Wild Horse Spring

by Lisa Williams Kline

  “Hang gliding?” Mom said uncertainly.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Dad said. “They teach kids as young as four years old here. I checked it out.”

  “Let’s go, Dad!” I said. Time to separate them. I grabbed my pillowcase and jogged with it around Dad’s car to the shotgun seat, which was full of a briefcase, printouts, brochures, and a box of business cards.

  “Just throw your stuff on top. We’ll move it later,” Dad said. “Wait, hand me one of those business cards.”

  I opened one of the boxes and pulled out a card, then handed it to Dad, who ceremoniously presented it to Mom. “How about we meet at the resort where the conference is? You know where?”

  “Yes. Five o’clock, then,” Mom said in a firmer voice than usual. “At the resort. And we all have each other’s cell numbers. Diana, be sure and give your dad Norm’s number.”

  “I will, Mom.” Her nervousness was making me nervous. I couldn’t wait for her to leave. She came over and looked like she was going to hug and kiss me, but I gave her a warning look, so she just kissed her index finger and put it on my forehead, smiling at me with searching eyes.

  And within moments, Dad and I were alone.

  “Okay,” he said. “We sign up for hang gliding lessons down this path here.” He squeezed my shoulder again. “So, tell me what’s going on in your life, dudette.”

  He’d never asked me that before. I took a deep breath, felt a little tingle run down my spine, and began telling him about life at the barn, Josie the barn manager, and the personalities of the different horses there. Started to tell him what it was like to live with Norm, and parttime with Stephanie.

  Dad’s phone buzzed. “Hang on,” he said, then answered. “Yeah? No, I should get commission on those. Absolutely.” He held up a finger to me to say “wait one minute,” and then stopped on the path. “I did all the legwork on those cases. Those sales should be mine.”

  We stood aside for two people to pass us. Dad finished his conversation, then turned back to me. “What were you saying?”

  I picked back up where I left off, and as we followed a winding path to the visitors center, I told him about Stephanie coming to my school, and how popular she’d become. I told him how lame it was that we had to memorize poems over spring break. I was about to tell him about some of the kids calling me “animal” in the hall, but then we arrived at the visitors center. Two people stood in line ahead of us to sign up for hang gliding lessons.

  For hang gliding you have to go to “ground school” first. I went in a movie room with a bunch of other people—kids and adults—and we watched a video where a guy talked to us about how to control the glider.

  “The dunes are a great place to learn because if you wipe out you land in the soft sand. It’s almost impossible to get hurt,” the instructor said.

  Dad didn’t go with me to ground school, and when it was over, I couldn’t find him. Finally I found him standing outside the visitors center talking on the phone. I told him we were supposed to hike out to the dunes and meet my instructor, who was taking the glider up the hill. There would be four other people in my class, and we would each get five turns at hang gliding.

  “So, are you excited? This is the chance of a lifetime,” Dad said as we headed across the sand. “Yeah!” As we climbed the first dune, the wind picked up, whistling in my ears, plastering my T-shirt against me, and whipping my ponytail around. The view from the top of the ridge, from one side, looked like we were walking through a desert. Then, when we crested the ridge, on the other side were acres of dunes, Highway 158, rows of houses, and beyond those, the deep blue of the ocean. Both adults and kids ran along, harnessed under the blue and white glider wings, with an instructor running alongside, holding on to a rope attached to the glider, to launch them. Someone had brought along their golden retriever, which excitedly galloped along, racing the gliders as they skimmed the landscape. A couple of kids were rolling all the way down the side of the biggest dune. It looked like a blast. As Dad and I climbed the ridge, I watched one guy about my age take off and get a long ride—probably eight to ten whole seconds—from the top of the dune all the way to the bottom. Then I watched another boy tip forward and wipe out in the sand within ten feet of taking off.

  I wasn’t going to wipe out. I would show Dad what a good athlete I was.

