Lizzie Flying Solo

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  Mom dug shiny black shoes out of the closet, pulled a slip from a drawer, then stood in the middle of the floor looking lost.

  “What path?”

  “You know, where it veers off to the right when we go to the library.”

  “I don’t know where it goes. Why?”

  “Just wondering about the dog. Where are you going?”

  She puckered her forehead. “Come here, sweetie. Let’s talk for a minute.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. Come sit.”

  I sat next to her on the bed, so close our shoulders touched.

  “I’m going to testify today,” she said.

  “Testify about Dad? Is this his trial?”

  “Not yet. His lawyer asked me to come answer some questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “What I knew or didn’t know about—well, about what Dad did.” She fingered a gold button on the dress. “I’ll only be gone a few hours.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  I jumped up and started throwing clothes together. She took them from me and shook her head. “You can’t come. This is a grown-up thing.”

  “Yes, I can, and I’m going with you!”

  I yanked the clothes from her and pulled jeans on over my pajama shorts. Mom stood in front of me, her blond hair already curled at the ends, her face pinched and sad.

  “Lizzie, stop. I’m sorry you have to go through this—I’m sorry we both have to go through this—but I’m trying to do everything they ask so the court will release my bank account.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means that when Dad was arrested, the court froze our bank accounts so I couldn’t use the money, even what came to me when Grandma and Granddad died. Once the court knows that money is mine and not Dad’s, hopefully they’ll let us have it back. I promise I’ll only be gone a few hours.”

  “Why do we even have to do things like talk to lawyers?” I asked. “What did we do wrong?”

  Mom pulled me to her and pressed my cheek against her shoulder. “Absolutely nothing, sweetie. You and I did not do anything wrong.”

  “Then why does it always feel that way?”

  Half an hour later, a lady from the lawyer’s office came to pick up Mom.

  “Go spend the morning at the library,” Mom said. “I’ll be back shortly after lunch.”

  As soon as the car pulled away from Good Hope, I ran to our room, grabbed my diary, and signed out in Miss May’s ledger, writing LIBRARY next to my name. I had no intention of going to the library. I was going to find that hungry dog and her puppies, and give her the toast I’d dropped out the window.

  At the split in the trail, I stopped to catch my breath. It was my first time alone in the woods, and I liked the feeling of being on my own again. Fingering the waxy honeysuckle leaves, I thought of how the path between our old house and MaryBeth’s started and ended with this same kind of vine. I’d walked that path by myself since I was nine. This was really no different, except now someone else could be walking the old one. Maybe someone else already lived in our house, slept in my room, and gazed at the red maple outside the window where my grandparents’ ashes lay waiting for us to come home.

  I placed the toast on the fallen trunk where Mom and I liked to stop, hoping the dog would find it, and sat down to write in my diary. No matter what Mom believed or tried to make me believe, I knew we would never be going back. Even after Dad’s trial, when he’d get out of jail, I didn’t really want to live in our old town, anyway. Not after all the people who were supposed to be our friends had treated Mom and me like criminals. No one rallied around us except Mrs. Alfieri, but that was only so she could collect gossip. Even my aunt Rebecca, Dad’s sister in California, accused Mom of knowing the whole time what was going on and bringing shame to the family. After she said that on the phone, we never heard from her again.

  After I’d written enough to feel a little better, I got up and moved along the trail veering away from the library, heading toward the unknown. I jogged around twists and turns, down little slopes, and up over ridges, jumping a thin, dry creek and landing on earth that was cushion soft under my sneakers. I kept going and going until the light in the woods began to change, the trees thinned, and the path ended behind the twisted trunk of a double chestnut.

  On the other side of the tree, a small pony paddock stood empty. Tufts of grass grew in clumps under the rails of a rough wood fence. The land beyond it opened up to gentle fields dotted with ponies and horses along a hillside, their heads disappearing in lush emerald grass. A narrow dirt road cut straight between the fields, down a dip, then up and up and up until it ended at a big barn standing like a red castle at the top of a hill.

  I tucked my diary into the V where the trunk of the chestnut split and stared at the horse farm. In the stillness of that summer morning, I heard only the faraway sounds of ponies’ teeth ripping grass from the earth as they moved slowly across the hills. Sunlight bounced off their backs, sparkling like the brand-new copper penny had so long ago when I’d flipped it in the air above a water fountain and wished for a pony of my own.

  I’d waited two years for the riding lesson that was supposed to happen last December. Once Dad was gone, no one ever said anything about it again. It wasn’t important anymore. It wasn’t essential. Even I didn’t think about it, except for when the helmet had dropped in the closet that day and again when I’d seen the riding clothes at the thrift store. I never dared to imagine there would be ponies in my life until after Dad’s trial, after we were back on our feet.

  A tiny smile spread across my face. I’d never been so happy to be wrong. That one riding lesson might have been abandoned, but not the possibility of ponies. They were right here in front of me, at the end of an unknown trail.

