Horse Shy (8 page)

“Hello?”

“Oh, Carole, you’re back!” Stevie said.

“Right on time,” Carole said cheerfully. “I was just about to call you. I had a wonderful time in North Carolina. I can’t wait to tell you and Lisa all about it. Saddle Club meeting tomorrow right after school? We can meet at TD’s for ice cream—”

“Carole, stop!” Stevie said. “You’ve got to get over here.”

“You missed me that badly, huh?” Carole teased. But when there was a silence, Carole began to get the awful feeling that something was wrong. Really wrong. “Where are you? What’s the matter?”

“I’m at Pine Hollow. It’s Cobalt—I mean, just get over here, will you?”

“
What?
” she said, but Stevie had already hung up the phone.

In a matter of minutes, Carole and her father were back in their car, this time headed for Pine Hollow. Carole was so worried she couldn’t speak. Her father just squeezed her hand and said, “It’s going to be all right, hon. You’ll see.”

As they neared the stable, Carole could hear the terrible whine of a siren. An ambulance pulled out of the driveway and turned toward the hospital, lights flashing, siren wailing. The diAngelos’ Mercedes was parked carelessly in the lot, its doors left open.

But the only things Carole really saw were the veterinarian’s pickup truck and the county vet’s wagon. That was when Carole knew the worst. Two veterinarians always had to sign a certificate before a horse could be destroyed.

“
Cobalt!
” she screamed, jumping from the car almost before it stopped.

Lisa and Stevie came running out of the stable. Lisa reached Carole first and put her arm around her. Stevie had tears streaming down her face.

“It’s too late, Carole,” she said. “He was too badly hurt! They had to do it. He would never heal. It was the long bone in his foreleg—it was shattered. He just lay there. And then it was over.”

“And then the ambulance came for Veronica,” Lisa continued. “She’s going to be okay. I guess she broke her arm. She was lucky. Luckier than Cobalt.” Lisa gasped at her own words, trying to hold back tears.

Carole stared blankly at the stable, wanting to go in, wanting to go away. She remembered feeling like that once before. She stood still, unable to move, until her father came up to her and put his strong arms around her shoulders.

“Come on home, hon,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

“
Cobalt!
” she sobbed.

Slowly, she turned, letting her father take her home.

“W
E
’
VE
GOT
TO
help Carole,” Lisa said. “She was like a zombie at school today.” She and Stevie were walking toward Carole’s house the day after the accident that had cost Cobalt his life.

“I think Carole’s going to have to get over this herself,” Stevie warned Lisa. She wanted to comfort Carole, but she knew that sympathy and comfort could only go so far.

“Carole showed me how important it was to get back on the horse when I fell off. This is different, I know, but in some ways it’s the same. We can’t let her feel too sorry for herself.”

“I don’t think she’s feeling sorry for herself. If I know Carole, she’s feeling sorry for Cobalt.”

“Well, just wait until we tell her what happened when we saw Veronica at the hospital, then,” Lisa said.

“That may just make her feel sorrier for Cobalt,” Stevie said, shaking her head. She just couldn’t understand the whole diAngelo family.

Carole was in her room when her friends arrived. She’d gone to school that morning, but she didn’t think she’d heard anyone or learned a single thing. As soon as she got home, she retreated to her bedroom. She was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, when Stevie and Lisa knocked.

“Your dad said it was okay for us to come up,” Stevie said, poking her head in the room.

Carole sighed deeply. She knew her friends had come to make her feel better. She also knew that they felt badly about Cobalt’s accident and maybe they needed somebody to make them feel better, too. She only wished she could have made Cobalt better. But, of course, she couldn’t.

“Sure, come on in,” Carole told the girls. They came in and sat on her bed with her. Stevie handed her a soda. Carole took a sip and nodded thanks. “I guess you’d better tell me exactly what happened. I really didn’t want to know yesterday, but I think I’m ready now.”

“It was Veronica’s fault,” Lisa began, confirming Carole’s suspicions. “It was just exactly what Max had been telling her not to do on the camp-out. We were
all there—it was a jumping class on the cross-country course. I was watching with Max. Stevie had just gone over the jump on Comanche. Veronica came barreling down the hill at a gallop and expected Cobalt to jump a high fence, landing on a downhill slope.”

“He had such a big heart, you know, Carole. He just always wanted to please his rider—even when he knew it was wrong. He didn’t slow down one bit. He just jumped,” Stevie said.

“It was beautiful in a way,” Lisa continued. “There’s no horse in that stable that jumps as smoothly as Cobalt—jumped, I mean—but he didn’t land right.”

“I saw it then, too,” Stevie said. “It was like he was flying, until his front legs landed. There was just too much of him, coming too fast. His forelegs hit the ground straight and then the right one buckled, but not at the knee. He began to stumble.”

“Veronica flew off over his head. She landed five feet in front of him. She broke her arm when she landed. Cobalt broke his leg. Everybody could see it was broken.…”

Stevie and Lisa went on, describing the horrible scene that Carole had been reliving in her mind for the past twenty-four hours: Veronica screaming her head off; Cobalt lying quietly, bearing his pain in silence.

Sometimes when horses broke bones, they could be set, like people’s bones, and they could heal and be
as good as new. With the horse’s cannon bone, though, it was almost impossible to keep the horse’s weight off the break long enough for it to heal. A million-dollar racehorse might be suspended in a body sling long enough for the bone to knit, but even then, with a broken cannon bone, he’d probably never race again. Although Cobalt was a fine horse with good bloodlines, he was no million-dollar horse, and that kind of treatment was too expensive and not reliable enough. And, even if the bone could have healed, he’d never have been as good as new, and he’d have been in pain all his life.

