Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

So I said, “If it’s clear,” and Marcy grinned at me, half braces and half teeth.

  We ran the spot Friday, on schedule. I’d noticed on the monitor that the horses’ green eyes didn’t show up well, and decided not to mention it. The girls were pretty enough, one all gold and blue on a gold and white horse, and one all black and green (did I mention that Charlene wore a green western shirt, something that glittered, with black jeans and boots?) on a black horse. Not quite as gorgeous as I remembered— in fact, not more than middling pretty—but things rarely look the same on tape, and I’m used to it. After all, we’d had to shoot the spot in midafternoon in July. Maybe those little lines came from squinting at the bright sun—the camera sees what’s really there; it doesn’t make allowances for lousy lighting. Kelly’s voice I’d figured wouldn’t tape well—breathy, a little too high—but I was surprised at Charlene’s—it sounded more hoarse than husky. But again—a hot day, midafternoon—maybe she’d been thirsty. Marcy thought the horses were great; I don’t know if she even looked at the riders.

  Saturday morning, traffic held us up north of the city, and if Marcy hadn’t been humming tunelessly beside me, I’d have turned back. It was nothing but a little pissant country town with two pretty girls riding horses in a tacky parade; we’d get hot and dusty, and eat too much cheap greasy food—Hal’s pool would be a lot more fun. But Denise had sent us off smiling; she wouldn’t like it if I changed plans on her now.

  We had to park at the far end of a dusty field beside the town’s rickety little football stadium, crammed in between a pickup truck with its bed full of assorted junk, and a rusty barbwire fence. It was a two-block walk to the parade route, nothing much in the city, but here a hot, sweaty trek past sunburned yards and houses flaking ancient paint. They looked even older, more faded, today than they had on the Wednesday before. Two people came out of one house, and glanced at us without speaking.

  We got to the main street a little late, and had to crowd in behind a double row of others. A little boy rode by on a bicycle decorated with crepe paper, holding a red ribbon in his teeth. I glanced at my watch. Time and more for the parade to start. Sweat trickled down my sides; I could smell the hair spray from the huge bouffant arrangement on the tall woman next to me. A puff of wind blew a wiry strand of it across my nose; I batted it away, blinking at the dust, just as another, sharper puff spanked my other cheek. Marcy shook her head, but when I looked down, she flashed her metallic smile at me. One thing about her, she’s no complainer, our girl. If she had the looks she deserves, she’d be a match for anyone. I squeezed her shoulder, and felt my heart contract at the look she gave me. I didn’t deserve that kind of trust—no man could.

  More little gusts of wind, carrying the smells of a summer celebration: bubble gum baked on the pavement, horses, barbecue. Scraps of paper lifted from the street; a small child chased one, was captured by a tired-faced woman wearing an apron over her dress. It crossed my mind I hadn’t seen a woman wear an apron like that in years. Then the dust hit, a soft fist pummeling our faces, our eyes, stinging; wind jerked my shirt and hair first one way then the other. Marcy grabbed my arm and squealed “Daddy!” then coughed. I could hardly breathe myself. For an instant, sight and hearing blurred, caught in a whirl of wind-noise and grit. Then I could hear the chokes, coughs, children crying, even screams.

  The wind went as it had come, without warning or reason; I watched the tawny blur of the dust-devil follow the road out of town, as steadily as a drunk driver trying to be careful.

  But the crowd’s noise yanked my attention back to the street. Something had happened. I cursed myself for coming without even a pocket ‘corder, but I’d promised Denise the trip was for Marcy. Still I edged us leftward, back toward the disturbance.

  Another news team stood where I usually stand, in the middle of things. How was I going to explain this at work? With Marcy clinging to my hand, a little nervous in the crowd, I couldn’t push my way through as I usually did. I went up on tiptoe, trying to see. There was an opening: that usually meant someone was on the ground. Just beyond the gap, a well-polished pickup had both doors open; behind it was the parade’s first float, and the girl who should have been perched on a throne waving was stepping across the trailer hitch from the float to the pickup, hampered only slightly by her formal gown, intent on seeing what had happened.

