Sky Rider

by Nancy Springer

  Dusty sighed.

  After a while she drifted to her diary to tell it the things that she could have told Mom but could not tell Katelyn.

  Dear Diary,

  I met up with Skye today, Monday, after school. I guess it’s no use pretending anymore that there isn’t a boy, that I’m not seeing spirits, or at least one spirit, the way Mom did. It’s scary to be so different. I wonder if it scared Mom.

  I read the newspaper article. It says the cable crushed Skye’s throat and the shock stopped his heart and he died instantly. That helps some, I guess, that it was quick. But he remembers dying–I know he does–and that must be awful. He is so angry he’s practically spitting fire. I mean, like what happened today. First he fixed my back and then he got mad and took it away. Talk about rotten attitude. I would like to take him and–I don’t know-put him in a back brace or something. If he had to gimp around the way I do, he’d learn some patience. But at the same time I have to think, whoa, I’m alive and he’s dead. I mean dead. As in D-E-A-D. I can’t even imagine.

  And when I try to think what it would be like to be him, I really don’t think he does anything on purpose to be mean. Not even what he did to me. It’s just that he’s in a rage all the time.

  And he has a right to be. What happened to him is so unfair. It says in the paper that his parents are calling it murder. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know if somebody is going to get charged with murder, but the District Attorney is asking anybody who knows anything about how that cable got there to come forward.

  No wonder Daddy is drinking.

  I know I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.

  Tuesday morning.

  I’m not getting up. I can’t face school. I can’t face anything.

  I’ve got to get up. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Life’s not fair. If I’m supposed to sleep eight hours, why’ve I got a seven-hour bladder?

  Dusty joked to herself to try to feel better. It didn’t work. She had barely slept at all, and when she had dozed, her dreams had been full of shouting and black wings and the hammering of angry hooves. Lying and staring up into another day, she felt a stony sense of wrongness sitting like a gargoyle on her chest.

  Get up, Destiny.

  She pulled her knees to her chest to try to stretch her back, then got herself moving. Her back hurt as she hobbled to the bathroom, but what else was new? It was the same as it had been for a while and was always going to be. She brushed her teeth, ran a soggy washcloth over her face, looked for her pain pills … Had she left them in the kitchen again? Must have. Two-footing the steps like an old person, hanging on to the railing, she struggled down the stairs to find them.

  Her father was sitting at the kitchen table, still in his rumpled suit, pale and stubbly, looking worse than she felt. He was drinking something from a stoneware mug. “Dusty,” he said hoarsely, “call the office, wouldja, tell them I won’t be in. Tell them I’ve got the bug.”

  Dusty stalled by reaching for her pills and dispensing herself a glass of water from the gizmo in the refrigerator door. She stared at her father as she dosed herself. “What’s in the cup?” She did not smell coffee.

  “Just make the damn call.”

  She did: “Yeah … uh-huh … I guess he’s got what’s going around.” She knew by the coy tone in her father’s secretary’s voice that the woman knew she was lying. Dusty hoped she thought he was just calling in sick to avoid going out in public. She hoped nobody knew yet that he was drinking again, hung over.

  I’ve got to stop doing this. It was the same thing she had done when her father had first started drinking—protecting him, defending him, making excuses for him, lying to cover up for him—and she knew it was no good. But there she was, doing it anyway.

  She hung up the phone and turned to face him. “Okay,” she said, “tell me.”

  Bleary-eyed, he blinked up at her.

  “The cable across the woods trail,” she said, trying to keep her voice quiet and steady. She didn’t want it to sound like she was accusing him.

  But she might as well have pointed her finger at him. His face flushed high-blood-pressure red, and he lunged up, bumping the table and splashing his drink across the cloth. “Nobody can prove a thing!” He shouted so hard, his voice cracked. “Anyway, it’s my land. That boy was trespassing!”

