The Year of Chasing Dreams (5 page)

Firecracker’s head pitched over the stall door and Jon obliged her with a scratch on her forelock. Ciana rubbed the aged, whitened muzzle of her grandmother’s former saddle horse in the adjoining stall.

Jon must have realized she’d closed off the discussion, because he walked to one of the new stalls and studied the new horses. “Tell me about your boarders.”

Ciana calmed down, switched gears from the meeting. “This one is owned by a tech guy. A kind of weekend cowboy living in Murfreesboro. Fred doesn’t ride much, says he’s too busy. Just likes owning a horse, I think.”

Jon appraised the dark brown horse. “Hope he didn’t pay much. Animal has poor confirmation.”

Ciana would never challenge Jon’s expertise. One thing the man knew, it was horses. He trained wild mustangs for ranch work, rode broncs for fun. She moved on. “This little
bay belongs to a fourteen-year-old girl in town. She’s a sweetheart and practically lived here this last summer.”

“Not too bad.” Jon’s gaze swept the horse head to tail. “Better stock than the first guy’s.”

“And the two others, named Mr. and Mrs. Smith, belong to a nice retired couple in town who just love horses and riding together.”

“Look to have some Tennessee walking horse blood in both of them.”

By now they were standing in the dark, far back in the barn in stillness and shadows. The sound of the animals moving quietly in the stalls, the steady drumming of November rain on the roof, offered a sense of aloneness in the world … just the two of them and no others. Ciana felt time slow. Jon’s nearness ignited memories of how his kiss, the touch of his hands, had once lit fires on her skin. That fire had been between them since the first time they’d kissed on a long-ago summer night. He reached for her. “Don’t walk away from me, Ciana. Please … I want more with you. Why won’t you let me in?”

She had no answer. It would be easy, so easy, to give in, and give herself to him in every way. And she might have—if tiny pricks from their tumultuous past and the unseen future had not surfaced in her head and heart. The warnings stretched like the barbed wire over the fences on her property.
Caution. Danger. Be careful
. Unable to put into words what she felt, or why she felt the way she did, she stepped away. She had no answer, no way to explain what she herself did not understand. So she turned and hurried outside, leaving him alone in the dark.

Eden was sitting cross-legged in the center of Ciana’s bed when Ciana came into her bedroom. “I heard from Colleen.”

With nerve endings still afire, Ciana dropped onto the bed beside her friend, glad for a distraction. “Tell me.”

“She’s back in Ireland.” Eden twisted a tissue wrapped through her fingers. “They had to quit the walkabout.” She took a shuddering breath. “You see … Garret—”

“Hey, hey,” Ciana interrupted, suddenly anxious for her friend. “Take it easy. Don’t pass out on me.”

Eden sucked in air and willed her thudding heart to slow down. “Garret got sick in Sweden. Double pneumonia. One of his lungs collapsed.”

Ciana put her arms around Eden, frightened over what she might hear next. “Go on. I won’t let go of you.”

Eden nodded, wiped her eyes with the wadded tissue. “Tom and Lorna took him back to Australia. They got him home, but Colleen hasn’t heard anything from them. It’s been
over a month. She doesn’t know if he … if he …” Eden broke down once more.

Ciana went cold through and through, the pain of Arie’s April death knifing her heart. Neither she nor Eden could face such loss again. She reached beyond the hurt for Eden’s sake. “Garret’s young and strong. Pneumonia’s curable. If he’s home, he must have family around him to help care for him. Did Colleen have any way to reach him?”

“She—she gave me an email address. It’s Tom’s, but he hasn’t responded to any mail from Colleen. Why wouldn’t he? Unless … unless—”

“Don’t even think bad thoughts,” Ciana insisted. “Let’s email Tom right now.”

Eden held Ciana’s arm in a death grip. “I’m so scared.”

“Where’s the address? I’ll write it for you.”

Eden picked up her electronic tablet beside her on the bed with shaking hands. “I’ll write it,” she said. “I owe Garret that much.” She looked into Ciana’s eyes. “But please stay with me while I do.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

It took Eden a while to compose a message because her fingers kept slipping on the virtual keys, but when it was finally finished, she let Ciana read it, and then pushed send. As it whooshed off into cyberspace, she felt as if her heart and soul had gone with it. “Maybe it won’t get there. Maybe Tom won’t answer me either.”

“Doubtful. Let’s write Colleen right now and let her know just in case she hears from Tom before we do. That way she can tell him you’re trying to reach Garret. Two messengers are better than one.”

Eden clung to the logic. “You’re right. I haven’t answered her. I just bolted down here when I got her message. I should
let her know what happened to us in Italy, and why I didn’t show up that day to go with them. She doesn’t know about Arie.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes.

“We’ll compose a message together. I’d like to say hello too.” Ciana eased the tablet from Eden’s hands, certain Eden’s fingers couldn’t manage a second message just now. “Let me.”

Eden flopped onto the bed, cradled a small pillow against her chest, stared up at the ceiling. “Read it back to me when you’re finished, okay? And … and would you mind if I stayed here a while? I don’t want to be alone upstairs.”

“No problem. Stay all night if you want. I don’t think I can sleep tonight myself.” She glanced at the paper stacks on the floor. “I want to go exploring.”