  Someone had written “SOS” in huge letters in the sand on the side of one dune that could be read from the sky.

  That was when I remembered that the whole morning had gone by and I hadn’t gotten in touch with Stephanie. I quickly texted her and told her that I had Mom’s phone and to text or call me and let me know how things were going.

  “You go, girl!” Dad said, giving me another hard pat on the shoulder as the other students and I gathered around the instructor.

  My instructor was a guy named Al, about sixteen or seventeen, with curly brown hair to his shoulders. He’d been hang gliding for six years. We hiked across the sand behind him to a flat spot for our first ride. I was a little confused how we were going to hang glide on a flat area.

  My group, which consisted of three other kids my age, and a grown-up couple, all put on harnesses and helmets, the way Al showed us. My first ride was not what I expected. It wasn’t really even a ride; we just had to balance the glider as we ran along a flat area of sand. But balancing the glider wasn’t as easy as it looked. The glider wasn’t that heavy, but you couldn’t let it tip either forward or backward. Tipping it back before you were ready would make you start to take off, and tipping it forward tended to “stall” it, or make it dive into the ground.

  Then Al showed us how to foot launch along that same flat area, by running along with the glider balanced but angled slightly up to catch the wind and then picking up our feet and letting the glider carry us. For hang gliding, you have to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing so that you launch with the wind, not against it. I got only about a foot off the ground for the first ride, and only flew about twenty feet or so.

  To turn the glider right, you have to move your hands to the right side of the glider bar and push your hips and legs to the right so you’re actually shifting your weight. To turn the glider left, move your hands over to the left side of the glider bar and shift the weight of your hips and legs to the left. When you land, you’re supposed to be flying into the wind and uphill, so that you’re slowing down.

  Finally, on our fifth flight, we had to practice taking off with the wind and flying downhill for about eighty yards. Al carried the glider back uphill for all of us.

  I got in line last because I wanted to watch the others and learn from their mistakes. The boy who went before me smoothly executed the entire ride, landing on his feet at the bottom of the hill. He dropped the glider and held his arms up in victory, and we all cheered for him.

  Then it was my turn. I planned to do exactly what that boy had done. I really wanted Dad to be impressed.

  I lifted the glider by the front bar and made sure it was centrally balanced over my shoulders. I didn’t look back at Dad. I ran along carrying the glider with my hands evenly spaced on the bar, and then ran the first few feet down the dune and launched myself, pulling my feet up under me and tipping the glider slightly backward to catch the wind. It caught! I sailed about ten feet off the ground toward the bottom of the dune.

  What a fantastic feeling! I was flying! The wind whistled by, and the ground gradually dropped farther and farther away. But for some reason—maybe because I’m left-handed—the glider started diving toward the left. Suddenly I heard Al beside me yelling, “Straighten up!”

  I tried to react quickly, but I overreacted, and the glider lost momentum and stalled, hooking left and diving into the sand three-quarters of the way down the hill. I landed on my feet but then fell down, crashing the glider into the sand. I wasn’t hurt—just mortified that Dad had seen me wipe out.

  Al took the glider from me, telling me not to be embarrassed, stuff like this happened all the
time. He dragged the glider back up the hill, and I trudged back up behind him, with sweat rolling into my eyes and sand filling my running shoes.

  When I got to the top of the hill, the two boys my age were laughing at me, and Dad was nowhere in sight.

  Al called me a trouper and then said that our lesson was over, encouraging us to rent a hang glider sometime soon and practice the skills we’d learned. I trudged past a couple of other groups getting lessons and finally found Dad on the phone again. He was arguing with someone. “So did you talk to them? Somebody needs to talk to them.”

  I waited for a while, until he hung up.

  “So? How’d it go?” he said.

  I realized that he hadn’t been watching me at all. “Great!” I lied.

  “Come on,” Dad said. “We’re out of here.”

  We trudged down the hill and through the valley.

  “Sorry,” Dad said. “Business is tough these days. I’m in a very competitive line of work.”