  Suddenly a siren went off in my ear, and I jumped. It was the fire engine that should have cleared the way for the parade; we had come around it, with the rest of the crowd, hardly noticing it—now its lights flashed, and the siren beeped and squealed. The volunteers, in their blue shirts with lots of insignia, began pushing the crowd back, and I saw another flashing light coming along a side street: the ambulance.

  Of course, everyone was talking about what happened, but already there were five or six stories just in those few minutes. Only a few, it seemed, had been on the spot, and they’d been squinting against the sudden dust storm the same as anyone else. The girls were hurt; the girls were killed; the girls had been bucked off; the horses had run away… I figured then who it had to be, of course. We backed up with the others, as requested, and let the ambulance through; I couldn’t see any more than the stretchers being loaded aboard it. Then the siren whooped again, and the parade went on, just as parades always do go on in spite of accidents.

  Marcy was less disappointed than I’d expected. There were other horses to exclaim over, and after all, she never had seen the palomino and black that weren’t there anymore except on tape. I felt it more; I’d really looked forward to seeing those two girls ride by, all proud and beautiful in the sunlight, and without them the parade was a predictable mixture of sentimentality and cheap glitter. The girls on the homemade floats, the pride of each little town in the festival circuit, were pretty enough, but nothing like Kelly and Charlene on horseback.

  But I set myself to being a good father, and Marcy enjoyed herself. I even waited patiently while she walked around talking to the people who had ridden in the parade. She petted their horses, flashed that metallic grin more than I’d seen in months. I caught myself thinking that if she looked like Kelly, I’d buy her a horse and let her ride in parades—she looked so happy. And that was almost enough for the day, except that I really did want to know about Kelly and Charlene.

  The late news that night had coverage from our competition; I sipped my drink as I watched, and tried to figure out how to salvage my part in it while criticizing the camera angles the competition used. The announcer said it was Kelly and Charlene, but the pictures certainly didn’t do them justice. Kelly’s golden hair looked dusty, and I guess it’s hard to be cute and pretty when someone’s splinting your broken wrist. Charlene must have been hurting, too; she looked almost gaunt, those gorgeous bones ready to break through the skin. Nothing was said about their horses on one channel; the next, when I flipped to it, had already done the story, and the other one stuck it on last and mentioned that the horses had run off in terror at the “sudden storm.” Our station ran the tape we’d done before, and a brief shot of their faces, and Melanie, who has the evening news spot on Saturday and is trying for more, said what a horrible ordeal for two such pretty girls.

  I don’t read the paper all that often, unless I’m researching something, but the Sunday paper had it on the front page—mostly because their Congressman had been there. I could have shot the old buzzard at City Hall, for not telling me he was coming when I picked up the brochure; if I’d known, I’d have brought a ‘corder no matter what. Mysterious disappearance of famous parade horses, they called it. I quirked my mouth over that “famous” but let it ride. Anyone who’d seen Kelly on that palomino wouldn’t have forgotten it. I wondered then if she’d ever ridden in anyone else’s parades, or if she’d been content to reign in a small realm. The horses, the story ended, had not been found.

  It occurred to me that I could salvage our station’s position by getting a human-interest continuation. That would justify seeing them again, and (my fatherly
conscience being tender) I could even ask their advice about Marcy: would riding in parades do anything to help a girl get along in high school? So about midweek, I took a camcorder and told my boss I might get an interview, and he raised his eyebrows but nodded. I also took a present I didn’t tell him about, two copies of the original tape we took of Kelly and Charlene (all but the rump shot, of course).

  Kelly’s mom didn’t look real friendly when she opened the door, and I was glad I’d come in my own car, not the station van. I told her I’d heard about it, and thought maybe Kelly would like a copy of the pictures we’d gotten before her horse was lost. The woman’s eyes glittered dangerously.

  “Her horse!” she said, with an emphasis I couldn’t quite understand. “That—!”

