Wild Girl (2 page)

A dizzy tilt, a turn, and the white buildings of São Paulo were far underneath me, coming in and out of the mist. Then the buildings were gone, lost somewhere below. And so was all of Brazil.

But for one second, I saw a sweep of blue. Was it the ocean?
“Ai,”
Tio Paulo had said once, “the waves, crashing together, rolling over everything, like you, Lidie, never still. You’ll love the ocean.”

I smiled to myself, even as my hands gripped the armrests: the plane soared up, reaching the clouds, and bounced through them. I swallowed. I was really on my way to America.

I settled back to practice my English, turning the pages of the little book Mrs. Figueiredo, my teacher, had given me. “Hello, hi, the weather is
niece;
watch out, the mosquito bites.”

And especially, I intended to say to Pai, the Horseman, and my eighteen-year-old brother, Rafael:
I am hippy to be here
. I’d say it so they’d admire my English way of speaking; I’d say it so they’d be really sorry they hadn’t sent for me sooner.

I kept practicing those words until I thought they were perfect as the sound of the plane’s engines roared in my ears and the food cart rattled down the aisle, once, and then again. By this time I was tired and messy, my shirt stained from the extra food the flight attendant kept giving me. The
trip was taking forever, but still I wanted to raise my hand and say
Not so fast
.

I drifted off to sleep, thinking about the moment Pai and Rafael would come toward me.
Hello, hi, I’m hippy …

At last the darkness gave way to a million tiny lights, and New York was spread out before us. Somewhere tucked in among all those twinkling lights were the John F. Kennedy Airport, and the Horseman waiting for me.

Horseman
, Mamãe’s name for him. I could almost hear the sound of her voice. I pictured her in the kitchen when she was still well, her thick, dark braid bouncing over her shoulder, talking about horses with him, always horses. She’d say how wonderful he was with them, and that someday he’d be a great trainer.

After he’d gone, I learned about horses, too. I read dozens of library books, memorizing stories about Rags to Riches, the first filly to win the Belmont Stakes since 1905; Ruffian, who was called the queen of the fillies; Whirlaway, the great chestnut who won the three races of the Triple Crown. I listened to the endless stories Tio Paulo told me as he sat on the front porch.
I was a great jockey when I was young
, he would say.
Rode the best of them
. He’d lean forward.
I had no fear
.

His eyes would slide away from mine. I knew what he was thinking. I had no fear, either. But neither one of us wanted to be one bit like the other.

The plane was descending. From the small window, I could see buildings, and highways with what looked like toy cars moving along. Could I even remember exactly what the Horseman looked like after five years? It was only his voice
I knew from the Sunday phone calls, every Sunday for all this time. And the cell phone suddenly vibrating when I least expected it. “Lidie, what are you doing?” A few words, and then he would be gone. When he came home one year, at Christmas, I was in bed with the flu and was too sick to pay much attention to him.

I thought of his going to America, spending the night in prison. And Rafael, too? How frightening! Suppose the customs people in the airport didn’t like my passport? Suppose they wanted to send me to prison?

I flipped open the passport; my picture looked like a girl with enough hair to stuff a mattress, a girl with two front teeth that overlapped a little. It looked like a girl who might have a false passport. I hugged it to me. Not false. It was a real passport, after all.

The plane bumped to a terrible stop. I slipped the lemon from my pocket to the depths of my backpack and clutched my papers in my hand. Then the flight attendant was standing in the aisle, waiting for me, smiling.

I wanted to hold on to the armrest.
Let me stay here for a minute, for another endless hour
, I thought. But, of course, I couldn’t do that. I followed the flight attendant into the huge airport, a place full of noise, with stairs and ramps and escalators curving from one floor to the next like a giant snail.

And lines of people!

Everyone zigzagged along toward a row of windows to present their passports. My heart beat faster, and my hands felt clammy. But the immigration man behind his window asked only a few questions.