  By the time Mom got home, I’d used up the last pages of the pink diary writing the beginnings of a poem about what I’d found earlier and had resorted to cramming teeny, tiny letters along the edges of the paper. I didn’t hear her come in until she closed the door and dropped her purse on the floor. The look on her face jerked me out of my beautiful pony-dream.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pressed her lips together, then started pacing from the window to the door and back again.

  “Mom, you’re scaring me. What happened?”

  She stopped abruptly, her arms crossed, then sank onto the metal chair.

  “He betrayed us,” she said.

  Her voice was sharp and hollow and frightened me. I climbed cautiously down the ladder and sat on the lower bunk.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your dad is already out of jail.”

  “How did he get out?”

  “Someone else had money and paid his bail. He’s been out for a month.”

  “A month?”

  My mind swirled, trying to put pieces of this news together. Dad was out of jail. I counted back. He’d been out when Mom and I moved to Good Hope, and we were still here. All these weeks and he hadn’t come to see me. Mom slumped forward, rested her elbows on her knees, and let her head hang.

  “I can’t believe I’m left to tell you this. It should be him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  She shook her head so her hair swung in front of her face.

  “Give me your phone,” I said. “I’ll call him.”

  “You can’t call him. He doesn’t have his old phone anymore.”

  “Well, what phone does he have, then? Give me the number.”

  “Stop, Lizzie,” she pleaded. “Just stop.”

  The air between us stilled. She stood up and got her pajamas from the drawer. It wasn’t even two o’clock in the afternoon and she was going to bed.

  “Mom, this isn’t fair. You have to tell me.”

  “He’s out, Lizzie. His trial isn’t for another few months, but we are staying here. We’ll just keep waiting to see what happens.”

  “Where is
he?”

  “He’s not at the old house, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, it isn’t. I mean, why isn’t he here with us?”

  She took her toothbrush bag and left the room. I heard the water turn on in the bathroom sink, then shut off. A minute later she came back. Her face was red like she’d scrubbed off her makeup too hard with a really rough washcloth.

  “Move over, sweetie. I need to lie down for a nap. It’s been a long day.”

  I moved to the chair. She pulled the covers up around her shoulders and closed her eyes.

  “Mom,” I said. “I need to know.”

  “I know you do,” she whispered.

  I waited for what seemed like an eternity, my heart racing. Finally, she stuck her hand out from under the covers and took mine.

  “He isn’t coming to get us, Lizzie. We aren’t going home. The only reason he had the money to get out is because of a woman he knew before. She paid fifty thousand dollars to get him out. He’s staying with her.”

  “Who is it? And why does that mean he has to stay with her?”

  She squeezed her eyes tight and spread her fingers wide. Her wedding ring was gone. “It means he chose her instead of us. Because she could get him out of jail and we couldn’t.”

  Everything went silent again as the truth about my dad dirtied the air. He was living with some rich lady while Mom and I were at Good Hope. He hadn’t even cared enough to help, or come see me. He’d sold us out.

  My heart splintered into a thousand pieces.

  Five

  On a hot, sticky Monday, exactly one month after we’d left our old home, Mom went off to work at a job for the first time since I was born.

  “It’s at an architectural company,” she said, brushing mascara onto her lashes in the mirror. “Having a good job will get us into our own home a lot faster.”

  I was sitting in my usual place by the window, watching for any sign of the hungry dog. “If Dad got money from that lady, why doesn’t he pay for us to get out of here?”

  At first, I’d been devastated by his betrayal. The worst part was that I missed him all over again, as much as I had when he first left. But it took only a few days to get over that. He hadn’t even tried to make our lives easier. That made me feel unwanted. Discarded. Chased off. Like the dog.

  “That’s an excellent question,” Mom said. “But it’s one I don’t have an answer for.”

  “How long will it take for us to get our own place?”

  “That depends on how fast I get the debts cleared up. We’re allowed to stay here a year, and I’m ninety-nine percent sure I can make it in that length of time.”

  “A year? We’re going to be here an entire year? That’s one-twelfth of my life!”

  Silence.

  “I’m doing my best,” she finally said.

  “I know you are, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  Before she left, she tore out used pages from a spiral notebook the lawyer people had given her. “You can have this, sweetie. I don’t need it anymore. First paycheck and I’ll buy you some sketch pads, too.”

  She kissed the top of my head and went out the door to catch a bus to her new job.

  That first morning, I returned two books to the library even though I hadn’t read them yet. Linda was at the desk, fanning herself with a handful of papers.

  “Hi, Lizzie. No Mom today?”

  “No, she started a new job.”

  “Oh, that’s right, good for her,” she said. “Where is she working again?”

  “For an architect.”

  “Nice. In an air-conditioned office building I bet. Our AC is out again.”

  “Yeah, it’s warm in here.”

  “Tell me about it. So, what are you going to do with the rest of your summer?”

  “I don’t really know. I don’t have any new friends yet.”

  Linda’s eyebrows stitched together. She fanned herself faster, like my problem made her hotter.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “do you need volunteer help? Maybe I could come for a little bit each day, and I don’t know, restock books or sweep or something?”

