark. Ishita heard later that the mare had come straight to her when she held out her hand, trembling all over, and put her nose in Yoli's chest and stood.

---

Six weeks in a sling. No riding for ten. The summer finals at the end of July, the ones she and Lark had been working toward all spring, came and went without them.

It was the worst summer of Ishita's life, and she spent most of it at the barn anyway, one-armed. She could not groom with her left hand, so she groomed with her right. She could not lift a saddle, so she did ground work, holding the lead rope in one hand, walking Lark past every flower box Yoli could find. Yoli bought geraniums. Aurelio built three small gates out of scrap lumber and painted them white and set the flowers in front of each one, and every day Ishita walked the mare past them, close, closer, until Lark could put her nose in the geraniums and snort at them and walk on.

"You're not angry at her," Aurelio said one morning, watching.

"Why would I be angry at her? She told me. Three strides out. Her ears locked, and her back went tight, and she shortened. She said *I'm scared of that* as clearly as she could. I didn't listen. I thought I knew better." Ishita rubbed the mare's forehead with her good hand. "It was my fall. Not hers."

Aurelio grunted, which from him was a long speech, and returned to the hay.

---

The sling came off at the end of June. In August, the whole family crowded in along the long table out back at the family house for a photograph, the first one in years with every single person in it: Nana in his good cardigan in the middle, Nani at his side, her fingers resting on his arm, Mama and Papa, Rajiv Mama and Mami, Vikram Uncle and his wife, Ryan making faces, Nandini behind Nani's chair and Ishita beside her. The fog was just pulling back off the bluffs. Papa set the timer on his camera and ran.

Afterward, looking at the picture on Papa's phone, Ishita saw the gap between herself and Nandini where Gabriel Bhaiya should have been. He was there, but not there. He was at the edge, half out of the frame, laughing, with little Ananya on his hip, since she would allow nobody else to carry her.

Ishita kept looking. She did not know yet what she was seeing. She only knew that it mattered, the way a horse's ear turning matters before you know what it has heard.

---

*9 September 2026, later.*

*I've been thinking about the flower box. Lark told me three strides out, and I rode anyway, because I had decided ahead of time what was true. That's the fall I mean to remember. The bone was only the part that showed.*

Chapter 9: Antivenom

*21 September 2026. Hot again. A snake crossed the path behind the teaching barn this morning, a black rat snake, harmless, and I still stopped so fast the girl behind me walked into my back.*

*Mama sent a photo of Foxy asleep on my bed at home with her chin on my pillow. The muzzle is white now. You can only see the scar if you know where to look, on the left side, just under the eye. I know where to look.*

---

October that year came in hot.

It happened on the coast every few years: the wind turned around and blew from the land instead of the sea, the fog vanished, and for a week the town baked under a hard blue sky that looked like it belonged to somewhere else. The hills went the color of a lion. The ocean lay flat and glittering and strange. People walked around Main Street in shorts, blinking, as though they had been let out of a cellar. At the barn the horses stood in the shade of the oaks, swishing at flies, and the dust on the arena rose in little clouds at every footfall and hung there in the still air.

On the Sunday of that week, Ishita took Lark out on the ridge trail.

She had not ridden her outside the arena once since the fall. Lark had come a long way. She was six now and filled out, her copper coat dappled across the hindquarters when the light caught it, and she had learned that the world was mostly not trying to eat her. They had been jumping little courses at home all summer, flower boxes and all. Yoli said she was ready for the hill.

The ridge trail ran up behind the barn through the coyote brush and the sagebrush, a narrow track along the property line, climbing to a high meadow where you could see the whole coast laid out below, the town and the harbor and the long curve of the beach running south into haze. Foxy came too. She always came. She trotted ahead of Lark with her nose down and her tail high, stopping every few yards to read something in the dust and then catching up, the folded ear bouncing.

They were nearly at the meadow when Lark stopped.

She did not spin. She had learned not to spin. She stopped and planted her feet and threw her head up, and her ears went forward and locked on something in the trail ahead, and she blew a long, ragged snort through her nostrils, and every muscle in her body went hard under Ishita's legs.

Ishita looked where the ears were pointing.

Foxy was ahead of them, ten feet up the trail, with her nose down at the edge of a clump of sage. She had found something. Her tail was wagging slowly, side to side.

Then Ishita heard it. A dry, rapid buzz, like a sprinkler head, like seed pods shaken in a gourd. It came from the sage.

"*Foxy!*" she screamed. "*Foxy, come!*"

Foxy jerked her head up at the voice, and as she did, something struck from under the bush, a blur faster than Ishita could see, and Foxy yelped, high and terrible, and leaped straight up in the air, and came down running, back toward her, with her head shaking.

Lark wheeled and bolted.

Ishita did not remember afterward how she stopped her. She remembered sitting back and closing her hands and saying *whoa, whoa, whoa* in a voice that was not hers, and the mare plunging down the trail and then, somehow, slowing, and stopping, trembling, at a bend in the path below. She remembered sliding off before Lark had quite stopped. She remembered Foxy coming down the trail to her with her head low and her tail tucked, pawing at her own face.

Ishita knelt in the dust and took Foxy's head in her hands.

On the left side of her muzzle, just under the eye, there were two small puncture wounds, side by side, a finger's width apart, each with a single bead of blood. As Ishita looked, the skin around them was already beginning to swell.