  But then Kelly walked in, her not-really-golden hair pulled back and her eye shadow a bit too blue. The cast on her arm still had her off balance; I could see the difference in her walk. No girl is as pretty when she’s hurt, and tired, and miserable about losing a favorite horse. You can see what they’ll look like in ten years. But she smiled at me, and the dimples were still there, and the white teeth. I handed her the tape, and told her how sorry I was, and maybe this would help. Her eyes were a little red, and now the tears started. That didn’t bother me: I’ve seen plenty, for better reason and none at all, in my business. But I said I was sorry again, and she choked on a thank you, and her mom huffed loudly and walked out. Kelly waved an arm at the living room, and I sat down.

  “He’ll never come back,” she said softly, with a wary glance at the door. I opened my mouth to say something about searches being made, and she interrupted the first word.

  “No. They’ll never find him. He’s gone back”—and then her head jerked up and her eyes widened, tear-smeary as they were. “I—I’m sorry—I’m so upset. I don’t really know what I’m saying, and besides—” I felt a jolt of glee—my instincts had been right; there was a story here.

  “I used to have a horse.” I lied, trying for empathy. Her face relaxed slightly.

  “Not like Sunny,” she said.

  “No. But I wouldn’t have believed it then.” I felt my way into my role as bereft horse lover, and like all roles, it came easily to me. “He was a plain old brown horse you wouldn’t look at twice, but to me—” I shook my head, and she nodded. Whatever else she was or wasn’t in the realm of beauty, Kelly had a normal amount of sentiment.

  “How long did you have him?” she asked, good manners overcoming grief.

  I pondered a moment. Could I remember enough incidents from my uncle’s place to flesh out a long horse ownership? “Five years,” I said, shaking my head again. “Then my family moved, and we—we had to sell him.” I glanced at her; a little color had come into her face. “How long did you have Sunny?”

  It was the wrong question. She stiffened and paled, as if I’d hit her cast with a bat. “I—it’s hard to think right now. My arm—” I looked at it dutifully, not impressed with her intelligence. A broken wrist five days old is a nuisance, no more. With my eyes safely away from hers, she said softly, “I got him with… from Charlene. She got hers first.”

  So I stood up, and smiled at her, and told her I’d brought a tape for Charlene, too, if she’d tell me where Charlene lived. And she told me in the way that country people give directions, all relating to things you only know about if you live there, but I finally figured it out when she came out on the front porch and pointed.

  I’d thought before Charlene was the smart one of the pair, and so it turned out. She had on dark glasses that day, and had propped her bandaged ankle on a couch, but her voice was as lovely as the first time I’d heard it.

  Charlene was, she told me straight out, just over two years older than Kelly, and at fourteen, she’d been a long, gawky girl with lank hair and no self-confidence. Smart, but the local school had no scope for her kind of smart, and she knew that she’d never qualify for a really good scholarship. But she could ride anything on four legs, and she’d seen an article about barrel racers’ winnings in a western riding magazine. That would be her ticket out. She’d sold her old sorrel horse that didn’t have enough speed, and gone looking for a new mount.

  She relaxed enough to slip the dark glasses up, and I could see Charlene at fourteen. Bones that might have character someday, but missed beauty by a slight margin almost worse for being slight. Well-placed collarbones with too deep a hollow above and below them. She’d have had thin muscular wrists and long thin hands, and she’d have pulled her dark hair back to a plain plastic clip. And the money from the sale of the sorrel horse would have been folded tightly into a wad, and tucked deep in the pocket of jeans worn thin at the knees.

  She’d come to the farm—she didn’t say where it was—still looking for a barrel-racing prospect. A brisk little woman, dark-skinned and gray-haired, had come out, looked her up and down, and offered only one horse: the black. The price was what she’d jammed deep in her pocket. And she’d taken one look and known she’d pay it, though she wasn’t the kind of girl to buy a horse for its looks. The woman took her money, and followed her home in a pickup with the black horse in the trailer. There, with the horse in Charlene’s lot, the woman gave her roweled spurs and spade bit, and told her she must never mount the horse without them.

  At that point, Charlene explained, she’d have decided not to buy the horse, because there are rules about spurs and bits in barrel racing, but the horse was there, and the woman had driven off with her money before she could argue. So she saddled up, strapped the unfamiliar spurs on her boots, and mounted.

