Miracle Beach (33 page)

“Glory, what are you doing?”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Well, just tell me then.”

“But you said not to talk. So I’m raising my hand. That’s what we do in class when—”

“Glory!”

“Fine.” She sulked, her shoulders drooping. At least she had put her arm down, but the girl’s instant deflation made Macy feel bad for snapping at her. Glory stared at the concession stand, which they had just walked past. “I’m hungry,” she said, so softly that Macy almost had to ask her to repeat herself.

“That’s fine,” Macy said. She stopped and waited, motioning for Glory to go back to the food stand.

Glory hung her head. “But I don’t have any money,” she said, staring at the ground.

Macy chastised herself for making Glory admit to that. The girl was all of eight years old—of course she didn’t have any money. What was Macy thinking, inviting her along and then making her grovel for a handout? Why hadn’t she thought of feeding her earlier? Just because Macy could subsist on nothing but coffee until late afternoon didn’t mean that was any kind of nutritional schedule for a little kid. Macy fished three loonies from her pocket and deposited them into Glory’s hand. “Now you do,” she told her. “Pick out whatever you want.”

“Anything?” Glory asked, staring at the coins in her hand and then up at Macy.

“Absolutely,” Macy said. “If you need more money, just wave me over. I’ll wait here.” She pointed to a bench.

Glory came back with a hot dog, a bag of Skittles, and a Mountain Dew. Macy thought they’d both probably regret this combination in the near future, but if the girl could get herself all the way from California to Vancouver Island unsupervised, who was Macy to stand in the way of a good sugar binge?

They settled themselves back on the bleachers overlooking the show ring. The children’s hunter class was in—riders fourteen to eighteen years old. A short, stout blond girl on a seal brown horse with three white pasterns—two in front, one in back—and a pencil-thin blaze the shape of a lightning bolt on its face glided through the course as if floating. You couldn’t see any of the girl’s cues to the horse. The horse never hesitated, or at least that was hidden from view, too. It was effortless, their union whole and complete.

It was Macy’s favorite class to watch. The girls—and a smattering of boys—were so young, yet so poised and accomplished already. They all had the whole world ahead of them. Macy felt as if she were a banjo being plucked—strings of envy, nostalgia, and wistfulness reverberating inside her.

She remembered being the age of the girls riding in this division. Knowing everything. So self-assured and confident that she could steer not only her horses, but also her life, to the exact destination she chose. Only somewhere along the line things had veered far off course. Even if shown a map of her life now, she’d hardly recognize the place she had ended up. The funny thing was, this—the girl on the seal brown horse, the dusty weekend shows, the sheer promise of what waited on the other side of next week, next year—it didn’t feel as far behind Macy as she knew it was. Did it feel like this to be seventy, eighty, or ninety, too? To know you had more of your life behind you than in front of you, yet still feel like twenty was a bit past, like a shadow instead of a far-off memory?

The stout girl on the seal brown horse pulled it to a walk after the last fence and leaned forward to scratch its neck. It was such an intimate gesture. Most people lightly slapped their horses’ necks in an attempt to convey that it had done a good job, when in fact the slapping made most horses more anxious. But the scratching—that told Macy that this girl was serious about her horses, and this horse in particular. She had gotten to know her mount, and he her, in a way that went far beyond winning. Macy clapped and whistled for the girl, having no clue who she was.

“He’s
so
pretty,” Glory whispered. In her voice Macy recognized a familiar note of longing. It was the same one she had felt at Glory’s age. When her dad would tell Macy and Regan to pick whatever treat they wanted (within reason) in exchange for helping him out with whatever needed doing around the house, Regan would pick ice cream or a movie or riding go-carts; Macy would ask her dad to take her to feed apples to Bucky, the old Appaloosa that lived down the road. Every single time. “Bucky is the prettiest horse in the world,” she would tell her dad, in awe of Bucky’s baby pink muzzle, his strong neck, his broad back. Years and years later, cleaning out her dad’s desk drawer after he had died, she had found a picture of her petting Bucky through the fence and realized that he wasn’t at all attractive as far as horses went. He was swaybacked and overweight, and his wispy suggestions of a mane and tail put him squarely on the equine chemotherapy-patient side of the spectrum. He was, for all practical purposes of comparison, the direct opposite of Black Beauty. Macy had always chosen to picture the Bucky of her childhood memories.