---

She called Yoli first, then Mama. She did not cry. She could not afford to. Yoli was at the bottom of the trail in four minutes, running, and took Lark, and Ishita picked Foxy up in her arms, all forty pounds of her, and carried her down the hill to the car. Foxy did not struggle. She lay against Ishita with her head on Ishita's shoulder, panting, her whole body shaking.

"Keep her still," Yoli said. "Keep her calm. Don't cut anything, don't suck anything, don't put ice on it, none of that cowboy business. Just get her there. Go."

Mama drove. She had come from the house in her slippers and a sweatshirt, and she drove over the hill on the winding road through the redwoods faster than Ishita had ever seen her drive, faster than was legal, with her hands at ten and two and her face perfectly calm, as though she were driving to a school board meeting she meant to win. Ishita sat in the back with Foxy across her lap.

By the time they reached the top of the hill, her face had doubled in size. The whole left side of her muzzle had swollen, tight and hot, so that her left eye was almost closed and her lip was pushed up off her teeth. She was drooling. Her breathing was fast and shallow. She looked up at Ishita with her one good eye, and Ishita saw the whale eye, the white half-moon, and her lips flickered in a lick that could barely move.

*I'm scared,* the face said. *Please.*

"I know," Ishita whispered. "I know. I've got you."

She put her hand flat on Foxy's chest and felt the heart going, fast and light, like a bird's.

---

The emergency clinic was in a low building in a business park on the bay side, open all night, with bright lights and a waiting room with plastic chairs. A vet tech met them at the door with a gurney. A minute later a woman in green scrubs came through the double doors at a fast walk, her dark hair pulled back tight, a stethoscope around her neck.

"Rattlesnake?" she said.

"Yes. On the ridge above the coast. Twenty-five minutes ago. Left side of the muzzle, under the eye. Two punctures. She was sniffing at a sage bush."

The vet glanced at her, a quick, appraising look. "You saw it?"

"I heard it. My horse saw it first."

"Okay. Good. That helps." She was already moving, her hands running over Foxy's face and neck and gums, which Ishita saw were pale. "I'm Dr. Paredes. We're going to give her antivenom, and fluids, and something for the pain, and we're going to watch her very closely tonight. Face bites usually do better than bites to the chest or belly, if you can believe it, because the venom stays farther from the organs. But the swelling can close off the airway, so we watch that. Does she have any other health problems?"

"No. She's twelve. She's never been sick a day in her life."

"Good. That's all good." Dr. Paredes looked up, and her face softened for one second. "We've got her. Go sit down. I'll come and talk to you as soon as I can."

They took her through the double doors.

Mama and Ishita sat in the plastic chairs for four hours.

It was a long four hours. Ishita sat with her knees pulled up and watched the double doors. Mama called Papa, and Papa came, still in his golf clothes, sunburned, carrying three bags of food from a taqueria that nobody ate. Nandini called from the city. Gabriel Bhaiya called. Nani called twice, and the second time she asked if Ishita had eaten, and Ishita said no, and Nani said, "Eat one bite, for me," and Ishita ate one bite of a cold carnitas taco, for Nani, and it was the worst taco she had ever eaten and she was grateful for it.

At ten o'clock, Dr. Paredes came out.

"She's stable," she said. "The swelling's stopped spreading. Her blood's clotting the way it should. Her breathing is fine. She's going to look like a prizefighter for a week and she's going to be very sorry for herself. But I think she's going to be okay."

Ishita put her face in her hands and finally cried, all of it, all at once, and Mama put her arms around her and held on.

---

They kept Foxy two nights. When Ishita went to get her on Tuesday, Dr. Paredes brought her out herself, on a leash, her face still lopsided and shaved on one side, a catheter bandage on her front leg. When she saw Ishita, her tail began going so hard that her whole back end swung with it, and Foxy made a sound Ishita had never heard from her before, a high, cracked whine that went up and down.

Ishita knelt on the floor of the waiting room, and Foxy walked into her arms and pushed her swollen face into Ishita's neck and stayed there.

"You did everything right, you know," Dr. Paredes said, crouching beside them. "You kept her still. You got her here fast. You knew exactly where the bite was and when it happened. You'd be surprised how many people can't tell me that." She tilted her head. "You want to be a vet?"

"Yes. For horses. And dogs." Ishita wiped her face on her sleeve. "Animal behavior, maybe. How they talk."

"You saw your horse see the snake before you did."

"She told me. With her ears. I just didn't know what she was telling me until I heard it."

Dr. Paredes was quiet a moment. "That's the whole job," she said. "Learning to hear what they're saying before it becomes an emergency. Most of what I see here at two in the morning, if somebody had been watching a day earlier, a week earlier, it wouldn't have had to come here at all." She stood up and held out her hand. "Come and shadow me sometime, if you want. Night shift. Bring coffee."

---

Foxy's face went down in a week. The scar faded to a small pale place in the fur under her left eye, two tiny white dots a finger's width apart, that you could only see if you knew where to look.

She was a senior now. On the first of November, after a month of drafts, she sent her applications: four to California schools an hour or two from home, one to a university in horse country two thousand miles east that she did not let herself mention at dinner, and one in Oregon. In December, waiting to hear, she was writing the essay for that far university's honors program. She sat at the dining table at the family house with Nana across from her, Nana with his fountain pen and the leather ledger Mama had given him, Ishita at her laptop, and every so often he would look over his glasses and ask her what she had written, and she would read him a sentence, and he would close his eyes and listen.

"Too much of what you did," he said once. "Not enough of what you saw."

