The Life of Glass (10 page)

Now that Aunt
Julie was gone and Ryan and Courtney were back to ignoring me again, I started to think about how else I was going to search for Sally. Ryan hadn’t mentioned anything to me about it since the day we’d gone on our long bike ride, and it seemed like his offer to help hadn’t been a real offer at all.

After school I’d lie on my bed and read through my father’s journal, looking for anything, for a hint of the person he might’ve or could’ve been. I learned that clinophobia is the fear of going to bed, something I certainly didn’t have as I seemed to be spending an extraordinary amount of time in mine lately. And I also learned that
your ribs move five million times a year, every time you breathe in and out. This one kind of creeped me out, and I became superaware of my own breathing, so much that I started to feel this pain, this tightness pulling on my chest every time I inhaled and exhaled. I wondered if that’s what it felt like to Ryan every time he had an asthma attack.

But there was nothing else I could find in his journal, save that one little scrap of paper with Sally Bedford’s name on it. So I figured that meant that a) she wasn’t really that important at all, despite what Grandma Harry said, or b) whatever it was about her that made her so important must’ve happened after my dad got sick and he pretty much stopped recording things in the journal.

I had no idea if she lived close still or if she’d moved, or if she was even still alive. It happened, all the time, every day. People got sick. People died. People crashed their cars and shattered themselves and broke. People did not have the life of glass.

But then, one afternoon, I flipped through my own journal, through my parents’ love story, and the part about my grandma Harry finding my mother by looking in the phone book caught my eye. It occurred to me that maybe I could just look Sally up that way, in the online
white pages. As easy as that. Why hadn’t I thought about it before?

I went to my computer and I felt my heart pounding furiously as I typed her name in. Three seconds later, one entry came up, only one Sally Bedford in our town. But there was no information with it. It simply said
unlisted
, a word that brought tears to my eyes.

Just before Valentine’s Day, Ashley and I had our first horse-riding lesson with Kevin. My mother had been so excited when Ashley told her we wanted to do it that she’d jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. “We’re only doing one lesson,” I said.

“Oh, girls, you don’t know how important it is for me that you get to know Kevin.”

Ashley shot me a look. We hadn’t realized it was
that
important to her. When she put it like that, it sounded like she was ready to marry the guy or something. So it was an understatement to say I was not excited on the drive over to his ranch.

Ashley didn’t seem thrilled about it either. She wasn’t being mean to me, but she wasn’t saying much of anything. She didn’t even complain about missing out on a Saturday afternoon with Mr. September. When we
were almost there, she started to say something. Then changed her mind and stopped.

“What?” I said, glad that she was going to start a conversation because the silence hurt my head, made me feel heavy and dull and guilty and annoyed all at once.

“You know that Dad hated horses.”

I shook my head. No. I hadn’t known that. And it seemed so unfair that Ashley knew so much more about our father than I did, that just those two extra years made her old enough to remember little important things that I would never be able to get back now.

“Yeah, one time he took me to the rodeo parade.”

“Where was I?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think you were sick or something and Mom stayed home with you.” I had absolutely no recollection of any of this, but I knew for sure I’d never been to the rodeo parade. My dad had always made fun of the fact that we lived in a city that gave us two days off school for Rodeo in February and had some giant parade to celebrate it. “We were just standing there watching the parade, and there were all these floats and people on horses wearing cowboy hats. And then this little kid’s horse got spooked, and the horse shot up in the air and threw him. It was so freaky. I mean this kid was
just flying through the air until he hit the pavement.”

I shuddered. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I just remember Dad cursing and talking about how horses are such dangerous animals.”

“Well, now I really want to go get on a horse.” I didn’t think Ashley had been trying to scare me half to death, but she’d gone and done it anyway. I hadn’t thought about the fact that these lessons with Kevin were going to be dangerous—annoying, yes, but I hadn’t been thinking that the horse could throw me or trample me or kill me.

“I’m sure Kevin knows what he’s doing,” she said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced herself.

