by Terri Farley
Cade’s face looked happy and sad at the same time. And then he walked away.
“Okay,” Darby said to Hoku as she watched Cade go. “That went really well, didn’t it?”
She pressed her cheek against Hoku’s silky neck.
Eyes closed, Darby heard Cade’s boots climb the stairs up to the porch, then go into the bunkhouse. He returned right away, and Darby stepped back from her horse.
“Here,” Cade said. He held out a tattered photo. “Is that her?”
In the picture, Cade was a gap-toothed toddler straddling the shoulders of a grinning woman. Tall, with a face round as the body of a banjo and gleaming blond hair, she steadied Cade’s leg with one hand and his shoulders with the other.
So careful, Darby thought. What changed?
Chapter Eight
Darby stared at the photograph of Cade and his mother while Cade waited. He was patient, giving her time to think about it.
Even if she told herself the photograph had been taken twelve or so years and an emotional lifetime ago, Darby wasn’t sure.
“I can’t tell,” Darby said. “I’m sorry, Cade.”
“Yeah, well,” Cade said, and he left, taking the photograph back inside.
“No sign of your mom yet?”
Darby jumped at the voice behind her. She’d been concentrating so hard, she’d missed Megan’s approach.
“Not yet,” she said, and Darby suddenly felt thankful.
What if she’d been born to Dee instead of Ellen Kealoha? She’d done nothing to deserve good parents. Cade had done nothing to deserve a mother who had looked the other way when he was being beaten by his stepdad.
Her own mother would never put her second to anyone. Darby knew it with every molecule of her being.
Cade’s face was blank as he came back down the steps from the bunkhouse porch, but Darby wished she’d kept the sighting to herself.
She felt another twinge of guilt when gravel crunched under the tires of her mother’s watermelon-colored rental car.
“Hey,” Cade said to Darby.
When Darby looked at him, Cade shook his head and winked as if he were giving her the go-ahead to celebrate.
Ellen drove so slowly down the ranch road, head swinging to stare from her windows, that the rental car didn’t raise dust, and Peach and Bart, the two Australian shepherds that hadn’t romped off to the pastures with Kimo and Kit, didn’t bark.
Curious sentries, the dogs stood with ears pricked toward the car and tails fanning at half-mast.
“Guess they recognize family,” Megan said, patting Peach’s head as she and Darby went past to greet Darby’s mom.
Darby had assumed Aunt Babe would further stake her claim on Ellen by driving her mother to the ranch. But her mom had come alone, and even though she still wore high heels and a stylish dress, Ellen popped out of the car with her eyes and arms wide, as if she’d embrace everything around her.
“Oh, Darby, we are going riding. I have places and things to show you! Do I ever!” When the wind flared her skirt, Ellen pushed it down absentmindedly, then stared off the bluff, toward the rain forest. “And Tutu, let’s visit her as well, shall we?”
Bart and Peach rushed to Ellen, and though Cade snapped, “Steady,” ordering them to calm down, the Australian shepherds nuzzled and licked Ellen’s offered hands before they obeyed.
Darby’s mom loved the ranch. Her perfectly applied cosmetics couldn’t hide the joy that glowed on her face.
Darby was only a millisecond away from throwing herself into her mother’s arms again when the shamble of hooves drew her attention as Jonah pulled Kona to a stop out by the tack shed and yelled, “Pig scraps.”
An instant after he said it, Jonah started as if he’d just noticed the rental car, and then his daughter.
“Aloha,” he said.
Something in Jonah’s tone confused Darby. He sounded almost like Ellen had pulled a trick on him. Had he expected her to come later, or what?
“Almost time for lunch.” Jonah sounded merely matter-of-fact as he dismounted, loosened Kona’s saddle cinch, then went into the tack shed.
Ellen’s elation had faded.
“No big deal,” Darby said. She laughed, trying not to analyze her mother’s expression. It wasn’t sympathy or disgust. “Ever since I adopted a new piglet, it’s my job to slop the hogs. And feeding the animals is more fun than doing dishes or cleaning my room.”
Every word was true, but couldn’t Jonah have reminded her before her mom got here or after she’d left?