It was what he had told her at Sunday dinner only a few nights before, when she complained about her journal over the roasted vegetables: that she should stop writing reports for an auditor, and write instead about the color of the sky, and the song on the car radio, and the smile of the man who sold coffee from a cart. She deleted her paragraph about her accomplishments and wrote instead about the moment on the ridge trail when Lark's ears locked forward and every muscle in the mare's body went hard, and the dry buzz from the sage, and Foxy's one good eye looking up at her in the car.

Nana read it when she was done. He folded his glasses and set them down, which was what he did when something mattered.

"Yes," he said. "That one is alive."

---

That same week Nana began, at last, to write his own stories down. Nani said he had been threatening to for sixty years. He wrote in the ledger every morning after his tea, one story at a time, and on Sunday he sent the first one home with her, copied out in his hand that leaned slightly backward, about a cookfire on a ridge in Sikkim. She read it sitting up in bed with Foxy asleep across her feet. He had put the date at the top, and the weather.

On the second Saturday of December, Gabriel Bhaiya walked down from the family house to Kelly Avenue in the fog, with a bag of clementines from Nani in his backpack, to start a new volunteer project at Breakwater House, the senior day program, where he already ran the Thursday lunches for the foundation. He was going to help an old man named Gus write his life down.

That evening he stopped by Ishita's house on his way back and stood in the kitchen eating a clementine, peeling it in one long spiral, the way he said Gus had shown him.

"He's eighty-six," Gabriel Bhaiya said. "He sharpens his pencil with a pocketknife. He made me delete the word *strong.* He's going to be impossible." He was grinning. "There's a woman there who doesn't talk to anybody. Joanne says she used to have dogs. Collies, I think." He looked down at Foxy, who was sitting at his feet watching the clementine with great intensity. "You know, they let visiting dogs come in, if the dog's certified. Calm ones."

Ishita looked down at Foxy. Foxy looked up at her. Her tail swept once across the kitchen floor.

Outside, along Main Street, the Christmas lights had gone up on the hardware store and the bakery and the bookshop, red and green and white, and in the fog each bulb wore a soft halo, like a streetlamp seen through tears.

Chapter 10: Visiting Dog

*2 October 2026. Cool, finally. The maples by the library are starting to turn.*

*In the student center today a man in a wheelchair stopped me and asked if he could pet the service dog I didn't have. He'd mistaken my sweatshirt, which has a dog on it, for the real thing. I said I was sorry, she's at home. Then I thought of Foxy with her chin on Imelda's footplate, and I had to sit down for a minute on the steps outside.*

---

In February, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Ishita found Nana at his desk in the back room with the ledger and a fan of loose pages around it, his reading glasses parked on his forehead and his jaw set. He had filled sixty pages since December and could no longer find anything in them, and the ink wandered when his hand was tired. She sat down beside him, opened her laptop, and made him somewhere to keep them: a private place, for the family only, where each story would stand on its own page under its date and the weather, with a photograph if he had one, and his voice messages beside the words. She set the letters large, so he would not need the magnifying glass. She showed him how to scan the black-and-white prints with scalloped edges from his old album, so every picture could live beside its story.

"You don't have to write a book," she told him. "Just one moment. Whenever one comes."

The first thing he wrote there was Ruby. It took him twenty minutes, and when it was done he sat back and studied it on the screen with the date above it and said, "So that is how it works." He wrote every morning after that. In May he wrote the last one, about the family, all of them, and Ishita read it that night with Foxy across her feet. It had her name in it.

---

Foxy took her test in March, at twelve and a half, gray to the eyebrows, in a community hall in San Mateo that the therapy dog group rented on Saturday mornings. The hall smelled of floor wax and old coffee, with folding chairs stacked against one wall and three evaluators with clipboards at a long table.

The test had fourteen parts. A stranger shook Ishita's hand and talked to her while Foxy sat and was not supposed to jump or sniff. A stranger knelt and ran her hands over Foxy's ears, her paws, her tail. Ishita walked her through a crowd of six people who bumped into them and talked loudly. A man on crutches dropped one, clattering, three feet away. Someone put a plate of food on the floor and Foxy had to walk past it and leave it. At the end, Ishita handed the leash to an evaluator and walked out of the room and out of sight for three minutes, and Foxy had to stay calm without her.

She stood in the corridor outside, with her back against a cold painted wall, and counted the seconds, and listened.

She could not hear anything. That was good. When she came back in, Foxy was sitting at the evaluator's feet, watching the door with both ears up, the standing one and the folded one, and when she saw Ishita her tail swept the floor in one long arc, and she stayed sitting, because nobody had told her she could get up.

"She's a very steady dog," the evaluator said, writing. "Where did she come from?"

"A house up the coast," Ishita said. "She climbed into my lap when I was five, and she's been following me ever since."

The evaluator looked up at her, and smiled, and wrote something else.

---

Breakwater House was on Kelly Avenue, a few blocks from the family house, in the old white farmhouse with the sunroom built onto it, linked by a glass lobby to the shingled apartments next door. Through the lobby glass Ishita could see the courtyard cypress and, on the bench under it, an older couple from upstairs sharing one newspaper. The day room smelled of coffee and floor cleaner, old Motown songs played low beside the piano, and by the window a puzzle of the bridge in the fog lay almost done, with one ragged gap where the sky should be.

