If Wishes Were Horses

by Robert Barclay

  “Nope,” she said. “I’ve seen it a hundred times before. Big John’s been bringin’ foals into this world for nigh on forty years. But my prayers go with you, just the same.”

  BY THE TIME WYATT, Gabby, and Trevor arrived, Big John and Mercy were already tending to Sadie. As the others huddled together on the far side of the stall door, no one spoke. Gabby knew nothing about birthing foals, but she realized that the scene playing out before her was important. Sadie was lying on one side in the clean straw that Trevor had laid down only hours before.

  “Do mares always lie down to give birth?” she asked Wyatt.

  “Usually,” Wyatt answered.

  As Gabby looked over at Trevor, she suddenly realized that he had never witnessed a birth of any kind. He was fixated on the scene, his expression a mixture of worry and fascination. This is indeed a day of firsts, Gabby thought.

  Soon Sadie’s contractions started. As everyone watched, over the course of the next twenty minutes Sadie’s foal was born. When the new colt arrived, everyone cheered. He looked perfect, with a gray coat like his mother’s. Brushing tears from her eyes, Gabby laughed. Aside from when she’d first held Trevor in the hospital, she had never seen anything so wonderful.

  “My God, Wyatt,” she said. “He’s beautiful.”

  Wasting no time, Big John cut the umbilical cord and Mercy painted the umbilical stump with iodine. They then gave the colt a quick examination to ensure that he was breathing regularly and to rule out unseen abnormalities. Soon he sat up on his hocks and elbows. When he started mouthing, Gabby realized that his suckling reflex had arrived.

  “How many days before he stands all the way up?” Gabby asked.

  When everyone laughed, she didn’t understand. She gave Trevor a curious look.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked her son.

  “He’ll be up within two hours,” Trevor said, his eyes still locked on the foal. “And soon after that, he’ll be nursing.” Trevor turned and looked apologetically at Ram and Wyatt. “Never mind my mom,” he added casually. “She’s still a city slicker.”

  As Ram and Wyatt laughed again, Gabby remained stunned by all that Trevor seemed to know about horses. “Did you learn those things here at the ranch?” she asked.

  Trevor nodded, then returned his full attention to the foal.

  Twenty minutes later, the foal was on his feet and eagerly suckling from his mother. When he had his fill, Sadie started licking him all over. Moments later, Ram beckoned Wyatt into the corridor. When they returned, each wore a mischievous smile. Gabby was about to ask what was going on, but Ram stopped her with a timely wink.

  Ram cleared his throat. “So what do you think we should name him, Wyatt?” he asked.

  “Well, I’ve got an idea about that,” Wyatt said. “Do you suppose that Trevor should name him? After all, he’s been taking care of Sadie for some time now.”

  Trevor immediately spun around and looked Ram straight in the face. Although words failed him, his delighted expression said it all.

  Ram took a deep breath while making a great show of rubbing his chin. “I don’t know. It’s a big responsibility. Foals like this don’t come along every day.”

  After silently torturing Trevor for a few moments longer, Ram smiled. “I suppose that it would be okay. Assuming Trevor suggests something we can live with, that is.”

  Trevor was so happy that he literally jumped up and down. “Yes!” he shouted jubilantly.

  Big John and Mercy left the foal to his mother’s care then walked over to join the others. As Big John hung his thumbs in his overalls, he gave Trevor a questioning look.

  “So, young man,” he said. “What’s his name going to be?”

  Unbeknownst to everyone else, Trevor had already selected a name. Since the day he’d first met Sadie and learned that her foal would be male, he had thought long and hard about it. He had even done extra research in the school library to help him decide. It was to have been his secret name for the foal, the name that only he whispered to him when no one else could hear. And now to his great amazement he had been granted the wonderful and unexpected chance to actually name Sadie’s colt. His mind made up, he turned around and took a deep breath.

  “We’ll call him Doc,” Trevor said simply.

  This time Ram’s skepticism was genuine. “Doc?” he asked. “That’s all? I don’t mind it, I guess, but it seems a pretty simple name for such a magnificent foal as this. What do you think, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt was also hesitant. “I don’t know…are you sure about this, Trevor?”