  This was true, Dusty knew. Skye had no right to be on somebody else’s land, and the landowner had every right to try to keep him off. To order him off at gunpoint, even. Trespassing: the word was legal, but—but it didn’t feel right. Back when Mom was alive, kids were welcome on Grove land, as welcome as the butterflies that flitted across the meadow. What Dad was saying felt wrong to Dusty. Its stony weight pressed so hard and hurtfully on her chest that she could not speak.

  Her father kept right on shouting. “Anybody could have put that thing there. They can’t charge me with a damn thing, and they know it, and they aren’t about to.”

  This also had some truth to it. There was something called reasonable doubt, or shadow of a doubt, or whatever. Also—Dusty didn’t like this part much—Daddy knew who he was: Abel Grove, the man providing paychecks for half the people in Grovesburg. Even the press didn’t want to get in his face. And the police and district attorney would be very careful. They wouldn’t charge Abel Grove with any crime unless they were very, very sure of their case.

  Dusty whispered, “Skye’s dead.”

  And instead of accepting any sort of responsibility, moral, legal, or whatever, there stood Daddy in a drunken rage. Even sober, Daddy could never handle being in the wrong. When Mom was around, she used to let him hand her the blame for anything he shouldn’t have done or forgot to do, like returning a phone call. Little things, mostly.

  This was no little thing. It was an enormity—so huge, almost incomprehensible, that Dusty said it again. “Skye’s dead.”

  Still yelling, her father probably didn’t hear her. He probably heard only himself. “There’s a sign right at the trail head, says Keep out!” Red-faced, red-eyed, he loomed toward her, leaning on the table. She stepped back. “Nobody had any business being in those woods. Nobody had any business going on that trail. If he went back there, well, it’s his own fault.”

  “It’s the ugliest thing I ever heard of,” Dusty said, loud enough to make sure he heard her. Her voice shook. She ran for her room, slammed the door behind her and locked it.

  He didn’t follow her. He stayed downstairs.

  He hadn’t told her a thing about the cable across the woods trail. But he didn’t have to. Dusty knew who had put it there.

  “No,” she whispered. No, she would not think it. No, it could not be true. The police couldn’t prove anything. They could not take her father away. If they took him away, she would have nothing, nobody. She had to keep him. She had to protect him. He would stop drinking again when he knew it was going to be okay. And Skye could just ride Tazz somewhere far, far away and stay there. Skye could just stay away from her father.

  Dusty hid in her room until early afternoon. The phone rang several times, probably the school calling to find out where she was. Or maybe reporters. Dusty did not know, because she did not venture out to answer it. No one answered it. Each time after five rings the answering machine picked up and took the calls.

  Around one o’clock, Dusty got hungry, opened her door softly and padded downstairs, her sneakers nearly soundless on the carpeting. She found her father passed out again in almost the same place as before. She left him there, went to the kitchen, and made herself a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jam sandwich and ate it. She did not listen to the messages on the answering machine.

  Around two o’clock she saw the police car coming down the driveway and walked outside, locking the door behind her.

  “Miss?” one of the cops called to her. There were two of them.

  She stood still and waited. The cop on the passenger side got out of the car. He was a young cop. Nice looking.

  “Mis
s, uh, Destiny Grove?”

  She nodded.

  “Is your father home?”

  She shook her head.

  “You sure?” The cop was hinting that it would be okay for her to change her mind. “His office says he didn’t go in today.”

  “I don’t know where he is, then.” She took a couple of steps toward the barn, as if she had been going to check on the horses. It was about time somebody checked on them anyway.

  “You mind if we have a look around?”

  She felt her heart pounding but hoped she looked bored and annoyed. “Aren’t you supposed to have a warrant or something?”

  The cop behind the wheel, older, not cute, poked his head out of his window and snapped, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I have a back injury. It’s acting up today.”

  “We really need to talk with your father,” the young cop said.

  “I’m phoning the school,” the older cop said, reaching down toward his dashboard. “See whether you’re excused.”

  “It’s about the incident this past Friday.” The young cop tilted his head toward the wooded ridge where the trail ran. “You heard about that?”

  “Of course I heard.”

