Splendor (25 page)

I could see from where I stood, leaning over the stall door, that his eyes were closed tight, pressed and wrinkled. His face was shiny with amniotic fluid, dark the way Delilah looked sometimes after a hard run when she was coated with sweat. But even though he was wet and in the dark, I could see a tinge of copper in his coat.

His ears were folded back against his head like fragile wings, and at first they looked too long for his head, but then his neck emerged and then his head looked too heavy to be supported by it.

I watched the contractions ripple over Delilah like waves, one after another, as her foal emerged, and I felt within myself as if waves were crashing, too, and I felt lighter and freer, more and more full of joy as each inch of her foal was born.

“Will you look at that,” Jack said, full of wonder. The boys were quiet, openmouthed, at a loss for words. Laura had a hand on each of their backs, and she looked at Delilah as if hypnotized, eyes gleaming.

After the foal’s shoulders came through, the rest of his body slipped out, effortlessly, and I could see Delilah’s muscles relax. Her head, which she’d lifted during the strain of her labor, relaxed into the straw. She didn’t even look at the baby she’d birthed.

I wanted to climb into the stall but contented myself with looking from where I stood. I could see the foal’s chest rising and falling. He looked healthy but tired, as if his journey to life had exhausted him as much as it had his mother.

His short tail fanned across the straw. He wrinkled his muzzle and snorted, a soft sound, but strong.

“Wow,” said Jack, and I turned around and smiled at him, at all of them, as if I’d had something to do with what had just happened.

The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the glow that precedes a sunrise was just touching the sky. In that light I noticed that Laura’s caramel hair had no more hints of gray. And though her hands came up to touch her necklace, they didn’t rest there for long; they returned to the shoulders of her sons, and she smiled at them.

“That was cool, Scar,” said Jasper. “When can we ride him?”

I laughed as I walked them back to their car. “Not for a long while. He’s got to get big first. But I wanted to ask you guys for a favor.”

Both Jasper and Henry looked at me. They were like miniature versions of their father, but the excitement in their eyes reminded me of Lily.

“I’m going to need help in the fall when I go away to school,” I told them. “I’m going to need someone to come out here a lot and play with the colt to make sure he gets used to people. Do you guys think you could help me out?”

They nodded, grinning.

“Good,” I said. “And between now and then, maybe I could bring you with me to the stable and teach you how stuff is done?”

“Like when you gave us the lesson before?”

God help me. “Uh-huh.”

“Yeah!” they said. “That sounds like fun.” They climbed into the backseat of the car. I could hear them fighting already over which of them the foal would like better. But then, mercifully, they slammed their doors and I couldn’t hear them anymore.

“Thanks for hauling us out here, Scarlett,” Jack said, giving me a quick hug. “Don’t be a stranger, okay? We always have enough dinner for one more mouth.”

“Okay, Jack,” I promised. “I’ll visit soon.”

Then Laura embraced me. “That was beautiful,” she said. “And what a special day for it.”

I must have looked confused, because Laura said, “It’s May tenth.”

She squeezed my hand and slid into the passenger seat. I waved as their car pulled away.

May tenth,
I mused as I headed back toward Delilah’s stall. Two years to the day since Ronny had died.

In the stall, Delilah and her foal were starting to wake up to each other. They nickered back and forth, and Delilah shifted around to reach the foal with her tongue. She licked him with thick warm strokes, and he nickered again and again.

Around us, the sun began to fill the sky. Delilah pulled herself to standing, and she bowed her head to the foal, nudging him, nipping him lightly, urging him to rise.

He folded his legs beneath his body, struggling to keep all four of them under his control, and finally, after two false starts, he managed to coordinate himself enough to rise up from the straw.

I swear, Delilah looked proud of him. She looked over to me, as if to say,
Do you see how talented he is?

“Very talented,” I agreed. “I think we should name him Star.”

Delilah didn’t voice disapproval, and as I watched Star search beneath his mother for his first sip of milk, as the sun filled the wide sky all around me, I said to her, “Do you know, Delilah, that we are all made of stardust?”

All of us, in the whole wide world—me and her and the foal, Lily and her parents and brothers, my own mom and dad, Alice, Ronny, Will, even Andy and Gunner and that man in the alley—all of us made from stars.

The thing about life, I thought as Star drank his mother’s warm milk, is that you have to choose it. And then you have to
keep
choosing it, again and again and again.

