Carriage Ride

Please note the conversations and exact words in this account are reconstructed from the writer’s memories of events that happened decades ago. While the core experiences and emotions remain vivid, the specific dialogue is approximated to the best of the writer’s recollection.

Memory has a peculiar way of preserving certain moments in crystalline clarity while letting others fade into fog. Even now, at forty-seven, I can close my eyes and feel the exact texture of that horse's mane between my fingers, smell the mixture of leather and hay wafting from the trailer, hear the precise timbre of that high-pitched voice that would haunt my dreams for decades to come.

It was October of 1992 – one of those perfect autumn days in St. Louis when the sky seems impossibly blue and the air carries just enough bite to make you feel alive. The reception was being held at the Lindell Terrace Cafe, an elegant venue run by the owner of that popular Central West End spot, Empanadas. My mother and stepfather had already done the intimate ceremony thing a month earlier at Ventana Resort in Big Sur, all dramatic cliffs and crashing waves. This was the big show for everyone else, the corporate titans and society figures who made up my new stepfather's world at PGAV.

I didn't want to be inside. At fourteen, I was caught in that awkward space between childhood and whatever comes next, too old to be charmed by wedding festivities but too young to drink champagne and pretend to care about architectural shop talk. So I gravitated to the horses. They were magnificent creatures, a matched pair of white Percherons with gentle eyes and feet the size of dinner plates. The carriage master was methodically checking every buckle and strap, his weathered hands moving with the confidence of someone who'd done this a thousand times before.

"They're Belgian drafts, you know. Bred for power but gentle as lambs."

The voice made something in my stomach clench, though I wouldn't understand why until later. He was short, maybe 5'6", with that kind of thin, fine hair that makes you think of baby birds. His glasses were thick – the kind that magnify the eyes behind them in a way that makes them look slightly wrong, like a funhouse mirror. Barb Geisman, one of my new stepfather's closest friends, had introduced him earlier simply as "Richard."

"Do you like horses?" he asked, stepping closer than necessary. His aftershave was cloying, something expensive but applied too heavily. I mumbled something affirmative, suddenly very aware of how isolated this corner of the parking lot was, despite being in full view of the venue's windows.

Inside was a circus of St. Louis power players. My new stepfather, all 6'5" of him, was holding court near the bar. His red beard caught the light when he laughed, which was often. He was in his element, August Busch III's favorite architect, the man responsible for transforming Busch Gardens into what it was becoming. My new stepsister stood near the dessert table, deep in conversation with a friend from University City High School, her confidence radiating in a way I envied.

My mother looked different than she had just a year ago when she was still counseling troubled teens at Parkway Central. Private practice had been good to her – designer dress, professionally styled blonde hair, that distinctive laugh of hers carrying across the room like wind chimes in a storm. She'd traded in crisis counseling for a booming practice serving the chemical dependency issues of St. Louis's affluent youth. Sometimes I wondered if she missed the raw authenticity of her old job, but watching her work the room, you'd never know.

Lyda Krewson, PGAV's Controller, was deep in conversation with Richard near the dessert table. Her husband Jeff kept shooting concerned glances their way, his architect's eyes perhaps seeing something in Richard's bearing that disturbed him. But when he tried to intervene, Lyda snapped at him with surprising venom, clearly more invested in whatever Richard was saying than her husband's discomfort.

The need to use the restroom came as a relief – an excuse to escape Richard's increasingly focused attention by the horse trailer. The bathroom was down a quiet hallway, away from the reception's buzz. The fixtures were dated, brass instead of chrome, with those old-fashioned separate hot and cold taps that never quite gave you the temperature you wanted.

I heard the door open behind me. The lock clicked.

"We keep running into each other," that high-pitched voice said. "Must be fate."

What followed exists in my memory as a series of sharp fragments: the cold press of the tile wall, the smell of that awful aftershave mixed with industrial hand soap, the sound of dress shoes on the bathroom floor. His hands were soft, like he'd never done a day of manual labor in his life. When I close my eyes, I can still feel those hands, still hear the whispered threats about keeping quiet, still see those magnified eyes behind those thick glasses.