In June she graduated, on the football field behind the high school, with the pumpkin field on one side and the cypress windbreak on the other and the fog holding off just long enough. The class sat in folding chairs on the grass in blue gowns that snapped in the wind, and Layla, two rows ahead, turned around every few minutes to make faces. When Ishita's name was called, a noise went up from the bleachers far too large for one family: Papa's enormous laugh, Nandini's whistle through two fingers, Gabriel Bhaiya and Linh shouting, Layla's father ringing a brass bell he had brought from the bakery, and under all of it Nani calling *shabash* in a voice Ishita had not known she still had. Nana did not shout. He sat on the aisle in his good jacket with his cane between his knees, and when she found him he lifted one hand off the cane and held it there, flat and still, the way you hold a hand out to a horse.

"It's always the sky," Joanne Petrakis said, the first Thursday Ishita came, the week after graduation. Joanne was the director, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice that could calm a room. "Nobody can ever find the sky. We have theories." She looked down at Foxy, who was wearing her blue visiting vest and sitting very straight. "And who is this lady?"

"This is Foxy."

Joanne bent down, slowly, and held out the back of her hand, and Foxy sniffed it and then leaned her whole weight against Joanne's shins.

"Oh," said Joanne. "Oh, you're going to be trouble."

Gabriel Bhaiya had run the Thursday lunches for two years, for the foundation where he worked: soup and bread in the sunroom, a little recorder on the table, and anyone over eighty who wanted to could tell a story into it. Most of them were old fishermen and flower growers and ranchers, or their widows, from families that had been on the coast for a hundred years, Portuguese and Mexican and Italian and Japanese and Irish, and Gabriel Bhaiya wrote down what they said word for word and did not tidy it.

Ishita and Foxy went around the tables while the soup was served.

She had learned how to do it in the training. You let the person decide. You came near, and stopped, and let them see the dog, and waited. If they reached out, Foxy went to them. If they did not, you smiled and moved on. Foxy knew it better than Ishita did. She walked through the sunroom at Ishita's side, loose and slow, her tail swinging easy, and at each chair she paused and looked at the person in it, her head a little tilted, and waited to be asked.

Most of them asked.

An old man named Gus Silveira asked first. He had the corner seat, back to the wall, his good ear toward the room, with a cigar box and a yellow pad in front of him, and when Foxy came to his chair he put down his pencil and reached out a big flat hand, a carpenter's hand, all knuckles, and set it on Foxy's head.

"Sheepdog," he said. "And something."

"Nobody ever met her father."

"Huh." He ran his thumb along the folded ear. "We had a mutt in the army. In Germany. Corporal. He rode in the jeep, sat up front like an officer." He scratched under Foxy's chin, and Foxy closed her eyes. "Smarter than half the officers, too. You put that in, Gabe," he called down the room. "Corporal. Smarter than the officers."

"I'll put it in," Gabriel Bhaiya called back.

---

The woman who did not talk was named Imelda.

She sat by the window in a wheelchair, every Thursday, with a lap blanket over her knees and her hands folded on it, looking out at the cypress in the courtyard. She was ninety-one. She had grown up on a ranch in the hills above Pescadero and had raised sheep there all her life, Joanne said, and for sixty years she had worked them with border collies, always two or three at a time. She had dementia now. She did not speak to the staff or to the other members, and she had not spoken to anyone at all, Joanne said, since the winter.

The first Thursday, Ishita brought Foxy close and stopped, and Imelda did not look at them. The second Thursday, the same. On the third Thursday, Foxy did something she had never done in all her visits. She walked forward on her own, the leash going slack, and lay down on the floor beside the wheelchair, and rested her chin on the footplate, next to her shoe, and stayed there, very still.

Imelda looked down.

She looked at the dog, and kept looking. Then her hand came off the lap blanket, slowly, trembling, and found the top of Foxy's head. Her fingers moved through the fur behind the ears, small careful circles, exactly the way you would do it to a dog you had known all your life.

"*Good girl,*" she said. Her voice was cracked and low, like a door that had not been opened. "*There's a good girl. Lie down now. That'll do.*"

Joanne, across the room, put down the plate she was holding.

Imelda went on talking. Not to Ishita. To Foxy. She told the dog the ewes were up on the north slope and they would bring them down in the morning. She said the creek was high. She said this was a good dog, a good working dog, and that Nell was getting too old for the steep ground but this one was young yet, she could do it, she could bring them down. She called Foxy by three different names, none of them hers. Foxy lay with her chin on the footplate and listened to all of it, and her tail moved slowly, once, twice, on the sunroom floor.

When it was time to go, Ishita knelt beside the wheelchair.

"Thank you for talking to her," Ishita said. "She likes your voice."

Imelda looked at her, for the first time, and there was nothing in her face at all, no recognition, no question. Then she looked back down at Foxy.

"That one's a worker," she said. "You can see it in the ears."

---

That was the summer Ishita rode along with Dr. Adeyemi.

He had offered when he heard she was going to study animal science, and so three mornings a week in July she met his white truck in the barn lot at five, in the fog, with two coffees in a cardboard tray, and climbed in among the clipboards and the clinking drawers. They drove all over the coast and over the hills to barns and ranches and backyard paddocks, to vaccinations and lameness exams and a mare foaling in the dark.

The call she remembered most was a colic, early on a Tuesday, at a ranch down past Pescadero where the road ran between artichoke fields and the ocean. The horse was a big bay gelding standing in his stall with his head low, and he kept turning to look at his flank, and then pawing, and then looking at his flank again. He did not want to eat.

Dr. Adeyemi stood in the stall door and watched the horse a full two minutes before he touched him.

"Look at his face," he said quietly. "Tell me what you see."

Ishita looked. She had been looking at horses' faces all her life. But she looked now in the way he had taught her, part by part.

