“Sorry, sweetie, we’re listening,” Daddy said, laughing, and he squeezed Lynn closer. I closed my eyes for a minute, pretending it was Daddy and Mama, but I opened them again quickly, knowing it was babyish to think that.
“Okay,” I sighed. I cleared my throat and started out the poem again.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”
“Perfect!” Daddy said. “Good job, sweetie.”
I had wanted to memorize this poem because my teacher had told me about the famous love story between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Elizabeth was born in England in the 1800s. She wrote her first poem when she was twelve. At that same time, she was learning Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. She was passionately religious and wrote about things like slavery, the rights of women, and child labor.
When she was fifteen, she was bedridden with some mysterious lung or spinal disease that doctors never diagnosed, and they gave her morphine for the pain. She became addicted to the morphine, which I guess used to happen to people a lot back then.
She was already a famous poet when Robert Browning wrote her to say he admired her work. They wrote letters to each other for a long time, and he told her in a letter, before he even met her, that he loved her poems and he loved her too. When he finally went to her home for a visit, they fell in love in person. She could not believe that a handsome man like Robert Browning could love an invalid like her. Elizabeth’s father wouldn’t give his permission for them to marry, so they eloped. Her father immediately disowned her, and she never saw him again. For the rest of her life, she wrote her father letter after letter begging for forgiveness, but he never even opened them. I thought that was terrible. Her health became worse, and after fifteen years together with Robert, she died in his arms. After her death, Robert and her son published many of her poems.
Anyway, it was such a beautiful and romantic story. Would I find love like this someday?
Lynn had been reading over the poem, and she said, “Let me try now.” She took a breath. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and the breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.” She stopped, then waved her hands with impatience. “I’m distracted.” She picked up her phone and looked at it. “I keep thinking about whether Diana might be trying to get in touch with me. I just hope things are going all right with her dad. Anyway, I wish I had a young mind! Look how easily you did that, Stephanie! I can’t remember the next line.”
“I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”
I knew that line because I remembered it meant that Elizabeth loved him both by day and by night. I finished the poem again, feeling even prouder of myself.
“That’s just great, sweetie.”
“What do you think it means by the line ‘I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints’?” Lynn asked.
I had thought about that. “I was thinking that maybe she had faith in God when she was little, but then maybe something bad happened to make her lose her faith. I read online that her brother drowned, and she became very depressed afterward because she had a fight with him the last time she saw him, and they never really got a chance to make up. I think bad things happening can make a person stop believing in God.” I thought about my conversation with Diana.
“Does the poem make it sound as though her love for Robert replaced her love for God?” Daddy asked.
I looked at the words of the poem again. “I don’t think so, because at the end she said that if God chooses, she’ll love him even better after death. So she believed in God’s will, and also in eternal life.”
“So maybe her love for Robert revived her ability to love both God and others again?” Lynn asked.
“That’s what I think,” I said.
Lynn and Daddy exchanged a glance. “I could understand how that can happen,” Lynn said.
A voice inside me said, Ask them now. Ask if you can live with them.
I opened my mouth, but then was too afraid. “How did y’all know you were in love?” I asked instead.
They looked at each other again and laughed, and each put a hand on the other’s knee. “For me it was love at first sight,” Daddy said.
“Oh, it was not!” Lynn said.
“Seriously, remember when I brought you flowers on our second date—”
“Daffodils and tulips!”
“—and the flower vase dropped on the floor, and I was trying to help you clean it up, and I cut my hand? The touch of your hands when you cleaned and bandaged mine … I’ll always remember that. It made me fall in love. The touch of your hands.”
Lynn put her hand on Daddy’s cheek and kissed him on the lips.
“Okay, I’m going to the beach!” I said, grabbing the poem away from Daddy.
“Go ahead.” Daddy and Lynn were both laughing.
I got my beach bag and headed down the wooden walkway to the beach, wondering what it would be like to fall in love. I mean, I knew I was really too young to be in love, but still, it was interesting to think about. I was only one year younger than Juliet was when she met Romeo.
I went to check out the little turtle nest and examined the soft, undisturbed sand in the little triangle outlined by the tape. Dozens of delicate, round eggs were hidden just a few inches below. It was way too early for them to come out. They wouldn’t hatch until July, and it was only April. I headed closer to the water and stretched out on my towel, facing the waves.
I opened my phone. Two more texts from Diana! I texted her and said I was out on the beach, about to get in touch with Cody. I asked her how things were going with her dad. Diana didn’t answer. Then I texted Cody telling him that I was on the beach. He answered that he would be here in a few minutes.
I started thinking, what did I know about Cody?
He seemed like he was from a middle class family like us. His parents were teachers and researchers. And he seemed really smart, as if his school might be harder than ours. I could tell his schoolwork was important to him, and that he studied harder than I did. I knew he was a caring person from the way he had acted about the injured horse, and I liked that. And he knew so much about biology and nature.