  Trevor nodded. “We’ll call him Doc,” he insisted. Then he smiled. “But not just any Doc.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ram asked.

  “We’ll call him Doc Holliday,” Trevor answered gleefully. “You already have Wyatt and Morgan. It just seems right, don’t you think?”

  For several moments, no one spoke. Then Ram laughed uproariously. Soon everyone followed suit.

  “By God, the boy’s on to something!” Ram said. He grabbed Trevor’s shoulders and gave him a strong hug. “Doc Holliday it is! And well done, too!”

  As Trevor smiled from ear to ear, Gabby was overcome again. “Good job,” she said quietly. “But we should head back to the house now.”

  Trevor looked at Sadie. “You did just fine, girl,” he said quietly. “I’m proud of you.”

  Soon everyone save for Big John and Mercy started walking back to the mansion. This had been a momentous day for Trevor. But before the night ended, he would hungrily gobble down two big slices of Aunt Lou’s apple pie, complete with vanilla ice cream.

  It would be the best he had ever tasted.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THREE WEEKS LATER, on a Saturday afternoon, Trevor sat alone in his bedroom doing homework. The New Beginnings Program would end soon, and he already knew that he would miss the ranch badly.

  His stomach growled, reminding him that he had skipped lunch. His mother had gone to run errands, promising to return in time to make supper. She would try to re-create Aunt Lou’s Cajun chicken, she had said. Then she had laughed, adding that she could make no promises about the results.

  Trevor sighed and turned the page in his geometry book. To his dismay, yet another group of incomprehensible problems stared back at him, daring to be solved. Prior experience told him that they were exactly the sort of thing that might prompt a surprise quiz. But as he examined them, he didn’t care.

  Whether his restlessness came from hunger or from pure lack of interest, he didn’t know. He only knew that he missed the Flying B, and that Monday couldn’t come quickly enough. Bored to tears, he decided to switch to his English homework. He was behind on his reading of Moby-Dick, anyway.

  When he reached for his books, his elbow struck them, causing them to slide off his desk and onto the floor. They were still bound tightly by his father’s belt, and had landed alongside his trusty red Windbreaker and beloved cowboy boots.

  He started to reach for the books, then he stopped and sat back in his chair. There was something odd about the belt, the Windbreaker, and the boots all lying together like that. He couldn’t remember ever seeing them that way, and he found it jarring. The belt spoke of his late father, the Windbreaker reminded him of his anger, and his boots took him back to the Flying B. He stared at the disparate objects for a long time, realizing that they represented very different parts of his life. But which of them means the most to me? he wondered.

  No easy answers came, and the longer he wondered, the more the mystery deepened. Although the sudden realization had been nearly twelve weeks in the making, not until this moment had he felt so torn between different worlds. Feeling sad and powerless, he left his bedroom to sit on the town house balcony.

  Although he had always enjoyed the balcony, nowadays it felt cramped. The view was nice enough, but it didn’t compare with the one from the front porch of the big house. As Trevor reclined on one of the lounge chairs, he looked out over the canal tha
t lay before the town house complex. To his left lay the swimming pool, its cool water filled with fellow residents and their children. Trevor sighed, again wishing that he was out at the ranch. It always seemed cooler there, and less crowded.

  Wyatt, Aunt Lou, Big John, Mercy, and Jim Mason had all taken root in his heart. But it was Ram who had given him his treasured pocketknife, taught him to face down Tim Richardson, and allowed him to name Sadie’s colt. It had again been Ram who was the most patient with him, and taught him the manly rules of the ranch. Of them all, it was that old, bowlegged codger with the shock of white hair he cared for most.

  He also knew that he had learned more than equestrianism. He had come to realize that the Blaines were good people, and not the monsters he had believed them to be. That last thought again caused him to remember his father’s death. For a long time he had tried hard to bury that special hurt, but it continued to haunt him. He sat there on the balcony for some time, again feeling threatened by it.

