Excerpts from -
THE HORSES OF A PRISONER’S DAUGHTER

Claire Dorotik M.A.     

“Claire Dorotik, did you kill your father?” The words rang in my ears, sending an electric current through my body.  My vision blurred.  The lights from the news reporter’s cameras blinded me. I couldn’t see the way out of the court room hallway.  I was surrounded by them, hounding me, “What do know about your father’s murder?” “Where were you on the night of February 13th?”  My lawyer told me there might be media here, but he didn’t prepare me for this.  He instructed me to say nothing as it would only be used against me.  Maybe he could have told me to take all the rage I felt about my father’s murder,  my mother’s arrest and possible indictment, and now her attorney trying to  shift the blame, and  hold it in. Looking back now, I can see myself walking in a haze, feeling numb.  I don’t think I could have allowed myself to fully experience the loss of my father.  I was afraid to.  I saw myself on my knees, wanting to disappear.  But I couldn’t.  What would the horses do?  There were eighteen of them back at home, the subjects of my mother’s and my business.  But even with the thought of them running through my mind, the feeling in my chest was like a hole in me so big, it enveloped me. Rocking me off my feet, and sending me into a distant world that didn’t offer any escape. He was a part of me, and in many ways, indescribable even now, larger than life.  His habit of taking off running ten miles on a whim, always seemed an untouchable ideal to me.  Or the fact that he took notes of every ride at every horse show he attended.  Nobody does that.  But he took to the role of supporting his daughter with an intensity that was unmatchable. He was the one who insisted that I go to the hospital when he found me on the kitchen floor passed out with pneumonia.  I don’t even know where me mom was.  But he took the day off work to make sure I was ok.  He never knew what that meant to me.  I didn’t either, until years later.  
            It wasn’t the fact that I was being targeted by my mother’s attorney, and now the media, that sent shocks down my spine, it was the fact that at that moment, I felt like nothing mattered.   Saying nothing made me look guilty, and maybe then I would lose even more people around me. I felt completely helpless, the sensationalism of the case had led me to mistrust anything that came out of my mouth because it wasn’t what appeared in the paper.  In fact, when I read the paper, I felt like someone else.  I even started to think I was guilty, and question my own sanity.  So I imagined people who knew struggling with they thought they knew, and what they were reading. I remember wearing glasses on that day.  I never really wear glasses, as I only really need them to drive, but I wore them that day, because I think I was very confused about who I was.  But the thought never even crossed my mind that my own two brothers would ever desert me.  Yet they did.