  She stopped fanning and studied my face. “How old are you?”

  “I’ll be thirteen at the end of December. Right after Christmas.”

  “Hmmmm,” she said. “It’s a dilemma.”

  “A dilemma?”

  “Yes. Typically you have to be fourteen to be a regular volunteer, for it to count toward community service hours for school.”

  “I don’t really care about the community service hours.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “Would your mom sign something saying she gave permission?”

  “I’m sure she would!”

  Linda got busy typing up a letter. When she was done, she read it over, made some kind of change, then printed it and handed it to me.

  “Have her read and sign this. If she has any questions, she can call me.”

  “Thank you so much, Linda. I won’t disappoint you.”

  I had successfully engineered a cover story for leaving Good Hope every day while Mom worked. A couple of hours at the library allowed me time at the horse farm with no one questioning where I’d been. I’d only been able to sneak over to see the horses twice since that first day, because I wasn’t ready to share my secret and risk being told I wasn’t allowed.

  “I have no doubts at all,” Linda said. I was halfway to the door when she stopped me. “Remind your mom we are supposed to go to the movies sometime. She can pick which one.”

  “I will and thank you!”

  For what was left of the second hottest summer on record in Connecticut, I spent two hours every weekday at the library, straightening shelves, sweeping, and whatever else Linda needed done, including occasionally helping her finish her daily crossword puzzle. Sometimes we talked about my poems.

  “I always wanted to be an English teacher,” she said. “Specifically, I wanted to teach poetry. Who is your favorite poet?”

  “I don’t really have one yet,” I said. “But I want to learn how to write really good poems.”

  “The best way to learn about poetry is to read it.”

  Linda got up, disappeared in between shelves of periodicals, and came back a minute later with a pale green book in her hands.

  “Robert Frost,” she said. “Start reading his stuff. We’ll move on from there.”

  The book was barely bigger than my hand and had a gold ribbon attached to the binding to bookmark the ivory pages.

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled and settled into her seat like she was pleased with herself. “Maybe I’ll get to do that teaching stint after all. You’ll be my guinea pig.”

  Every day, the very second my two hours at the library were up, I took off down the trail to spy on the horse farm. I lay flat on my belly in the grass near the shaded edge of the woods and watched the horses’ muscles ripple as they moved across the hills. I made up names for each of them and sketched pictures in the new spiral notebook Mom had given me, being careful to utilize every inch of space on each page. And I wrote poems. Really awful poems, mostly. But every once in a while, a string of lyrical words would appear, almost as if someone else wrote them. I read them out loud over and over, trying to understand why those in particular made music in my heart.

  Mostly, I watched the horses and ponies. Sometimes one of them would spook and they would all take off, galloping side by side, up and down the hills. Their hooves pounded the earth, kicking up a cloud of dust that spun a smell in the air so thick and sweet, it followed me into my dreams. Every afternoon, at exactly the same time, I left the grassy area and hid under the cover of trees when two men walked down the hill to collect the horses from their fields and take them back to the barn. When the last horse was gone and the pastures empty, I gathered my writing tools and traipsed around to the far side of the farm where an old stone wall ran straight through a dense grove of trees, and I waited.

  Between my hiding pla
ce and the back side of the barn was a small riding ring where a man named Joe and a girl called Kennedy took turns teaching kids how to ride. Just before four o’clock, a steady stream of cars pulled down the driveway and dropped off students wearing helmets and boots—nearly all of them girls. They’d disappear into the front of the barn, then come out to the ring a few minutes later, leading the same horses and ponies I’d watched running free in the fields not even an hour before. When the riders mounted their horses, I straddled the stone wall and pretended to slip my feet into silver stirrups. With an imaginary set of reins between my fingers, I imitated those riders trotting around the ring, going up and down, up and down, and dreamed of the day my hands would hold not just a book about ponies but a real mane, soft and feathery, twisted between my fingers.

  I envied those girls with so much passion, my heart churned into hate. I hated their matching pink shirts with Birchwood Stables embroidered on the back and their black helmets, so much like the one I’d left behind. I hated the way they high-fived each other after flying over the jumps Joe or Kennedy set for them. After the lessons were over, my jealousy peaked when I watched them feed peppermints from leather-gloved hands to the ponies I could only love from a distance with all my empty, homeless heart. And on the rare afternoons I let myself think about Dad on the walk home, I hated him, too.

  Autumn

  Six

  By the time school started in September, I already knew the names of a bunch of the kids from Birchwood who would be my classmates. I learned them from hearing the riders talk after the lessons, when they led the horses and ponies around the ring to cool them out. Usually they walked in pairs, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays there was a group of four girls about my age who rode together and walked their horses around the ring all in a row: Rikki, Sabrina, Jasmine, and Jade. One time, they walked so close to my hiding place, Jasmine saw me straddling the stone wall like it was a pony. She caught my eye through the trees and we stared at each other while she and her friends meandered past, then she looked away without saying anything.