  After staring blankly out at Boca Raton for another half hour, he finally decided. Leaving the balcony behind, Trevor walked into his mother’s bedroom. Because she wasn’t home, he felt like an intruder. When he reached the far side of the room, he slid open the closet door with unnecessary stealth.

  On the top shelf of the closet lay a cardboard box. Reaching up, he gently took it down and placed it on his mother’s bed. Gabby had often mentioned the box and where it could be found, but until this moment he had never wanted to see it. His mother called it “the Jason box,” and she said that it contained mementos of Trevor’s late father.

  For the last five years, Trevor had been torn about whether to look inside the Jason box. He knew it contained things of his father’s he wanted to see, and that knowledge heightened his curiosity. But knowing that certain other items were also there had always stopped him. For some reason that he couldn’t explain, he suddenly needed to examine them all. With trembling hands, he removed the lid from the box and looked inside. What he found brought back painful memories, and he wiped away a tear.

  He saw a lock of his father’s sandy hair, its strands tightly collected by a red ribbon. There were two gold wedding rings, also bound with ribbon. Next to them was a white gold wristwatch that Trevor vaguely remembered. The watch crystal was smashed, its bent hands permanently frozen at 3:21. He saw the flaking remnants of a withered red rose, some wedding pictures of his mother and father, and a small stack of letters and greeting cards addressed to his mother in her maiden name.

  When Trevor removed these things from the box and looked at them, his hands trembled because he knew what would come next. He tentatively looked back into the box. To preserve the precious documents, his mother had secured them in plastic zip bags. After gently putting the first objects aside, he removed the press clippings and the police report, and started to read.

  GABBY HAD BEEN AWAY longer than planned, and night had fallen. As she juggled her bags with one hand and unlocked the front door with the other, she was surprised to see that save for a shaft of light coming from the hallway, the town house was bathed in darkness.

  She quietly placed the packages on the kitchen table then tiptoed to the hallway corner. The door to her bedroom lay open; the lights were on inside. For several moments she was afraid that an intruder had entered the house. But her maternal instincts quickly overcame her fear, and she had to know if Trevor was all right.

  “Trevor?” she called out.

  “I’m in here,” he answered softly.

  Gabby walked down the hallway and into her bedroom. When she saw Trevor sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by the contents of the Jason box, she drew in a sharp breath.

  For several moments, mother and son simply stared at each other. Then Gabby crossed the room and sat down on the carpet alongside him. Before looking into Trevor’s eyes again she picked up the two wedding rings, remembering. After a time she gently placed them back on the floor.

  Gabby realized that Trevor had finally read the press clippings and the police report, because they had been removed from their zip bags and lay unfolded on the carpet. Traces of Trevor’s splotchy tears could be seen here and there on them, and his eyes were red. Gabby gave her son a compassionate look.

  “So you finally read them,” she said softly. “That’s good.”

  Trevor sniffed and rubbed his nose. “If it was so good, then why does it feel so bad?”

  “Because the old adage is right. Sometimes the truth hurts.”

  Trevor’s face darkened. “My father was a drunk, wasn’t he? He was a drunk who went out and killed two innocent people. The accident was his fault, not Mrs. Blaine’s.”

  “That’s right,” Gabby answered. “And yes, your father had a drinking problem. But he never meant to kill Danny and Krista, any more than he planned for himself to die. He wasn’t a bad man, Trevor. He loved us both very much, regardless of what you might think.”

  Trevor blinked back some fresh tears. “Why don’t the Blaines hate us?” he asked. “Especially Wyatt…I can’t believe that he let me into the New Beginnings Program.”

  Gabby tried to smile. “Wyatt realizes that we aren’t to blame. But he wasn’t the only hurdle. Do you remember that day in Principal Marshall’s office? It was like you wanted to get kicked out of school.”

  “I know,” Trevor said. “And I’m sorry. I just didn’t know who I was supposed to be, or how I should act.”

  Gabby nodded. “You’ve been through a lot. But tell me—do you see things more clearly now?”

  Trevor looked down at the yellowed papers and nodded.