Kevin’s ranch was large and sprawling, with dusty fenced-in enclosures and an L-shaped brick house that sat at the end of a long driveway.
DUSTY MEADOWS
, the sign by the driveway read. “Lame.” Ashley shook her head when she read it. For once, we were both in agreement.

I wondered—if my mother and Kevin ever did get married—if we would have to move here. Though it was only fifteen minutes away from our neighborhood, it felt like it was in nowheresville, the middle of the desert, all dirt and cactus and sagebrush, and horses that roamed
behind a wooden fence looking sort of annoyed.

I thought about the fact that Aunt Julie had left this city for college and never returned, and I knew immediately that if this was the place I had to come home to, I would not be coming back either. This would never be my home.

Kevin was waiting for us, standing on his front porch in some weird cowboy-ish attire, complete with black leather boots and a black cowboy hat. “God,” Ashley muttered. “He looks like a bad country singer or something.”

She was right, he did. With the whole cowboy getup he didn’t even look handsome or young or tan, not even like someone who could be worthy of our mother.

Ashley stopped the car, and he waved and walked toward us, but neither of us made the first move to get out. “It’s just one lesson,” Ashley finally said, and unhooked her seat belt.

I sighed, did the same, and got out of the car.

Kevin had already picked out horses for us. “Don’t worry, girls,” he said. “These are my old grannies. Very calm for beginners.”

My horse’s name was Daffodil, which didn’t suit
her at all because she was a dark brown color and sort of moody-looking. She looked about as annoyed by the whole situation as I felt. Ashley’s horse was named Prancer. Prancer had a jet-black coat and looked a little saggy under the burden of age and work, but you could tell that she must’ve been really beautiful once.

Kevin said that for today, we were just going to get acquainted with the horses, and then next time we could really start to learn to ride. Ashley and I exchanged looks, but neither of us had the guts to tell him this was a one-shot deal.

Ashley went first, and Kevin helped her get up on the saddle. I watched him lead the two of them around the ring. Ashley looked pretty on the horse, as if she were made to do something like this, like one of those refined English people who rode their horses in shows or something. Her ponytail bounced against her back, and her face shone in the sunlight, and just before she got off I thought I saw her smiling, which made me really annoyed with her. She was actually enjoying this.

“Okay,” Kevin said. “Your turn, Melissa.”

I petted Daffodil lightly on her back and she gave me a dirty look and grunted, sort of unhappily. “I don’t know if I’m ready to sit on her yet,” I said, thinking to myself,
If I could just get out of it for today, then I wouldn’t ever have to do it.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” Ashley said, and I shot her a dirty look.

“It’s okay.” Kevin put his hand on my shoulder. I tried to shrug it away discreetly, by bending down and pretending to fix my shoe. “You can’t rush it. Everyone moves at their own pace.” Ashley stamped her foot in the dirt. Then she glared at me. “Well, that’s enough for today then, okay? Next week we’ll see if Melissa wants to give it a try.”

He gave us each a little pat on the top of our heads, as if we were horses, and then he turned and walked back inside the house.

“Baby.” Ashley gave me a little push.

“Bitch.” I pushed back.

Ashley didn’t say a word to me the whole way home, and when we pulled into the driveway she announced, “I need to take a shower. I smell like horse.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t going to fight her for the shower. I didn’t notice a smell, and besides, I didn’t have anywhere important to go anyway.

I saw Ryan was outside, walking away from his mailbox, so I got out of the car and waved. He started walking
toward me. “Where’s Courtney?” I asked.

“I dunno. She had to do something with her mom. Spa day or something.”

I wondered if they were going to Belleza, where my mom was at work, and I hoped not. My mom had never met Courtney, but the thought of her styling Courtney’s hair annoyed me for some reason. “Ashley and I were riding horses,” I said, which sort of hid the truth of the matter, that I’d been too scared to actually ride.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. My mom’s boyfriend has a ranch.” It was strange that I hadn’t told him any of this, because we used to tell each other everything at the moment that it happened.

