Space Magic (24 page)

The loudspeaker boomed and the first rider walked her unicorn out into the floodlights’ scrutiny to mount in front of the judge. One by one they trickled away, in ascending order of points for the year, until only Misty remained.

“And finally,” roared the announcer, “with four hundred and eighty-seven points, Miss Misty Bell and B.R. Vulcan’s Golden Hammer!”

The gate steward swung the gate open and smiled at her.

Vulcan gently nudged her shoulder with his muzzle. They had done this hundreds of times, and he knew the routine. They should move forward into the glare of the arena.

And she knew. She knew that she could ride him.

She licked her lips and took one step forward. And stopped.

The announcer’s voice came again. “Miss Misty Bell. Two minutes.”

The gate steward looked at her quizzically. Vulcan reached under the brim of her hat to touch her face with his muzzle. His breath was sweet with oats and alfalfa.

All she had to do was walk in, mount, ride this class, and she would win it.

And then she’d win the Nationals, and next year she’d be back here doing it again. And every year after that, as long as her mother’s ambition held out.

Her mother’s ambition. Not hers.

“Scratch,” she said quietly.

“Beg your pardon, Miss Bell?” said the gate steward.

“Close the gate, Harry.”

And the ring steward closed the gate, giving the judge a go-ahead wave.

Misty turned and led Vulcan away from the lights of the show ring and out into the peaceful darkness of the fairgrounds. Behind her, the announcer’s voice called out “Miss Bell scratches.” A mutter of consternation and curiosity ran through the stands, but she just kept walking, putting one pink boot in front of the other, in no particular hurry as she headed back through the evening to the barn.

Her mother caught up to her in the fringes of the barn lights, her face half-lit like a bright half moon. “
How can you do this to me?
” she screeched, face dark with rage above the white leather of her Show Mother suit.

“I’m not going to ride tonight, Mother,” she said, her boots firm on the packed earth. She’d expected to be afraid, but she wasn’t.

“Listen, little girl...”

“I’m not a little girl, Mother. That’s the point.”

Caroline pounded up behind Misty’s mother. “What happened? Wouldn’t he let you mount?”

Misty’s mother froze, staring at Misty with dawning understanding and rage. “You. Little. Slut.” She clenched her fists, and Vulcan growled a warning. “Who was it?” she hissed.

“That’s none of your business.”

Misty’s mother whirled on Caroline. “You were supposed to watch her! How can you let this happen after all I’ve done for you?”

Caroline opened her mouth, but Misty cut her off. “You’ve never done anything for her, you platinum-plated bitch.”

Misty’s mother gawped at Misty, sputters and gasps of frustrated fury choking in her throat.

“You should go back to the hotel, Mother. Have a drink. We’ll talk about it in the morning. And my knee’s fine, thanks for asking.”

“We’ll see how fine you are with no money, you ungrateful little whore.”

“Good night, Mother.”

Left with nothing else to do, Misty’s mother stalked stiff-backed toward the parking lot. Misty felt the muscles in the small of her back unclench.

Caroline could only stare. “Misty... what did you do?”

“I...” Misty slumped. “I think I just got you fired. Oh, Caroline... I’m sorry.”

“I won’t have any problem finding another job—Jack Thornton’s been begging me for two years. But what about you? She’s your mother!”

“I couldn’t let her treat you like that any more. If I hadn’t done something, neither of us would ever have gotten away.”

“Misty, what’ll you do?”

Misty shrugged, shook her head and couldn’t make herself not smile. “I dunno. Maybe Jack Thornton’ll let me shovel stalls for him or something.” She put her foot in the stirrup and swung up into Vulcan’s saddle. He purred and reached around to nuzzle her boot. “I’m going for a ride to clear my head. Will you still be here when I get back?”

Caroline squeezed Misty’s knee. “You know it, shorty.”

Misty pulled off the pink-rhinestoned hat and flung it into the darkness. Then she nudged Vulcan with her knee, and as they ambled down the quiet aisle between the barns, she shook her hair loose into the cool of the evening.

The stained aluminum screen door was cold in Dora Huntleigh’s hand as she waited in the cool summer night. She stood still for a long time, listening. She heard the hum of the light over the door, the soft rush of traffic on 82nd Avenue, the distant barking of a dog. But no frogs.

