by Terri Farley
It came loose. Darby ducked out of the way and let it fall to the ground. She felt Mistwalker gather herself to buck.
She slipped off, and though the mare’s startled squeal made the other horses whinny again, Darby didn’t have time to comfort them.
“You’re okay, Navigator, Soda,” she called as Mistwalker galloped away. Her chest felt tight as she added, “I’ve got the first-aid kit, Patrick!”
She ran as fast as she could, but the hatchet was too heavy to carry and too clumsy to drag, so she alternated, and its metal head made furrows in the forest floor.
She was breathless, but almost back to the dock when another idea struck her.
Navigator had earned his name by knowing his way home from anywhere. If the big gelding galloped home riderless, Jonah would come.
“I’ll be right back!” Darby yelled.
Despite Ann’s sound of disbelief, Darby dropped everything and ran to the horses.
“You’re okay,” she told the worried geldings. “Navigator’s going for help.”
Darby jerked the quick-release knot loose, but the coffee-colored Quarter Horse just stared at her.
“Go home, ’Gator!”
Darby gave his rump a slap so that he knew he was free, and the gelding bolted into the rain forest, crashing through vines and over saplings instead of taking the trail.
Darby could only hope the horse knew a shortcut to ‘Iolani Ranch.
As soon as she was in earshot, Ann said, “You have to get up here and switch places with me.”
Ann must be desperate. Until now, she’d hidden her distress from Patrick.
Darby felt herself start to hyperventilate, except that she couldn’t. Her asthma-scarred lungs wouldn’t allow it.
She closed her eyes and, oddly, thought of Hoku. She was trying to train her horse to face fear by lifting her head, stopping, and thinking. Not running around in circles or panicking.
Darby decided she’d better do the same thing.
She dropped the hatchet, pinned the first-aid kit under one arm, and swarmed up to join the others on the dock. It swayed under her assault and Darby heard Patrick moan.
She felt grateful for the sound and tried not to think too much about what that meant.
Of course Patrick was still alive. Brilliant eighth-grade boys didn’t die in the jungle while they were playing pirate. It wouldn’t be right.
Holding her breath, Darby took Ann’s place. She placed her hands exactly where Ann’s had been.
Shouldn’t Patrick’s shirt be damp with sweat? It wasn’t.
“I’m really thirsty,” he began.
“I have a canteen,” Ann said, flexing her fingers before she picked up the flashlight.
“You can’t give me water. I was just saying…” Patrick’s tongue swept over his lips, but they didn’t shine with moisture. “In case I have to have surgery,” he explained.
Darby stared into the dark woods. Surgery seemed a long way off.
“I turned Navigator loose. He’ll go home and everyone will know we need help,” she said. Then she told them about getting the days mixed up. “I was supposed to go ride with my mother, and if I know her, she’s got Jonah totally freaked out by now. She’ll know exactly where to look for us. They’re riding this way. I’m sure of it,” Darby insisted. “And if Tutu sees Navigator first, we’re still in good shape.”
No one commented that “good shape” might be an exaggeration, but she felt them thinking it.
“I don’t think there’s anything creepy under the dock,” Patrick said faintly. “Maybe you should see if you can look at my leg, because it doesn’t hurt anymore. It just feels heavy. I didn’t sever the artery or we’d probably see blood squirting, but if you could feel my pedal pulse; that’s on my foot—”
Ann cut him off. “Patrick, I never thought I’d say this, but it’s possible you know too much for your own good. You rest. I’ll go look.”
She hopped off the dock to do just that.
“Don’t touch it, though,” Patrick called weakly. “A broken bone could still cut that femoral artery after all. Wouldn’t that be stupid?”
“Way stupid,” Darby said. She closed her eyes, listening to Ann’s movements. The dock was like a big wooden box, roughly rectangular, and though it might be open on the ends and worn with age and weather in places, she heard Ann grunt as she squeezed under the dock right underneath them.
It was quiet for a long time.
“I don’t see any blood,” Ann mumbled, and then there was a scuffing sound in the dirt.