“The Hair?”

I thought for a minute. “Actually, we should call him the Cowboy.”

He shook his head. “The Cowboy. Seriously.” He paused. “So how was the riding?”

“Well.” I tried to look like I was searching for the perfect words to sum up the experience. “It was kind of like riding a bike,” I lied, “only higher up and a little bumpier.”

“Yeah, I went riding once. When I was really little
and my parents were still together, we went on vacation to this ranch in Montana. And they put me on one of those real little horses. What are they called?”

“A pony?” I guessed, though the amount I knew about horses could seriously fit on my pinkie finger.

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right, I guess.” He got this weird smile on his face, like he was remembering what it was like for his whole family to be together, and it was something he hadn’t thought about in a long time, but now that he did it made him really happy. A good memory of his mother, not like the later stuff, the stuff that usually haunted him in the middle of the night.

I thought about the fact that Courtney had cheated on him in San Diego and that he had no idea, and a part of me wanted to tell him, but the other part of me didn’t want to burst his little bubble. Before I could decide, he interrupted me. “Hey, you know, we haven’t ridden in the wash in ages.”

I nodded. “I know. You wanna go now?”

“Let me put this stuff in the house and I’ll get my bike,” he said.

It was a perfect February afternoon in the desert. The air was dry and crisp and just a little cool, but the sun was
warm and beat down on us from the rich, deep blue sky. I took my sweater off when we got to the wash, and the sun felt amazing against my bare arms. I thought about the fact that Aunt Julie was back in Pennsylvania. She’d sent me an email last week telling me that they’d gotten six inches of snow and ice, and she’d had to shovel her car out of a parking spot on campus. At the end of the email she’d written, “Younger sisters rule, and don’t you forget it!” which had made me laugh because it was so the opposite of true, at least in our case. Now I wondered, feeling the warm air on my skin, why anyone would leave this place for cold and snow and ice and digging their car out with a shovel.

Ryan and I kept a steady pace as we rode. We kept riding until our development ended on one side of the wash and Courtney’s ended on the other, and we were just surrounded by that bare patch of desert on either side before we hit the railroad tracks.

Then Ryan stopped pedaling, and I skidded to a stop behind him. “You okay?” I asked, worried for a second that he’d forgotten his inhaler.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I just wanted to stop for a minute and look around.” He laid his bike down and started walking toward the side of the wash where we normally
found the most interesting junk.

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the smooth piece of glass. I’d put it in there that morning for luck, or maybe just because a small part of me felt I needed to take something that was partly my dad’s with me to spend time with Kevin. “Do you remember that glass you found the night my father died?” I asked him. I took it out of my pocket and held it to the light, so all the little rainbows started breaking and bending in the rays of the sun.

“I can’t believe you still have that,” he said.

“I never told you, but I showed it to my dad when I got home that night. And then he told me that it takes glass a million years to decay. And that was it. The last thing he ever said to me.” I bit my tongue to try to hold back tears. It wasn’t like me to get so emotional, but the morning with Kevin had set something going in my mind, the fear that I would have to spend the rest of my life going back home to a place that smelled like horses, with a man who wasn’t and never could be anything like my father.

“That’s really cool,” Ryan said. “A million years.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “You know the last thing my mother ever said to me was ‘Clean your room.’ I was seven.” He paused. “Of course,
it’s not the same thing. She’s still alive. I guess.”

I never thought about the fact that Ryan’s mother was alive and out there somewhere. I’d never met her, and in all our years of being friends, he’d barely even talked about her. “Do you ever think about trying to find her?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. No way.” He paused. “I mean she should want to find me, right?”

“Maybe she does.”

“What about you?” He asked. “Did you figure out another way to find that woman you were looking for?” I shook my head. I thought about reminding him that he had offered to help, but we were standing close now and looking each other straight in the eyes, which, for some reason, made me want to stop talking.