A Summer Without Horses

by Bonnie Bryant

  I’d ordered a steak and it smelled delicious. It was, too.

  “How was Aunt Alison today?” I asked.

  “She’s okay.”

  That was all my mother said and it told me an awful lot. The fact that she gave me only two words meant that Aunt Alison really wasn’t okay and Mom didn’t want me to worry. That gave me one more thing to worry about.

  We talked a lot, but said very little, mostly chatting about how we needed to send postcards to friends and family. I knew there was something my mother didn’t want to tell me about. I wondered if she knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. We finished up our dinner and were in bed early. We both wrote out a couple of postcards and then turned out the lights.

  I don’t think I slept at all that night. First, I’d think about lying to my friends and when that made me feel really awful, I’d think about Kip. Then I’d think about ruining The Saddle Club by having Veronica in it and when that made me feel really awful, I’d think about Kip. Then I’d think about how much it was going to cost to house, feed, and care for Kip and when that made me feel really awful, I’d think about riding Kip. And then I’d think about not having Kip and the fact that I was already planning to lie to my friends, because not telling something can be just as much of a lie as telling something and when those thoughts made me feel really awful, I’d think about Kip again.

  Nobody in the world could sleep with thoughts like that tumbling around in her head. I’d gone to bed feeling miserable and confused and by the time the sun came up, I felt miserable, confused, and tired.

  SINCE I HADN’T decided yet what I was going to do, I decided not to think about it for the whole day. Mom had our day all planned. We were going to visit the Los Angeles County Museum in the morning, then have lunch in Beverly Hills at a nice little restaurant she’d read about, then we’d go visit Aunt Alison.

  I know it sounds boring, but it really wasn’t at all. I had a good time with Mom. She knows a lot about art and was able to help me see and understand things I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. We spent a long time studying the Impressionist paintings, which I used to think just looked fuzzy—as if the painters needed new glasses. Mother explained to me that they were experimenting with light and color, showing what light did to and for perception. Also they were painting the things of everyday life—people, objects, places, and that was very different from the painters who came before them who tended to deal with grand or famous or historical subjects.

  After that, we looked at some paintings of horses and hunting. I explained some of the finer points of horses to her. She’s always thought that how a horse looks is the most important thing about it. I was finally able to convince her that looks were the least important factor. It’s how well the horse performs the job he’s expected to do, whether that’s pulling a heavy wagon to market or jumping over a fence after a fox.

  The restaurant in Beverly Hills had an outdoor garden with tables in it. I know I spent too much time looking at the people around us and wondering if any of them were rich and famous, and I was aware that my mother was doing the same thing. But there must have been some people there who wondered if Mom and I were rich and famous! Star-gazing is a two-way street.

  Then we went to see Aunt Alison. Mom seemed relieved the minute we saw her and that confirmed my suspicion that Aunt Alison had been having a bad day the day before and Mom hadn’t wanted to tell me just how bad it was. My great-aunt was sick, of course, but she had a warm smile on her face when we walked into her room.

  “Lisa, tell me about your ride yesterday!” she said eagerly.

  She wanted every single detail of every minute of it and I was only too happy to fill her in.

  “Kip sounds like a wonderful horse!” she said.

  “He absolutely is. I think he’s the best all-round horse I’ve ever ridden. You should have seen how he took the jumps. I mean you should have felt it!”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s English riding you do, isn’t it? We never did much jumping in Montana. We just rounded up cattle.”

  That got me talking about my Western riding—the times I’ve gone with Stevie and Carole to our friend Kate’s dude ranch.

  “I’ve been on some cattle drives and I’ve camped out. In fact, we even had a race with a forest fire!”

  “Fires on a dry day can be deadly,” Aunt Alison said.

  “Especially when there’s a breeze,” I agreed. “For a while there, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.”

  “Now, now, Lisa,” Mother said. “Don’t you go making up stories for Aunt Alison.”

  “I’m not making it up, Mom. It happened.”

  “It did?”

  The look on my mother’s face reminded me that I might not have given her exactly all the details of our pack trip, and the look also reminded me why. My mother could be so overprotective sometimes. It was too late now and besides, what did it matter? I was home safely.

  “There was a fire near our ranch one very dry summer,” Aunt Alison went on. “It came across our land and killed half the herd of cattle, but it jumped over most of our garden. They do that, you know—jump, I mean.”

  “I know. It’s one of the reasons they can move so fast sometimes.”

  “Oh, that land,” she said. Once again, she sounded wistful. “It was truly God’s country. I can remember thinking sometimes that land went on forever. Sometimes all I could see were the mountains, sometimes just the prairies. And everywhere there was the blue sky. It stretched on for all eternity.”

  “Big Sky country, right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, sighing.

  I realized that the very thought of Montana was comforting to her.

  “You think about it a lot, don’t you?” I asked.

  “All the time,” she said. “I think it’s because it occupies so much of my mind and fills my heart with happiness that I don’t have room in my brain to think about this disease and the pain it’s causing me.”