"His ears are held stiff and pointed back a little. Not pinned. Just stiff. The muscles above his eyes are tight, so the eye looks almost triangular. His nostrils are strained, squared off at the top. The muscle along his jaw is bunched. His mouth is tight." She stopped. "He's in pain. Real pain. Maybe a seven out of ten."

Dr. Adeyemi gave a single nod.

"There's a scale for it now," he said. "Researchers took hundreds of photographs of horses' faces and worked out the signs. Ears. Eyes. Nostrils. Chewing muscles. Mouth. A horse grimace, they call it. Most horse owners couldn't name one of those signs." He went into the stall and put his hand on the gelding's neck. "In your lifetime, Ishita, somebody's going to build machines that can see a face like that and say, *this animal is hurting,* before any human notices. I hope that somebody is a person who knows what it's for."

She did not answer. But she thought about it all the way back up the coast.

Chapter 11: Early Action

The email had come back in January, on a Thursday at four in the afternoon, while Ishita was at the barn with Foxy.

She did not open it there. She saw the name of the university at the top of her phone, and her stomach turned over, and she turned the phone over on the tack trunk and went on soaping Lark's bridle beside Aurelio, because she did not want to find out in front of anybody. Aurelio watched her do it and kept his peace. But when she got up to leave, he reached down and put one hand on Foxy's gray head and said, without looking at her, "Whatever it says, mija, the horses don't care."

She opened it in the car, parked under the eucalyptus, with Foxy in the passenger seat watching her face.

Then she sat there without starting the engine until the windshield fogged.

Foxy leaned over and licked her ear.

---

The university was two thousand miles east, and it was enormous, with more students than the whole coast had people, its own bus lines and its own power plant, set down in the middle of horse country, where the land rolled green in every direction and the fences ran for miles, black-painted plank fences around fields of grass so blue-green in spring that people wrote songs about it. It had a teaching barn with eighty horses and a strong animal science program and a road from there, if you worked, to the best veterinary schools in the country. It had a lab where people studied how animals communicated, and the professor who ran it had written back to Ishita in October, two kind paragraphs, after she sent him her science fair project and a page about the rattlesnake on the ridge, and how Lark had heard it first.

She had applied to six schools. Four of them were in California, an hour or two from home. This was the one she had wanted. She had not let herself say so out loud.

Nobody in the family had ever gone so far. Nandini had driven over the hill every day for four years. Gabriel Bhaiya had been an hour away and come home most weekends with his laundry. Mama had gone to college in the same state where she grew up. Rajiv Mama went everywhere in the world, but he had started from home and always came back to it, and that, everyone agreed, was different.

She told them at dinner. She had planned to make it a speech. Instead she set her phone down between the dishes, with the email open on it, and sat back, and waited.

Papa read it first. He read it twice, his reading glasses going up and down, and then he laid the phone down with great care, like an egg, and looked at her across the table, and his big face did several things at once.

"Two thousand miles," he said.

"About that."

"Do they have golf?"

"Papa."

"I'm just asking. I'm going to need something to do when I visit." He picked the phone up again and read it a third time. Then he got up from the table, came around, and hugged her so hard that her feet came off the floor, and laughed his enormous laugh into her hair, and she could feel that he was also not quite laughing.

Mama said nothing at first. She sat with her hands folded on the table and looked at her younger daughter the way she had looked at her when Ishita was five and had come out from under the dining table to ask what Ruby heard.

"You always knew," Mama said finally. "Didn't you? Even when you were tiny. You always knew exactly where you were going."

"Not always."

"Always." Mama's eyes were wet, but her voice was steady, her principal's voice, the one she used at graduations. "I'm proud of you. I'm so proud of you I can hardly hold it. And I am going to miss you so much that I'm going to be very difficult to live with, and your father is going to have to take up a second sport."

---

Nandini drove down from the city that night and lay on Ishita's bed with her, the way they had when Ishita was little and afraid of the foghorn, and they looked at the ceiling.

"You know what's weird," Nandini said. "I'm twenty-seven. I've got a job and an apartment and a car payment. And I've never lived more than forty-five minutes from this house in my life."

"Is that bad?"

"No. It's what I wanted. I like being close. I like Sunday dinner." Nandini turned her head on the pillow. "But you're going to see things I've never seen. You're going to be somewhere nobody knows us, and you're going to have to be yourself without any of us around to remind you who that is. That's scary. I'd be scared." She was quiet a moment. "I'm a little jealous. Just a little. Don't tell anyone."

"I won't."

"You're the baby," Nandini said. "You were supposed to stay home the longest."

"I know."

Nandini reached over and held her hand, the way she had when Ishita was four, and they lay there and listened to the foghorn.

---

At the family house, Nani asked if they would feed her.

"They have dining halls, Nani. Lots of them. All kinds of food."

"What kinds?"

"Everything. Pizza. Salads. Indian, sometimes. There's a Thai place near campus."

Nani considered this with deep suspicion. "Do they make dal?"

"Probably not like yours."

"Nobody makes it like mine," said Nani, as a statement of fact. She went on folding laundry that did not need folding, smoothing a dish towel flat on the kitchen table with both hands. Then she said, not looking up, "You will call me on Sundays."

"Every Sunday."

"And I will ask you if you have eaten, and you will tell me the truth."

"Yes, Nani."

