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Amy trudged her way down the stairs. She could hear pots and pans clanking, cutting through any of the fatigue still clinging to her— she’d slept only four hours after spending just as long staring at the ceiling in the dark. Carol was always in a pissy mood on weekends, taking her anger out on whatever she was making for breakfast. Even just thinking about it was agitating Amy. Like nails on a chalkboard, or nails on styrofoam, or nails on literally anything. She bit hers for a reason.
Her teeth ground against each other as she turned the corner into the kitchen. But it was only Mark, pushing a skillet onto the stove. He was whisking eggs and milk in a glass tray, and there was some sliced bread on the counter next to it.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. The overly-cheery words rolled from his mouth like they were coming off of a teleprompter. “I’m just making some French toast, since we’re out of pancake mix. That sound alright?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Amy mumbled. She skirted around him and went to pour a glass of water for herself. “Where’s Carol? And Vic?”
“Your mother and sister are at that photo shoot in Concord, remember? They’re staying overnight.” Mark looked back to the stove and fiddled with the heat. “I was thinking that we could go out for the day, maybe see the new exhibit at the natural history museum.”
The mental image of taxidermied animals and plastic models of dinosaurs was grim. Maybe she could play the homework excuse and lock herself upstairs? She was not heading to the hospital, though. She had seen enough of it, and the hospital had seen enough of her. Seventy hours in the past week, to be exact. Amy took a sip of water to conceal her reluctance and shrugged slightly.
“It’s about the evolution of horses,” Mark continued to himself. There was a sizzle as a slice of bread hit the pan. The French toast smelled good, even if food always turned out slimy when Mark made it.
Amy took her cup of water to the dining table and slumped down in a chair. Her adoptive father hadn’t cooked breakfast in what must have been weeks. She shot a glance at his back. New medication? No, she had been with Carol when she picked up the latest prescriptions at the pharmacy. It must have been one of his rare days, with sunshine and rainbows in lieu of closed blinds and pajamas in the middle of the day.
Mark plated two slices of toast and gestured for Amy to take them. “Did you know that horses’ hooves are equivalent to our middle fingernails?”
“Yes.”
He looked vaguely disappointed at that.
She got up to grab the plate. Amy hesitated before opening the fridge and grabbing the can of whipped cream. Her muffin top was obvious when not covered by her costume or a jacket. But whipped cream was necessary for French toast, and she’d only feel disgusted with herself after eating a fuckton of delicious aerosolized sugar. She sat down again, shook the can, then cringed as the cap flew off and hit the potted orchid wilting in the center of the table.
The smile on Mark’s face had gone from uncharacteristic to full-on strained. “So, Amy, what do you say? We don’t have to spend the whole day there. Maybe you’d like to go shopping later?”
Amy squeezed the whipped cream into a distorted cloud across the top of her toast. It was obvious what Mark was staking on this interaction. Either it was the museum or total disintegration of the family unit. Shopping sounded almost as agonizing. Stores musky with perfume, great herds of leggy girls around every clothing rack, no Vicky to defend her from the insistent employees peddling scarves and earrings that Amy could feel the pathogens writhing on.
She bit her lip before responding, “Sure, I’ll go get dressed after this.”
Mark handed a wad of bills to the employee at the ticket desk. He hadn’t gone to the bank in recent memory, leaving him with only a fistful of fives and ones. “One adult and one child,” he said politely.
The employee, a spectacled old man in a Boston Bruins jacket, peered at Amy.
His daughter sunk a little deeper into her Glory Girl-branded hoodie. Her chubby face gave her a fighting chance at being mistaken for twelve, but the adolescent sullenness to her eyes brought her estimated age right back up to its actual sixteen. So much for the child discount on admission. Breaking the rules never paid.
“... Have a nice day,” the old man said reluctantly, passing Mark two tickets marked General+Theater. He waved a hand and looked away like he had just seen a ski-masked criminal sneak by.
Amy sniffed and turned on her heel, loping into the museum in a seemingly random direction. She didn’t even turn her head to look at the signs for directions.