I checked my phone again. Still no text from Diana about her dad. She’d been so excited about seeing him after such a long time. Would he let her down again?
A shadow fell over my feet. I looked up. Cody. Wearing an OBX T-shirt.
“Hey!” I said, sitting up. “I was just texting Diana. She’s texted me about three times, wanting to know if we found anything.”
Cody laughed. “Well, we better get going so we can report back to Diana! Should we take bikes? I know your parents won’t go for the ATV again.”
“Sure.” We headed back to the house. Daddy and Lynn, carrying their towels and beach bags, were getting ready to come down to the beach, and I told them we were going for a bike ride.
“You kids sure are riding bikes a lot this week,” Daddy commented. “More than usual. Great that you’re getting so much exercise on vacation.”
“I have a hard time just sitting on the beach,” Cody said, hopping from one foot to the other, as if to prove it. “I like to b
e doing something.”
I just stood there and smiled vaguely.
As we were walking our bikes down the wooden walkway to the beach, our eyes met, and we were laughing. Then Cody looked down at the handlebars and pushed his glasses up on his nose.
Down on the beach, as we pedaled along, the waves roared beside us, and the sandpipers were funny, running like crazy away from our tires. Above us, in perfect formation, four pelicans glided by. The sun dazzled my eyes with its brightness, and I felt completely breathless.
Why did time have to go by? When you wanted to stop it, it seemed to spin by even faster, going by in an instant. Our vacation was almost over.
We rode in the water a little bit, sending a rainbow spray soaring. We hollered, “Woo-hoo!” And the wind caught our words and blew them away.
A few minutes later, we were riding down the sandy paths through the neighborhoods, stopping often to walk the bikes through deep, fluffy sand. We entered the maritime forest, staying on the path, with gnarled trees with twisting branches arching over us on either side. We had to duck to avoid tree branches and brace to bump over hills. The ground became dark and rich looking under the sand. Finding some paths that looked like they might be used for four-wheeling, we sped down them.
And then, as we emerged from a stand of trees to a small, sunny opening in the forest, we saw a harem of the wild horses, their heads down, grazing, with two little foals cavorting. When we rode up, the foals raced back close to their mothers, and the others turned their heads to look at us. They were beautiful! Within a few heartbeats, they whirled and galloped away from us, manes and tails flying. I wished Diana could have been here to see this with us.
“Amazing,” Cody said, turning toward me.
“I hate that we scared them.”
We followed the path to the end of the open space, walked our bikes a short distance, and found ourselves at the edge of a precipice, staring at a view that I had never dreamed existed here. Probably fifty feet below us, stretching to the horizon, lay a patchwork of marshland and maritime forests in a dozen lush hues of green. Gigantic live oaks stood like floating islands amid the carpet of green, and a wide stream wound its way through the center, the water so still it perfectly reflected the blue sky, white clouds, and green and gold grasses. “Wow,” I breathed, taking it all in.
“Amazing,” Cody said again.
“Look at the birds!” I pointed to a line of white birds, sparkling in the sun, rising from the marsh and into the sky, their cries drifting faintly up to us.
A few seconds ticked by, and then the scene was suddenly shattered by the earsplitting grind of ATV engines behind us, and Buzz Cut and Curly crested the hill. We caught snatches of their laughter as they flashed by. Because we had walked off the path and were hidden by foliage, they didn’t see us.
“Hey, want to follow them?” I said to Cody.
“We probably can’t keep up.” Cody seemed nonchalant, as if he really was more interested in the view than our search.
“But Diana thinks they’re the ones who hit the horse.”
“They didn’t hit the horse,” Cody said. He cast his eyes downward, focusing on the ground.
“Who did it, then?” I asked. “We haven’t seen anyone else around here riding ATVs.”
Cody didn’t say anything. Blood started to rush into my head with a roaring sound as I watched his face twist with guilt. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his T-shirt.
“I did it.”
I gasped and put my hand over my mouth. “What?” I could hardly get the word out.
He turned away from me so I was looking at his back while he was talking. “I wanted to see the bioluminescence in the ocean. I wanted to see what it was like to drive the ATV at night. I was driving and looking in the other direction, at the water, and just came up on her really suddenly, and clipped her back leg. She didn’t even stop running, and I didn’t know that she’d fallen until Diana and I went back. It didn’t even damage the ATV …I hardly hit her at all.”
I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. My thoughts began racing. “So you lied to the police, and to us? And you’ve been letting us spend half our vacation riding around looking for a damaged ATV? Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you just admit that you did it?”
No wonder he had said over and over how relieved he was that the mare was doing all right.