"And I will ask you if you are being kind to people." She looked up then. Her eyes were very bright behind her glasses. "In a new place, that is the most important question. Everybody there will be far from home, like you. Some of them will be more frightened than you. Be kind to the frightened ones. That is how you make a home in a strange place. Your Nana and I learned it in 1978, off the plane in the cold, with three children and eighty dollars."

Ishita put her arms around her, and Nani, who was small now, smaller every year, held on harder than Ishita expected.

Nana kept his own counsel for two weeks. Then one Sunday after Weekly Council he called her into the back room where he kept his drafting board, and took a small envelope from the drawer, and gave it to her.

Inside was a photograph, very old, the edges scalloped: a black dog sitting where the snow began on a high ridge, ears straight up. It was a different print from the one he had given Gabriel Bhaiya, smaller, more worn, as though it had lived in a pocket for years.

"I had two," Nana said. "One I gave to your brother when he went away. This one I kept. I carried it in my breast pocket in Sikkim, and on the plane in 1978, and I have had it in that drawer since." He looked at her over his glasses. "You asked me what he heard."

"I remember."

"I have thought about it for sixty years," Nana said, "and I still do not know. Perhaps you will find out." He closed the drawer. "Write down what you learn. Put the date at the top, and the weather, and then one true thing. So the rest of us can know it too."

---

The last show was in June, at the horse park in Woodside, under the oaks, on a bright morning with the fog pulled back to the edge of the sea.

Lark was a grown mare that summer, and a different horse. Her copper coat shone. She had muscle over her topline and a calm eye. She still worried, sometimes, and she still told Ishita about it, three strides out, with her ears. But now Ishita listened, and answered, and Lark believed her.

They went in for the last round of the last class of the day, a course of eight fences at two-foot-nine. There was a flower box at the fifth fence, red geraniums, at the base of a white gate.

Three strides out, Lark's ears went forward and locked on the flowers.

Ishita sat deep and breathed out and closed her legs, gently, and said, "I see it. I know. Go on." And she felt the mare's back soften under her, and the ears came back to her, one and then both, listening, and then forward again to the fence, and Lark jumped the flower box round and soft and landed and cantered on.

They got third. A yellow ribbon. A girl from Portola Valley won on a horse that cost more than Linh's house. Ishita did not care. She pinned the yellow ribbon to Lark's bridle and walked her out on a long rein under the oaks, and leaned down and put her arms around the mare's copper neck, and cried, and Lark stood and let her.

Lark stayed at Lobitos Ridge. Yoli had a student, a twelve-year-old named Noor, an anxious, careful, determined girl who had come to the barn the year before and who reminded Ishita, Yoli said, of somebody. In July, Ishita taught Noor everything she knew about Lark. The flower boxes. The yawn. The way the mare's ears went back to you in the corners, not angry, just listening. The ninth day at the fence.

"How do you know all that?" Noor asked.

"I watched her," Ishita said. "That's all. You just watch, for a long time, and don't want anything. And then she tells you."

---

Foxy knew before anyone told her.

The suitcases came down from the garage in the second week of August, and from that moment Foxy would not leave Ishita's side. She had followed her everywhere for thirteen years, and now she did it as if it were a job. She lay in the doorway of the bedroom while Ishita packed, her chin on her paws, her eyebrows moving as she watched each thing go into each bag. When Ishita left the room she got up and followed. When Ishita came back she lay down again, a little closer. On the third night she climbed into the open suitcase on the floor and lay down on top of the sweaters, curled tight, and looked up with both ears flat out to the sides, the way they went when she was unsure.

*Where are you going?* the ears said. *Can I come?*

Ishita sat down on the floor beside the suitcase and put her face in Foxy's neck.

She had asked. She had called the university housing office and asked if there was any way, and they had said no, gently, as they must have said no to a thousand other students. No dogs in the dorms. Foxy would stay home with Mama and Papa, who loved her, and Papa would walk her to the corner for ice cream every night, and Mama would let her sleep on Ishita's bed, which had been forbidden for thirteen years and was now, suddenly, allowed.

"I'll come back," she told her. "At Landing Night. And Christmas. And all summer. I'll come back."

Foxy licked her ear and did not get out of the suitcase.

---

The last Weekly Council before she left was on the third Sunday of August.

Everyone came: Mama and Papa, Nandini from the city, Gabriel Bhaiya, Rajiv Mama and Mami, who had come down from the north coast for it, Vikram Uncle and Ryan and Ananya. They crowded around the dining table under the brass lamp that hummed, and Nana sat at the head with the yellow pad and his fountain pen, eighty-nine years old, his hand slower now, his voice the same.

Old business. New business.

"The chair recognizes Ishita," Nana said.

She stood up. She had written it out on a card, but she did not need the card.

"I move," she said, "that I come home for Landing Night."

There was a short silence. Then Gabriel Bhaiya said, "Seconded," and Nandini said, "Seconded," and Papa said, "Seconded, and also I'll pay for the ticket," and Ananya, who was seven and did not understand any of it, said, "Seconded!" very loudly, and everyone laughed.

Nana wrote it on the yellow pad, slowly, in his square capitals, while Ishita watched the pen move.

*MOTION: THAT ISHITA COME HOME FOR LANDING NIGHT. STATUS:*

He paused. He looked up at her over his glasses. Then he wrote one more word.