  “And do you still love your father?” she asked.

  He nodded again. “Yes. Despite what he did.”

  “That’s good,” Gabby said, taking Trevor’s hands into hers. They felt warm, their palms still damp with his tears.

  “And the Blaines?” she asked. “How do you feel about them now?”

  “I love them, too. Is that wrong?”

  Gabby shook her head. “No. We owe them more than we could ever repay. And now that you’ve told me all this, I realize something else about you.”

  “What?” Trevor asked.

  Gabby placed her hands on either side of her son’s face and lifted it to hers. “You’ve forgiven everyone. You’ve come full circle, and you’ve made me proud.”

  For the first time since the car crash, Trevor laid his head on Gabby’s shoulder. Seated among the aging mementos of her previous life, she held her son close.

  “But the day after tomorrow starts the last week of the program,” Trevor said quietly. “What will I do without the ranch?”

  It had suddenly become Gabby’s turn to become emotional. While fighting back tears, she searched for the right words.

  “Oh, we’ll go back once in a while,” she said, her voice nearly cracking as she thought about Wyatt. “I’ve already asked Wyatt, and it’s fine with him. But we mustn’t go too often, or we’ll wear out our welcome. And don’t forget—the Flying B annual ball comes soon.”

  “But it won’t be the same,” Trevor said. “I’ll miss it all so much.”

  So will I, Trevor, Gabby thought. And in a special way that you will never know.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MAY I BE of help?” the saleslady asked pleasantly.

  “I hope so,” Gabby answered.

  The woman standing before Gabby was slim and middle aged, with long, auburn hair. As befit her profession, she was impeccably dressed and coifed. The gold-colored nametag pinned to her suit coat read: GWENDOLYN MARCH, FASHION CONSULTANT. None of these elegant touches surprised Gabby. After all, this was Neiman Marcus.

  “Please call me Gwynne,” the other woman said.

  “And I’m Gabby.”

  Gabby wanted help choosing a gown. She always knew her own mind when it came to clothes, and she had good taste. But by her own admission, this purchase had to be just right. To help make sure, she had asked Celia to join her in the hunt. As expected, the s
noopy redhead had been only too happy to tag along.

  “Is this for a particular occasion?” Gwynne asked Gabby.

  “You can say that again,” Celia chortled.

  “And what sort of function is it?” Gwynne asked.

  “It’s a ball,” Gabby answered.

  “And I assume that it’s formal?” Gwynne asked.

  “Yes.”

  Gabby removed the engraved invitation to the Flying B annual ball from her purse and gave it to Gwynne. The ball was six days away. Gwynne recognized the invitation immediately.

  “Oh, you lucky thing!” Gwynne said. “Every woman in Boca would give her eyeteeth to be invited!”

  “No kidding,” Celia quipped.

  “You’re the third woman this week I’ve assisted for this occasion,” Gwynne gushed. “And that’s a good thing, because it’ll help keep you from showing up in the same dress as someone else!”

  “Always a plus,” Celia said under her breath to Gabby, “especially when peasants go hobnobbing with the rich and famous.”

  “Sorry?” Gwynne asked.

  “Never mind,” Gabby said. “May I see some recommendations?”

  “Of course,” Gwynne answered. “I assume that you’re an eight?”

  “Yes.”

  Gwynne returned the precious invitation to Gabby. “I’ll be right back.”

  While Gwynne went to collect some dresses, Celia wandered over to a rack of gowns that were marked down. Even the sign announcing the deep discounts somehow exuded an air of superiority. As Celia perused the prices, she groaned.

  “Good God, Gabbs!” she exclaimed. “This isn’t retail therapy—it’s credit report suicide!”

  Gabby sighed. “I’d rather not think about that part of it.”

  “And just what part of all this are you thinking about?” Celia asked as she selected a dress for closer examination. “It wouldn’t have to do with a certain eligible rancher, would it?”

  Gabby only smiled.

  Celia returned the gown to the rack then walked back to Gabby. “Fish that invitation out of your purse again,” she ordered. “I never did get a proper look at it.”