Our car was packed. After Stephanie and I helped Norm attach our bikes to the bike rack on the back of the car, we climbed into the backseat.
“Bye, little house with the triangular window,” Lynn said from the passenger seat. “Didn’t we have a wonderful time, girls?”
“Yeah,” Stephanie said.
I scanned the dunes, looking for one last glimpse of the horses. Leaving a place could be hard sometimes.
“Look,” Stephanie said. “Cody’s out on his front porch.”
I didn’t want to look.
“Daddy, can I take a minute to say good-bye to Cody?” she asked.
“That would be nice,” Norm said.
She jumped out of the car and ran across the sand, up past the red Mongoose in the yard. I watched her stand there talking with him, smiling and gesturing with her phone, I guess talking about the fact that maybe they’d text each other. His expression was serious, and he only smiled once, when she said her last good-bye. She ran back to the car, and I quickly looked away.
“How can you act like he’s still our friend?” I asked.
Stephanie looked at me with a level gaze. “What he did was no worse than what we did last summer with the wolves. He accidentally did something wrong, and he tried not to admit to it. He didn’t hurt Isabel on purpose. Remember how last summer you wished Russell would forgive you for what we did? Cody probably feels the same way.”
I glanced over at Cody. Stephanie had found out that Cody had to pay a fine, but since he had reported the accident himself, he wasn’t charged with a misdemeanor.
On the day after I found out that Cody was the one who hit Isabel, I had gone up to him in the driveway and yelled at him.
“How could you have sat there with me, watching the horse suffer, and known all along that you were the one who did it? How could you have walked around the aquarium with us, knowing that?” I was so mad I was shaking all over. What I couldn’t put into words was how betrayed I felt. I had started out not liking him; then I’d changed my mind. And then this!
“I’m sorry. It was an accident,” he had said. “I feel terrible.”
But I had walked away from him.
Now Mom and Norm waved at Cody as we pulled out of the cul-de-sac. I thought about what Stephanie had said and realized I only had a few more seconds to make up my mind. I lifted my hand and waved.
Without smiling, he pushed his glasses up on his nose and then waved back.
Thirty minutes later we pulled up at a barn, and I jumped out of the car. Mom and Norm had agreed to bring us by to see Dark Angel and Isabel on our way home. I saw Sally’s white SUV parked beside the barn. I couldn’t wait to see how the horses were doing. “Are they okay?” I yelled to Sally as I crossed the lot.
Sally, standing just outside the barn, looked up and held her finger to her mouth. “Shh!” She rubbed her eyes and looked at me. “The foal is hanging in there.”
“Can I see her? Can I help with her?”
I realized that Stephanie had come up behind me. “Can we see her?”
Sally nodded soberly and gestured for us to follow her into the barn. A cone of sunlight cut across the doorway, illuminating floating dust particles. Inside I heard a whinny, and the rich smells of horses and leather and straw relaxed me. This barn was a lot like the one where I rode at home, but bigger. And cleaner. We followed Sally down the central aisle to the first stall on the left. We looked over the half door, and there, lying on a blanket, with her little round feet tucked under her, was the black foal with the blaze on her face. Her mother stood in the stall with her, with a bandaged hind quarter.
I caught my breath. An unexpected, unexplainable feeling of pure love came over me.
“Mom was lucky’“ Sally said. “It wasn’t broken, only cut and bruised. She’ll recover in time. She is starting to walk more. And Dark Angel is nursing regularly.”
I looked into Dark Angel’s eyes, feathered with dark lashes. I wanted so badly to hold her, to stroke her neck. She scrambled to her feet, standing with locked knees, watching us warily, and then she stepped closer to her mother.
“She’s pretty scared,” Sally said. “It’s to be expected.”
While Stephanie and I watched, the foal sidled behind to her mother, then raised her head and began to nurse for a minute or so. Protectively, the mare nuzzled her foal.
“How often does she nurse?” I asked Sally.
“Several times an hour,” she said. “She is doing well, and the mother and foal bond is strong, even after the accident. Oh, by the way, I heard from Sergeant Stone that the young man who hit the mare called and confessed.”
“Yeah,” Stephanie said.