You can choose it by staring out at the vast horizon. By focusing on the smallest stone. By feeling humbled by the greatness of others. By claiming victory in a challenge. By judging. By loving. Through balance. Through knowledge. In wisdom. In grace.

I chose it by unlatching the door to Delilah’s stall, by stepping inside and stretching out my hand to her foal.

His warm, wet muzzle touched my palm as gently and surely as a benediction, as sweetly as the breath of God.

Writing a sequel, it turns out, is hard. Ideas that are explored in the first book must be considered more carefully, researched more deeply. I owe a debt of gratitude to several rabbis whose words and instruction guided me. First, Rabbi Steven Moskowitz of Temple Israel: our conversations were deeply illuminating and always sparked my imagination. Rabbi Abba Perelmuter, your Kabbalah class inspired several of my images, and your discussion of Abraham helped shape an early scene in the book. And Rabbi Geoffrey W. Dennis, author of
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism,
your book and the email conversations we had were invaluable. Thank you all.

Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Rubin Pfeffer. See? I finished it! And thanks
again
for finding the perfect title. Every time we talk, I am blown away by my good fortune to be your client. Of course, I am also deeply grateful to Françoise Bui, my editor, who gently guided my writing away from the murkiest depths of purple prose. Thank you for believing in me, Françoise.

Once more I am indebted to my brilliant family of readers—my siblings, father, and grandmother, all of whose support (of every kind) enabled this book to be born. And special thanks to you, Nana—it was in your library that I first discovered Agatha Christie, and some of my favorite memories are of curling up in a patch of sunlight, eating fruit, and thumbing through your paperbacks.

Finally, my own little family—Keith, Max, and Davis—what can I say to you? You are the beginning and end of my day, and my heart. I love you all.

E
LANA
K. A
RNOLD
thinks everyone has a story to tell. It took her a long time to find hers. She grew up in Southern California, where she was lucky enough to have her own horse, a gorgeous mare named Rainbow, and a family who let her read as many books as she wanted. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, two kids, and a menagerie of pets, including her chicken, Ruby.
Splendor
is the sequel to
Sacred
. Visit Elana at
elanakarnold.com
.

FIND OUT HOW SCARLETT’S STORY BEGAN IN

A
ll around me, the island prepared to die. August was ending, so summer had come, bloomed, and waned. The tall, dry grass on the trail through the hills cracked under my mare’s hooves as we wound our way up toward the island’s heart.

Summer sun had bleached the grass the same blond as my hair, which was pulled into a rough ponytail at the nape of my neck. The straw cowboy hat I always wore when I rode was worn out too, beginning to split and fray along the seams.

The economy had done its part over the past few years to choke the life out of the small island I called home—Catalina, a little over twenty miles off the coast of Los Angeles. This summer, the island had felt remarkably more comfortable, as the mainland’s tourists had largely stayed away. But even though it was nice to have some breathing room for a change, it came at a price. Our main town, Avalon, had seen the closure of two restaurants and a hotel, and my parents’ bed-and-breakfast had gone whole weeks without any guests.

It was selfish that I enjoyed the solitude. Selfish and wrong, but undeniably true—solitude was a luxury, a rare commodity on a twenty-two-mile-long island that I shared with three-thousand-plus people, all of whom seemed to look at me differently lately, now that my brother was dead.

Yes, death was all around. The dry, hot air of August pressed down on me, my brother would not be coming home, and Avalon seemed to be folding in on itself under the weight of the recession, like a butterfly that’s dried up, its papery wings faded.

As if she could sense my mood, my mare, Delilah, tossed her pretty head and pulled at her bit, yearning to run. Delilah was also a luxury, one my parents had been in the habit of reminding me we really couldn’t afford—until Ronny died. Then, suddenly, they didn’t say much to me at all.

I get it, your kids are supposed to outlive you, it’s the natural order of things, but since Ronny had died, it was like I was dead too.

That was how I measured time now. There were the things that happened Before Ronny Died, and then there was Since Ronny Died. It was as sure a division of Before and After to our family as the birth of Jesus is to Christians.

Before Ronny Died, Mom smiled. Before Ronny Died, Daddy made plans for expanding our family B&B. Before Ronny Died, I was popular…as popular as you can be in a class of sixty-four students.