“They’re like, like . . . magic,” Glory said out loud, but not really to Macy.

“They are,” Macy whispered back.

Glory turned to Macy, and something in her movement—the way her chin jutted out toward the person she was about to address, or the slight squint of her eyes, or the way she smiled as if she already knew she had an answer for the question she was about to ask—was as if Nash were sitting there right beside her. It almost made Macy want to reach out and touch her cheek, just to make sure.

Then, like a wave, the girl transformed into looking every bit like Glory’s mom, with her smug smile and almond eyes and petite wrists and collarbones.

Glory was as much her mom as she was Nash, if not more. No, worse. She was the exact combination of the two of them: of that woman and a husband Macy no longer had any idea whether she had ever really known. Macy saw that clearly, in a flash, in a way she hadn’t all day long.

“Do you think you could teach me? To, you know, ride and stuff?” Glory asked. Her wide eyes fixed on Macy, as if this were the best idea she’d had yet in her short, young life. It was the same exact look Glory’s mother had given Nash’s camera—Nash—in the photograph on the beach.

Macy thought about the words Nash himself had written:
My California girl.
She thought of him bending down to kiss Kat’s upturned face after taking her picture. Him whispering those words. Him running his hands under her sweatshirt—
his
favorite UW sweatshirt. On Kat.

Macy looked at Glory’s eyes. She wanted to say yes. She did. But she couldn’t. Macy shook her head. And she watched the horse-filled world that Glory had conjured for herself disintegrate in them as Macy uttered one simple syllable: “No.”

The hell of it was, she would have loved nothing better than to open up the world of horses to a little girl exactly like she’d once been. She just preferred to do it for one who didn’t have Nash’s eyes. Or Kat’s. One who didn’t need a mother right about then.

“I’m sorry,” she told Glory. “I can’t.”

JACK BEGAN HIS DAY ON THE DECK OF HIS BOAT SITTING IN A rocking chair he had found at a rummage sale the week before, breathing in the summer island air that now had a bit of a bite to it, that now whispered of fall. Back and forth. Forward and backward. One big toe providing all the push necessary to keep the motion fluid, the movement of the water rocking him the other way.

He began his day like that—on the boat, his heart sitting heavy with anticipation in his chest. And then, later, nearly skipping out of the office of Carl Vicker, barrister and solicitor, after being told that his chances of adopting Glory looked “excellent.” The Ministry of Children and Family Development would have to do a home visit, and they’d need to get a landing visa for Glory, and immigration might ask for presumption of paternity—all of which conjured in Jack’s mind a mountain of paper tied up in a bow of red tape—but Vicker seemed certain that none of those requirements should pose a problem. Jack could hardly believe it was going to work out so smoothly.

He began his day like that, and he ended it, or almost ended it, after eleven o’clock that same night by practically stealing Sophie’s car (she had accepted a last-minute guiding trip, and Macy and Martine had gone to Victoria to look at a horse) and driving to the Fanny Bay Inn—or the FBI, as everyone called it—after receiving a phone call from a trucker named Body who said he’d picked up Glory somewhere outside Parksville and finally convinced the girl to give him a phone number. He bought Glory a hamburger with extra pickles and a Mountain Dew, and waited with her until Jack could meet them at the pub.

On the way home, the road stretched out in front of them like a black velvet ribbon. Jack cursed the headlights on Sophie’s old station wagon, which were too weak a match for the black night that had settled around them. Glory sat stoically in the passenger seat, pressed hard against the door.

“Honey, I wish you wouldn’t do that. At least lock the door,” he said. He wondered if she should even be riding in the front seat at her age. Weren’t there all sorts of laws about that sort of thing? He quickly reconsidered. Where Glory rode in the car was the least of the things he should have been worrying about.