  That began the happiest years of her life, she said, beginning to cry. When a boy she knew, who had ignored her for years, stopped her even as she rode down the street that first day, and stared, wide-eyed. When she looked in the mirror. When she dressed the next day for school and things were tight and loose in different places. When she got more looks, and more attention, than she’d ever had before… and she knew it was wrong, she said, sobs blurring the words, but she couldn’t stop once she knew what she had.

  She didn’t drive back out to the farm to demand her money and return the horse. She didn’t even think of it, or of the barrel racing that had been her plan of escape. By midsummer, she had become the acknowledged town beauty, overshadowing the older girls. And she was asked to lead the parade on her beautiful black horse, carrying the American flag down the center of Main Street as everyone cheered After that first parade, after she had the taste of it in her mouth, the odd little woman had visited, and explained the dangers and limitations of the gift. Charlene didn’t tell me what they were right then, or if she did I didn’t hear her. I had a sudden vision of Marcy, sitting tall on such a horse, no braces on her teeth, and a crowd waving. Maybe a red horse, and her hair the color Denise’s had been, a vivid flame. My vision blurred. Maybe I had more than a story.

  For three years, Charlene and the black horse graced the town, and the honors she couldn’t win by being smart and hardworking came easily to the town beauty, the most popular girl in school. Then she noticed Kelly, down the block, standing forlorn in the yard and watching her ride by. Kelly was not quite cute, the way Charlene had not been quite beautiful.

  To seventeen, fourteen doesn’t seem like competition. Charlene never thought of the older girls she’d displaced, but she remembered her own miseries. First she thought she’d let Kelly ride the black horse. That didn’t work: Kelly couldn’t even get on. But somewhere in the conversation, Charlene let slip to Kelly that the horse was her secret, the way she had become what she was. And for Kelly, that was enough. She pestered, and warted, and fretted, and pleaded, and finally Charlene gave her certain directions, and two days later Kelly rode down the street on a golden palomino that matched her now-golden hair. Charlene wanted me to know that she had offered to let Kelly lead the parade that summer, but I was sure that Kelly would have been asked anyway. No one could resist that golden image.

  And that had been… Charlene closed her eyes, counting
. That had been twenty years ago, the first year that Kelly led the parade. I must have moved or something, for her eyes flicked open, and her mouth quirked. “You don’t believe me?”

  I looked at her face, now every bit of thirty-seven years old, if not more, and nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure what I believed, but I wanted Charlene to go on talking. Questions could come later.

  “I would have quit before,” she said slowly. “I had had my high school triumphs; that’s all I wanted. I had two scholarships—not big, but big enough to get out of town—and I planned to go. I could give up being the local beauty, to gain the world. But then—” Her longer fingers moved restlessly in her lap. “There was Kelly, and Sunny—”

  Kelly had never wanted anything more than to be a golden girl leading a parade on a golden horse. To freeze time in that moment of triumph, to be forever prancing down the street with everyone watching her, a light breeze rippling the flag she carried. I found myself nodding: that’s what any girl would want, if she could get it. Perfectly natural. Kelly, though, had scoffed at the warning she received, as Charlene had not scoffed. Maybe Charlene would have to quit, but she wouldn’t. She would ride that parade every year of her life. She would step out of time, and take the world with her.

  I still didn’t understand. “What warning? How do you mean, the gift had limits? And what was it about in the first place?” More questions clogged my head: how and why and who and when and where. Especially where.

  “Five years, or my twentieth birthday, whichever came first. That’s what the woman said, after my first parade: I was to ride the horse back out there before then. If I didn’t, he’d disappear, and I’d have that to explain. And as for why… I never knew. I never asked.” She saw my doubt and insisted, “I never asked why: there were answers she might have given that I didn’t want to hear. Why did I buy that horse in the first place? It had to be some kind of magic—dangerous, maybe even wrong… wicked. I can imagine what the preacher at church would have said, if he’d known about it. You don’t question things like that. If you find out it’s something really bad, then you can’t do it, but if you don’t know then it’s not your fault.”