Mark hurried after her, trying not to bodycheck other visitors as he did so. He caught up in a few strides. “Amy? You’re going the wrong way,” he told her diplomatically. “If you really want to see the Pleistocene exhibit, we can visit after.”
“I hate judgy people,” muttered Amy. She glared down at the carpet, scratching underneath her star-embossed sleeves, frizzy bangs casting a shadow over her eyes. “Bet if Vicky was here, he wouldn’t have cared a bit. Would’ve just given us the tickets for free, probably.”
“I think he was just wondering if he recognized us,” offered Mark. He reached out to clasp Amy’s shoulder, but something stopped him before he made contact. His hand hung awkwardly above her arm as he continued, “Let’s not let that ruin our day.”
Amy looked up at him. A convulsion passed across her face, and after a couple of seconds her expression resolved itself to a more appropriate, non-miserable emotion. She pulled her sleeve over her scratched wrist. “Whatever. Where’re the horses, then?”
Finally, a question that Mark could answer. He pointed past a garden area full of Cretaceous recreations, towards a hall full of paintings of prehistoric plains. “That-a-way. The movie’s at one, so we have an hour or so to look around.”
Amy kept her distance from him as they walked through the sculptures. She shot just as many furtive glances at the other guests as she did the models of hadrosaurs.
Mark hated to see her like this, and her self-consciousness dredged up memories of what he had been like in high school. He gestured for her to stop where they wouldn’t be out in the open, instead blocked from view by a mother maiasaura and its young. “Amy?” he said softly. “Is something going on?”
His daughter kept her eyes down, looking at the plaque by the display explaining how Maiasaura peeblesorum lived in herds with their juvenile young. One of her hands moved up to her mouth so she could bite her nails, and there was a loud snipping noise as she did so.
“It’s nothing,” Amy eventually forced out. She gestured towards the other side of the room. “Those girls just reminded me of Vic and I got confused.”
Mark turned to look, though his view was partially obscured by a fake fern. He saw two tall young women, one blonde and the other with pale brown hair. They were chatting animatedly and the first girl had a galaxy-patterned phone case that looked just like Victoria’s. Why that would have upset Amy, he wasn’t sure.
“Are you missing Victoria?” he asked tentatively. “She’ll be back by tomorrow, like I said earlier.”
Amy mimicked him and sat against the railing, muttering, “I guess.” She finally met his gaze. “She’s always with Dean nowadays, you know?”
“Oh boy, do I know,” Mark said, rolling his eyes. He smiled despite himself, remembering the brief panic he’d felt when he’d discovered the door to Victoria’s room closed while Dean was visiting the week before. It had turned out that they were just downstairs and the wind had blown the door closed, but it had still raised his blood pressure through the roof. His little girls were growing up…
“I hate it,” Amy huffed. Her voice was sharp as she continued, “I just wanted to spend my weekend with her, but now she’s off modeling or whatever without even telling me. She even said that we’d go see Netizen before AP exams started, but now we can’t even do that.”
Mark’s eyebrows raised. He hadn’t been expecting such an outpouring, but he attempted to sound nonplussed as he asked, “And what’s Netizen? Would that be something you’d like to go see later with me?”
To his continued surprise, Amy turned red and frantically shook her head. “No, no, um. I don’t think you’d like it. It’s about the Internet and stuff.”
“I know about the Internet,” Mark said in a faux-offended tone. “How old do you think I am?”
“But it’s… a romance movie,” Amy continued limply. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“Alright, alright.” He raised an eyebrow playfully at her. “Something too racy to see with your old man?”
Amy’s blush darkened, freckles practically disappearing into the red skin around them. “Not really, I guess. It’s about these two girls who meet on the Internet, but one of them’s kind of crazy and gets obsessed with the other one.”
“Oh, like Single White Female. That sounds interesting.”
“Like what?”
Mark laughed. “Well, I suppose that must have been before your time. It’s a thriller sort of like what you just described. I’ll never forget it— the week after your mother and I saw it in theaters, we found out that she was pregnant with Vic.”
“Huh,” Amy said. “Weird to think that Carol would ever go see a scary movie.”