“If only they could have tried something to save him,” Lisa said.

“No,” Carole told her. “They did the right thing. Cobalt’s life was over. He was born to run with the wind, not limp.”

Stevie got the feeling it was time to change the subject a little. “Say, we just saw Veronica. We visited her at St. Claire’s. She’s got a private room and there are nurses running all over the place.”

“Was she hurt that badly? I thought it was just a broken arm.”

“It was, but you know her parents,” Lisa said. Carole nodded. They all knew her parents. They were the richest people in town and liked to show it off. “You’d think she’d had open-heart surgery from all the attention she was demanding—and the flowers!”

“It looked like a funeral!” Stevie said.

“It was,” Carole told her friends. Stevie and Lisa exchanged looks.

“Well, Veronica was all full of talk about how Max wasn’t a very good teacher and this would never have happened if it hadn’t been for him.”

“That’s outrageous!” Carole said. “We all heard Max tell her a hundred times she was jumping the wrong way. How can she—”

“That’s not even really the worst of it,” Stevie said, full of indignation. “Her father was prancing around the room telling her not to worry—that they were going to get plenty of insurance money for Cobalt and she’d have another horse as soon as her arm healed. Can you believe trying to replace Cobalt?”

Carole shook her head. “That sounds like the diAngelos,” she said. “They think they can solve every problem with money.”

“Oh, he’ll have a new horse for Veronica soon, that’s for sure,” Lisa said.

“Well, he won’t be able to make her ride it,” Carole said.

“She’ll ride it for sure,” Stevie said. “The trick will be to make her ride it
right
.”

“What makes you think she’ll ever get on a horse again?” Carole asked.

Stevie almost laughed. “Of course she will! She said she would and we both believed her. She may not be horse crazy the way we are, but she likes riding and she knows accidents happen. She knows you have to get back on—the same way you do.”

“Not me,” Carole said.

Stevie was startled. Had she heard Carole right? “What?” she asked.

“I said not me. I’m done riding. For good.”

Lisa and Stevie both stared at her. Was it possible? Carole was the best. Her life was riding. She was the one who was going to own a stable, was going to teach, was going to train and breed horses. Horses were everything to her. It couldn’t be true, Stevie was sure.

“Oh, that’s the way you feel now, I know, but you won’t feel that way always. You’ll start riding again. You love it too much.”

“I don’t expect you two to understand,” Carole said. “But Cobalt was more than just a horse to me. There could never be another horse like that. With him gone, there’s no point in riding. Anyway, this is kind of hard to explain, but when I was outside the stable yesterday, knowing that he was gone and he wasn’t coming back, it reminded me of the day my mother died. I don’t ever want to feel that way again. So I’m quitting.”

“Carole!” Lisa said, her voice filled with worry.

“Lisa, I think we should get to the bus stop now,” Stevie said, cutting her off.

Lisa was about to remind Stevie that her mother was picking them up at Carole’s in an hour when she saw the look on Stevie’s face and clammed up.

“We do?”

“Yeah, sure,” she agreed. “Will you be okay, Carole? I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”

Carole nodded.

Lisa and Stevie backed out of her room and quickly went downstairs. Colonel Hanson was in the kitchen making dinner.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked the girls.

“Yeah,” Stevie said. “She says she doesn’t want to ride again.”

“Well, if she wants to give it up, that’s her choice,” the colonel said.

“But it’s not a choice!” Lisa protested. “It’s some kind of phony escape. Horses are too important to her.”

“Well, certainly
one
horse was,” Stevie said.

“We’ll just have to see what happens,” Carole’s father said. Stevie and Lisa reluctantly agreed with that.

“I
DON
’
T UNDERSTAND
Carole,” Lisa said as she and Stevie waited around the corner from Carole’s house for Mrs. Atwood to pick them up.

“I’m not sure I do, either. But it looks like a bad case of horse shyness, like after an accident. This time, she can’t just climb back up on the horse—because the horse isn’t there. I have the feeling that nothing we say or do will help. She’ll have to come around on her own. Look, are we horse crazy, or what?” Stevie asked.

“We’re horse crazy,” Lisa agreed.

“So, our only choice is to keep riding and try to help Carole come around. After all, she’s horse crazy,
too, but right now, she’s more crazy than she is horse. You’ll be at class on Saturday, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Lisa told her.

“So, we’ll ride and then, afterward, we have some work to do.”

“We do?”

“Yeah, remember how we planned to do research on Max the First?”

“Oh, yeah, we want to find out if he really was in the Russian Revolution.”

“I think we know he wasn’t there, but the question is: Where was he? You said we should start in the library.”

“Right! We can look at the back issues of
The Willow Creek Gazette
. That’ll be fun.” Lisa knew that Stevie was right. At least the two of them would continue riding and having fun together. But she wondered how long The Saddle Club would survive with just two members.

“Y
OU
’
RE REALLY LEARNING
fast, Lisa!” Stevie complimented her after class on Saturday. “Your seat is much firmer, your contact is better. I mean, you’re riding!”

“It seems like months ago that I didn’t know anything about horses—except for which was the front end and which wasn’t. But, actually, it’s only weeks, right?”