“What are you doing?” Darby demanded.
“Scooting out backward from under the dock, like a badger or something. But there’s no blood. None. Just that sliver going into Patrick’s leg.”
“Is it big?” Patrick asked.
“Boy, is it big,” Ann said.
Darby winced at her friend’s tactless response, but Patrick wanted yet more detail.
“Big like a Popsicle stick?” he asked.
“Big like…” Ann paused, and Darby’s mind spun along with her friend’s. “Smaller than your forearm.” Ann’s voice drew closer. “More like one of those stakes builders put in the ground when they’re laying out a lot for a house.”
Ann pulled herself back up. As she did, she tilted her head and mouthed incomprehensible words.
Darby shrugged, and Patrick’s weight hung so heavy on her hands, she didn’t have the energy to figure out Ann’s charade.
Darby thought her wrist and elbow bones were pulling apart. She remembered thinking Patrick was heavier than he looked when she boosted him into Mistwalker’s saddle.
He didn’t feel so frail now, either. In fact, he seemed to be growing heavier.
“We still haven’t done anything with the first-aid kit,” Darby said. “Patrick?”
Darby looked down and Ann focused the flashlight on Patrick’s wrist.
It reminded her of the white part of a celery stalk, just as pale and no bigger. Still, his pulse bumped blue and steady beneath the skin. He was either sleeping or unconscious, and that must mean he was getting worse.
She didn’t want to use the hatchet, but she had to do it.
“Ann, listen. Step one: We cut the hole around his leg a little bigger. Step two: We sever the splinter at its base. Step three: We lift him out.”
“Thank goodness,” Ann said, nodding at the ground. “I thought, well, you know…”
Horror choked Darby.
Had Ann thought she wanted to cut off Patrick’s leg?
“No. No! But we have to make sure Patrick’s conscious and understands while we explain, because that would not be a good sight to wake up to.”
Ann giggled.
“You’re sick,” Darby said.
“Hysterical, I think,” Ann said, but she helped Darby awaken Patrick and explain.
“Flawless, it’s not,” Patrick said, “but it’s a pretty good plan for now.”
“Thank you,” Darby said, and she and Ann began using the flashlight to study Patrick’s leg and the wood around it.
“Are you calculating angles?” Patrick asked.
“Of course,” Ann snapped, but her hand covered her lips in dread.
Switching places with Darby, Ann held Patrick up while he trained the flashlight beam on his leg and the space around it.
To Darby, it appeared the wood was such a tight fit, it had actually peeled back a sheath of skin and left the meaty part of Patrick’s leg exposed and open to infection.
She didn’t mention that to Patrick or Ann. They had grim imaginations of their own. Besides, there wasn’t anything she could do until she got her friend loose.
“Anyone else would tell me to be careful,” Darby said once she had the hatchet up on the dock, but before she knelt to cut.
She hefted the ax’s weight for a moment, checking for pain in her arm, but she didn’t feel a single twinge of weakness.
“I just think you’re brave to try it,” Patrick said.
>
Brave? She was more afraid than she’d ever been. And what he’d said wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
Once more, Darby reviewed what she was going to do. She couldn’t cut too deep or she would injure Patrick with the blade, by ramming the splinter deeper or by creating a deadly trapdoor.
She held her breath, raised the hatchet, and suddenly the spot she was aiming for went black.
“Hold the light steady!” Darby screeched.
“Sorry!” Ann yelled back, but it wasn’t her fault.
Patrick didn’t say anything, but he was looking away, into the forest.
“Oh my gosh.” Darby gasped. She’d almost brought the sharp blade down without seeing where it would cut.
“I heard something,” Patrick said.
“I thought I did, too,” Ann said, but her tone was as remorseful as Darby’s was terrified.
“This time,” Darby said, raising the hatchet once more, “Patrick, can you count for me?”
He held the light steady and began the count-down.
“One,” Patrick said, in a steady voice. “Two.”
And then all three of them looked away from the tiny vortex of light.