“After Victoria was born, she got less interested in going out, that’s true. She spent a lot of time reading in the nursery, just watching Vic in her crib.” Mark turned slightly to point at the mother maiasaura. Below it, newly-hatched babies were set into poses crawling out of their eggs and flopping around in the nest. “Remind you of anyone here?”
Amy stared at the sculpture for a moment, then snorted. “Carol looks a lot less friendly than that. I mean, if we were that wrinkly and covered in albumen, she’d throw swords at us until we showered.”
“Hey,” protested Mark, “don’t demonize your mother. I would also throw swords at you if you got egg all over the furniture.” Almost impulsively, he wrapped an arm around Amy, pulling her close enough that her head bumped against his bicep. The sounds of other visitors faded into the background as he felt Amy relax into the embrace.
She inhaled deeply, then slumped further against him. They sat like that for a couple of minutes: watching the crowds amble past illustrations on the walls, breathing in the scent of resin and paper, listening as a tour guide tried to explain the history of whales to her wandering flock.
“I never knew you were so into zoology,” Amy eventually said. “Were you a horse girl, Mark?”
Mark raised his eyebrows. Sometimes conversations with his youngest were an endless parade of surprises. How long had it been since they’d sat down like this and he’d heard more than a simple request to be driven to the hospital? He replied, “Horse girl? No, I wouldn’t phrase it that way. But in my high school days, zoology was taught by my favorite teacher. Mr. G was his name. It’s why I paid such attention.”
Amy nodded; she still rested against his shoulder, the movement mussing the side of her hair. “I wish I had cool teachers. Have I told you about what my stats teacher did last Friday?”
That made Mark wince. He hadn’t heard the details exactly, as he’d been lying awake in bed while Amy stomped around downstairs, crying in between bouts of throwing papers. Carol hadn’t exchanged many words with him either. Energy practically seeped out of him as he thought about his wife, the way she’d turned to sleep with her back facing him.
“... so that’s why I got a C on my last quiz,” Amy was finishing. She glanced up at Mark. Any attempt to feign aloofness was ruined by the expectant look in her eyes, grasping for a sympathetic response. “It’s total bullsh— I mean, it was awful.”
“I’m sure it was,” Mark sighed in commiseration. He shifted his weight from leaning and stood up, dislodging Amy from her place next to him. “How do you feel now? Would you like to get out from behind this dinosaur?”
She sniffed and wiped her nose with one sleeve. “Yeah, whatever. It’s almost time for the movie, right?”
Mark checked his watch. “Yes. Let’s head over now, shall we?”
“Sure.” Amy tucked her hands back into the pocket of her hoodie, expression muted. Her hair fell across her face as she unconsciously returned to slouching.
The walk across the first floor of the museum was short and spent in a soft silence. Though Amy didn’t shear so far away from him while walking as before, Mark felt the distance palpate between them. He stared off at a display on the far wall of the central atrium; it would likely upset his daughter more if she felt him stare at her. When they reached the museum theater and ducked through the curtains, Mark let Amy enter well ahead of him.
The lights inside the theater were already extinguished as they entered. All the chairs were plastic and unfolded in their crooked rows like pale stick-bugs. Then the screen flickered with a gray and staticky life, the title “Equus: Tales of the Horse” rolling across the screen before a British woman began lilting out the opening narration.
Mark chose a seat in the back so as to not strain his neck; Amy arranged herself on his right side, though not leaning on him as before. He finally allowed himself to look over at her and smile. They were spending time together, and it was good. Carol and Victoria would be back tomorrow and they could manage the house while he recovered from this outing. As the narrator continued speaking, he sank back into the seat and let his eyelids droop.
Amy watched the film’s drone footage of a herd of horses running across the Mongolian steppes. The scrubby landscape, lit by a rising sun, was a familiar shade of gold.
She thought of Vicky, how she had been a horse girl from the start of fourth grade lasting through that summer— a phase started after reading My Friend Flicka, ending when Vicky realized that she couldn’t be a cape and a show jumper at the same time. Was that interest something else that Amy hadn’t inherited from their father?
Amy watched the horses on the screen gallop and leap, their movements flowing like hers never had, and eventually didn’t think at all.