I nodded to each one as if I understood perfectly well
what he was saying, and when he frowned, I changed the nod to a quick shake of the head.

Stamp, stamp
, went his machine. I was so relieved I told him that the weather would be
niece
soon for growing corns.

He lifted his eyebrows. Maybe he didn’t know about those words. Maybe he was new to English, too.

We stopped at one more window. I nodded, shook my head, and we were through.

“Let’s find your father,” the flight attendant told me. “What does he look like?”

I tried to think of what to tell her. “Dark hair.”

She nodded.

“Straight teeth,” I said, closing my lips over my own teeth.

I raised my shoulders; I could hardly breathe. And suddenly the Horseman’s face was blurred in my mind. I had no idea what he looked like.

Then I saw him coming toward me. The blur was gone; he looked exactly the way I must have known he would, except that his hair was getting gray. And were there tears in his eyes?

I had a quick picture of him laughing with Mamãe in the kitchen; I saw him holding me up in the lemon grove. And for a moment, I forgot about how angry I was at being left in Jales to wait forever.

He reached out to me, but as I took a step forward, I dropped my purse; coins rolled across the floor, so our hug was over in a second as we bent to find everything.

I stood up and saw Rafael. He was eighteen, so grown-up now! He would ride his first race as a jockey soon. But when
he began to smile, I saw that his teeth were almost like mine, and his bony face as well.

He crushed me in a hug until I had to catch my breath. And the English words I’d practiced flew straight out of my head.

All I could think of to say were words in our own language. But my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t even get them out.

I waved goodbye to the flight attendant to take up some time while I tried to remember what I might say in English to the Horseman, but he was holding out a thick red hooded jacket for me.

I shrugged into it as he wound a scarf around my neck: pink with rabbits prancing up and down.

Good grief, bunnies munching on baby carrots. I tried not to look embarrassed. But what would people think of me wearing a scarf meant for a three-year-old?

We spun through the revolving door and outside to a polar-bear cold. Even the ocean, which Tio Paulo had said was nearby, must be frozen like the Arctic.

My eyes began to tear from the wind in that strange world with cars blaring at each other. People rushed around,
stepping on my feet, saying something that must have meant
sorry
.

“You’re welcome,” I said back, trying to be polite, ignoring Rafael, who laughed.

The Horseman herded us around the other travelers and across the street. Would I ever be warm again? I thought of the poor lemon shivering in my backpack; it should still be on its tree in the sun.

But soon we were inside the truck, where the heater blasted warmth onto my frozen legs and numb fingers.

I kept stealing glances at the back of the Horseman’s head, at this stranger I’d thought about all this time. He was leaning forward, both hands on the wheel, maneuvering his way in the traffic.

I looked at Rafael, next to him in front. Rafael turned toward me, grinning without saying a word.

Rafael, who had finished high school but on the phone said idiotic things like
How is your doll?
or
Do you still sing songs from
Snow White?

I closed my eyes, swaying a bit with the motion of the truck, and jumped as I heard the Horseman’s voice again. “There’s the most beautiful track in the world.”

I craned my neck and caught a glimpse of stone pillars before the track disappeared behind us.

At that moment, I saw myself on the porch at Tio Paulo’s, the library book in my hand, the sharp scent of geraniums around me, and Santos the dog chewing on a drooly old bone at my feet.

How many times had I paged through that thick book,
touching the pictures of that very race course, the great grandstand, the horse barns, the oval tracks?

I had seen the huge white pine tree, so beautiful that the track had been built around it long before I was born. And I had longed to be there.

Now the Horseman pointed to a school and, a few blocks later, a row of stores. We turned a corner, and then another; we drove along a road lined with bare trees and evergreens, then turned into a long driveway, the tires grating against the gravel. “Here’s the farm,” Pai said.

We passed a large house, shadowy in the darkness. In back, lights beamed down on a barn and an exercise track.

“I train all the horses for Mrs. Januário,” he said. “She has seven, and we have—”

Rafael laughed. “One and almost two more.”

