A Summer Without Horses (2 page)

I
LOVED
C
ALIFORNIA
from the moment we arrived. It was sunny and beautiful. Everybody there took the time to tell me that it never rains in the summer. There were palm trees and wide streets. None of the buildings I saw were very tall, though later I did see some skyscrapers in the downtown area.

Washington, the city nearest where we live, has a sort of old-fashioned elegance and style. New York, where I went with Stevie and Carole the first time we met Skye, is tall, cramped, and rushed. It always feels exciting. Los Angeles is modern, low, open, and seems much more relaxed.

In New York and Washington, the traffic jams are on the streets. In Los Angeles, they’re on the freeways. As we sat in traffic on the way to our hotel, I was thinking about
this and also about how much fun it was to be here, near Hollywood and where Skye lived and worked.

I still had my fingers crossed that I’d get to see Skye.

I hadn’t been able to reach him before we left, although I certainly tried. First, I called his home. There was no answer and I couldn’t tell how long it would be until somebody was home. Then I’d called his agent from home. It took me three tries to get past the first secretary and one more to get past the second. I bet they get a lot of calls for Skye from young girls who insist that they are Skye’s friend and just want to know where they can reach him, but I think it would have been easier to get the President of the United States on the phone than Skye Ransom’s agent. Finally, two days later, I got a message back from the first secretary that Skye wanted to have dinner with me the first night we were arriving in Los Angeles and would call our hotel the afternoon I arrived.

As soon as we got to the front desk at our hotel and said who we were, the man at the desk beamed at me. This was quite a change from the sullen look he’d had on his face before we told him who we were.

“You had a phone call, Ms. Atwood,” he said. Then, as if it were a crown jewel, he handed me the message.

I’ll pick you up at 7:30. Skye.

“Mr. Ransom called about an hour ago,” the man added, as if I couldn’t tell by looking at the note on the phone message. I think it was his way of telling me he knew what an important person I must be to get a phone
message from a star like Skye Ransom. I hate it when people make a big deal of Skye’s fame. That’s not what I like about him. What I like about him is that he’s a friend. Stevie probably would have known just what to say to the man who was, by then, practically bowing and drooling all over us. All I could think of was “Thank you.”

A bellboy showed us to our room. It took us fifteen minutes to unpack (compared to the three hours it had taken Mom to pack) and a half hour later, we were walking up the stairs of the nursing home. It was part of an enormous hospital, but it had its own building and it didn’t feel much like a hospital. I liked that. I bet the patients liked it, too.

Mom asked directions and we followed a lady along a hallway, past a lot of doors to the last room on the hall.

“Alison? Are you awake? You’ve got company …”

We went in.

The look on Aunt Alison’s face when she saw my mother made me ashamed that I’d ever thought our trip out here was for anything but to see her.

“Eleanor?” she whispered.

Mom just nodded. She couldn’t talk. I knew it. She was so happy to see Aunt Alison, and so upset by how sick she looked that the words just couldn’t come.

“And this is Lisa?”

I nodded. I was feeling the same way as my mother was. Aunt Alison reached out her arms from her bed. We
both ran over and hugged her very gently. Then Aunt Alison started crying. Mom hadn’t told her we were coming so she was surprised, as well as just plain happy.

It took a few minutes for everybody to get over their tears. A nurse came in with an extra chair so both Mom and I could sit down for a good long visit.

At first, Mom and Aunt Alison just caught up on things. Mom had to tell Aunt Alison about how Dad’s work was going, then about her own job, then about her brother and his family and, it seemed, almost everybody else in the world. I thought it was pretty boring, but Aunt Alison seemed hungry for news and listened to everything. Then, Aunt Alison turned to me.

“Are you still horse-crazy?” she asked.

I hadn’t known she’d known this about me—even if it was the most important fact. Mom must have told her sometime before, and Alison remembered.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “Totally horse-crazy.”

“I was, too,” she said. “I think I still am, in a way.”

“You ride?” The minute the words were out, I was embarrassed. She certainly wasn’t riding now and hadn’t been for a while. She was much too ill for that.

But Aunt Alison didn’t seem bothered in the least. “You bet I do,” she said. “See, even now I can’t say I
did
that or I
used to.
If I could get up out of this bed today, I’d head straight for the high mountains of Montana and be in the saddle in less time than it would take you to tack up one of your fancy-bred English horses. I think that
when you’re really horse-crazy, you never get over it. Don’t believe people who tell you that you’ll outgrow it. You won’t. Horses stay in the bloodstream forever.”

I could have sworn she glanced at my mother when she said the part about “people who tell you.” It was a sure sign to me that Mom had been telling her about my riding. Mom was a big believer in “outgrowing” horses. She didn’t understand what I loved so much about horses and everything else at Pine Hollow. Obviously, Aunt Alison did.

“Did your mother ever tell you about the Montana ranch that your grandmother and I were raised on?”

“Not really,” I said. “My grandmother once told me that Great-grandfather bought the land for a tune, sold it for a song, and now it’s worth a whole symphony.”

“If you like malls,” said Aunt Alison glumly. “But it wasn’t a mall then. It was beautiful green acres. Lida and I would get up before dawn sometimes and ride bareback to the hillside, where we could watch the sun come up. Then we’d race its beams back down into the valley.” A sweet smile came over her face with the memory. I knew why, too. I’d done the same thing with my friends when we went out West to a dude ranch. It was such a beautiful time of day, and riding a horse that way made you feel so free. The memory made me smile as well.

“Did you get dew from the tall grass on the bottom of your bare feet?” I asked.

