Lizzie Flying Solo

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  I dug my fingernails into the bark of the chestnut tree, listening to the sound of silence as the chill of the autumn wind wrapped ugly arms around me. Fire was gone, and I was right back in that kitchen the day Dad left, watching Mom weep, with no idea how everything I’d known in my life had just been stolen from me. I sank to my knees, watching the barn, hoping to see Fire bolt from inside and gallop up the road to me, but all remained quiet.

  I don’t know how long I’d been kneeling in the dirt before I saw Bryce, already halfway up the lane, waving his arms to get my attention. “Lizzie!”

  I jumped up and wiped my face in the crook of my elbow. Bryce stopped where he was and raised both hands in question.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “It’s okay if you don’t make me late for my lesson,” he called. “Hurry!”

  I ran down the lane and caught up with him. We walked quickly up the hill, into the barn, and down to Tucker’s stall.

  “They put that pony you like in there.” He pointed directly across the aisle from Tucker. “Don’t go in there; he’s pretty wild. You should have seen them trying to get him in the barn.”

  “I did,” I said. “It was awful.”

  “Hope you don’t like him too much,” Bryce said. “Not sure how long they’ll keep a pony that nasty around, no matter how fancy he is. Luis has teeth marks on his arm.”

  When Bryce kneeled down to wrap Tucker’s legs, I darted across and stuck my head over the stall door. Fire was braced against the far wall, his ears flattened, and one back hoof cocked in warning. A fresh flake of hay lay untouched in front of him.

  “Fire,” I whispered. “It’s me. I’m here.”

  He unflattened his ears and flicked them back and forth, but he didn’t come. I held out half an apple.

  “It’s okay, buddy. I saw what happened. You’re okay.”

  I talked softly, mumbling things over and over until finally he turned his head and looked at me.

  “You have to come here to get the apple,” I said quietly. “I can’t go in there.”

  “That’s exactly right!” Kennedy’s voice boomed sharply behind me.

  I startled, and Fire flung himself against the wall again.

  “No one goes in with him at all. He’s loco,” she said, rolling her index finger in a circle around her ear.

  “Oh, he isn’t—” Behind her, Bryce held his finger up to his lips and shook his head at me.

  “Hey, Kennedy, Lizzie’s coming to watch the lesson. That okay?”

  Kennedy looked me up and down, shrugged, and stalked away. “Your money. I’ll meet you in the ring.”

  “You do want to watch, right?” Bryce asked. “I mean, you don’t have to. I just thought since you like dressage and all—”

  I tossed the apple inside Fire’s stall.

  “I definitely want to watch,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded, then handed me his helmet to carry as I followed him to a small sandy ring on the other side of the barn.

  “This ring is used only for private lessons,” Bryce said to me, tightening Tucker’s girth. “I’m just saying, so if you ever come and can’t find me, I might be in here. You can come anytime, you know.”

  Kennedy moved a black rubber step stool from behind a wall. “Here, sit on the mounting block,” she said, dropping it in the center of the ring. “Advanced riders like Bryce aren’t allowed to use it to mount, only beginners.”

  I sat obediently while Bryce focused everything on warming up Tucker at a walk. It was like, once he was on his horse’s back, they became one, like no one else was there, no one else needed to be there. It was exactly the way I imagined it would be when I rode Fire someday. Because after watching Bryce with Tucker, I knew, without any uncertainty, I would ride Fire, and he would be mine.

  Kennedy sipped coffee from a green cup and watched the pair move around the ring. There was another full cup of coffee in a box on the block next to me, with a peach-and-gold rose on the side and O’Toole’s Pub written underneath.

  Kennedy downed her first cup and traded for the full one. “Okay, get him moving. Trot some serpentines, do some figure eights, make him bend and stretch. We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  I could hear people out in the barn getting their horses and ponies ready for lessons. Hooves clomped up and down the concrete aisle, stall doors rolled open and closed, kids called for help saddling ponies, and Joe’s voice was in the midst of it all. “Hustle, hustle, hustle, guys. You’re missing valuable lesson time!”

  Bryce didn’t seem to hear a thing except the words from Kennedy’s mouth. His face was set like a stone for most of the lesson. But when Tucker moved in a particular way, even though I couldn’t tell for sure what he was doing differently, Bryce beamed and glanced over quickly to see if I’d noticed. After about forty minutes of work, both horse and rider were drenched in sweat.

  “Good job. Get him cooled out,” Kennedy said. “You’re coming along. Keep practicing.”

  She picked up her coffee trash and walked out with barely a nod to me.

  Bryce dismounted, loosened the girth, and walked Tucker in circles to cool him off, a small, satisfied smile curving his mouth up at the corners.

  “You guys looked great,” I said.

  He took off his helmet and ran his fingers through damp hair. “Thanks. Kennedy makes us work, but that’s exactly what I wanted.”

  “Did she not want me here?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was just—I don’t know—snippy, like she was irritated I was watching or something.”

  “Nah. She’s just weird that way. Distant. Doesn’t talk much until you know her. She’ll be friendlier next time.”

  Next time. My belly tickled.