Sunlight woke Ciana where she lay curled up on the floor of her room, covered by a quilt and clutching one of her grandmother’s old diaries. Eden was sound asleep on the bed. Ciana sat up, stretched sore muscles, rubbed her stiff neck. She had no idea when she’d fallen asleep, but it had to be late morning now because sunlight puddled across her lap. The horses! She struggled up, one leg all pins and needles, hobbled into her bathroom, and splashed cold water on her face.

She got to the barn quickly and discovered that someone had already fed the horses and released them to pasture. The rain had left the ground muddy, and the red clay clung to her work boots. The November air was chilly, but weak sunlight spread across the sky.

Back in the house, she went to the kitchen for coffee.

“Eden all right?” Alice Faye asked.

Ciana eased into a kitchen table chair. “I think so.” She told her mother what had happened.

“Poor girl. Hope this man she likes is well by now. You want some breakfast?”

“Just toast.” She watched Alice Faye slice freshly baked bread and slide two pieces into the toaster. “Thanks for letting the horses out.”

“I put fresh water into the pasture trough for them, but didn’t muck the stalls.”

“I’ll do it.” As the hot coffee warmed her, Ciana relaxed. When Alice Faye placed the toast in front of her along with butter and a bowl of strawberry jam, she asked, “Do you remember a family named Soder? They used to have a farm next to ours on the north end.”

Alice Faye poured herself coffee and sat across from Ciana. “Name’s a little familiar. Why do you ask?”

“Now, don’t get crabby. I know what you think about Olivia’s diaries—which so far have been pretty dull—but that name keeps coming up.” Alice Faye looked uninterested but didn’t interrupt, so Ciana took it as a sign to continue. “She talks about the Soders adopting a boy, some pathetic kid the sheriff found digging through garbage cans in an alley.”

“Awful. But I don’t recall the family or the boy.”

“I found a newspaper article about it tucked into one of her earliest diaries—1936. Olivia was eight. Seems the boy only gave his first name, said he had no parents. Reporter called him a ‘throwaway child.’ Guess the Depression broke up a lot of families.” Ciana sipped her coffee, ate a bite of toast. “Anyway, they guessed him to be about nine or ten and the sheriff was set to take him off to the county orphanage when the Soders stepped up and said they’d take him. The article quoted Mrs. Soder to say, ‘Lord didn’t see fit to give us no kids of our own, so it seems like good Christian charity to take in this one. Like Pharaoh’s daughter bringing that Moses
out of the bulrushes.’ Quaint, huh?” Ciana slathered jam onto the second slice of toast.

Her mother said, “Grandpa Jacob often spoke about the Depression. Hard times. Lots of people lost everything. Tennessee was spared the worse of the dust storms, but we had a bad drought.”

“I think it’s interesting that Olivia wrote about the boy. She was so young, so he must have made an impression.”

“Small-town life means
anything
that happens is interesting. When I was growing up, my friend, Suzie Lawson, and I used to pilfer movie magazines from the drugstore, read every word, then sneak them back on the racks.”

“You
stole
magazines?”

Her mother’s face reddened over what she’d confessed. “We put them back! Life was dull here. Hollywood was exciting. People were beautiful out there, so far from farm pastures and cow dung.”

Ciana grinned. “Bad girls.”

Just then, Eden stumbled into the kitchen wrapped in the quilt Ciana had left on the floor. “Sorry about confiscating your bed,” she mumbled on her way to the coffeepot.

“No problem. Any emails?”

“Just spam.” She had the tablet with her and placed it on the table along with her coffee cup.

“Huge time difference,” Ciana said, to encourage Eden.

“Breakfast?” Alice Faye asked.

“Not hungry.”

In unison, Ciana and Alice Faye said, “Toast!”

Alice Faye rose, went to work on the loaf of bread. Eden stared glumly into her coffee cup.

Changing the subject, Alice Faye said, “We should talk about Thanksgiving. Only two weeks away. I was thinking of
inviting Arie’s parents and Eric and Abbie over. What do you think? We can plan a menu—”

The ding from Eden’s tablet stopped the conversation cold. Eden peered down at the glowing screen announcing the arrival of email. “It—it’s from
Garret
,” she said breathlessly.

“That must mean he’s all right,” Ciana said with an encouraging smile.

Eden sat immobile, frozen in place by fear of the unknown. Once she opened the email, her world would change one way or the other. Not reading the words meant maintaining the status quo in which her life was predictable, safe.

“You going to open it?” Ciana sounded impatient. “Want me to do it for you?”

Eden shook her head, picked up the tablet, and with shaking fingers, tapped the surface. For a long minute, she simply stared while Ciana squirmed. Finally she turned the tablet so that Ciana could read the message. It was short:

Thirteen hours of flying on a jumbo jet sandwiched between a teenager playing video games and a woman juggling a baby made Eden feel like a white rat in a too small cage. Especially after her long layover in Dallas/Fort Worth from Nashville before boarding the longer flight to Sydney. She was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, but hadn’t been able to turn off her thoughts. All her restless mind did was churn with memories, or make up scenarios about Garret. How would they feel about one another after so much time?