Hooves thudded on the rain-forest floor. A horse nickered and a voice called, “Stop, honey. It’s Mommy, and I want you to put the hatchet down.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ten minutes later, Jonah and Ellen, smelling of horse sweat and wind, helped the girls extract Patrick’s trapped leg from the dock.
After surveying the boy’s situation and talking to Darby and Ann, they widened the crack in the dock and sliced off the splinter at its base, just as Darby had planned. Then, they pulled Patrick straight up and out.
They didn’t try to move him to the forest floor. Instead, they lay Patrick down on his back on the dock with Jonah’s jacket folded beneath his feet. They cleaned the wound and pushed the skin back down where it belonged.
“That needs to be cleaned up by an expert,” Ellen told Patrick.
It was no time for laughing, but Darby couldn‘t help being amused by Patrick’s expression as he listened to her mom. Ever since Ellen had explained to him that his leg had been “degloved” by the old wood, introducing him to a term he’d never heard before, Patrick found her mother fascinating.
He stayed still as Ellen used every inch of gauze in the first-aid kit to wrap the injury and steady the splinter in place.
“We shouldn’t pull it out? You’re sure?” Ann asked. She studied the whole arrangement skeptically.
In the moment of quiet, horses squealed and neighed below them.
“I’m sure,” Ellen said. “That’s a job for a doctor in Hapuna. Or one of the EMTs on the ambulance.”
Darby sighed, feeling weak with relief, because Jonah had explained that Aunty Cathy had called for help as soon as they saw Navigator gallop into the ranch yard.
“I am so glad I was right about where you were,” Ellen said.
“Of course, a spirit horse led her here,” Jonah joked.
“It did?” Darby asked.
Anything seemed possible in this forest of clouds and mist, but Jonah was only teasing.
And he was teasing her mother. His daughter. Some might not call that progress, but Darby did.
She thought of the quote Miss Day had written on the classroom whiteboard: “Love isn’t what you say, it’s what you do.”
Regardless of what Jonah said, he and her mom had ridden out here together. They were working side by side to help Patrick, and they’d both complimented Ann and Darby on the care they’d taken of their friend.
“I don’t know how you could have missed that horse,” Ellen said in frustration to her father.
“There was no horse but Navigator,” Jonah told them in a loud whisper.
“Mistwalker,” Ellen explained to the kids. “She was just off to the side of the trail the whole way here. Your horse loves you.”
Patrick smiled without opening his eyes.
“You can ride her anytime you want,” Patrick said. “I don’t think she’ll be getting much exercise from me. I’d feel a lot better if someone looked out for her.” His eyes opened and for the first time all day, Patrick looked agitated. “What you said about keeping her safe—”
“I’ll be around to help her out,” Ellen said, smoothing Patrick’s dark hair away from his sweaty brow. “Don’t worry.”
She would? Darby thought. Had Jonah and her mother worked out their problems? Or was Ellen just humoring Patrick to keep him quiet until the ambulance arrived?
Ann was staring at Patrick’s leg, and the color in her face was leaching away. Ann was paler than Darby had ever seen her. Now that everything was under the control of someone else, her friend looked as if she were about to faint.
“Ann,” Jonah said, and the red-haired girl’s head snapped up to look at him. “Could you go down and catch all the horses and tie them up? When we got here, we just trusted to their training, but when the ambulance shows up, there’ll be quite an uproar.”
“I will. I’ll do it right now,” Ann said. “Thanks.”
In the quiet that followed, Darby felt as if she were about to cry. Her emotions were in a knot and she couldn’t untangle them.
It began to rain, and as her mom rearranged the saddle blankets they’d placed over Patrick, she glanced down.
“There she is, Jonah,” Ellen whispered. She pointed below them at Mistwalker.
Surrounded by ferns, the beautiful mare would have been invisible if it hadn’t been for her white markings. The light that Ellen aimed from the flashlight made Mistwalker look like a magical woodland beast.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Darby said, squeezing her grandfather’s arm.