Dora worried about her frogs. She enjoyed their soothing, rhythmic
bredeep-bredeep-bredeep
—it reminded Dora of the peaceful suburban nights at the old apartment. When she listened to the frogs she forgot the peeling paint here, the noisy neighbors, the Burgerville grease that clogged her pores. Sometimes she could even forget about Mom, wasting away in a bright sterile room on Pill Hill.

It used to be that the frogs’ chirping chorus would pause for only a few moments as she walked across the parking lot past the drainage ditch where they lived. It was as though there were some invisible line at the third parking place, where the woman from 3A always parked her rusty green pickup, and once Dora had crossed that line it was safe for the frogs to resume their song.

But two weeks ago, Dora had noticed that the frogs didn’t start up again until she was well past the blue Toyota next to the pickup. Last week they had remained silent almost until she reached her own front door. And tonight...

Just then a single voice called out
bredeep
, then repeated itself. Soon it was joined by another, and another. But they wove a thin fabric of sound, a patchy thing that felt as though the lightest movement would tear it in half.

They’re frightened of something
, Dora thought, then rolled her eyes at herself. She pulled the screen door open, the harsh rasp of its hinges startling the frogs into silence again, and rattled her key into the lock.

The phone machine’s red light blinked at her from the little table beside the door. Her chest tightened at the sight—any phone call could be bad news—but it was only Jenifer, from her old school. “Hey Dora, it’s Jen. Haven’t heard from you in a while. Give me a call, OK?”

Dora paused with her finger on the button. Jen had been her best friend, and it would be nice to see her again. But it would take an hour and a half on the bus, and then, inevitably, she would have to face The Question: “How’s your Mom?”

“Message, has been, erased,” said the machine’s crisp Japanese-accented voice.

Dora took a shower and scrubbed her face hard, trying to remove every tiny particle of Burgerville from her pores. Then she wrapped herself in her favorite fuzzy bathrobe and opened the freezer, where a Marie Callender’s Apple Cobbler waited among the Healthy Choice frozen dinners. “Thanks, Dad,” she said aloud, then pulled the cobbler from its box and popped it in the microwave, ignoring the Healthy Choices.

While the cobbler heated, she sorted the mail that lay piled just inside the front door. That was one of her jobs. Bills went in the folder on the kitchen table. Junk mail went straight into the recycling bin. Letters, or anything that might be important, went on Dad’s chair where he’d see it when he got home from his four-to-midnight shift at the phone company.

Here was a fat envelope from the hospital. Dora flexed it; was it something important, like test results, or just another bill? She finally put it on the chair unopened—she had already learned more than she wanted to know about alkylating agents, and glucocorticoids, and all the other painful and expensive things they were doing to Mom in the hospital.

The microwave’s single clear note, so unlike the calming rhythm of the frogs, jerked Dora from her thoughts. She ate the whole cobbler, washing it down with Diet Pepsi and an ancient re-run of The Cosby Show. She would rather have watched The Sopranos, but that was on HBO and they didn’t have cable here.

Leukemia was a bitch.

Soon the cobbler and the Cosby Show were both finished. It was ten o’clock and she was supposed to go straight to bed, but she turned around on the couch and stared out the window instead.

She saw her own reflection—a sixteen-year-old girl with freckles, straggly dark brown hair that refused to behave, and a nose that was too long and had a stupid little bulb at the tip—and the reflection of the TV, and blackness. Dora listened hard, but if her frogs were singing they couldn’t be heard over the TV.

She got up and turned off the TV and the lights, then returned to her post, resting her chin on the back of the couch. It smelled dusty. With the lights off she could see the parking lot—cracked asphalt covered with yellow lines and rusty, outdated cars—and the line of reeds and cattails marking the edge of the drainage ditch. Beyond that, silence and darkness.

No—not quite darkness.

A light was moving among the cattails. A very faint greenish-blue light. Could it be a firefly? She had never seen one before; she didn’t think there were any in Oregon—or not any more. She had read that they were dying out because of insecticides and global warming. Like the frogs.