  It was a long walk back to the parking lot, like hiking across the desert. Wind swirled sand so it stung my calves, and the sun glared in my eyes.

  My stomach growled, and I felt light-headed. I had been too excited to eat early this morning before we left, and the lesson had been over three hours long. Occasional black spots drifted in front of my eyes. I hadn’t noticed until now, but I’d scraped my shin when I wiped out, and blood was running down my leg. I licked my finger and wiped off the blood.

  Two seagulls flew overhead with shrill cries, and down by the visitors center, a little kid was screaming because he didn’t weigh enough to take a full hang gliding lesson and had to go in the kids’ group. A hot wind kept blowing.

  “Come on,” Dad said again. He put his hand on my back and pushed me forward, to speed me up, and I kind of stumbled.

  “Okay,” I said. I felt like crying. I hadn’t felt this way in such a long time, and I’d thought those memories were gone. But it was amazing how quickly those same old feelings came flooding back. I checked Mom’s cell phone to see what time it was. Almost one o’clock. Four more hours with Dad.

  I got a text from Stephanie and opened it.

  Daddy and Lynn made me spend the morning memorizing my Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem. Cody and I are getting together later.

  So wherever the ATV was hidden, no one was looking for it. And whoever had hit the mare was still getting away with it.

  Disgusted, I shoved the phone back into my pocket.

  Dad got into the car and started it. He waited impatiently while I moved the business cards and other stuff to the backseat so I could sit shotgun. He stared ahead with his hands gripping the wheel.

  “So …” he said. “I’ve had enough of this place. Now what?”

  “I’m kind of hungry.”

  He cocked his head, nodded, and backed out of the parking space at warp speed, then headed north. As he drove, he seemed to become lost in thought. I figured he was thinking about a place to stop to eat.

  “This conference I’m attending is giving us all kinds of new marketing techniques for selling insurance online. It used to be we sold insurance based on relationships. Now it’s all based on search engines. It’s frustrating for the kind of person I am, a people person. I say put me in a room with a human being, and I can make a sale. But this online stuff is a whole different animal.”

  “Right,” I said.

  We drove almost all the way back to where our house was, and then we pulled into a resort with hotel rooms and condos on one side of the road and a pool and spa on the other. I could hear the laughs and screams of kids in the pool as we turned in.

  “Here we are!” Dad got out of the car, slamming the door. “I’m going to drop you off here at the pool—I’ll sign you in—and run over and make an appearance at the meet and greet. I won’t be gone too long. Looks like there are a lot of kids there. You should have fun.”

  I got out, wondering if there was any food here. I fingered the twenty-dollar bill in my back pocket. I could at least buy a sandwich if I needed to.

  Dad went up to the lifeguard at the counter by the front gate and showed his room card. The gate opened, and I went in.

  “See you in a bit!” he said, and then jogged across the parking lot and went inside the lobby.

  On the way to the women’s room, I saw a hot tub labeled Teen Hot Tub, and about five kids around my age sat in it, laughing and joking. The girls wore expensive bathing suits and had pedicures. Stephanie would probably have just walk over and said “Hi.” I, on the other hand, ignored them.

  I found the women’s room and changed into my bathing suit. I didn’t like going shopping, so this was a Speedo that Mom had bought for me on sale at the end of last summer. A bin with a stack of huge fluffy white towels stood beside the door. I took one and went out to the pool. I picked a chair that was off by itself. The sun was glaring hot, and the chlorinated water in the pool flashed white in my eyes. I got out Mom’s phone and tried to think of someone I could text.

  Stephanie was the only person I could think of. As much as she drove me crazy, and as much as I had been mean to her, she was the one. So I wrote her, asking if she and Cody were looking for the damaged ATV yet.

  She answered right away. She said she was still stuck reciting her poem with Daddy and Lynn. And I realized that she had truly become someone I could count on. Right then I wished more than anything that I could talk to her.