  “Did you know the Ryder boy?”

  She shook her head, realizing with a sudden pang that she wished she had known Skye when he was alive.

  “Do you know who strung that cable there?”

  “No.”

  “Whoever strung it that way,” the older cop barked out of the cruiser window, “is liable for criminal misdemeanor at the very least, and maybe manslaughter, which carries a sentence of two to five years.”

  Dusty purposely unfocused her eyes in order to look bored silly, then turned toward him. “Did you call the school?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were going to call the school to see whether my father phoned my excuse in.”

  He blinked. She was yanking his chain, knowing darn well he had never called. Cops had better things to do than chase truants, or considered that they did. He was just trying to scare her and she knew it and he didn’t like her for knowing it. “You know where your father is?” he snapped.

  “If he isn’t at his office, how would I?”

  The cop puffed his cheeks in exasperation.

  “Just tell him to contact us, would you, miss?” the other one said. Without waiting for an answer he got back in the cruiser, which made a pretty impressive roar as it drove a loop around Dusty and headed back up the driveway. She stood there a minute longer, then continued toward the barn in case they might be parked along the road, watching.

  She needed to cry, but the need was like a lump of ice in her chest. She couldn’t let it melt. Cold willpower was the only thing holding her together. If she let down her guard even for a minute, they would come and take her father away and stick her in an orphanage or something. A mental institution if she let them know that she was seeing spirits, that she was cracked in the head like her mother.

  In the barn, she paused by the wall where Tazz’s bridle hung, and his halter and blanket. She laid her head against the blanket and closed her eyes, whiffing Tazz’s warm, fox-red smell still on the cloth, trying to pretend he was there. But it did not help as much as she would have liked. She knew he was gone.

  She took a carrot and a scoop of grain to the little pony in the paddock. Kneeling in the dirt, she watched him eat. “Pinocchio,” she whispered. “Pinoke.” He was a shaggy little thing, all chin whiskers at this time of year, looking gravely back at her. Shedding. He needed to be groomed. Everybody needed something.

  “Pinoke, sweetie, what am I gonna do?” Just whispering the words made her eyes sting. Damn, no crying. “Oh, help,” Dusty muttered, swallowing at the clotted feeling in her throat. Trying to lighten up, trying to make herself feel better, she told Pinocchio gravely, “Pinoke, I am in deep doggy doodoo. I need a break. I need an option. I need a winning lottery ticket.”

  Pinocchio gave her a bored look.

  “Your nose is growing,” she told him, because it was fun to watch him not be insulted. She’d been telling Pinoke for years that his nose was growing, and he didn’t care.

  It was Mama who had given Pinocchio his name, because little-girl Dusty had seen the pony’s petite muzzle as ever so long.

  Mama. Oh, God. Dusty had to close her stinging eyes. She heard the pony snort in satisfaction as he finished eating, felt his soft muzzle against her shoulder. Still trying to joke, she whispered, “Pinoke, I need … I need my mommy.”

  And for just a moment she felt an odd waft of peace.

  Chapter Five

  That night, sleeping on her straw-bale bed in the barn, she dreamed of her mother.

  She was sleeping in the barn because she liked it out there. It felt cleaner there than in the house, where Daddy lay drunk with his AA buddy babysitting him. Outside, the night air was fresh and cool, the night sky, so deep. The stars, so white—angel eyes, Mom used to call them. Dusty had made her bed with her head almost outside the big barn door so that she could sleep amid stars, velvety sky, a chalky hoof-paring of crescent moon, shadowy pasture and indigo hills.

  In the dream, Mom was a dead person, like Skye yet not like Skye. Always Skye seemed vivid, supercharged, made of shadows and electricity, like a thunderhead filled with heat lightning. But Mom—Julia was her name, beautiful name, Julia Grove—Julia/Mom was a gauzy presence, a breeze caught in white organza, the fragrance of lilacs in the rain. Dusty knew Skye to be beautiful, but he was a crayon drawing compared to Mother in the dream. Her eyes were purple witching glasses. Yet they were fireflies. Yet they were her eyes. Her voice was a wren singing. Yet it was green corn rustling. Yet Mom.

