A Summer Without Horses (6 page)

“Would you like to go to Montana again?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked it. It was a foolish question and the minute it was out of my mouth, I regretted it, for in that instant, Aunt Alison’s eyes filled with tears.

“More than anything,” she whispered. Her eyes closed then and she slept. Mother and I left her alone.

We didn’t talk much on the way back to our hotel. We’d both been moved by Aunt Alison’s passion and saddened by her sadness. Aunt Alison had also made me think about Pepper, the horse I’d learned to ride on, who’d gotten ill and had been put down last fall.

I don’t mean to say that an animal’s death is the same as a person’s. What I thought about was the fact that Pepper had lived a good life. He’d done everything a stable horse could do by the time he was old and dying. If he’d known what regrets were, he wouldn’t have had any. But Aunt Alison had regrets. She missed Montana and she wasn’t going to be able to get on an airplane and fly back there one more time. That made me sad. It also
made me think about regrets. Sometimes regrets are about things you’ve done; sometimes they’re about things you haven’t done. Sometimes they’re unavoidable; sometimes they aren’t.

The phone was ringing when we got back to our room. I grabbed it and heard Skye’s voice.

“I’m so glad you’re there, Lisa,” he began. “I’ve got everything set for chartering the plane to take Kip back to Virginia. The charter people just want to know exactly when they should plan to arrive. Have you talked to Max yet?”

I hesitated, then said, “I can’t accept Kip, Skye.”

“Why not?” he asked.

I could have explained about our pledge in The Saddle Club and about Veronica diAngelo and he would have understood, but it wasn’t the real reason. It was only half the reason. The other half was the expense that my parents simply couldn’t afford. They’d considered buying me a horse at one time, and we’d even looked at quite a few. Since that time, they’d learned more about how much a horse costs to keep and it’s a lot of money. The better the horse, the more money. Kip would be well beyond our budget and I knew it. It wasn’t fair to ask my parents to do something I knew they couldn’t afford.

I began to explain that to Skye.

“I want you to have this horse, Lisa. I think he’s perfect for you. You said so yourself. Giving him to you is the best
way I can think of to thank you for what you did for me. Can I help to convince your parents?”

“No, please,” I said. “Kip is wonderful and perfect, but I just can’t accept him. The wonderful day you and I had yesterday is more than enough thanks for what I did. Really.”

“Oh, come on,” Skye said. “There must be something—I mean, Lisa, if you don’t let me do something for you, I won’t feel as if I’ve thanked you properly.”

Then it came to me. I guess I already had this image of the airplane specially designed to carry horses, just waiting at the airport for my horse. It popped into my head then that there were other airplanes that were specially designed for various purposes, including ambulances.

“Aunt Alison—” I blurted out.

“What?”

“Remember my aunt—the one in the hospital?”

“Of course. I’m going to stop and visit her next time I’m seeing the kids there.”

“Well, if you’re really in the mood to charter airplanes, how about an ambulance plane that can make a nice little round trip to Montana?”

I
T WAS A
day I’ll never forget.

In the first place, it took about four hundred phone calls, including one to the hospital, a private nursing service as well as Aunt Alison’s doctor, and then to the ambulance services and then probably to the FAA for all I know, but it was arranged. It was scheduled for two days later, but Aunt Alison was having a bad time that day, so everything had to be put off for a day.

One of the nicest things was that we didn’t tell her about the trip until the ambulance showed up to take her to the airport at seven o’clock in the morning.

“Where am I going?” she asked.

Mom looked at me. “Montana,” I said. “I promise to tell you the whole story on the airplane.”

Aunt Alison was speechless and that was okay because
if she’d been talking, I might have had to talk and I don’t think I could have.

Mom, Aunt Alison, and I rode in the ambulance to the airport. Skye met us there. I loved the fact that he wanted to come along and it coincided with a day he had off the set. The ambulance drove right up to the airplane and Aunt Alison was put aboard in a comfortable bed. Since it was going to be a couple of hours until we got to the Big Sky country (and I was now thinking of it totally as the Big Skye country), the nurse gave Alison some medicine so she would sleep. Mom, Skye, and I went into the passenger cabin where there was a nice breakfast spread out for us.

I could almost feel it when we got to Montana. Below us, the Rockies seemed cleaner, higher, shinier, and more snow-covered. There were fewer towns and more greenery.

I went into Aunt Alison’s cabin. Her eyes were opened.

“We’re there, aren’t we?” she asked. I knew she’d felt it, too.

It was a sparkling clear day. As the pilot descended through the sky, Aunt Alison and I looked out the window.

“We had a pasture just like that one,” she said, pointing. “And we kept our horses there just like that.” I looked where she pointed. There was a herd of horses. Our plane was low enough now for them to be able to hear the sound. One, a big bay, looked up at us and then
rose in a magnificent rear that startled the whole herd into action. They galloped across the meadow, racing the small shadow of the plane.