Anyway, the light didn’t
move
like an insect. It traveled in a straight line, three or four feet at a time, then stopped dead for a moment before moving off in a different direction. Up, left, right, left, down. And it didn’t blink on and off—it flickered, like the light of a TV seen from very far away.

Sitting backwards in the dark, watching that strange faint quivering greenish light moving outside the window, Dora suddenly got a chill that started at the back of her neck and ran all the way down to her tailbone. There was something about that light, about its pale luminescence and deliberate motion, that made her feel very small and defenseless. She felt
watched
.

Dora closed her eyes and shook her head. She was just spooking herself.

But she drew all the curtains and made sure the door was locked before she went to bed. And then she pulled the covers up over her head like she used to do when she was little.

Just before falling asleep she realized she had forgotten to brush her teeth. But even the knowledge that Dad would be disappointed in her wasn’t enough to get her out from under the covers.

-o0o-

Dora hated the paper mask she had to wear when she visited Mom. The little metal strip over her nose always pinched somewhere no matter how she adjusted it, and the mask filled up with her breath and smelled like tears, even when she wasn’t crying.

Mom didn’t look too good today. Her eyes were rimmed with red and black, and they didn’t seem to quite focus on Dora when she came in. A few remaining wisps of hair poked out from under her Cubs cap. Why did she want to identify with a team that always lost—especially now? “Hey, sport,” she said. “How’s my Theodora?” She reached out a hand.

“I’m OK, I guess,” she said. “I’m worried about the frogs.”

“C’mere, you. Don’t be such a stranger.”

Dora took a step toward the bed, but stayed out of reach. Mom looked so fragile, with all the tubes and wires attached to her, and between the disease and the treatment she had almost no immune system. Early in her illness she had caught a cold that Dora brought home from school, and it had nearly killed her. “They’re getting so quiet, Mom. It’s like they’re afraid of something.”

“It could just be the weather changing,” Dad said, his voice muffled by the mask. “They don’t sing when it’s too warm.”

“Already?” said Mom, and sat up a little. “Where did the spring go?” Dad and Dora shared a quick glance over their masks. Mom had been in the hospital since February. It seemed like a year ago. A lifetime. “I wish I... uh... oh God...” Mom groped for the kidney-shaped plastic dish on the table by the bed, barely getting it into her lap in time to throw up into it. Dora smelled the vomit, even through her mask, even through the smell of tears.

She left the room and sat on the hard plastic chair in the hall outside, knees drawn up under her chin and arms wrapped tight around her legs. She couldn’t stand to see Mom throwing up. Through the door she heard the retching, and Dad’s voice murmuring reassurances. Dora shivered, though it wasn’t particularly cold in the hall.

“You OK? Can I get you something?” It was Nina, one of the nurses. She was Vietnamese and even shorter than Dora, who was small for her age. “How about some cranberry juice?”

“Uh... sure.”

The nurse came back with a clear plastic cup. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

Nina stroked Dora’s shoulder while she sipped the juice. “Your mother’s a fighter, Dora. She’ll come through. She’s motivated.”

“You really think so?”

“She wants to see you grow up.”

“Is that enough to make a difference?” The last word came out half-choked with tears, and Dora was ashamed. She needed to be strong.

“It really is. But she needs to know you’re there for her.”

Dora finished the juice and handed the empty cup back to Nina. “Thanks. For everything.”

But she didn’t go back into the room.

Eventually Dad came out and said “She’s sleeping now. Let’s go home.”

-o0o-

In the afternoon Dora visited the drainage ditch with her ecology notebook. So far she had seen water bugs, minnows, dragonfly nymphs, snails, and of course tadpoles and frogs. She had tested the water for some common pollutants. But she still hadn’t figured out what was making the frogs so quiet and nervous. She’d done research at the library and had learned that amphibians were dying out all over the world, but nobody knew why for sure, and that wouldn’t explain what had changed just in the last few weeks.

She pushed through the reeds at the edge of the parking lot and squidged down into the marshy area by the water. It smelled warm and moist and earthy here—a little icky, but natural and real, not like the sterile artificial smell of the hospital.

There was something strange at the edge of the water—a slippery translucent thing, like a used condom but much smaller. She poked at it with a stick, spread it out so she could see what it was.