  Mom, as warm as fresh-baked bread, giving her the same old loopy smile. “Sweetie,” Mom said as if continuing a conversation they had started long before, “you have no idea. Aaak, the responsibility.”

  Gazing into her mother’s starwhisper face, Dusty wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. She was asleep.

  “Keeping the logs,” Mom prattled on, “and reporting to the arch-supervisor, and trying to guide without interfering, and it’s not just Skye, either, it’s all those other struggling souls.”

  In her dream, Dusty floated face to face with her mother, elbows on the air, as if they were sitting at the kitchen table—in the air? Her mother was talking to her as she used to converse with spirits. Were there wings? If Mom had wings, they were made of moonfire. Dusty wanted to look for her own wings, but she did not want to take her eyes from her mother’s face.

  “Although I must say I worry about Skye the most,” Mom confided. Mom’s voice was the distant chiming of spring peepers. Wind in trees on the far hills. A whippoorwill calling. “The afterlife is so terribly permanent,” she said. “I know you’re having problems, Dusty, but even if your father goes to jail, it’ll be just for two years, five years. That’s an eyeblink. Just a wink in eternity. Time will pass and you will be fine. But Skye … you have to understand, sweetie, he could be doomed for all time.”

  It seemed to Dusty in her dream that the kitchen was kind of a mess, as always, even though it was made of air and starlight, but from somewhere there were flowers in Mom’s hands, moonflowers to be arranged in the crystal vase of night.

  “He needs to transcend, he needs to fly away to eternity,” her mother was saying as she sorted the flowers. “But anger is holding him back. He’s in soul peril. He could be trapped in his rage forever.”

  Forever is a very long time, Dusty wanted to joke, but Mom handed her a flower the color of a star. “You’re so much like your father,” she said, and Dusty heard a quirk of tenderness in the words, a midnight echo of the way Mama had loved Daddy when she was alive.

  I am? Dusty thought, and she wanted to ask what Mom meant, but she couldn’t. She could only breathe in the fragrance of her flower; it smelled like a rainbow. She was asleep.

  Whatever Mama meant, it was all right. Mama had loved Da
ddy.

  Mom was the scent of white clover, lace curtains drying on the line, wild hyacinths. Her gauzy manifestation dislimned into starlight. But her voice grew closer, warmer. “Sleep well, darling.”

  Dusty slept well. When she awoke at dawn, Pinocchio stood in the barn, nodding over her, his grass-scented breath warm on her face.

  Mom, Dusty thought, feeling that warmth. What a good dream.

  What a goofy dream. Just a dream. Struggling to sit up, her back aching, she forgot all about it within a few moments; it was gone like wisps of morning mist in the sunlight. But she was left with a feeling of strength—and a sense of urgency.

  At first she could not think what was so terribly important. But then she knew. To the marrow of her mortal bones she knew.

  Skye.

  Skye was in soul peril. Danger so deep she could barely comprehend.

  DAILY SOULOG ANNO DOMINI 1998, 4TH MOON, 22ND DAY

  Subject Skye Ryder, all too adolescent, continuing in ghost phase. Best hope at this point lies in Destiny Grove, equally adolescent, but visionary and therefore wiser. Providentially, Destiny has chosen to dream about me, enabling me to visit her and speak to her about Skye. Visit may indirectly help him, yet would not be considered actual intervention were the question to arise. Conscience nags: Is this line of thinking specious, too much like the rationalizations of my poor, hurting, erstwhile husband? He told himself that he just meant to scare, not really hurt anyone; I am telling myself that I am just talking with my daughter, not really meddling. Is my thinking as muddled as his was? Perhaps. But now conscience comforts: My heart is filled with concern. Not with fear and spleen, like Abel’s. Even specious thoughts cannot send one too far wrong when there is a caring heart. It will be all right; I think my actions are not too terribly misguided. Maintaining discreet vigilance,