by Meg Donohue
Inside the cab, Bear muttered darkly. I’d read in books of siblings who were friends and protectors, but I’d been given a dud, a brother who hated me and would happily feed me to a mountain lion. If my brother and I had ever shared a loving moment, I’d forgotten it.
Now, it seemed, my father had corrected the mistake.
“Can he sleep in my room?” I stood on my toes and tried to catch sight of Amir around Bear’s back. What was Bear doing to him in there? “Do you want to sleep in my room, Amir?”
“Well he sure as hell isn’t sleeping with me,” said Bear, finally pulling back out of the truck. He spat once at the ground and then plodded heavily up the porch steps.
Amir appeared unshaken by Bear’s inspection.
“Come on out,” my father told him. “Most of us don’t bite.”
Amir crawled across the seat of the cab and lowered himself to the ground. I was surprised to see that once straightened, he was taller than me. He clutched his blue coat in his arms the same way that the kids who didn’t know how to swim held rafts at the beach in Osha, and it made me feel as sorry for him as I did for them.
“I don’t bite,” I told him. “Sometimes the chickens peck, but not much. There are coyotes, but they mostly bite the chickens. The horses don’t bite unless they think your fingers are carrots. Dad doesn’t bite, but Rei says his burps are so loud they hurt her ears.”
“Guilty as charged,” said my father.
Amir’s eyes hinted at a smile. I took a step closer to him. “Rei is our friend from town who bakes pies and sells Dad’s carvings at festivals. How old are you? I’m eight.”
“I’m almost nine.”
I nodded. “That’s why you’re taller than I am.” I turned to my father. “Will Amir go to Little Earth?”
“Yes. Now go inside, both of you. It’s cold out here. I’ll get your things, Amir.”
I wondered what kinds of things Amir had. He trailed after me into the house.
“Did you bring books?” I asked. When he shook his head, I hoped my face didn’t reveal my disappointment. “That’s okay. You can borrow as many books as you want from Little Earth. That’s your new school. It’s in town. You’ll be the only other eight-year-old besides me. I’m reading Pippi Longstocking right now, but if you don’t like that there are a lot of other books you can choose. But Pippi is really funny. You’ll like it.”
Amir’s eyes were traveling all over the kitchen. I was happy to see that Bear was in his bedroom with the door shut. I followed Amir’s gaze around the room. I tried to see it the way he might. I’d never had someone my own age over before.
“Is it bigger or smaller than your house?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a house. I had an apartment. This is darker.”
I laughed. “Well, we only have the one light on. We like to save electricity. It’s good for the earth.” Pal was sniffing Amir’s sneakers. “That’s my dog, Pal.”
Amir stroked Pal’s head. They looked each other in the eyes, and Pal wagged his tail in a thoughtful way. When Amir straightened, he said, “You’re lucky to have a dog.”
I swallowed. I thought of his dead mother. “We can share him,” I said quietly. It pained me to offer this, but when Amir smiled the pain disappeared.
My father came in carrying a green duffel bag in one hand and a paper bag in the other. “We stopped for hamburgers on the way home. Here’s one for you,” he said, handing me the bag.
Normally, I might have asked if he’d brought one for my brother, but in that moment, I didn’t care if Bear ever ate again. Even though my stomach was full from the eggs and the bread I’d eaten, I stood right there in the middle of the kitchen and devoured the hamburger.
Dad watched me, shaking his head. “Slow down,” he said. The look he gave me almost made me tell him what Bear had done that day, but the sight of my brother’s closed door across the kitchen stopped me.
“Follow me, Amir,” Dad said, walking toward my room. “You’ll sleep on the floor in Merrow’s room for now. Rei’s dropping off an extra bed tomorrow. We’ll get you settled in before you know it. I can tell Merrow is happy you’re here.”
“I am,” I confirmed, swallowing the last of the hamburger as I hurried after them. “Are you tired, Amir? I’m not.” I liked saying his name. Amir is here, I thought, enjoying the rhyme.
“He’s had a very hard few weeks and a long day of travel. Try to let him get some sleep, okay?” My father set the green duffel on my floor and left the room. “You’ll show him the ropes, won’t you, Merrow?” he called from the kitchen. I heard the fridge door open and knew he was searching for his beer. I wondered if Bear had left him any.