That was all different now. Since Ronny Died, my mother didn’t seem to notice that a film of dust coated all the knickknacks in the front room. My dad didn’t weed the flower beds. More than a tanking economy was sinking our family business. We were bringing it down just as surely, our gloomy faces unable to animate into real smiles. We probably scared off the guests.

Ronny died last May in the middle of a soccer game. Cause of death: grade 6 cerebral aneurysm. He was just finishing up his freshman year at UCLA. We weren’t with him. The distance between Catalina Island and the mainland seems a lot farther than twenty miles when your brother’s body is waiting for you on the other side.

I blinked hard to clear these thoughts. They would stay with me anyway, I knew, but I let Delilah have her head, knowing from experience that while we were galloping, at least, my mind would feel empty.

My mare didn’t let me down. Twitching her tail with excitement, Delilah broke into a gallop, her short Arabian’s stride lengthening as she gathered speed, her head pushed out as if to smell the wind, her wide nostrils flaring. Her coat gleamed red in the afternoon sun.

Ronny used to joke that
Delilah
should have been named Scarlett, not me. Ronny was a literal kind of guy. And he liked to say that
I
should be called Delilah, because of my long hair. That was stupid, of course; in the Bible, Delilah wasn’t the one with the long hair. It was her lover, Samson, whom she betrayed by chopping off his hair—the source of his strength—while he slept, damning him to death at the hands of the Philistines.

Ronny just shrugged when I explained all this to him. Sometimes he could be awfully dumb, for such a smart guy.

I wanted to cut off my hair after Ronny died. I stood in the kitchen the afternoon of the funeral, dressed in one of my mother’s suits left over from her days as a lawyer, back before she and Daddy decided to move to the island to open a B&B. In my hands, I held a long serrated knife. There was a perfectly good reason for this: I couldn’t find the scissors.

But when my mother came into the kitchen, fresh from burying her only son, and saw me standing in the kitchen with a knife in my hand, she freaked out. She started screaming, loud, piercing screams, as if I were an intruder, as if I planned to use that knife against her. Or maybe she thought I was planning to use it against myself, pressing the blade into flesh instead of hair. Then Daddy ran in and saw me there, and his eyes filled with tears, something I’d seen more times that week than I’d seen in the sixteen years of my life up till that point. He took the knife gently from my hand before leading my mother to bed.

Afterward, I couldn’t seem to gather the strength to cut my hair. I had wanted to cut it because Ronny had loved it, though he’d never have admitted as much. He used to braid it while we watched TV. I wanted to cut it off and then burn it.

But my mother’s expression had taken all the momentum out of my plans. So as I rode Delilah through the open meadow at the heart of the island, I felt the heavy slap of my ponytail against my back, hanging like a body from a noose in the elastic band that ensnared it.

Delilah tossed her mane and slowed to a trot, heading for a clump of grass at the base of a large tree. I thumped her neck with my palm.

“Good girl,” I murmured as her trot became a slow, stretchy walk. I slid down her side and pulled the reins from her neck. She made a contented sound as she began pulling up bites of grass. I flopped down next to her in the tree’s shade, her reins looped loosely over my wrist, and allowed my body to relax.

School would be starting soon. Junior year. This was supposed to be the best year of high school, even if the academic load would be tough: too soon to worry about college applications, and since I was no longer an underclassman, all the required PE classes were behind me. Still, I was dreading it. Just a few more days, and then I’d be yoked to school as surely as Delilah was yoked to me.

I tried to remind myself of the good things that went along with school in a halfhearted effort to cheer myself up. Lily would be back; that would be good.

My best friend, Lily Adams, was a member of the small wealthy class on Catalina Island. Her parents could have lived anywhere they chose. Independently wealthy as a result of some smart real-estate purchases in the early 1990s, they had come to Catalina because they thought it would be a safe place to raise their kids: Lily and her younger twin brothers, Jasper and Henry.

Catalina was safe, except for the occasional boating accident. The visitors bureau boasted that “violent crimes are virtually nonexistent on this island paradise.” Well, the paradise part was dubious, but as far as I knew, it was true about the lack of crime here.

Because of their money, though, and because their livelihood wasn’t dependent on the high season for tourism like almost everyone else’s on the island, Lily’s family got to travel during the summers. This year they were touring Italy. Her family had offered to bring me along; Jasper and Henry had a built-in friend (or enemy) by virtue of being twins, but Lily’s parents thought it would be nice if I could come to keep Lily company.