He sat down, cross-legged, and plucked a few strands of grass and began tearing them up. “At home, I’m the ‘good’ brother. My older brother has gotten into so much trouble. He’s been suspended from school a couple of times. My mom sent him to stay with my dad because she couldn’t deal with him anymore.”
Just like Matt’s mother sending him to stay with Barry and Mama. And me.
“I’m always feeling this pressure to be a decent kid. I have to get good grades. I have to be a good kid. Like my mom just can’t stand it if I screw up.”
“I get that,” I said. I felt the same pressure all the time. “Still, you’ve been lying to us for days!”
“I know … I’m sorry. It was just an accident, a terrible accident, and I wouldn’t have even known that anything bad happened if Diana and I hadn’t gone back and seen her. ”
I felt heavy disappointment, like I was about to explode. I had thought I liked him, that I knew him, and now this! I thought of Diana. She was going to freak! Absolutely freak! She’d never forgive him.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again. “I’m going to have to tell my mom. It’s such a relief that the horse is still doing okay.”
I remembered the wolves.
“Last summer, Diana and I lied to our parents about releasing the wolves for two days, because we were afraid of what would happen when they found out. So I guess Diana and I have done almost exactly this same thing.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“You’re going to have to call the cops,” I said.
“I know.”
Still, we sat and didn’t move. Thoughts tumbled around in my mind. I relived our time at the aquarium, when Diana was blaming the other two boys. I relived our walk on the beach, when we were talking about the bioluminescence, the special light inside each one of us. It made me mad that he let us talk like that, knowing what he’d done.
Yet, we’d done exactly the same thing.
“Are you going to call the cops now?” I said.
He shrugged and cleaned his glasses again, though they hadn’t had time to get dirty. Slowly he pulled his phone from his pocket. Diana had saved the number for the sheriff’s office on his phone, and he punched it in. “I’d like to report accidentally injuring a horse on the beach,” he said.
He ended up talking to Sergeant Stone, who agreed to meet him at his beach house in twenty minutes. So we pushed our bikes back out onto the path and rode toward home. The beauty of the spot we’d found had been lost and forgotten. We passed a small grassy area where the black earth had been churned into ruts and chunks, and I figured that those boys had done it on their ATVs. We kept on going.
When we got back to our houses, Sergeant Stone’s car was already in the driveway. The car door creaked as he stepped out.
As Cody and I parked the bikes under our house, I noticed Daddy’s car was gone. I watched Cody walk toward Sergeant Stone, with my heart beating so hard I had a pain in my chest.
“Good luck,” I said.
21
DIANA
I sat across from Dad at one of the tables beside the pool. The kids in the hot tub had left. We weren’t talking. I dipped french fries into the little cup of ketchup and shoveled them into my mouth like I hadn’t eaten in weeks.
He had ordered a double bacon cheeseburger and was taking huge bites of it. “I just wish you’d told me you were hungry,” he said without looking at me, in between bites. “I absolutely would have gotten you something to eat.”
I got a lump in my throat the size of a golf ball, but I wasn’t about to cry. I wouldn�
��t let him see me cry. “We’re eating now,” I said.
The sun went behind a cloud, and it suddenly seemed dark.
“I know I’m out of practice with this kind of stuff,” he said.
I twirled a french fry in the ketchup and looked up at his face. He had lines around his eyes, and his lips looked dry and cracked. He rubbed his big hand over his reddish-gray stubble in a tired way.
“My job is very demanding right now,” he said. “I know it’s tough everywhere. But I should have been more aware. I’m sorry.”
When I looked at his face, he looked truly sorry. The thought occurred to me that he was probably trying to do his best.
Suddenly words spilled out of me. “I wanted to show you stuff, Dad. My whole life.” I spoke calmly and in a normal voice. “You have no idea of what my life is like now. Today all I wanted was to show you how good I was at hang gliding, and you weren’t even watching!”
He blinked, then wadded up the empty yellow wrapper from his burger. He looked across the pool, then back at me. Then his salesman personality came roaring back. “Hey, don’t call your mom just yet, dudette.”
“No, I think I want to call Mom.” I got out the phone. I was tired of things always being the same with him. Maybe it wasn’t too late to be with Stephanie and Cody.
“Listen, Diana, give me a second chance,” he said. “Let’s do something else together.” He picked up his drink cup. “I know. Let’s go parasailing.”
“Parasailing? You’re kidding, right?”
“Not kidding.”
And thirty minutes later, I was standing on the back of a boat, rocking on the sound with Dad and a couple of other people, wearing a heavy life vest and a harness and holding on to a handle behind a bar. Dad wasn’t going to go, because it was expensive, but he wanted me to.
“We have a problem,” said the boat captain. “With the low wind out there today, you’re too small to go single. We need you to go tandem. Is there anyone here who will go with her?”
Some of the other people looked at each other, but no one volunteered.
Wild Horse Spring Page 14