The rest of the reception plays like a movie with the sound turned down. I watched my mother and new stepfather climb into the carriage, her white dress carefully arranged by helpful hands, his tall frame ducking to avoid the carriage's roof. The horses' hooves clattered against the pavement as they pulled away, the late afternoon sun turning everything golden. A perfect moment for everyone else.

My stepsister drove me to my father's house afterward. The radio played something by Boyz II Men, but I couldn't focus on the lyrics. She kept asking why I was so quiet, if I was okay, if I was just sad about the wedding. I stared out the window and watched St. Louis slide by, its familiar streets suddenly feeling foreign.

When I finally told my mother, she did what good mothers do – she acted. But the system wasn't interested in justice. I sat across from Dee Joyce Hayes a year later, watching her face shift from concern to calculation as she explained that I was probably confused, probably misremembering, probably making it up. There was too much political risk in investigating "Richard." The message was clear: some predators are too well-connected to touch.

That same year, 1993, my stepfather collapsed at his desk at PGAV, his heart giving out without warning. A cruel twist of fate that took this larger-than-life figure – this 6'5" gentle giant who was just beginning to feel like a father – away before we truly had the chance to know each other. My mother fought her own battle just four years later, cancer claiming her in the spring of 1997. Her laugh, once so prominent it could fill a room, faded to whispers and then to silence, taking with it any chance of ever fully processing what had happened that October day.

Life went on. I grew up, moved away, built a career. St. Louis became a place I visited for holidays and funerals. But the past has a way of refusing to stay buried.

Summer 2022 brought me back to St. Louis with political aspirations of my own. The AT&T building project was making headlines, and I reached out to discuss it with a well-known political consultant. When I walked into that meeting at Coffeestamp Cafe on Jefferson, the years collapsed. Richard Callow – I finally had his full name – sat across from me, those same thick glasses, that same high-pitched voice. The recognition in his eyes was immediate, followed by something colder.

What followed was a masterclass in political destruction. A political operative appeared in my campaign – a woman I later learned worked directly for Callow. She was efficiency personalized, managing canvassers, requesting resources, building what seemed like momentum. I provided everything she asked for – Chromebooks, a BMW for transportation, hotel rooms for out-of-town canvassers, nearly $12,000 for campaign operations.

The trap was elegant in its construction. Suddenly, fourteen people appeared at my door demanding payment for signatures, claiming promises of $10 per signature I'd never made. The total approached $30,000. My carefully crafted press statements somehow reached my opponents before release. The operative vanished with campaign resources, only to have the BMW returned days later by an unnamed friend. She shut down our campaign social media accounts, taking vital data and mapping files with her.

Despite gathering twelve affidavits from childhood friends attesting to my residency, despite the initial confirmation of ballot placement from the Board of Elections, despite encouragement from respected politicians like Shamed Dogan and Peter Merideth, the lawsuit succeeded. By August 1st, my name was removed from the ballot.

Then came the call. That voice hadn't changed in thirty years: "Don't ever show back up to St. Louis again. If you think of telling anyone, you'll be sorry."

By December, I had relocated to the East Coast, trading the familiar shadows of St. Louis for the anonymous canyons of Midtown Manhattan. Investment banking offers its own kind of protection – money, distance, respectability. But some nights, I still dream of horses' breath in cold air, of bathroom tiles and brass fixtures, of carriage wheels on pavement and the sound of my mother's laugh carrying across a room I can never return to.

They say trauma lives in the body. Mine lives in the click of a bathroom lock, in the scent of aftershave, in the sound of horses' hooves on pavement. It lives in the knowledge that sometimes the monsters win, that justice is more about power than truth, and that some carriage rides never really end – they just keep circling the blocks of our memory, the wheels turning in time with our fears.

Sometimes I wonder if that fourteen-year-old boy is still standing in that parking lot, watching the horses, unaware that his life is about to change forever. I want to warn him, to tell him to stay in the reception hall, to never leave his stepsister's sight. But that's not how memory works. All we can do is carry our stories forward, hoping that someday, someone will hear them and believe.