  Aunt Alison shifted her position in her bed and although she didn’t say anything, I could see that the movement had been painful to her. She pulled the covers up with her thin, white hands. It was a simple movement, one I make every night, but I could see that it wasn’t simple for her and the whiteness of her hands reminded me that she’d been in this bed and in this hospital for a very long time. That, more than anything, made me sad, because I’ve always loved being outdoors—especially when being outdoors included being with horses.

  I didn’t say anything then. I just waited and watched. Aunt Alison wanted to say something else.

  “At night, I close my eyes and pretend I’m in Montana. I know the place I grew up isn’t there anymore, but a lot of the state is still just about the way I remember it: wild, mountainous, craggy, open, and beautiful. It’s as if it calls to me. Sometimes I wonder what heaven is like and if I’ll get there. One night I decided that I only want to go there if it’s just like Montana.”

  “Would you like to go to Montana again?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked it. It was a foolish question and the minute it was out of my mouth, I regretted it, for in that instant, Aunt Alison’s eyes filled with tears.

  “More than anything,” she whispered. Her eyes closed then and she slept. Mother and I left her alone.

  We didn’t talk much on the way back to our hotel. We’d both been moved by Aunt Alison’s passion and saddened by her sadness. Aunt Alison had also made me think about Pepper, the horse I’d learned to ride on, who’d gotten ill and had been put down last fall.

  I don’t mean to say that an animal’s death is the same as a person’s. What I thought about was the fact that Pepper had lived a good life. He’d done everything a stable horse could do by the time he was old and dying. If he’d known what regrets were, he wouldn’t have had any. But Aunt Alison had regrets. She missed Montana and she wasn’t going to be able to get on an airplane and fly back there one more time. That made me sad. It also made me think about regrets. Sometimes regret
s are about things you’ve done; sometimes they’re about things you haven’t done. Sometimes they’re unavoidable; sometimes they aren’t.

  The phone was ringing when we got back to our room. I grabbed it and heard Skye’s voice.

  “I’m so glad you’re there, Lisa,” he began. “I’ve got everything set for chartering the plane to take Kip back to Virginia. The charter people just want to know exactly when they should plan to arrive. Have you talked to Max yet?”

  I hesitated, then said, “I can’t accept Kip, Skye.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  I could have explained about our pledge in The Saddle Club and about Veronica diAngelo and he would have understood, but it wasn’t the real reason. It was only half the reason. The other half was the expense that my parents simply couldn’t afford. They’d considered buying me a horse at one time, and we’d even looked at quite a few. Since that time, they’d learned more about how much a horse costs to keep and it’s a lot of money. The better the horse, the more money. Kip would be well beyond our budget and I knew it. It wasn’t fair to ask my parents to do something I knew they couldn’t afford.

  I began to explain that to Skye.

  “I want you to have this horse, Lisa. I think he’s perfect for you. You said so yourself. Giving him to you is the best way I can think of to thank you for what you did for me. Can I help to convince your parents?”

  “No, please,” I said. “Kip is wonderful and perfect, but I just can’t accept him. The wonderful day you and I had yesterday is more than enough thanks for what I did. Really.”

  “Oh, come on,” Skye said. “There must be something—I mean, Lisa, if you don’t let me do something for you, I won’t feel as if I’ve thanked you properly.”

  Then it came to me. I guess I already had this image of the airplane specially designed to carry horses, just waiting at the airport for my horse. It popped into my head then that there were other airplanes that were specially designed for various purposes, including ambulances.

  “Aunt Alison—” I blurted out.

  “What?”

  “Remember my aunt—the one in the hospital?”

  “Of course. I’m going to stop and visit her next time I’m seeing the kids there.”

  “Well, if you’re really in the mood to charter airplanes, how about an ambulance plane that can make a nice little round trip to Montana?”

  IT WAS A day I’ll never forget.

  In the first place, it took about four hundred phone calls, including one to the hospital, a private nursing service as well as Aunt Alison’s doctor, and then to the ambulance services and then probably to the FAA for all I know, but it was arranged. It was scheduled for two days later, but Aunt Alison was having a bad time that day, so everything had to be put off for a day.

  One of the nicest things was that we didn’t tell her about the trip until the ambulance showed up to take her to the airport at seven o’clock in the morning.

  “Where am I going?” she asked.

  Mom looked at me. “Montana,” I said. “I promise to tell you the whole story on the airplane.”

  Aunt Alison was speechless and that was okay because if she’d been talking, I might have had to talk and I don’t think I could have.

  Mom, Aunt Alison, and I rode in the ambulance to the airport. Skye met us there. I loved the fact that he wanted to come along and it coincided with a day he had off the set. The ambulance drove right up to the airplane and Aunt Alison was put aboard in a comfortable bed. Since it was going to be a couple of hours until we got to the Big Sky country (and I was now thinking of it totally as the Big Skye country), the nurse gave Alison some medicine so she would sleep. Mom, Skye, and I went into the passenger cabin where there was a nice breakfast spread out for us.

  I could almost feel it when we got to Montana. Below us, the Rockies seemed cleaner, higher, shinier, and more snow-covered. There were fewer towns and more greenery.

  I went into Aunt Alison’s cabin. Her eyes were opened.