“I’ll do it. You can pay me back,” Megan said. She darted toward the house for the bucket.
“Thanks!” Darby called after her. “Mom, come see Hoku. You won’t believe your eyes.”
“Wait,” Ellen said, before Darby could lead the way. “I’ll go see her after lunch. No pouting. It’s just that I didn’t bring riding clothes because I had no idea I’d want to go riding. But I’ve changed my mind. I can’t wait.”
“You and Aunty Cathy are about the same size,” Darby suggested.
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Her mom looked as if she were about to ask a question when Darby cut her off.
“Okay, but can’t you just come look at her?”
Her mom was using both index fingers to point down at her red high heels when the chinging of Jonah’s spurs made them look up.
“How’d that happen?” Jonah asked, looking at Ellen’s feet.
“I guess the ranch girl turned into a city girl,” Ellen said coolly. “It happens.”
“And vice versa.” Jonah nodded at Darby.
Don’t put me in the middle of this, Darby thought, but it was too late.
“There’s a difference between a ranch girl and an unsupervised child allowed to run wild and get into life-threatening situations,” her mom snapped.
“Mom.” Darby gasped.
“I only want what’s best for you, and that starts with keeping you safe.”
Her mom’s honesty was obvious and not overshadowed by a grudge.
“Lunch!” Megan yelled as she trotted past with a bucket. “Oh, for us, too, my mother said. I’ll be right back.”
Unsupervised child.
Running wild.
Life-threatening situations.
Okay, Darby thought as she helped Aunty Cathy carry lunch out onto the lanai, the last one was valid, but Jonah didn’t deserve the blame.
Hundreds of people on the island—hadn’t Tutu said something like it was a young land, still forming?—had felt the earthquake and been endangered by the tsunami.
Aunty Cathy carried a sizzling metal platter of steaks onto the lanai. Darby was about to follow with a basket of rolls and homemade french fries when Megan, carrying a bowl of fruit salad, bumped her hip against Darby’s.
“What now?” Darby grumbled.
“Don’t brood, or you’ll blow it.”
“Girls?” Aunty Cathy called.
Darby exhaled. She pictured herself flouncing onto the lanai with the hatboxes and presenting her mother with her past. She knew her mother well enough to think Ellen would be embarrassed at the hint she was still acting like a defiant teenager. Sort of.
“Knock it off,” Megan said. “They’ll work it out.”
“What? Now I can’t even sigh?”
“That wasn’t a sigh. It was a huff,” Megan told her. “And I ought to know.”
Darby chuckled, bumped Megan back, and hoped for the hundredth time that ‘Iolani Ranch would remain her home.
Ellen and Jonah left their quarrel out in the ranch yard. Aunty Cathy and Ellen got along so well—talking about cooking, clothes, movies, and weather—it was hard to believe they’d never met before today.
“I knew Ben,” her mom said. She’d reached between the pitchers of tea and lemonade to lay her hand atop Aunty Cathy’s, but she looked at Megan. “He saved me lots of broken bones, I’ll tell you.”
There was a Hawaiian cadence and kindness in Ellen’s voice, then, tha
t made everyone love her back.
“Thanks. Me too.” Megan cleared her throat. Then, with a trembling smile, she changed the subject. “I want to know all about being an actress. It sounds so glamorous.”
“I adore acting,” Ellen said in a qualified way. “But times haven’t always been easy….”
“You didn’t have to make them so hard,” Jonah put in as he popped a french fry into his mouth.
Ellen’s glassy smile stayed in place as she continued, “Because I knew nothing but this ranch. I had to teach myself everything else.”
“There’s no pleasing this one,” Jonah said. He turned his gaze from Ellen to Cathy. “I kept her safe at home and she ran away. I give my granddaughter the freedom her mother was champing at the bit to have, and that’s no good, either.”
“There’s a big difference between freedom and…” Ellen let her voice trail off as if she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t be drawn into another quarrel. Blotting her lips with her napkin, she turned to Cathy and said, “I saw her on television.”
They were both looking at Cathy and both their voices were too level.
