Wild Horse Spring (17 page)

“Come on,” Dad said again. He put his hand on my back and pushed me forward, to speed me up, and I kind of stumbled.

“Okay,” I said. I felt like crying. I hadn’t felt this way in such a long time, and I’d thought those memories
were gone. But it was amazing how quickly those same old feelings came flooding back. I checked Mom’s cell phone to see what time it was. Almost one o’clock. Four more hours with Dad.

I got a text from Stephanie and opened it.

So wherever the ATV was hidden, no one was looking for it. And whoever had hit the mare was still getting away with it.

Disgusted, I shoved the phone back into my pocket.

Dad got into the car and started it. He waited impatiently while I moved the business cards and other stuff to the backseat so I could sit shotgun. He stared ahead with his hands gripping the wheel.

“So …” he said. “I’ve had enough of this place. Now what?”

“I’m kind of hungry.”

He cocked his head, nodded, and backed out of the parking space at warp speed, then headed north. As he drove, he seemed to become lost in thought. I figured he was thinking about a place to stop to eat.

“This conference I’m attending is giving us all kinds of new marketing techniques for selling insurance online. It used to be we sold insurance based on relationships.
Now it’s all based on search engines. It’s frustrating for the kind of person I am, a people person. I say put me in a room with a human being, and I can make a sale. But this online stuff is a whole different animal.”

“Right,” I said.

We drove almost all the way back to where our house was, and then we pulled into a resort with hotel rooms and condos on one side of the road and a pool and spa on the other. I could hear the laughs and screams of kids in the pool as we turned in.

“Here we are!” Dad got out of the car, slamming the door. “I’m going to drop you off here at the pool—I’ll sign you in—and run over and make an appearance at the meet and greet. I won’t be gone too long. Looks like there are a lot of kids there. You should have fun.”

I got out, wondering if there was any food here. I fingered the twenty-dollar bill in my back pocket. I could at least buy a sandwich if I needed to.

Dad went up to the lifeguard at the counter by the front gate and showed his room card. The gate opened, and I went in.

“See you in a bit!” he said, and then jogged across the parking lot and went inside the lobby.

On the way to the women’s room, I saw a hot tub labeled Teen Hot Tub, and about five kids around
my age sat in it, laughing and joking. The girls wore expensive bathing suits and had pedicures. Stephanie would probably have just walk over and said “Hi.” I, on the other hand, ignored them.

I found the women’s room and changed into my bathing suit. I didn’t like going shopping, so this was a Speedo that Mom had bought for me on sale at the end of last summer. A bin with a stack of huge fluffy white towels stood beside the door. I took one and went out to the pool. I picked a chair that was off by itself. The sun was glaring hot, and the chlorinated water in the pool flashed white in my eyes. I got out Mom’s phone and tried to think of someone I could text.

Stephanie was the only person I could think of. As much as she drove me crazy, and as much as I had been mean to her, she was the one. So I wrote her, asking if she and Cody were looking for the damaged ATV yet.

She answered right away. She said she was still stuck reciting her poem with Daddy and Lynn. And I realized that she had truly become someone I could count on. Right then I wished more than anything that I could talk to her.

I closed the phone and stared at the bright water in the pool. Black spots started floating across my vision. I wondered again if I could get some food here. The
twenty-dollar bill Mom had given me was still in my shorts pocket.

I looked around and saw the counter where food was served. Two high school girls, dressed in white, were waiting on people. I went over. I pulled the twenty out of my pocket and said “Excuse me” to the girl standing closest to me. She had smooth brown hair and almond shaped eyes with a thin line of blue eyeliner around them, making her eyes look huge.

“How much is a Coke and a cheeseburger?”

“We don’t take money here,” she said. “You have to charge it to the room.”

“I have twenty dollars. Can’t I just pay for it with that?”

“No. We don’t have any way of taking money.”

“Oh.” I tried giving her Dad’s name, but she insisted that the room number was what she needed.

“Thanks.”

I went back over to the side of the pool. I sat down and let my feet swing over the water, rubbed the blood off my leg again, then felt kind of faint and shaky and lay down. The sun shone through my closed eyelids. Here, I was just waiting, and I had no power over anything.

I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes. I heard the faint sloshing of the water against the tiles on the side of the pool and opened my eyes. How much time had gone by? I jumped up.

Black spots bloomed in front of my eyes, and the sky whirled. My arms helicoptered, and I fell over the edge into the shallow water, landing on my back with a soaking splash. “Whoa!” I yelled, swallowing water, scrambling to my feet. The water was only about two feet deep.

All the kids in the hot tub started laughing.

What an idiot
.

I thought about it. We had passed a restaurant a ways back on the road. I could walk back there.

I didn’t bother to try to find Dad. Why should I? What did he care? I just headed across the parking lot, listening to the squish of my shoes and the gravel crunching under my feet, squeezing the water out of my ponytail.

“Diana!” Dad came out into the parking lot yelling.

I kept walking. What did I owe him?

“Hey! Where are you going?” He stopped and gestured as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

I wheeled and yelled back at him. “What do you care?”

I continued my march toward the highway and looked up and down the road. A lot of the businesses around here weren’t open yet for the season, and I saw a lot of empty parking lots. But a block away, on the other side of the highway, was a gas station. I could
get a Coke and some kind of sandwich there. Maybe they had fries. I was dying for some fries. It would be hard to find a break in the traffic, though. Cars flew by at a blur.

“Diana!” Dad came up behind me, grabbed me by the elbow, and swung me around.

“Let go of me!”

“I will not! What are you doing?”

“I’m hungry, all right? I need something to eat!”