Amir looked around my room, but there wasn’t much to see. Most of the toys and treasures I tried to accumulate were lost.
“We brush our teeth in the kitchen sink,” I told Amir. “And there’s a toilet shed around the side of the house.”
Before Amir could answer, my father appeared with a pair of quilts I’d never seen and a new pillow, too. As soon as they were spread on the floor, Amir lay on top of them and covered himself with the big blue coat.
“You’ll be all right,” my father murmured to the boy. He didn’t seem surprised that Amir hadn’t brushed his teeth or changed into pajamas. When he turned off the light, moonlight flooded the room. “Get some sleep, and in the morning, we’ll show you around the property. You’ll like it here, Amir. Horseshoe Cliff is a wonderful place for children.”
I was feeling tired myself and it didn’t seem like my father was paying attention to me, so I followed Amir’s lead and climbed into my bed without brushing my teeth or changing into my pajamas. Pal looked at me with his ears all perked up and expectant, but I shook my head to let him know not to jump onto the bed until Dad had left.
“Good night,” said my father, kissing my forehead. The door clicked shut and Pal immediately leaped onto my bed and curled himself around my feet. I turned onto my side and watched Amir. His eyes moved below his eyelids in a way that made me think he was not yet asleep. I longed to reach out and touch the blue coat, to knead it like dough below my fingers. New York must have been very cold to need a coat so big.
“That’s a big coat,” I could not help but whisper.
“It was my mother’s,” Amir whispered back without opening his eyes.
“Oh. Was your mother very big?”
Amir was quiet for so long that I thought he had fallen asleep. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. What a strange day I’d had. First my father had left on a mysterious errand. Then Bear had locked me in the closet for hours. And now an orphan had come to live with us, bringing not much more than his mother’s enormous coat. Had my own mother been big or small? I wondered. There was a stack of her clothes on the top shelf of my father’s closet. I would lay them on the floor in the morning, I decided, to see how big my mother had been.
“She wasn’t very big,” I heard Amir say then, so quietly that I wondered if the words had come from my own lips, if I’d drifted off to sleep and murmured the answer to my own question. But when I rolled back onto my side and looked down, I saw that the boy’s eyes were dark jellyfish in shimmering twin seas. I felt a connection to him that I could not explain. On an impulse, I reached out my hand to him, and he held it.
Chapter Five
Amir took to Horseshoe Cliff like a fly to washed-up seaweed. It was hard for me to believe that before we met, he’d never ridden a horse, or held a just-laid egg, or eaten something pulled straight out of the dirt. He’d never even planted something in the dirt.
When we walked around the property on his first day, he kept stopping to crouch down and examine things. We saw all kinds of rocks and sticks and plants and bugs that day, including a small, strange, gold-winged bug that I’d never seen before. Amir didn’t say a lot, but his eyes shone with curiosity. Everything was new to him, everything a discovery.
When we stopped at the pasture, Amir looked up at the mural on the
side of the horses’ lean-to.
“My mom painted that,” I told him.
My father had told me the story. He’d worried about my mother standing on a ladder because she was pregnant with Bear at the time, but she’d said a little daring made a baby strong. And then Bear had turned out to be as big and strong a baby as had ever existed, and by the time he turned one our mother could barely carry him.
“My mom was a painter, too,” Amir said. His accent made his words sound even and pure. It reminded me of rain falling into a half-full barrel.
“I wonder if our moms became friends because they both liked to paint,” I said. “Or if one of them taught the other how to do it.”
Amir stared off for a moment, thinking. “Maybe they met each other in a class.”
I threw a stick in the air but didn’t manage to catch it. Pal scooped it up and shook it a few times before stretching out in the dirt to gnaw on it. I looked up at the mural.
“My dad wanted my mom to paint the solar system,” I said. “He said if you linked all the peace signs in Osha, they could circle the planet. He thought we should be different, but my mom said that someday someone was going to paint the peace sign that did the trick. The peace sign that worked. What if that person was her? My dad couldn’t argue with that.”