  “Hey,” Bryce said. “The indoor polo season starts Friday night. Wanna go hot-walk the ponies with me? The riders pay pretty well, plus it’s fun. We could pick you up at your house and bring you home afterward.”

  I’d never even seen a polo match on YouTube and had only a vague idea what hot-walking ponies meant, but I was all ready to say yes until he said the part about picking me up and taking me home.

  “Oh, Friday, um, I can’t—I have something to do with my mom that night. But thanks anyway. And thanks for letting me come watch your lesson. It was cool.”

  I left soon after, running straight between the fields toward the path in the woods, thinking about what Bryce had said about polo. If I could figure out how to get there and back without him picking me up at Good Hope, it was a way to earn money for Fire. Once again, the bitterness toward Dad and all he’d done to complicate our lives rose in my throat. I was almost to the split in the trail when a single orange leaf fluttered to the ground in front of me. It was probably one of the last in all of Connecticut with any hint of color. I stopped to pick it up, rubbed my fingers up and down the lobes, then put it to my nose and inhaled the familiar smell of autumn woods.

  Every fall before Dad got weird, he and I used to gather sprays of orange and red leaves for our scrapbook. Mom would iron each spray between pieces of wax paper as carefully as she ironed Dad’s shirts, pressing the tips of the leaves all the way to the edges so they wouldn’t curl and dry out. Then we’d glue them onto the ivory pages of the scrapbook to preserve them forever.

  Now, I carried this leaf carefully back to Good Hope and tucked it between the pages of the working student papers. The scrapbook, the one with all the leaves from our old life, was packed inside a box somewhere, and forever would never mean the same again.

  Eleven

  When Mom got home, I was waiting on the bed with the Birchwood papers stashed behind me. I’d rehearsed in my head a hundred times what I was going to say. I was ready. But then she burst into the room, her eyes all bright and shiny, waving two one-hundred-dollar bills in the air.

  “Guess what? I got a bonus today for getting the office through a big project!”

&nb
sp; She hung her jacket on the door where we’d Velcroed a coat hook. The rule list had specified no nails, no picture-hanger things, and no hooks bolted into the walls. So, we’d gotten the Velcro kind and tested it to see how many jackets we could hang before it fell off. One.

  “And I earned a half day off, so as soon as you’re home from school tomorrow, we’re going clothes shopping!”

  She stood in front of me with this big goofy smile like she expected me to jump off the bed and dance around the room.

  I didn’t want to go shopping.

  I wanted to tell her about Birchwood. And if we were going to spend money on anything, once I became a working student, I would need boots and a helmet.

  “I don’t need clothes,” I said.

  “You do need clothes, and we need a Mom-and-Lizzie adventure. We’ll take the bus to Hartford.”

  “We can just get some stuff at the thrift store. Remember they had jeans for five dollars?”

  And riding clothes.

  “You turned your nose up at them.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. We should be saving money, in case we need something more important than regular old clothes.”

  She put the back of her hand to my forehead. “You feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “The arms of your jacket don’t even come to your wrists. This is a chance to get a new coat that will last. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

  I leaned my back against the wall so the Birchwood papers were completely hidden, and made up an excuse for my melancholy. “I’m just tired of walking into the bathroom and finding the toilet full of throw-up.”

  “Are Angela’s kids sick?”

  “They’re always sick. They throw up more than any kids I’ve ever known. Shouldn’t they go to the doctor or something?”

  “Doctors are expensive, Lizzie,” she said sharply. “Maybe Angela doesn’t have health insurance. Kids throw up. Even I didn’t run off to the doctor every single time you did.”

  “But shouldn’t Angela at least flush the toilet?”

  Mom folded her work blazer over the back of the chair and sighed. “No judging, young lady. She is a single mom with no support. It wouldn’t hurt you to offer to help her from time to time.”

  “Only if there’s something I can do that doesn’t involve stinky diapers,” I grumbled to myself.

  Regardless of my objections, we took the bus to Hartford the next afternoon. I’d never been to Hartford, and I’d never stepped foot inside a Walmart. In our Life Before, we shopped at the boutiques in our town. Sometimes we took the train into New York City, had lunch with Dad, and went shopping at the big fancy stores.

  But that was then.

  The Walmart aisles were jam-packed with people piling Halloween decorations, candy, and costumes into their carts. We wandered around for fifteen minutes with our arms full of jackets and jeans before finding a dressing room. The first one still had a pile of clothes on the bench. We moved on until we found one that was empty.

  “These prices are good, Lizzie,” Mom said. “Get whatever you want.”

  It wasn’t until I tried on a coat that actually fit that I realized Mom had been right about the old one. The new one was puffy and pink, almost the same color as the Birchwood jackets, with secret pockets inside just the right size for horse treats. We headed off for the bus stop, loaded down with plastic bags.

  “For someone who didn’t want to go shopping, you didn’t do so bad,” Mom said when we settled into our seats.

  In addition to two turtlenecks, a lavender hoodie, two sweaters, underwear, socks, sneakers, and two pairs of jeans, she’d let me get a stack of six spiral notebooks in assorted colors and a box of nice, sharp number two pencils. Not too shabby, indeed.