*CARRIED.*

---

*7 October 2026. Rain all day. Cold enough for the sweater Nani knitted.*

*Mama says Foxy sleeps on my bed every night, on my side, with her chin on my pillow. She says sometimes in the evening Foxy goes and stands by the front door at the time I used to come home from the barn, and waits, with her good ear up. Then she gives up and goes and lies down.*

*I know exactly what her face looks like when he does that. I have been watching it all my life. That's the hardest part of being this far away. Not that I can't see him. That I know exactly what I would see.*

Chapter 12: Ears Forward

They drove her to the airport on the last Thursday in August, over the hill on the highway through the fog, the whole car full: Papa driving, Mama in front, Nani in the back beside Ishita with a foil packet of parathas in her lap that she had made at five that morning and would not let anyone else hold. Foxy lay across Ishita's feet with her gray chin on her shoe.

At the top of the hill the fog fell away behind them in one stroke, as it always had, and the bay lay spread out ahead in hard bright sunlight. Ishita turned around in her seat. The fog was a white wall sitting on the ridge, pouring slowly over the top like milk from a bowl. Somewhere under it was the town, and the family house, and Nana in his chair by the window, who had said goodbye to her that morning at the front door with both hands on her shoulders and had not been able to say anything else at all.

At the curb Papa set her bags on the sidewalk and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the terminal as if it had done something to him personally. Mama said to call when she landed, for the fourth time. Nani pressed the foil packet into her hands. "For the plane. Eat it before it gets cold. It is already cold. Eat it anyway."

Then Ishita knelt by the open car door, with people and suitcases streaming past on all sides, and put her arms around Foxy's neck.

Foxy did not wag. She stood very still, leaning her whole weight in, her standing ear turned toward Ishita's face and her folded ear flat, and she made a small sound in her throat, almost too low to hear. Ishita had heard it once before, the night of the rattlesnake. It meant *I don't understand. Please.*

"I'm coming back," she whispered into the fur. "Landing Night. It's been carried. Nana wrote it down."

She walked into the terminal and did not look back, because she knew exactly what she would see.

---

The university was green, and it was enormous.

Not the green of the coast, dark and wet and half hidden in fog, but a soft, open green rolling away under a huge sky, fenced with black planks that ran over the hills for miles. The air was thick and sweet with cut grass. At night the trees pulsed with insects, and she lay awake in her narrow dorm bed listening to them and to the silence underneath, where the foghorn should have been. Forty thousand students. Buses with their own routes. A dining hall the size of an airplane hangar, where she heard six languages before she found the yogurt.

Her roommate, Tamsin, came from a farming county three hours east, with beef cattle and four older brothers, and cried every night the first week with her face to the wall, very quietly, thinking Ishita could not hear. On the fourth night Ishita sat on the edge of her bed and held out half of Nani's last paratha, cold, in its foil. They ate it in the dark. Tamsin told her about a heifer she had raised from a calf and sold at the county fair and cried over for a month, and Ishita told her about Cal and the trailer in the fog. After that they walked to the teaching barn together at five-thirty every morning, with coffee.

*Be kind to the frightened ones,* Nani had said. Ishita had not understood until she found out that she was one of them.

---

The teaching barn stood on a low hill at the edge of campus, long and white with a green roof, and below it the broodmares grazed with their foals. At dawn the mist lay in the hollows like water, and the mares stood in it to their knees while the light came gold across the grass. The first morning one mare lifted her head and turned an ear toward Ishita, then the other. *There,* Ishita thought. *That's a yes.*

The barn manager's old blue heeler, Pepper, slept in the tack room on a saddle pad and took a week to decide about her, which Ishita respected.

Three afternoons a week she worked in the lab of the professor who had written back to her, a basement room full of screens where graduate students in headphones marked videos of dogs frame by frame: ear position, tail height, lip lick, yawn, whale eye, play bow, freezing, the weight on the front feet or the back. Someday, the professor said, a computer would learn the patterns and tell a person who did not know how to look what a frightened dog was saying.

"Most people never learn the language," he told her. "You did. So the question is how we teach it to everybody else."

On her screen a shelter dog turned its head away and licked its lips, twice, and showed the white of its eye. She knew that dog. She did not know that dog. She knew all of them.

---

Her floor had a kitchen with two burners and a smoke alarm everyone feared, and on Sunday nights in September it began, without anyone planning it, to fill with people cooking the food they missed.

Ji-woo from Seoul brought half-moon rice cakes her mother had mailed for the harvest holiday, packed in pine needles that made the whole hallway smell like a forest. Batbayar, who had grown up in Ulaanbaatar and spent every summer at his grandfather's herd on the steppe, showed them a video of a dun mare being milked at dawn, and he and Ishita argued happily for an hour about whose horses were tougher. Camila from Monterrey made cajeta in a borrowed pot and told them how her family set out marigolds and photographs in November. Tamsin made her grandmother's buttermilk pie and admitted she had never eaten food from anywhere but home and was now, she said, ruined for life. Arjun, from Kochi, listened to Ishita describe Landing Night and said, delighted, that his family had nothing like it.

"Nobody does," Ishita said. "We made it. Nana and Nani came down out of a cold October sky with three children and eighty dollars, and the family's been lighting lamps for it ever since."

So she told them the rest. A coastal town in a metropolitan area where half the world had come to live. Aurelio's rancheras at dawn in a barn on a ridge, and Yoli's marigolds for the barn dog. Linh's grandmother's sticky rice in banana leaves at Lunar New Year. Layla's father's manakish with methi in it, because Nani had traded him a recipe. A long table under a walnut tree, and Weekly Council on Sunday nights, where a motion for a dog had been tabled for eleven years.

"Tabled," said Batbayar, enchanted. "Like a parliament."

"Worse," said Ishita. "Like my grandfather."