Amir stood very still as he listened to me. I could tell that he liked this story as much as I did.
The horses had been walking lazily toward us from the far end of the pasture.
“How about I teach you how to ride?” I said. It would help us become best friends like our mothers had been if Amir liked horses as much as I did. I climbed the rails of the fence and paused at the top, waiting for him to join me. The horses snorted warm bursts of air onto my legs, saying hello. “You can ride Old Mister, the bigger one. He’s my dad’s horse. Guthrie’s mine.”
As soon as Amir climbed up beside me on the fence, I grabbed a fistful of Guthrie’s gray mane and swung my leg over the pony’s back. I pressed my leg into his side to move him toward Old Mister, corralling the horse closer to where Amir sat on the fence. “Go on,” I said. “Grab his mane. He won’t stand still forever.”
Amir grabbed Old Mister’s mane and swung his leg over the horse. Seated, he grinned at me.
I laughed. I was a little surprised by how easily he’d done it. “There! Now all you need to do is hold on. Old Mister’s in love with Guthrie. He’ll follow him anywhere.” I pressed my sneakered heels into Guthrie’s sides and made little kissing noises with my mouth. For as long as I could remember, Guthrie had been my pony, but my father had once told me that Guthrie used to be Bear’s. Only Bear never liked to ride him. He didn’t like any animals, as far as I could tell, not even Pal, who was the most likable animal in the world.
I planned to ride down to the beach, but when I turned Guthrie toward the paddock gate Rei and my father were standing there, watching us.
“Rei!” I hollered, waving. Her face was pinched under her big hat. She was a terrible worrywart. For a moment, I forgot that Amir was behind me on Old Mister. I squeezed my heels into Guthrie and trotted across the paddock, dodging the gopher mounds below as best I could. Pal ran along as though on springs beside us, tail going in circles, barking even with that stick still in his mouth.
A quick tug on Guthrie’s mane was all it took to bring the pony to a halt right in front of Rei and my father. I was proud of my clean, rein-less stop, but Rei wasn’t even looking at me. I turned to see Old Mister hurrying toward us. Amir looked loose on the horse, his elbows jangling at each bounce, his body slipping from side to side, but his expression was set with determination and he managed to keep his seat. His shaggy black hair rose and fell around his big ears. When Old Mister stopped behind Guthrie and gave the pony’s rump an annoyed nip, Amir laughed. His laughter was a full, rich sound, and his eyes were so bright with joy that it seemed to me you could have seen them in the dark.
“You’re taking to this place like a fly to seaweed,” my father said. I must have learned the saying from him.
“Where is your helmet? And the bridle?” Rei asked. The way she spoke was the thing I liked third best about her, after her pumpkin pies and the books that she gave me. Rei was from Japan. Each word she said was as crisp as a bite of fresh cucumber.
“We’re fine,” I assured her. “I’m teaching Amir how to ride.” I tried to make my voice sound low and calm like my father’s. Rei never scolded my father.
“You just sprinted across the field without the boy!”
“‘Sprinted’!” I laughed, already forgetting to keep my voice low. “Rei, you’re so funny! Horses don’t sprint.”
Rei huffed. She turned her attention to Amir. “It’s you I came to see, young man. Are you all right up there? Would you like to come down?”
“No,” said Amir.
Rei frowned. “No, thank you.”
Amir nodded, but didn’t repeat her words. Later, I would have to tell him what my father said about Rei, which was that she’d never had time to have her own children because she was too busy raising everyone else’s. My father had said this with a smile because he loved Rei just as I did. At dinner one night back when Bear still ate with us, Bear had said that Rei was in love with Dad and the idea of this had made Dad laugh so hard that I was surprised his chair survived the meal.
“Rei lives in Osha, the nearest town,” my father told Amir as he gave Old Mister’s forehead a massage. “She brought over a bed she wasn’t using. I set it up in Merrow’s room for you.”
“We love Rei,” I added. The thought of Rei helping to make Amir’s stay in my room permanent made me contrite. After only one night together, I could not imagine ever again being able to fall asleep without Amir nearby. “Sometimes she visits Little Earth and reads stories to us. She was a teacher in Japan.”