He tightened his grip on my elbow and pulled me away from the street. “What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you tell me you were hungry?”

“I did!” I wasn’t going to cry. In fact, I was too mad to cry. “But you didn’t listen!”

“O
ne more time, sweetie, and then you can head out to the beach,” Daddy said. We were on the back porch. He and Lynn sat close together on a chaise lounge, holding hands, and he wore his sunglasses, squinting at my printout of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem “How Do I Love Thee?” as it flapped and crackled in the sea breeze. It was supposed to be one of the most famous love sonnets ever written. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her husband, Robert Browning, who was also a famous poet.

“But I only made two little mistakes!” I said, shaking my foot to jiggle one flip-flop, in a hurry to get to the beach. We’d promised Diana that we’d look for the ATV! She’d already texted me, asking if Cody and I had found anything. “Besides, Diana hasn’t practiced hers at all yet.”

“You be concerned about your own work, not hers,” Daddy said.

“I love the fact that you’re memorizing a famous love poem,” Lynn said. “I think I’ll try to memorize it too, so I can recite it to your daddy.” She leaned over and kissed Daddy on the end of his nose. Daddy turned and smiled at her, and even in the sun I could see him blush.

“PDA!” I covered my eyes and made a gagging motion, but secretly I liked seeing them joke around this way.

“Sorry, sweetie, we’re listening,” Daddy said, laughing, and he squeezed Lynn closer. I closed my eyes for a minute, pretending it was Daddy and Mama, but I opened them again quickly, knowing it was babyish to think that.

“Okay,” I sighed. I cleared my throat and started out the poem again.

“Perfect!” Daddy said. “Good job, sweetie.”

I had wanted to memorize this poem because my teacher had told me about the famous love story between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Elizabeth was born in England in the 1800s. She wrote her first poem when she was twelve. At that same time, she was learning Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. She was passionately religious and wrote about things like slavery, the rights of women, and child labor.

When she was fifteen, she was bedridden with some mysterious lung or spinal disease that doctors never diagnosed, and they gave her morphine for the pain. She became addicted to the morphine, which I guess used to happen to people a lot back then.

She was already a famous poet when Robert Browning wrote her to say he admired her work. They wrote letters to each other for a long time, and he told her in a letter, before he even met her, that he loved her poems and he loved her too. When he finally went to her home for a visit, they fell in love in person. She could not believe that a handsome man like Robert Browning could love an invalid like her. Elizabeth’s father wouldn’t give his permission for them to marry, so they eloped. Her father immediately disowned her, and she never saw him again. For the rest of her life, she wrote her father letter after letter begging for forgiveness, but he never even opened them. I thought that was terrible. Her health became worse, and after fifteen years together with Robert, she died in his arms. After her death, Robert and her son published many of her poems.

Anyway, it was such a beautiful and romantic story. Would I find love like this someday?

Lynn had been reading over the poem, and she said, “Let me try now.” She took a breath. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and the breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.” She stopped, then waved her hands with impatience. “I’m distracted.” She picked up her phone and looked at it.
“I keep thinking about whether Diana might be trying to get in touch with me. I just hope things are going all right with her dad. Anyway, I wish I had a young mind! Look how easily you did that, Stephanie! I can’t remember the next line.”

“I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”

I knew that line because I remembered it meant that Elizabeth loved him both by day and by night. I finished the poem again, feeling even prouder of myself.

“That’s just great, sweetie.”

“What do you think it means by the line ‘I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints’?” Lynn asked.

I had thought about that. “I was thinking that maybe she had faith in God when she was little, but then maybe something bad happened to make her lose her faith. I read online that her brother drowned, and she became very depressed afterward because she had a fight with him the last time she saw him, and they never really got a chance to make up. I think bad things happening can make a person stop believing in God.” I thought about my conversation with Diana.

“Does the poem make it sound as though her love for Robert replaced her love for God?” Daddy asked.

I looked at the words of the poem again. “I don’t
think so, because at the end she said that if God chooses, she’ll love him even better after death. So she believed in God’s will, and also in eternal life.”

“So maybe her love for Robert revived her ability to love both God and others again?” Lynn asked.

“That’s what I think,” I said.

Lynn and Daddy exchanged a glance. “I could understand how that can happen,” Lynn said.

A voice inside me said,
Ask them now. Ask if you can live with them
.

I opened my mouth, but then was too afraid. “How did y’all know you were in love?” I asked instead.

They looked at each other again and laughed, and each put a hand on the other’s knee. “For me it was love at first sight,” Daddy said.

“Oh, it was not!” Lynn said.

“Seriously, remember when I brought you flowers on our second date—”

“Daffodils and tulips!”

“—and the flower vase dropped on the floor, and I was trying to help you clean it up, and I cut my hand? The touch of your hands when you cleaned and bandaged mine … I’ll always remember that. It made me fall in love. The touch of your hands.”

Lynn put her hand on Daddy’s cheek and kissed him on the lips.

“Okay, I’m going to the beach!” I said, grabbing the poem away from Daddy.

“Go ahead.” Daddy and Lynn were both laughing.

I got my beach bag and headed down the wooden walkway to the beach, wondering what it would be like to fall in love. I mean, I knew I was really too young to be in love, but still, it was interesting to think about. I was only one year younger than Juliet was when she met Romeo.

I went to check out the little turtle nest and examined the soft, undisturbed sand in the little triangle outlined by the tape. Dozens of delicate, round eggs were hidden just a few inches below. It was way too early for them to come out. They wouldn’t hatch until July, and it was only April. I headed closer to the water and stretched out on my towel, facing the waves.