  I closed the phone and stared at the bright water in the pool. Black spots started floating across my vision. I wondered again if I could get some food here. The twenty-dollar bill Mom had given me was still in my shorts pocket.

  I looked around and saw the counter where food was served. Two high school girls, dressed in white, were waiting on people. I went over. I pulled the twenty out of my pocket and said “Excuse me” to the girl standing closest to me. She had smooth brown hair and almond shaped eyes with a thin line of blue eyeliner around them, making her eyes look huge.

  “How much is a Coke and a cheeseburger?”

  “We don’t take money here,” she said. “You have to charge it to the room.”

  “I have twenty dollars. Can’t I just pay for it with that?”

  “No. We don’t have any way of taking money.”

  “Oh.” I tried giving her Dad’s name, but she insisted that the room number was what she needed.

  “Thanks.”

  I went back over to the side of the pool. I sat down and let my feet swing over the water, rubbed the blood off my leg again, then felt kind of faint and shaky and lay down. The sun shone through my closed eyelids. Here, I was just waiting, and I had no power over anything.

  I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes. I heard the faint sloshing of the water against the tiles on the side of the pool and opened my eyes. How much time had gone by? I jumped up.

  Black spots bloomed in front of my eyes, and the sky whirled. My arms helicoptered, and I fell over the edge into the shallow water, landing on my back with a soaking splash. “Whoa!” I yelled, swallowing water, scrambling to my feet. The water was only about two feet deep.

  All the kids in the hot tub started laughing.

  What an idiot.

  I thought about it. We had passed a restaurant a ways back on the road. I could walk back there.

  I didn’t bother to try to find Dad. Why should I? What did he care? I just headed across the parking lot, listening to the squish of my shoes and the gravel crunching under my feet, squeezing the water out of my ponytail.

  “Diana!” Dad came out into the parking lot yelling.

  I kept walking. What did I owe him?

  “Hey! Where are you going?” He stopped and gestured as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  I wheeled and yelled back at him. “What do you care?”

  I continued my march toward the highway and looked up and down the road. A lot of the businesses around here weren’t open yet for the season, and I saw a lot of empty parking lots. But a
block away, on the other side of the highway, was a gas station. I could get a Coke and some kind of sandwich there. Maybe they had fries. I was dying for some fries. It would be hard to find a break in the traffic, though. Cars flew by at a blur.

  “Diana!” Dad came up behind me, grabbed me by the elbow, and swung me around.

  “Let go of me!”

  “I will not! What are you doing?”

  “I’m hungry, all right? I need something to eat!”

  He tightened his grip on my elbow and pulled me away from the street. “What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you tell me you were hungry?”

  “I did!” I wasn’t going to cry. In fact, I was too mad to cry. “But you didn’t listen!”

  20

  STEPHANIE

  “One more time, sweetie, and then you can head out to the beach,” Daddy said. We were on the back porch. He and Lynn sat close together on a chaise lounge, holding hands, and he wore his sunglasses, squinting at my printout of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem “How Do I Love Thee?” as it flapped and crackled in the sea breeze. It was supposed to be one of the most famous love sonnets ever written. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her husband, Robert Browning, who was also a famous poet.

  “But I only made two little mistakes!” I said, shaking my foot to jiggle one flip-flop, in a hurry to get to the beach. We’d promised Diana that we’d look for the ATV! She’d already texted me, asking if Cody and I had found anything. “Besides, Diana hasn’t practiced hers at all yet.”

  “You be concerned about your own work, not hers,” Daddy said.

  “I love the fact that you’re memorizing a famous love poem,” Lynn said. “I think I’ll try to memorize it too, so I can recite it to your daddy.” She leaned over and kissed Daddy on the end of his nose. Daddy turned and smiled at her, and even in the sun I could see him blush.

  “PDA!” I covered my eyes and made a gagging motion, but secretly I liked seeing them joke around this way.