“You sent her to me a timid little mouse. Not a daredevil like her mother. Good sense tempered her horse craziness, most of the—” Jonah stopped and tapped the table with his fist. “She’s doing fine.” He kept tapping, and water lapped over the edge of Darby’s glass. “Fine.”
Megan sat back in her chair. Aunty Cathy dabbed up the drop of water. Ellen watched Darby as if she had the answer to a riddle, but no one stormed away from the table.
Jonah’s eyebrows lined up straight across his forehead as he studied Darby. “I’m doing better with this one, and she’s doin’ good enough to run this ranch.” He ignored the gasps all around him. One of them might even have come from Darby herself.
“That’s not happening, Jonah,” Ellen said softly.
Darby remembered thinking her mother would never put her second. Not to a man like Manny, and not as the bone of contention in a feud with her father, either, right?
Jonah pretended not to hear Ellen. He picked up Darby’s hand and touched the calluses on her palm and the scraped knuckles on her fingers.
He gave a firm nod. “Not next week, you know. But eventually.”
For a minute it was so quiet, Darby heard the dogs yapping and running in a game of chase in the ranch yard. Francie’s chain clinked as she grazed in the shade. A faucet dripped in the kitchen.
“I’ll go turn that off,” Megan said, and Darby didn’t blame her for grabbing the excuse to escape as Ellen took a loud breath, looking like she’d just gotten her second wind to continue the fight.
“Tell her,” Aunty Cathy said. There was no doubt she was addressing Jonah.
“Tell me what?” Ellen asked.
“Nothing,” Jonah said, pushing back from the table.
“Jonah.” Cathy’s tone was either a warning or a plea.
“Nothing,” he repeated. “At least, nothing to do with you. Now, are you going to go ride, or shall I put that horse up? That Kona? He’s brother to your Prettypaint. She’s a gray.” Jonah said it with as much certainty as he’d use telling her that ‘Iolani Ranch grew green grass.
“I want to ride,” Ellen said.
Then Aunty Cathy offered to loan Ellen boots and jeans and showed her where she could change.
Glad that she’d be riding out on horseback with her mother for the first time ever, Darby still kept wondering what secret Aunty Cathy and Jonah were keeping.
Tell her. Judging by Aunty Cathy’s voice, it wasn’t a happy secret. And her mom’s reaction indicated she was afraid of the same thing, because Darby had heard a quaver in her mother’s voice when she’d asked, Tell me what?
Chapter Nine
Darby and her mother walked down to see Hoku after Ellen changed into borrowed riding clothes. Halfway to the corral, Ellen stopped looking around as if she could soak up the scenery of home, and touched Darby’s new necklace.
“That’s cute,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
Darby touched the gold flying heart. “I’ve kind of been thinking it used to be yours, since Jonah gave it to me.”
Her mother’s black eyebrows arched in surprise before she said, “Not mine.”
“He said it would remind me that my Hawaiian heart would always want to fly home,” Darby said. She winced because she’d mangled Jonah’s words, but her mother seemed to understand, anyway.
“He loves you,” Ellen said.
Darby didn’t know what to say.
Hoku interrupted with a quivering neigh.
“So does she.” Ellen nodded at Hoku.
The filly stopped trotting toward the fence. She danced in place when she realized the stranger meant to keep coming closer.
“And so do I,” her mother said, giving Darby’s shoulders a squeeze. “And, oh, honey—” Darby’s mother broke off as if Hoku had stolen her breath. “She’s exquisite.”
The late-spring sun turned the filly’s coat to copper fire, and her mane floated around her.
Ellen sounded as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, and now, knowing her mother had been raised as a horsewoman—she hadn’t known that when her mother had admired Hoku in the cold Nevada barn months ago—Darby smiled with pleasure.
“Before, when she was at Mrs. Allen’s horse sanctuary,” Ellen went on, “I could see what she’d been and how much she’d taken to you, but her coat was dull and stiff, and so were her eyes. She had sunken places over her eyes, too, as if she was a very old horse.”
“She was traumatized,” Darby explained as she offered her hand over the top of the fence, coaxing her horse to come closer.