“Many years ago,” Rei said. When she was pleased, her black eyes gleamed like wet rocks in the sun. I’d forgotten that seeing this was nearly as fun as seeing her rub her hands together with worry. She’s going to start a fire doing that someday, I had murmured to my father once, making him duck his head and smile.
“Thank you for the bed,” said Amir quietly.
Rei nodded. “You’re welcome. Do you like lemon bread? I just put a loaf in the house. Make sure you kids have a piece before Bear gets a whiff of it.”
I hoped Bear hadn’t seen Rei’s car pull up. “Follow me, Amir,” I shouted. “We can ride to the house.” I tapped my heels against Guthrie’s belly, waking the pony from his doze.
“To the house?” Rei cried. “The boy’s never ridden before! Jacob, talk some sense into her.”
“It’s not far, Rei. They’ll be fine. Just walk, Merrow. Don’t make Amir eat your dust.”
I gave a frustrated groan but walked Guthrie toward the paddock gate. Old Mister and Amir followed behind us.
We had not made it far when Rei said in a clear voice, “Saying ‘no’ to that child every once in a while would do her some good, Jacob.”
If my father replied, I didn’t hear it.
I WISHED I could press Guthrie into a gallop, but lemon bread or no lemon bread, I was Amir’s guardian now. Without my encouragement, Guthrie was in no hurry; his home and hay lay behind him. Old Mister plodded along with his chin practically resting on Guthrie’s haunches. Guthrie swished his tail in a show of annoyance, but I knew that in truth nothing made the pony happier than feeling the weight of his friend’s adoration.
“Is Rei your mother?” Amir asked. “The one who painted the barn?”
I looked back at him, surprised. “No. My mother died when I was little.”
“Oh.” His expression shifted, and I guessed he was thinking of his own mother.
“I can tell Old Mister likes you,” I said. “Maybe my dad will give him to you. He hardly ever rides with me. My dad still likes riding, but his ass doesn’t anymore.”
I was learning that when Amir laughed, a burst of delight as sweet as any of Rei’s pies spread through m
e.
We left the horses grazing on a patch of weeds along the dirt driveway. True to Rei’s word, a loaf of bread drizzled with icing awaited us on the kitchen counter. Within moments we were eating hunks of it from our hands.
“Mmm,” I said. “Thank goodness for Rei.”
There were heavy footfalls outside and then Bear’s voice, muttering, “If those horses run away because no one bothered to tie them up, I’m not going to be the one . . .”
I grabbed Amir’s arm, but it was too late—Bear was already inside. His muttering ended abruptly, and his eyes narrowed as they fell on my hand encircling Amir’s arm. He walked toward us. I pressed my eyes shut and waited for the blow, but it was Amir who crumpled beside me with a grunt, falling first against the kitchen table and then to the floor.
“Bear! No!” I cried, but he didn’t bother to respond. He scooped up what remained of the loaf of bread and ambled out of the cottage.
Amir stood, cradling his elbow.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He managed to shrug and wince at the same time. “Is he always like that?”
“Only when my dad isn’t around. He hates me.”
Amir didn’t seem surprised by my statement. I peeked at his elbow and sucked in my breath when I saw the cut.
“Hang on. I’ll get you a Band-Aid.”
My father kept a first aid kit in his bureau. When I shut the drawer, I heard muffled voices. Rei and my father must have stood just outside the house. I pressed my ear to the wall and listened.
“Was she sick for a long time?” Rei asked.
“That’s what her father said when he got hold of me. I haven’t spoken to Allison in ages. Not since Marigold died.”
“And Allison’s father wouldn’t take the boy? Who would not take his own grandson?”
“He didn’t approve of Allison adopting Amir. But Allison was never close with her parents. Back when we knew her, she hadn’t spoken to them in years. Her father said she didn’t get in touch with him until she got sick and moved home from India. He’s been helping them out for a while, but once Allison died . . .” His voice lowered. I pressed my ear against the wall. “He wanted to try to send Amir back to the orphanage in India, but someone found Allison’s will. She had set me as Amir’s guardian if anything happened to her. I guess Marigold had told her, years ago, that Horseshoe Cliff was a good place for a child to grow up.”