“There’s one there—the Appaloosa, see him? It looks just like Cass! Gallops like her, too. How she used to love to run, that horse! Oh, Lisa!” she said. I know I wasn’t paying for the plane ride, but as far as I was concerned, the joy in her voice was enough payment for ten ambulance planes to Montana. She was breathless with excitement.

She reached for my hand and squeezed it. She never let go of it for the whole rest of the visit to Montana, either. She held tightly as we swooped around the mountains, bringing her closer than she’d ever been on horseback. She held my hand as we entered a valley. There was a small ranch nestled among a stand of trees at one end and it had a flourishing vegetable garden between it and the barn. The barn was surrounded by animals in pens, pigs, sheep, goats, and a larger area where some cows stood, contentedly munching on grass. Beyond their field lay the meadows where the cattle grazed. Aunt Alison gave my hand a little squeeze then. I knew it was because that ranch reminded her of her girlhood home. The plane made a turn then, heading farther north.

“Approaching ground zero,” the pilot announced. Aunt Alison looked a little confused.

“You’ll see,” I said. “Just wait.”

Aunt Alison did see. She saw everything. She sat as far
upright in her bed as she could manage and watched out the window for every single detail she could get of Montana. Then the wild country changed into a settled area below us. It wasn’t exactly a city, but there were a lot of houses and streets and then there was a small shopping mall.

I waited quietly to see if she would recognize anything specific. Then a look came across her face as she stared at the craggy top of one of the mountains.

“It’s Bison Rock! I know it. There it is!” She took a deep breath. “I’m home,” she said.

“What’s Bison Rock?”

“Well, just look,” she said. “See how the rock there on the side of the mountain is shaped sort of like the back and head of a buffalo?”

I looked. I couldn’t see it at all, but I had a feeling that it was clearer when you were on horseback than in an airplane. The important thing was that Aunt Alison could see it.

“Is that where the cave was?” I asked, recalling her story of the bats and the snakes.

“Not quite,” said Aunt Alison. “That was in the mountain just to the east of Bison Rock. It was—” She paused, closing her eyes to think. “Maybe a half an hour east of here.” She leaned over then to see out the window on the other side. “It was in an area we used to call Chapel Valley. I always thought the name had something to do with a chapel, but I learned later it was named for the
family who settled in it. In spite of the fact that I learned better, there’s a part of me that’s always thought chapels should be crescent-shaped!”

“Like that?” Aunt Alison’s nurse asked, pointing out the window to something in the distance. Aunt Alison looked where the nurse pointed.

“Just like that,” she said and from the way she said it, I knew we’d found it and it wasn’t a parking lot at all. It was still a wild, untouched high meadow.

I scooted up to the pilot’s cabin. We just had to have a close look. When I returned from the cockpit, Mother and Skye followed me back into Aunt Alison’s section of the plane. They didn’t want to miss this.

In a minute the plane banked and turned. Then we dipped down low and flew the curved length of Chapel Valley. It was everything I’d hoped for from the moment I’d asked Skye if we could do this.

“I remember!” Aunt Alison said breathlessly. “We used to stop and cool down in the shade of that big rock. That’s where Lida dared me to go into the cave. Then, there, we tried to see into the cave from there, but we couldn’t.”

She started talking very fast then because she was racing with the airplane. “It was too dark to see, so we just had to go in. And there, by that tree, though it was barely a bush then. That’s where we tied our horses up while we explored the cave. And there’s the entrance to the cave. See it?!”

We all looked. We all could see. It was all so real I could almost see two girls hop off their ponies and approach the cave entrance.

Something happened then that I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was the noise of the plane echoing down the valley. Maybe it was something else. I’ll never know. All I do know is that at that exact moment a black dot appeared outside of the cave. It was followed by another and then another and the next thing any of us knew, the whole sky outside the cave entrance was filled with black dots, curving, swirling, dipping, flying. It was bats—thousands and thousands of bats.

Nobody said anything for the longest time, not until we were well clear of Chapel Valley. Then Aunt Alison spoke.

“I told you so.”

There was a wonderful, totally satisfied grin on her face.

M
OM AND
I left Los Angeles the next day. It had been a wonderful trip. I had had a great time with Skye, especially at Penelope’s when I’d helped him out with his problems with Chris Oliver. But the best part of our L.A. vacation had to be meeting Aunt Alison again. With some help from my friend, Skye, I’d been able to do something for her that really made a difference. It wasn’t going to change her health; I knew that. It was just going to relieve her of a regret. That’s an important thing to be able to do for a friend.

As we flew home, I stared at the clouds, wishing that somebody could do that for me now. I still had one gigantic regret on my plate. I was about to lie to my
best friends. For the first time since we’d formed The Saddle Club, I’d broken a promise to my best friends. Not only that, I was about to lie through my teeth about it.