“Yes, child, I did. It was cool and fresh. A daily gift
from heaven to the beautiful meadow. My horse’s belly would sometimes get wet, too, so when I groomed him, the drops would come off into his brush. I could dry my feet, but I couldn’t dry his belly and Mama would always know when Lida and I had been out by our horses’ legs and bellies.”

I grinned. “The horses at Pine Hollow tell
our
secrets like that,” I told her. “We’re always supposed to walk them before we get back to the stable, but sometimes we’re in a hurry and we try to get away with walking them just a little. Max, our instructor, always knows just by looking at them. That’s what Stevie, one of my best friends, says. Carole—she’s my other best friend—says Max knows because the horses are still lathered. Personally, I think he knows from looking at our faces. When we’re guilty, we look it!”

Aunt Alison laughed. Her laugh was even nicer than her smile. “So your horse is a tattler, too. Well, sometimes they tell, but more often, they keep our secrets. I used to ride a quarter horse mare by the name of Cass. I’d go out on Cass, and Lida on her gelding.… I forget his name—”

“Orion,” my mother said. I was astonished. I’d never known until now that my grandmother was a rider, and it made me wonder why my mother had never mentioned it before.

“Yes, Orion,” Aunt Alison continued. “Cass and Orion never told about the time we went into the cave on the
mountainside. Papa would have been furious if he’d ever known. He swore to us the place was filled with snakes and bats and anyone would be attacked if they went in. Naturally, we just had to go in to see if he was right.”

“And? What did you find?” I asked.

“Snakes and bats,” Aunt Alison said. “He was absolutely right. The first noise we made roused about a thousand bats and they all started flying around like crazy. We ran out of the place almost faster than they flew and we were on our horses and down the mountain before our fear could even catch up with us.”

“What about the snakes?” I asked.

“We didn’t wait around to check those out. Papa had been right about the bats. Didn’t see any reason to question his judgment on the snakes.”

Aunt Alison was laughing and so was I. Then we both looked at Mom. She was laughing, too.

“Mother told me that story,” Mom said. “Only she told it a little differently.”

“I’ve heard her version,” said Aunt Alison. “It has me going into the cave and running out, terrified, without a bat in sight and her laughing at me. Well, don’t you believe it. She was there with me and she was just as scared as I was.”

My grandmother had died a long time ago so she couldn’t stick up for herself. It didn’t matter. The story, no matter which way was accurate, was a good one.

“I wonder about the snakes,” I said.

“We’ll never know,” said Aunt Alison. “Unless, of course, I go back to the cave and look there myself, though I think it’s the parking lot for a mall now. Still, I’d like to see it. In fact, if I could have just one wish, it would be to see Montana again, the beautiful land of my childhood.”

I looked at the woman lying in the bed. There was a hint of the child who had been in that body once, the girlish grin and sparkle in her eyes. But now she was an old woman, weak from fighting her disease. There was no way that she’d get to Montana, short of a miracle, and that made me even sadder than knowing that she wasn’t going to live very much longer.

Aunt Alison’s eyes closed then and very soon she was sleeping quietly. Our visit was over.

It had been wonderful for me and I felt certain that it had been for her, too. I was very glad I’d come with Mom. Now it was time to leave. I glanced at my watch. It was time to get ready for my dinner with Skye Ransom.

N
O
MATTER
HOW
far I stretched my legs in the limousine, my feet couldn’t touch the back of the driver’s seat. It was a very big limousine. I didn’t think Skye would notice me trying, but he did.

“I can’t reach, either,” he said, smiling.

Skye is old enough to drive and he has his driver’s license, but his parents don’t like him to use their car. And the studio prefers that he use a limousine and let a professional do the driving. Skye started to explain the reason to me, but I understood it. He’s a very important star to them and they don’t like the idea of him driving with an inexperienced driver—himself. Life is weird when you’re famous.

Most of the time when I’m with Skye I don’t think about how he’s famous; I think about how he’s a friend.
He’s just a really nice, very normal guy. He’s about fifteen times better looking than any “normal” guy I know and an awful lot wealthier, but that isn’t what comes through when he’s with The Saddle Club.

Because he’s a good friend, I can usually tell when something is bothering him and something was definitely on his mind when he picked me up. So, I asked.

“It’s the picture I’m working on,” he said. “Actually, it’s my co-star, Chris Oliver.”

I felt my heart jump. I hadn’t known Skye was working with Chris Oliver! Chris Oliver was the star of a weekly television show about a group of high school students and just about every female in America between the ages of birth and twenty-five was in love with him—that is every female who wasn’t already madly in love with Skye. Stevie, particularly, had a wild crush on Chris Oliver. There was an interview with him in a teen magazine that she’d read so many times the paper had started to crumble. The first thought that entered my mind after Skye mentioned him was to call Stevie and Carole—right then and there on the car phone.

Instead I tried to listen to Skye. All I said was, “Stevie was reading about him in
TeenMag.
He sounds like such a nice guy.”

“He always does,” Skye said. “
Sound
like a nice guy, I mean. He’s spent almost every day on the set getting the director’s ear to let him know what a wonderful person he is—always at my expense. If something goes wrong with a
scene, Chris makes it sound like it’s my fault. If something goes right, he did it. He always manages to make me look bad, or at the very least like I can’t act.”

“He sounds like a jerk!” I said. “What can you do about it, though?”

“Nothing.” Skye sighed.

“The director has to know what’s going on.”

“Maybe, but maybe he doesn’t. No matter what, Chris keeps going on and on with this all over the set and even in the press. He never comes out and says I’m no good or a troublemaker, he just hints and that’s even worse. I’ve been trying to find a way to get back at him and I never seem to have an opportunity.” Skye grinned at me. “What I really need is to be in another Saddle Club project, like the time you girls saved me by teaching me how to ride.”