  I pressed my forehead against the window and let my breath make a little circle of steam on the glass. The bus lurched forward. I drew a picture of Fire in the steam, then wiped it away with my arm and watched the busy people rushing along the sidewalk as the evening light faded. It wasn’t fully dark yet, but all the streetlamps flicked on. We stopped again to pick up more passengers, then chugged forward in traffic at the same pace as everyone on the sidewalk. Mothers and kids, businesspeople, construction workers, couples, and Dad.

  I jumped up and screamed. “Mom, it’s Dad! Look!”

  Her whole face froze. He was so close, if it weren’t for the glass between us and the traffic noise, he would have heard me. He strode purposefully beside the bus, in and out of the light, unaware that we were right there. I reached out to bang on the window, but Mom grabbed my arm and pushed me down into the seat, her fingers clasped tightly around my hands.

  “Stop,” she said harshly. “Leave it alone.”

  Her voice was cold, but her eyes were on fire. Her face flushed with something that frightened me. The brakes squealed as the bus came to another stop. Dad stopped, too, and draped his arm over the shoulders of a blond lady wearing high heels and glittery earrings. A teenage girl in a dressy coat and scarf stood between them. Her eyes were glued to Dad’s face. She threw her head back and laughed at whatever he was saying. The lady laughed, too, and the three of them turned together like water ballerinas and walked away.

  “Dad?” It was barely more than a whisper.

  My whole body slumped. Every molecule of air was sucked from my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. The bus jerked forward, and my back slammed against the seat, releasing the hold on my chest. I gasped for air and watched out the window as individual strangers blended into one mass of people. Dad had disappeared. He was one of them now, a stranger. He didn’t even know we’d been there.

  Mom didn’t say anything for the longest time. We sat on the bus, our shopping bags in our laps, staring straight ahead, expressionless, as the lights of the city fell behind us and we traveled through the dark for the thirty minutes it took to get back to our new town. Finally, she took my hand and squeezed three times.

  “I’m so sorry, Lizzie.”

  I laid my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

  It was past eleven o’clock, but Mom’s tiny reading light shined a V on the wall from below. We hadn’t spoken much since we got home. Neither of us could sleep. I took the Birchwood working student papers out of the notebook and held them up against the wall so the light illuminated the words.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know about the girl?”

  I could hear her close her book. “No. I’m so sorry.”

  “Is that where he lives?”

  “I don’t know. But next time we need something, we won’t go to Hartford.”

  She got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. The orange leaf fell from between the pages of the Birchwood papers. I examined it in the light, then dug my fingernail into the brilliant orange blade, crushed it into a million bits, and threw it against the wall. The pieces scattered like orange confetti. Mom came back, silently got into her bed, and switched off the reading lamp.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  Pause. “That sounds ominous.”

  “There’s a horse farm on the other side of the woods.”

  Silence.

  “I know we can’t pay for anything. I’m not asking that.”

  “Is it near the library?”

  “Sort of. It’s down that other path, the one that goes right at the fork.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s a pony there. He’s new. I named him Fire.”

  “Ooo-kaaay.”

  Deep breath.

  “There’s a boy at school who keeps his horse there. He just moved from Wyoming. He let me come into the barn to meet him—Tucker, that’s his horse’s name—and I met the guy who runs the stable. His name is Joe.”

  Her covers rustled and she flipped the reading light back on.

  “When did all this take place?”

  “The whole thing or just the Joe part?�
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  “I guess the whole thing.”

  Deeper breath.

  “I’ve been going in the afternoons and watching the lessons. I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you’d say I couldn’t go.”

  “What about the library?”

  “I still go sometimes but mostly on Saturdays.”

  “Did you think I’d tell you not to go because you weren’t allowed there?”

  “I didn’t want you to think I was going to ask you to pay for anything. And also, well, kind of because it was the only place that was all mine.”

  Mom pushed her covers off. The bunk jiggled when she sat up. “And what made you decide to tell me now?”

  I climbed down and curled up next to her with my head on her shoulder, and I told her the whole thing. Everything. Including how I never felt I belonged anywhere anymore and about the poems I wrote. I told her how afraid Fire was when he came but that he trusted me, only me. I told her how sad I was when I heard that Fire would be for sale someday because that meant he could lose his home all over again.

  I let those words settle for a second, to let them sink in. For her and for me. Then I told her about Bryce and how he took me into the barn like it was no big deal and how I was both jealous and happy about the way Tucker loved him. And finally, after I had told her everything else, after I told her about Kennedy giving me the papers for the working student program and how she’d said I wasn’t the first kid to come to them through the woods, I told Mom about going there the day before and finding Fire gone and how it made me feel the same way I felt on the day Dad left and I found her crying in the kitchen.

  As soon as I told her that part, she asked to see the papers. And that was that.

  Twelve

  Mom called Joe from her office the next day and made arrangements for us to meet at Birchwood on Sunday morning. She asked me not to go back again until everything was settled and she’d seen it for herself. That meant I had to wait four whole days to see Fire again.

  “What if Bryce invites me?”

  “Just let it float, Lizzie. Four days won’t kill you. Put your attention on things that need it right now.”