Glory didn’t budge from the door. She didn’t lock it, as he had asked.

“Lock the door, Glory. Please.”

She looked at him and turned away, staring out the window.

“You want to tell me what happened?” Jack asked her, but not softly.

They were almost home and a mutual haze of something close to anger had settled inside the car. Jack could almost see it wafting in the air.

Glory shook her head.

“That’s fine. Fine,” he said, though the tone of his voice communicated the opposite. “But we’ve been good to you, and I think you owe us the respect of telling us what’s going on instead of just up and leaving. You can’t run away every time something goes wrong.”

Jack knew he wasn’t talking like he should to an eight-year-old, that he was talking to her like he’d talk to the guys on his staff, but he was out of practice with kids.

“Who’s ‘we’? You have a mouse in your pocket?” Glory didn’t turn to look at him. She stared intently out the passenger-side window instead.

“ ‘We’ as in Sophie and Macy and me.”

“Hrumph,” said Glory.

Jack had slowed down to ease into the long, winding driveway leading to Sophie’s house. That was right about when Glory nearly startled Jack off the road by wailing, “Nobody wants me!” before bursting into body-racking sobs. Jack pulled to the road’s edge and threw the wagon into park. He took Glory’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and said, “You stop that right now. You know there’s not a shred of truth to what you just said.”

But he didn’t sound convincing, because it was true, or at least partially true. Macy? Well, she’d made her feelings well-known. Sophie loved Glory and spoiled her rotten, but she had an unpredictable life, a business that didn’t and couldn’t revolve around the girl; when a guiding opportunity called, Sophie went. As she should. And Jack? He wanted Glory more than anything, but was it really the right thing to do by her? To bring her into this shim-sham family they had set up here, together barely forming a whole?

“What happened, Glory? Go ahead and tell me. Everything was fine last night.”

“No, it
wasn’t
,” Glory wailed.

“You’ve got to try to tell me where you’re coming from. I can’t read your mind.”
Throw me a bone here, kid
.

Glory brought her face inside her shirt and swiped at her eyes and nose. “I told you,” she said. “No one wants me.”

“I want you,” Jack said, nice and quiet. “And so does Sophie. She loves you to pieces.”

“And what about
her
?” Glory asked. Her eyes were steely as she locked them on Jack. She had stopped sobbing as quickly as she had started. “She won’t even teach me to ride.”

“Oh, Glory, honey—”

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. My dad was supposed to be here!” And then it started again. It was like the girl had an internal faucet that she could turn on or off at whim. Glory started hiccuping, her body jumping with each quick breath. She raised her fists, which looked like hammerheads at the end of her spindly arms, and began flailing them against the dashboard. The sound of bone against the unyielding plastic of the dash filled the inside of the wagon and stunned Jack into action.

“I miss my mom!” Glory screamed. “I want to go home! I want my mom!”

Jack reached out and threw his arms around Glory’s wild ones, pulling the girl close and holding her so tight that he worried Glory might not be able to breathe. But she was still hiccuping now and then, her doll head pressed tight to Jack’s chest.

“Shhhh,”
Jack soothed. “It’s going to be all right. Don’t you worry.”

But he wasn’t sure whom it would be all right for. His heart nearly broke at the thought that the one thing that might torpedo the plan to keep Glory with him would be Glory herself. It might have been the fact that Sophie’s house had been shut up tight all day while she was up north guiding and Jack was searching for Glory, or maybe that the weather front that had felt like the end of summer for a week or so was simply a teaser. Maybe he had become acclimated to being rocked to sleep by the soft sway of his boat. In any case, Jack couldn’t get comfortable. He tossed and rolled and turned on the couch, but the heavy-wet air that settled all around him wouldn’t budge. So he got up, poured himself a finger of the bourbon Sophie kept in the cabinet above her refrigerator, and wandered out to the sunporch—Glory’s room, for now—to check on the girl.