They laughed, and she understood, standing at the two burners with a wooden spoon, that she was not giving any of it away by telling it. It came back larger. Camila's marigolds and Yoli's were cousins. Batbayar's grandfather and Nana would have sat silent together on a fence rail and been perfectly happy.

The week before she flew home, Ishita strung a line of small electric lamps along her window, since the dorm allowed no flames, and by Friday the whole floor had added to it: a paper marigold from Camila, a red tassel of horsehair from Batbayar's grandfather's bridle, a tiny paper lantern from Ji-woo, and from Tamsin a blue county-fair ribbon. From the quad, at night, it looked like nobody's holiday and everybody's.

---

Gabriel Bhaiya called the night before he flew to Lisbon. He had asked her for a favor: a new branch on the family tree she had kept for years, for his birth mother's family, Marisol and her parents in Jacona and Tía Lupe, and his brother and sister, Mateo and Valeria. Mateo had been sending her every photograph he could find all month.

She took the call in the tack room, sitting on a trunk with the laptop on her knees and Pepper's chin, unexpectedly, on her knee beside it, and she explained where each person went and which dates were still missing, in her careful science-fair voice.

"You're doing the voice," Gabriel Bhaiya said, from two thousand miles away.

She did not argue. She went on explaining.

On the morning of the twenty-third she finished it: a second branch, green and full, growing from the other side of his name, with one photograph of him at the joining, from graduation day, squinting into the sun. She sent it to him in the middle of his afternoon in Lisbon and went to chemistry. That night he sent one line. *Thank you, Ish. I needed a minute.*

---

She wrote too. She had begun on her first night, in the family's private place for keeping stories, the one she had built for Nana on a rainy Tuesday last February. Only the family could open it. Nana's pages were there, each under its date, with his voice beside the words. Now there was a new page under Ishita's name, on the branch she had grown.

One incident at a time, the way Nana had taught her: date at the top, then the weather, then one true thing. The horse whose ears went back to her like Cal's. The flower box. The snake. Imelda and Foxy's chin on the footplate. Far from everyone, nobody needed her to be anything, and in the quiet she saw more, not less.

Under every entry the family left notes. Gabriel Bhaiya wrote *Yes. Exactly this.* Mami wrote that she had read the snake one aloud to Rajiv Mama, who listened without interrupting, which for him was a standing ovation. And under every entry, sometime in the night her time, came the same three words from Nani.

*Have you eaten?*

---

She flew home in the last week of October, because it had been carried.

At the top of the hill Papa drove down into the fog, and it closed around the car, cool and gray and wet, and Ishita put the window down and breathed salt and cypress and wet earth, and Papa passed her a napkin from the glovebox without looking at her.

When the car pulled into the driveway the front door was already open, and on the top step stood Foxy.

She did not run. She stood perfectly still with every part of her pointed at the car, head high, tail lifted and waiting, and her ears, the standing one and the folded one, straining forward as far as ears could go, toward the sound of the car door opening, the way Ruby's ears had gone up at the edge of the snow on a ridge in Sikkim sixty years before.

Then Ishita said her name.

The lamps went on the back steps of the family house that night, and that year the marigolds came too: Yoli and Aurelio brought two buckets from her garden, because Landing Night and the first of November fell in the same week. Layla's father brought manakish. Linh's grandmother told Ishita, through Linh, that she was too thin and studied too much. Gus came in a pressed shirt, brought by his daughter, Tess, and let Foxy put her chin on his knee. Gabriel Bhaiya, home from Lisbon, lit the sparklers too early. Nana sat at the top of the steps with a blanket over his knees and the old photograph of the black dog in his breast pocket, and watched the little flames lean and recover in the air off the sea.

"So many people," he said.

"Everybody's from somewhere," said Ishita, on the step below him, and he put his hand on her head and left it there.

---

What came after is easy to tell, because she wrote it down.

She would finish her degree in animal science and go on to veterinary school, and become the kind of veterinarian who stands in a stall a while before she touches anything, watching the face. And then, as the world changed faster than anyone expected, she would step into the advancing world of AI, where her trained eye was exactly what was missing. She would help build models that learned, from hundreds of thousands of hours of watching, how dogs talk: the ears, the tail, the weight on the feet, the yawn that is not tiredness, the play bow, the bark that means *come* and the bark that means *stay away*. Models that could stand beside a shelter worker or a frightened child or a soldier with a working dog and say quietly, *This dog is scared. Slow down. Turn sideways. Give him time.* Technology made for good, by someone who knew what it was for.

On her office wall, years from then, there would be a black-and-white photograph with scalloped edges of a dog where the snow began, ears straight up. People would ask about it, and she would say her grandfather had wondered all his life what the dog heard, and that she was closer than she used to be.

But that night she was eighteen and home, on the bottom step of the family house in the fog, with the lamps lit and her dog's chin on her knee.

---

*29 October 2026. Landing Night. Fog all evening, thick enough to lose a horse in. Home.*

*Foxy was on the step when the car pulled in. Both ears forward, as far as they would go, and she did not move until I said her name. Nana says Ruby stood like that at the edge of the snow, the morning the slope came down. All my life I have asked what Ruby heard. Tonight I think the better question is why he listened so hard. Foxy answered it from the top step: you listen like that for the ones who are yours. Ruby's people were on that ridge. Ears forward means someone matters. On my floor, two thousand miles from here, a string of lamps is burning in my window with a marigold and a horsehair tassel and a blue ribbon on it, and I think that means the same thing. I'm going to spend my life teaching people to see it.*