I was too tired to ask what he meant. But then I saw a small house with light streaming from the windows.

“It’s waiting for you.” Pai smiled at me. “Home.”

I stumbled out of the truck behind them and scurried up the front path in the freezing cold. We dived through the front door into a room that was truly warm.

The living room looked almost like Titia Luisa’s, with pale yellow walls, but the green couch and the chairs were lined up in a row, reminding me of the dentist’s waiting room in Jales. Terrible.

In the kitchen, a cake was on the table, with pink flowers and welcome words swirled across the top:
Bem-Vindo
. “I remembered you liked pink,” Rafael said.

I hadn’t had anything in pink for years: an insipid color, as Mrs. Figuerido, my teacher, would say.

I sat there trying to smile around a huge bite of cake with the strawberry taste sweet in my mouth, but I could hardly keep my eyes open.

Pai waved his hand. “And in the hall,” he said, “is the computer. Use it whenever you wish.”

At last we went upstairs, passing a large painting of a jockey on his horse. Pai ran his fingers over the frame as we went by. I was too tired to do more than glance at it.

At the end of the hall, Pai opened a door. “Here’s your room.”

I looked around and gulped. It was a bedroom meant for a little girl. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had been painted on one wall, and reflecting them on the other side was a mirror with a pink bow.

They stood in the doorway, waiting. “We painted.” The Horseman waved his hand.

I tried to smile, but I could see my face in the mirror. It looked as if I’d just had a tooth pulled.

Rafael pointed to the floor. In front of the bed was a small rug with the face of Minnie Mouse in the center.

“Boa,”
I said at last.

They both smiled, nodding at each other, pleased with themselves.

Ai!

“Rafael’s idea,” the Horseman said, and then they were gone.

I sank down on the edge of the bed, so tired I could hardly yank off my sandals.

But I made myself go downstairs to the computer. I e-mailed Titia Luisa:
XOXO
, and Tio Paulo:
So I’m alive
. Then I went up to bed and pulled the quilt over me.

I lay there, feeling numb; it was all so different from what I’d expected.

All strange.

I shook my head. What had I expected anyway?

Don’t think about Jales, or the Horseman, or Rafael, who’s so proud of his Minnie Mouse rug
, I told myself.

I closed my eyes.

She was no longer a foal, drinking her mother’s milk. She was a filly now. Her coat was a mixture of black and white hairs, and underneath, her skin was a gleaming black from a forebear of hundreds of years ago, an Arabian whose dark skin protected him from the desert sun
.

The filly spent her days in the warmth of the field with its sweet-smelling grass
.

She wasn’t alone. The mare was there, and a bay colt and a roan, too. She waited as they began to run, standing still as if she were rooted to the earth until they were halfway across the field
.

She chased them; the wind flattened her ears and raised her mane. She ran like the swift birds that flew over her head, or lightning when it flashed across the sky. She stretched her neck
,
stretched her nose, stretched her legs; she reached the gate at the end of the field before they came near her
.

A lake ran along the side of the field, and sometimes she drank, or cooled her legs in the shallow water. She always jumped back, surprised, when a small creature plopped under the surface, or a shell-like creature moved slowly along the mud away from her
.

She never stopped watching, though, to be sure the mare was resting in the center of the field with one of the other mares, their necks crossed. And sometimes she went back to stand with the mare, or to feel the swish of that long tail in her face
.

The one fearful part of her life was the two-legged one. He wore something to cover his small head, and a few times he had pulled it off and hit her flank with it
.

He sucked on pieces of hay with his mouth, and when he made sounds with that mouth, they were loud and grated on her ears. With him was a small but fearsome creature with four legs; it raised its sharp claws when the filly came near and hissed at her
.

The filly tried to stay away, but they were always there
.

The bedroom windows rattled against their frames, and a poor tree branch, naked without its leaves, tapped lightly against one of the panes.