That had been the plan, Before Ronny Died. Then, suddenly, my parents couldn’t stomach the thought of my being so far away from them…though they hadn’t seemed to notice me much this summer, and the three of us existed pretty much like strangers living under one roof all season long.

It made me angry that I had missed out on the trip. But I felt rotten that I could be mad at my parents for anything right now…and that I could be mad at Ronny, who was dead, for screwing up my summer plans. Lately I just wasn’t a very good person.

Lily didn’t seem to agree. She’d kept up a stream of communication all summer, through email, Facebook, and text messages, even though I rarely wrote back. She understood; she didn’t hold my silence against me. I hoped things were going to get better now that she was coming home.

Friday afternoon. She would be in the air, on her way to Los Angeles from Rome. Then she and her family would come to Catalina by helicopter. They were the only people I knew who could afford to travel this way. Most everyone else took the ferry, and a few of the wealthier families kept their own boats for transportation to the mainland, but Lily’s family coptered. Not bad.

I couldn’t wait to see Lily again. The last time had been at our island’s airport in early June, just a few weeks after Ronny’s funeral. Her parents had embraced me effusively, Lily had been in tears at the thought of leaving me, and even the twins had given me shy, apologetic hugs.

“Two whole months!” Lily wailed. “How will I survive?”

I smiled grimly. “Fabulous food, handsome Italians, all the wine you can drink…I think you’ll manage.”

“But without you!” Lily moaned, shaking her short, dark curls. Lily had always been dramatic.

“You’ll pull through,” I promised. “And I’ll be here waiting for you come September.”

The helicopter had risen into the sky, Lily and her family growing smaller and smaller as they flew away, waving furiously until they were out of sight.

So, Lily’s return. That was one good thing about school starting back up. And there was Andy, of course.

Before May, Andy had been my boyfriend. After May, it seemed silly and self-indulgent to have a boyfriend. With Ronny’s death, it was like I had stepped over some invisible line into a world miles apart from the one I’d inhabited before the piercing phone call from UCLA Medical Center.

I didn’t have much to say anymore. It had all been said. Lily understood and was waiting for me to reconcile my brother’s death with the rest of life. Andy, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as patient.

Andy was lots of things. He was handsome, for one. At just under six feet tall, with the well-muscled body of an athlete—which he was, the star of our school’s baseball team, scouted even during his sophomore year by colleges—Andy was taller than most of the boys in our class. His cap of shining light hair looked nice in school dance pictures next to my long straw-colored ponytail. We were blond together.

He was whip-smart, too, taking all the advanced classes our little school offered and doing online classes with Long Beach State College. I had a theory that the teachers didn’t even bother grading his papers anymore. I didn’t know if Andy Turlington had ever gotten lower than an A in his life.

So we were well suited that way too, since grades were important to me. I was competitive, maybe because I’d grown up in Ronny’s impressive shadow, maybe just because that’s the way I was made. Andy and I enjoyed our unspoken competition, and though I couldn’t keep up with him on the occasional runs we took together, I certainly held my own when it came to things academic.

All of this seemed dreadfully sophomoric after Ronny’s death. Suddenly, I could barely force myself to breathe, let alone worry about setting the curve on the latest math test.

I don’t know how much my parents noticed my disinterest in school, if they noticed anything at all. Mostly they were drowning in their own oceans of grief, and my teachers basically let me slide, passing me along with gift grades of As and A-minuses.

So there we were, my parents and I, three tiny islands on the greater island of Catalina, and it felt like the weight of the entire Pacific Ocean was pressing on my chest. Sometimes, when I noticed my mother clutching her hand to her heart, I knew she felt the same way.

There was no room on my private island for Andy, which he seemed to figure out soon after school closed for the summer. I failed to return his calls, failed to meet him and the other kids at the beach, failed to thrive.

Delilah was all the company I wanted. Andy had come to the stable just once, at the end of June, determined, I guess, to get some response from me in person. He walked up to me while I stood at the wash racks, spraying the sweat from Delilah after a long run. When I saw him, it didn’t register at first who he was. I remember wondering what this tourist was doing out here at the stable, and I called to him, “We don’t rent horses to the public.”