Even someone who didn’t admire paint horses had to see that Mistwalker was amazing.
When he still didn’t say anything, her mom insisted, “You see her now, don’t you?”
Jonah cleared his throat.
“Sure,” he said.
“She’s the horse you sold me,” Patrick managed.
Ellen rested a hand on the boy’s chest to keep him from sitting up, but she was also staring at her father.
“The paint,” Jonah said to Patrick, but there was a question in his voice that even he heard. He cleared his throat again. “The truth is, I’ve got old eyes. I don’t see so well in low light.” He gestured at the trees and darkness. “My peripheral vision’s not the best, either.”
All at once Darby thought of Jonah squinting at her mom across the cremellos’ corral, even though the sun was at his back. And the way he’d almost overlooked Ellen when he’d come to tell Darby to feed the pigs.
Oh my gosh, and the day of the earthquake! She couldn’t figure out why he’d asked Aunty Cathy how bad her head injury was, but he might not have been able to see it very well. And one day he’d had Kit examining Black Lava’s tracks when he could clearly see them himself.
Wait.
Darby felt a surge of sickness and concern. None of those things had taken place in poor light.
“How long has this been going on?” her mom asked. “This is what Cathy wanted you to tell me, isn’t it?”
Jonah laughed and looked down at Patrick as if it were guys against the girls. “Yeah, that’s it, but you tell people you have a little—what do you kids say?—issue, and they’re all over you. I don’t need sympathy. I know my work better than most.”
“Of course you do!” Darby said, but how bad would Jonah’s eye condition get? Could it have anything to do with him always looking around for someone to take over the ranch after him?
“How long have you had it?” her mother insisted.
“Awhile,” Jonah admitted with a wave of his hand. “Your mother,” he said to Darby, who knew how much he hated being fussed over. He shook his head. “Let’s discuss this later, yeah?”
“No,” Ellen said evenly. “I won’t stop asking, and since I can’t ask Patrick to step out of the room, I’m going to ask fo
r his discretion.”
Patrick gave a nod.
“Give it up, girl,” Jonah said. “I was a terrible father, but it was a lifetime ago.”
“Were you worried about your eyes way back then? When Mama was alive?” Ellen’s voice sounded suddenly girlish, and Darby’s heart squeezed in sympathy.
Jonah pointed a finger at his daughter. “I’ll tell you, but then that’s the end of it, yeah? Not another word.”
“Okay,” Ellen agreed.
“At first I was pretty mad, yeah? Newly married and finding out there’s this hereditary condition that could blind me. Could, you hear. It’s not a sure thing.”
Jonah lifted his chin before going on. “I kept it to myself because people are always remindin’ me of it even without knowing. They say ‘you won’t believe your eyes,’ and ‘right before your very eyes’ or ‘even a blind man could see….’”
Ellen hugged Jonah, leaning across Patrick to do it.
“And that’s why you kept me in a cage when I was a teenager?” Mom demanded against his cheek. “You were afraid you’d need to see something and I wouldn’t be there to be your eyes.” She held him until he made a disgusted snort and wrenched himself free of her arms.
“Partly,” he said, then smoothed one side of his mustache and winked as if his next words were a joke. “Are you gonna make me admit I didn’t want to lose you, too?”
It was no joke and they all knew it.
“Look,” Jonah said forcefully, “this disease? It’s gone real slow. It’s likely to keep on that way or maybe even stop. And I swear on my ancestors’ bones, if either of you change—you, coming back home to take care of the old man,” he said, pointing at Ellen, “or you, thinking I won’t see when you pet my horses,” he said to Darby, “forget about it.
“What kinda paniolo goes blind? I been thinking about it, and it seems to me, lately, he’s the kind who sees people he loves a little more clearly. Now that’s enough. Hear that siren? That snail of an ambulance is almost here.”
According to what Tutu said later, Ellen and Jonah had done their own ho’oponopono. Darby wasn’t sure she’d call it that. The reconciliation had begun when her mother said to Jonah, “Well, at least you had a reason to act crazy.”