Boot Camp (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 24)

by Claire Svendsen

  “What happened?” I said, getting out of the truck. “Last time I was here they had done so much work. They had cleared the land and were putting in a ring and the barn was half finished.”

  Now there was no ring, just a lumpy patch of tall grass. The barn, that once had stall fronts inside it just waiting to be installed, was now completely empty.

  “What happened to the stalls?” I said.

  “When I couldn’t pay, they took the materials away,” Dad said wearily. “I told you not to get your hopes up.”

  I’d imagined this cute little farm that was rustic and rundown but that we would make pretty and perfect again but this wasn’t anything that could be fixed in a day or a couple of weeks. This was months and years of hard work.

  “Where are we going to put the horses?” I said.

  “If we patch up the fencing, we’ll have a couple of fields for them. At least there is grass,” Dad said, trying to sound hopeful.

  “At least there is grass?” I spluttered. “What about stalls? What about a ring? Where am I supposed to ride?”

  “I don’t know Emily,” Dad said. “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We worked until dark. Dad brought a hammer and nails and I held the boards while he wrestled the splintered wood into place. At this rate my horses would end up impaling themselves and they weren’t going to be amused that they had to sleep outside in the dark. Bluebird wouldn’t care. When I first got him he didn’t even like going into a stall but the others were used to the cushy life they’d led at Fox Run. They were show horses. Now what were they going to be? Messy, wild field horses that wouldn’t come when you called them and spent all their time totally dirty and disgusting.

  “That should do it,” Dad said, rubbing his back and wincing.

  “Yes, great,” I said. “We’ve got one field. You know we can’t put them all in together, right? They’ll kill each other.”

  “I know,” Dad said. “I’ll come back tomorrow and fix some more but they won’t have individual paddocks right away. Some of them are going to have to share.”

  While Dad loaded his tools back into the truck, I wandered into the empty barn. They had poured the concrete and marked out the stalls but that was it. Those lovely wrought iron fronts had been hauled away. There was nothing to even make a makeshift stall out of. Birds fluttered down from the rafters and swirled around me before flying out into the darkening sky.

  “This is going to be our new home?” I said aloud to the empty barn.

  It wasn’t the sort of challenge I was prepared for. I knew the farm would need work but this farm needed all the work. It needed a team of men working around the clock to fix it and Dad didn’t have the money for that. He didn’t have money for anything.

  I suddenly realized that the whole last year that I’d spent at Fox Run, I’d been spoiled. I’d had grooms and facilities and my horses had the best feed and stalls filled with shavings and hay. And I’d taken it all for granted. I hadn’t stopped to think what an amazing life I’d been living and now it had been taken away from me, probably because I hadn’t deserved it in the first place.

  “We’ll make it work,” Dad said as he came to stand beside me.

  “I know,” I said. “We have to.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I tried to put on a brave face when people came up to me and told me how sorry they were. I said that it was totally fine because now we’d have our own farm and I’d have my own space and more time to ride and that really, at this point, it was the best thing for my career. They nodded and wished me well, saying that they’d see me on the show circuit and maybe one day on the TV at the Olympics. And each time they walked away, my lies still hanging in the air, a little piece of me died inside.

  At night I cried myself to sleep, when I was even able to sleep at all. I’d thought that I was okay with it but seeing the farm, I knew that it was going to be ages before we got it back into shape. It wasn’t even in a fit state for humans, let alone horses. Dad was spending all his time making sure we had a safe space for our horses but what about the house? Apparently the roof leaked, the plumbing was dodgy and the electrical was temperamental. We’d be lucky to survive living there and so would our horses.

  I was supposed to be packing my stuff up but mostly I just stood there, looking at the boxes in a sort of numb state. I didn’t even know where to start.

  “Need some help?” Cat said, sticking her head around my door. “I’m an expert at packing since I’ve done it so many times.”

  “Okay,” I said, sinking back on my bed.

  I still wasn’t sure if Cat was a friend or an enemy but she’d been nice to me since they came back and I had no reason other than my suspicious nature to believe that she wasn’t actually being genuine.

  “This sucks,” I said as Cat opened up a flat piece of cardboard and made it into a box.

  “It will be okay,” she said. “You’ll see. Things have a way of working out in the end.”

  “You haven’t seen the place,” I said.

  “We’ll make the best of it,” Cat said.

  She sounded like Pollyanna, always looking on the bright side. I was surprised that after everything she’d been through, life hadn’t crushed her into a bitter person.

  “But there aren’t even stalls for my horses,” I said wearily. “There is nowhere to ride. How am I supposed to keep my career going?”

  “Well I don’t know anything about stalls or riding careers,” Cat said, taping the box together. “But up in Wisconsin we had snow up to the windows of our house and there were still horses out in the fields and they seemed okay.”

  “They probably weren’t show horses,” I said grumpily. “They were probably just some old trail horses.”

  “Maybe,” Cat said. “But they were still okay. Your horses will be all right. And I can help you clear a place to ride and maybe we could make some jumps.”