“You fixed that,” Ellen said, and then, noticing the bruise across the back of her hand, she asked, “But who fixes you?”
Darby turned her hand palm up, hiding the spot where the lead rope had pulled tight.
“What did you do? That must have hurt,” her mother said. “I’ve always heard people bruise where they have fat, and your hands are nothing but skin and bones.”
Before Ellen could press her further for an answer, Hoku walked within about five feet of the fence and studied Ellen.
Chin tucked against her neck, Hoku gazed through her eyelashes as intently as if she were looking over the top of spectacles.
Ellen laughed. “Come here, my lovely.”
Hoku did, accepting the touch of her human’s mother, and feeling the kindness in her hands.
Darby and her mother had been riding for nearly an hour when they saw a ring of clouds around the top of the ohia trees. Then a coasting owl pulled a gray shawl of rain in its wake. As they rode through a corridor of trees so straight it must have been planted by humans, the fog crashed over the forest before them like a wave, and pressed close, filling every unoccupied space with spun-silver moisture.
“It’s like riding back in time,” Ellen whispered.
“Into a cloud forest,” Darby agreed.
Bird calls could be screeching dinosaurs, Darby thought. Wild Horse Island could be rising from an ancient bog on a world so new it was still being shaped by volcanoes and the sea. This fog was far different from the lung-eating volcanic vapors that had choked her just weeks ago. This fog smelled of woodland earth, fern fronds, and salt.
Navigator’s hooves thudded beneath her, but Darby couldn’t hear Kona’s hoofbeats. The fog blotted out sound, along with scenery.
Muffled senses would usually have made Darby nervous, but her mom had grown up here and they rode side by side, partners in a primeval world.
Questions swirled in Darby’s mind, but she refused to break this spell. In the saddle, her mother’s grace and fluid strength told Kona not to question her as she’d set him into step beside Navigator. Why had Ellen ever stopped riding?
Her mom couldn’t hide her passion for the island’s emerald hills and crystal air. She trotted into veils of mist with her face thrust forward, absorbing its magic. So why had she ever left?
Ellen couldn’t stop praising Darby’s new health, prettiness, and her ease with the huge bay Navigator. Watching Darby swing into the saddle and settle there, her mother had folded her fingers together almost prayerfully, and held them against her mouth as she murmured, “Oh, look at you!”
Now, Navigator snorted an inquiry and Kona halted. Navigator stepped between the smaller horse and the rustling foliage on their right. Ears alert, both animals stared as if their equine eyes pierced the fog.
“What do you think it is?” Ellen leaned forward on Kona’s neck, sounding eager.
She wouldn’t sound so jolly if she’d been dodging rabid hogs, Darby thought.
But this wasn’t the sound of rooting; it was—
“A horse,” Darby suggested.
As if she’d said abracadabra, a breeze parted the mist to show a black-and-white horse standing a few feet off the trail.
“Ohhh…” Ellen’s delighted sigh matched Darby’s.
Masked by satiny black from muzzle to eye patches, the horse studied them. Its flat cheeks, forehead, and neck were white, but a black swan’s throat flowed down to the ferns among which she stood. All they could see of the rest of the horse was a black mane blowing in inky tendrils.
“I know that horse….” Ellen shivered in recognition.
“So do I,” Darby said, but she didn’t tell her mother that the horse had appeared at the fold yesterday. Instead, the words of her mother’s diary echoed in Darby’s memory.
He came for Ebony, a wild black-and-white paint stallion.
Her mother’s lips parted in amazement, but she didn’t speak.
“You’re tame, aren’t you?” Darby asked the paint as it touched noses with Navigator and Kona.
Tame and friendly, just as she had been with Hoku yesterday, Darby thought. Remembering how her reach for the lead rope had frightened the horse yesterday, Darby didn’t move.
But then the horse rubbed her dew-beaded whiskers on Ellen’s forearm.
“I guess I can see who’s her favorite,” Darby said, pretending to pout.
“You stepped out of my dreams, didn’t you?” Ellen’s fingers touched the tracery of veins under black-and-white skin. “When I was a girl, I saw a horse like this, a wild paint stallion.”