“I heard the rider felt very guilty. He wasn’t supposed to be out riding at that time of the night, obviously.”
“He was a friend of ours. He felt bad about injuring the mare, and he didn’t want to admit that it happened,” Stephanie said.
We stood and watched Dark Angel and her mother. I was so, so happy that they were going to be okay. I wanted to tell Dad about her. When we got home, I’d call and tell him all about it. I thought of flying up in the sky with him, seeing all around us, and the way he suddenly seemed to pay attention to me.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I told Stephanie. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Mom came in with Norm and took out the camera, and Sally let us go into the stall so she could snap a picture of us with Dark Angel. We leaned our heads down next to the foal’s so we could be cheek to cheek when the shutter clicked.
Sally came back and stood with Mom and Norm outside the stall door.
“How long before Dark Angel and her mother can go back to the herd?” Stephanie asked.
The foal seemed relaxed and leaned the weight of her little body against her mother.
“You know that she can never go back to the herd,” Sally said.
“Oh no!” Stephanie said. “Why not?”
I knew but let Sally answer.
“Because she will be tamed and friendly toward humans by then. She will be used to depending on us for food, and that’s not a good thing for the wild herd.”
“What will happen to her?” Mom asked.
“She will be adopted out,” Sally said. “There are lots of potential owners out there who would love to have a pretty little Spanish mustang like Dark Angel. Don’t worry. We’ll make sure she has a loving home.”
Oh, what if we could adopt Dark Angel? Would it be possible? That would be the most amazing thing. I felt like I’d never wanted anything so much as that.
“Oh, Mom! Can we adopt her?” I said. Deep inside I knew the answer, because we didn’t have a barn, but I just had to ask anyway.
Mom smiled. “I wish I could say yes! But you know we don’t have anywhere to keep a horse. I’m sure they will keep you posted on how she’s doing.”
Mom and Sally moved away, talking. Stephanie and I stayed and kept watching the foal. So she could never go back to the herd. And that was the way of nature. Nature, as the poet William Blake had written, was a fearsome thing.
“Stephanie,” I said, “People talk about me at school.”
She looked at me with surprise. “I didn’t know you knew.”
“Yeah. They call me ‘Animal.’”
Stephanie was silent for a long time, and then she said, “I’ve felt bad because I haven’t stood up for you. I’m sorry about that. I feel so bad.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I have to stand up for myself. In a way, you standing up for me could make things worse for both of us.”
Stephanie thought about that. “Well, you could take being called ‘animal’ as a compliment. I mean, look how tough animals are.”
“I do,” I said. I thought about how I’d gotten so much closer to Stephanie on this vacation and how I was able to talk to her heart to heart. I felt like I could really trust her.
“Got to get on the road, girls,” Norm called from the barn entrance. With last good-byes to Dark Angel and her mother, we headed back to the car, blinking in the bright sunlight after the darkness of the barn. Sally stood at the barn entrance to say good-bye.
“Thanks! Can I write you to see how they’re doing?” I said.
“Sure. My pleasure,” Sally said. She disappeared again into the barn.
An hour later, we had just crossed the second bridge and were driving along a straight stretch of highway with marshland on both sides. I was feeling depressed about having to go back to school next week, when traffic slowed and several cars backed up in front of us. We craned our necks to look out the window and saw about three cars parked beside the road, and people standing on the shoulder, some with binoculars and others with cameras. They were all staring at something in the black water.
“Wonder what’s going on?” Mom said.
We inched closer, staring at the spot where the people’s attention was directed.
And then I saw too. Two yellow eyes and two small nostrils, motionless, just on the surface of the water.
“An alligator!” I said. And I thought again of the William Blake poem. Nature was fearsome. Every animal preyed on another. Everywhere in nature there were predators, both seen and unseen. The horses couldn’t survive without the herd. In the maritime forest, the twisted trees needed each other for protection from the winds and salt spray. For all living things, life was hard, and living things needed each other.
But I was here with my family, Mom and Norm and Stephanie too. Our car moved onto the last bridge for the mainland, and we headed out over the long, low span over the Alligator River.
“Hey, Steph,” I said. “Will you help me practice my poem?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m happy to help.”
The End