  “You don’t even know the first thing about it,” I said. “You can’t just make jumps. You need real ones. Proper ones with standards and cups and poles.”

  “Look,” Cat said. “You can’t change what is happening so you might as well make the best of it.”

  “Great,” I said.

  But I decided that I wasn’t going to make the best of it at all. I was going to talk to Missy and ask her if I could stay. No, I was going to beg her to let me stay. I needed to be here. I needed Fox Run because without it I knew that my career would crash and burn and all my dreams with it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Missy?” I said as I sat out in the woods.

  I’d wandered out there, not wanting to take the chance of my father overhearing me. I knew that he’d be heartbroken if he thought that I’d chosen Missy over him but what was I supposed to do? This was all his fault in the first place.

  “I was wondering how long it would take you to call,” she said on the other end of the phone.

  “Why are you doing this?” I said, my voice all wobbly.

  I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t cry. That I would remain professional but as soon as I heard her voice, I wanted to burst into tears. She’d been part of our family and now she was betraying us. How could she do that?

  “Are you really kicking us out?” I said.

  “I’m not kicking you out,” she said. “The owners of Fox Run are just going in a different direction and that direction is with me.”

  She sounded cold and a little callous. This wasn’t the Missy I knew. The one who had hugged me and told me that things would be okay.

  “I know that you are mad with Dad,” I said. “And I’m sorry. But I haven’t done anything wrong. Can I stay here with you, please?”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Missy said.

  “But why not? I would be a big help, you know that. I’m no trouble. I won’t get in the way. I promise.”

  Missy was quiet for a moment like she was thinking. “If you stay, it will be an excuse for you
r father to come on the property and I don’t want to see him. Besides, I'm not even your legal guardian.”

  “You could adopt me,” I said, begging now.

  “Don’t be silly,” Missy said. “You have your father and your real mother back in your life now. You don’t need me.”

  “I do need you,” I said. “I don’t want them. I want you.”

  “You can’t choose your family Emily,” Missy said. “And I’m afraid you are stuck with them. Your father has a farm. It's not like you’ll be homeless.”

  “We might as well be,” I said, sobbing now. “The barn has no stalls, the fences are falling down and there is nowhere to ride.”

  “I didn’t know it was that bad,” she said, her voice soft for the first time. “I’m really sorry but there is nothing I can do about it.”

  “Missy, please, don’t make me leave,” I cried but she’d already gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once I knew that Missy wasn’t going to let me stay, I didn’t have much choice but to accept my fate.

  “I can’t believe we’ll never get to do this again,” Mickey said.

  She’d come out to the barn and we’d gone out on the trail. She was on Hampton and I was on Bluebird. Dry brown leaves crunched beneath our horse’s feet and our reins were long and loose. It was hot, a strange summer blast in November that had everyone scrambling to clip their horses before they died of heat stroke and running their air conditioning units at full blast.

  “This probably isn’t the last time,” I said. “We’re not even fully packed yet.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  I’d told her about my conversation with Missy and she didn’t believe it.

  “I can’t believe she wouldn’t let you stay,” she said.

  “She probably doesn’t want to get into some big fight with my dad about it,” I said. “And she is right. She is not my legal guardian.”

  “She could be. She could adopt you or something,” Mickey said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “We’re just going to have to make it work over at my dad’s farm.”

  “I can come over and help,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I replied but I knew that Mickey’s help wouldn’t be enough. We needed an army of men and we couldn’t afford them.

  We trotted through the woods and then cantered across the clearing, Bluebird surging ahead into a gallop. Since I’d told him that I was giving him the winter off, he’d been more eager to work than ever but I wasn’t going to jump him. He needed to rest and be a horse. And galloping on the trail was kind of just like being a horse. It wasn’t like real work or shows or any of that stuff.

  “Do you want to go to the beach?” I said. “It’s not that much further from here.”

  “I can’t,” Mickey said, looking at her watch. “I promised my mom I’d go shopping with her. She is planning this massive family Thanksgiving feast and apparently we don’t have enough plates or chairs or anything really.”

  “Right, Thanksgiving,” I said as we turned our horses back for home.

  I’d forgotten that in a few weeks we were supposed to be enjoying a giant cooked turkey with all the trimmings and having a wonderful family time. I wasn’t even sure if the old farmhouse had a stove, let alone if it worked or not and would my mother even be in any fit state to cook one? She’d cut back on the drinking a little at the insistence of my father but it was still a toss-up if you were going to go back to the house and find her sloshed out of her mind or not.

  Mickey must have known what I was thinking because she said, “You can always come to ours if you want for Thanksgiving. There is going to be so much food that we’ll never eat it all.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I should probably stay home. It's not really fair to leave Cat behind with my parents.”

  “So she is being all nice then, Cat, I mean?” Mickey asked.

  “Kind of,” I said. “I think it's probably because we only have each other. Both our parents are messed up so we might as well stick together.”