  “We’re there, aren’t we?” she asked. I knew she’d felt it, too.

  It was a sparkling clear day. As the pilot descended through the sky, Aunt Alison and I looked out the window.

  “We had a pasture just like that one,” she said, pointing. “And we kept our horses there just like that.” I looked where she pointed. There was a herd of horses. Our plane was low enough now for them to be able to hear the sound. One, a big bay, looked up at us and then rose in a magnificent rear that startled the whole herd into action. They galloped across the meadow, racing the small shadow of the plane.

  “There’s one there—the Appaloosa, see him? It looks just like Cass! Gallops like her, too. How she used to love to run, that horse! Oh, Lisa!” she said. I know I wasn’t paying for the plane ride, but as far as I was concerned, the joy in her voice was enough payment for ten ambulance planes to Montana. She was breathless with excitement.

  She reached for my hand and squeezed it. She never let go of it for the whole rest of the visit to Montana, either. She held tightly as we swooped around the mountains, bringing her closer than she’d ever been on horseback. She held my hand as we entered a valley. There was a small ranch nestled among a stand of trees at one end and it had a flourishing vegetable garden between it and the barn. The barn was surrounded by animals in pens, pigs, sheep, goats, and a larger area where some cows stood, contentedly munching on grass. Beyond their field lay the meadows where the cattle grazed. Aunt Alison gave my hand a little squeeze then. I knew it was because that ranch reminded her of her girlhood home. The plane made a turn then, heading farther north.

  “Approaching ground zero,” the pilot announced. Aunt Alison looked a little confused.

  “You’ll see,” I said. “Just wait.”

  Aunt Alison did see. She saw everything. She sat as far upright in her bed as she could manage and watched out the window for every single detail she could get of Montana. Then the wild country changed into a settled area below us. It wasn’t exactly a city, but there were a lot of houses and streets and then there was a small shopping mall.

  I waited quietly to see if she would recognize anything specific. Then a look came across her face as she stared at the craggy top of one of the mountains.

  “It’s Bison Rock! I know it. There it is!” She took a deep breath. “I’m home,” she said.

  “What’s Bison Rock?”

  “Well, just look,” she said. “See how the rock there on the side of the mountain is shaped sort of like the back and head of a buffalo?”

  I looked. I couldn’t see it at all, but I had a feeling that it was clearer when you were on horseback than in an airplane. The important thing was that Aunt Alison could see it.

  “Is that where the cave was?” I asked, recalling her story of the bats and the snakes.

  “Not quite,” said Aunt Alison. “That was in the mountain just to the east of Bison Rock. It was—” She paused, closing her eyes to think. “Maybe a half an hour east of here.” She leaned over then to see out the window on the other side. “It was in an area we used to call Chapel Valley. I always thought the name had something to do with a chapel, but I learned later it was named for the family who settled in it. In spite of the fact that I learned better, there’s a part of me that’s always thought chapels should be crescent-shaped!”

  “Like that?” Aunt Alison’s nurse asked, pointing out the window to something in the distance. Aunt Alison looked where the nurse pointed.

  “Just like that,” she said and from the way she said it, I knew we’d found it and it wasn’t a parking lot at all. It was still a wild, untouched high meadow.

  I scooted up to the pilot’s cabin. We just had to have a close look. When I returned from the cockpit, Mother and Skye followed me back into Aunt Alison’s section of the plane. They didn’t want to miss this.

  In a minute the plane banked and turned. Then we dipped down low and flew the curved length of Chapel Valley. It was everything I’d hoped for from the
moment I’d asked Skye if we could do this.

  “I remember!” Aunt Alison said breathlessly. “We used to stop and cool down in the shade of that big rock. That’s where Lida dared me to go into the cave. Then, there, we tried to see into the cave from there, but we couldn’t.”

  She started talking very fast then because she was racing with the airplane. “It was too dark to see, so we just had to go in. And there, by that tree, though it was barely a bush then. That’s where we tied our horses up while we explored the cave. And there’s the entrance to the cave. See it?!”

  We all looked. We all could see. It was all so real I could almost see two girls hop off their ponies and approach the cave entrance.

  Something happened then that I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was the noise of the plane echoing down the valley. Maybe it was something else. I’ll never know. All I do know is that at that exact moment a black dot appeared outside of the cave. It was followed by another and then another and the next thing any of us knew, the whole sky outside the cave entrance was filled with black dots, curving, swirling, dipping, flying. It was bats—thousands and thousands of bats.

  Nobody said anything for the longest time, not until we were well clear of Chapel Valley. Then Aunt Alison spoke.

  “I told you so.”

  There was a wonderful, totally satisfied grin on her face.

  MOM AND I left Los Angeles the next day. It had been a wonderful trip. I had had a great time with Skye, especially at Penelope’s when I’d helped him out with his problems with Chris Oliver. But the best part of our L.A. vacation had to be meeting Aunt Alison again. With some help from my friend, Skye, I’d been able to do something for her that really made a difference. It wasn’t going to change her health; I knew that. It was just going to relieve her of a regret. That’s an important thing to be able to do for a friend.