  “Your dad is okay though,” Mickey said. “At least there is that.”

  “At least,” I said.

  But Dad had been depressed since he got fired. I knew he was trying to hide it by throwing himself into fixing up the old farm but I knew he wasn’t really any happier about it than I was.

  “Things will work out,” Mickey said.

  It was what everyone kept saying only it wasn’t comforting at all. How could they know that things were going to work out? They couldn’t. Their words were empty promises.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  But I already knew that things weren’t going to work out as well as Mickey thought they would. If Missy wouldn’t let me stay at Fox Run then there was no way that she was going to let me take Socks, especially when she saw the state of our farm. That meant that not only was I losing my home and my horse’s home, I was losing my Junior Olympic horse as well.

  I’d promised to let Bluebird rest for the winter. I knew he wasn’t ready for the grueling show schedule that being a Junior Olympic horse would bring. That left Hashtag and Arion to choose from and I wasn’t sure either of them were ready for it but I was going to have to figure it out because there was no way I was giving up my spot on the team. Not now. Not ever. And in the back of my mind I was thinking that if the worst came to the worst, then maybe after a month off my pony would be ready to jump again. That he could be my team horse after all because he was the one I loved the most. The pony that had been with me from the beginning. I trusted him more than I trusted anyone. If only Jess hadn’t poisoned him then I wouldn’t have to worry about nursing him back to a healthy competition fitness level. There would have been no question that he would be my team horse.

  “You do know that you and Jess are going to be neighbors now,” Mickey said.

  “I know,” I replied darkly. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I spent quite a while over at the new farm, helping Dad clear weeds and put up fences. It was hard work. The sort of manual labor that I wasn’t used to and nothing like riding horses or showing. This was bending over for hours at a time as we tried to pull everything that might be poisonous out of our fields and lifting heavy boards so that my father could nail them in place. We hung gates and made divisions in the fields so that our horses could be separated.

  “What about when it rains?” I said. “They don’t have a shelter.”

  “Then they’ll have to stand under the trees,” Dad said.

  “But trees get hit by lightning,” I grumbled under my breath. “And we don't have that many of them left.”

  My father had his work guys clear a bunch of them when they first started work on the property but the biggest was still there. The old oak that he had saved for me before I even really knew him. That would stand in Bluebird’s paddock now and I hoped it would protect him like I lobbied to protect it.

  “They’re horses Em,” Dad said gently. “They are not made of sugar. They won’t melt.”

  I knew he was right. Our horses would probably be happy to live more of an outdoorsy kind of life. I just couldn’t help thinking about all the extra grooming it would take to get them ready for shows. If we ever went to another show again because at this point it was looking highly unlikely.

  In the house Cat and I cleared cobwebs, chasing the spiders out of the kitchen and the living room and every other room. Cat had a rag tied around her head as she hit the curtains with a broom and great clouds of dust billowed up into the air.

  “We should just take these down,” she said.

  “We should,” I replied. “But we don’t have the money to replace them.”

  Everything in the house was ancient but as we cleaned and scrubbed and worked our fingers to the bone, I could see the potential. Mom couldn’t. Dad brought her over one evening to see the place and I thought she was going to faint. She picked her way over the puddles in the drive and then stood in th
e kitchen looking pale. Cat and I had worked really hard to get it looking at least halfway presentable. We’d even scraped half a ton of grease off the cooker which made me gag but we’d done it and we were proud of our work.

  “No.” Mom shook her head. “No. I can’t live here. This isn’t a house, it's a shack. It should be condemned.”

  “The girls have worked really hard Lily,” Dad said. “You should have seen it before.”

  He didn’t add that Mom hadn’t even offered to come and help. She’d lain in bed for a week, claiming to have had a migraine when we all knew it was a hangover that she had instead and that she just didn’t want to pitch in and help. It wasn’t like we’d always lived in palaces. When it had been just my mom and me, we’d gone from one roach infested rental to the next, always cleaning and making it our own in whatever way we could. I didn’t know exactly what Derek had done to my mother but she wasn’t the woman I used to know and love. He’d broken her, in more ways than one.

  “You should look at the bedrooms,” I said. “They are nice and big and there are enough so that no one has to share and Cat won’t have to sleep on the couch anymore.”

  I smiled at my stepsister but Mom just looked like she was going to cry and when Dad tried to put his arm around her, she stormed out to the truck, got in and slammed the door. He followed her and I could hear him trying to talk some sense into her through the window. I knew it wouldn’t work. She didn’t want to move here anymore than we did but I really thought she should just keep quiet about it, considering it was all her fault in the first place. If Dad had never gone to get her. If he hadn’t brought her to live with us, then Missy would never have left and if Missy had never left then she wouldn’t have stolen my father’s job and got us kicked out in the process. So when you looked at it, the whole thing was really my mother's fault. I was just too tired to hate her anymore. And she didn’t feel like my mother anyway. She felt like a stranger who lived in our house. A house guest that you put up with but secretly hoped would just leave.