Wild Horse Spring (16 page)

I had the deck of cards, and I’d brought a pillowcase with Dad’s old Heineken T-shirt, a change of clothes, a bathing suit, a towel, and a toothbrush just in case I ended up spending the night. But I felt all mixed up. If Cody and Stephanie found the damaged ATV, they probably wouldn’t know what to do without me. They needed me there with them. I really wanted to see Dad, but I really wanted to be there with Cody and Stephanie. If only I could clone myself or be two places at once.

I needed a cell phone in case I had to call them and tell them what to do.

As if Mom read my mind, she handed me her cell phone. “Here. Take this today. And here’s Norm’s cell number.” She scribbled Norm’s number on a page of her Day-Timer, and when she handed it to me, a bit of blood from her torn cuticle smeared onto the paper.

“Mom, I know Norm’s cell. And it’s stored in your phone anyway. He’s, like, number one on your call list.”

Mom blinked. “I know, I know. I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.”

As soon as Mom left, I’d text Stephanie to see what she and Cody were planning to do to find the ATV.

Mom pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet. “And here. Take this. You never know when you might need it.”

“Thanks.” I folded the bill and put it in the back pocket of my shorts.

Mom drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Hmmm. What else? Obviously if he tries to take you skydiving or something like that, you just say you can’t.” She gave a high-pitched, fake-sounding laugh.

“I think you have to be eighteen to skydive. Anyway, I’m going to be fine,” I said roughly.

“I know, I know. I hope you and your dad have a great visit.” She reached to brush my hair back from my forehead. I looked away, so that she was brushing air. “I’ll be here promptly at five o’clock to pick you up. Make sure you call me if you’re going to be late for any reason. And, just call me halfway through the day to let me know how things are going. Just so I won’t worry.”

“Mom, you’ll worry no matter what. So what difference does it make if I call you?”

“Diana, call me. I mean it.”

At that moment a silver convertible car spun into the parking lot and came to a screeching halt at an angle next to us. I glanced over, cringing slightly.

It was Dad, just hanging up his cell. He jumped out of the car and opened our passenger door. “Dudette! How great is this, that we get to spend the day together?”

I have never been a touchy-feely person. I slid out of the seat and kind of stood there while he hugged me and gave me several hearty, nervous pats on the back. Mom always described him as the kind of guy who could sell ice to Eskimos. His nickname in high school and college was “Motor,” short for “Motormouth.”

“We had a breakfast session that went long this morning, people just listening to themselves talk ad infinitum.” He was tall and skinny and energetic, with reddish gray hair and piercing green eyes. He and I have the same eyes and freckled skin. He had a loud voice, and when he walked he had loud footsteps.

Mom had jumped out of her side of the car and come around. “Hello, Steven,” she said.

“Lynn. You look absolutely fabulous,” he said, his smile widening.

“Oh, thanks.” Mom cleared her throat, looked down, and jangled her car keys. “So”—she gestured to the convertible—”this a rental?”

“That’s right! I figure when I’m renting I might as
well rent something decent that I actually want to drive. It’ll be fun for Diana. We can spend the morning together. Then I have to go back to the resort for some ad-hoc meetings, so I figured Diana could keep herself busy at the pool. Do you have your bathing suit?” He patted me on the shoulder. I guess he meant for it to be a pat, but it was more like he was hitting me, the way referees hit the wrestling mat during a match.

“Yeah.” I held up the pillowcase.

“So, there will be time when you can’t be with Diana?”

“It won’t be long, just a quick meet and greet,” Dad said. “She’s fourteen. She’ll be all right.”

“Sure,” I said.

Mom squinted at him. “So, what are you going to do?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking we’d go for the veritable all-sports day,” Dad said, squeezing my shoulder. “Start out with a little hang gliding here at Jockey’s Ridge? And maybe move on to some jet skiing or parasailing later? What do you say, dudette?”

“Sounds cool to me!” I smiled in spite of the lameness of the
dudette
. Jet skiing last summer had been a blast. And I’d never gone hang gliding, but it looked fantastic. All the stuff Dad had mentioned was expensive. It made me feel like Dad was willing to spend a lot on me.

“Hang gliding?” Mom said uncertainly.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Dad said. “They teach kids as young as four years old here. I checked it out.”

“Let’s go, Dad!” I said. Time to separate them. I grabbed my pillowcase and jogged with it around Dad’s car to the shotgun seat, which was full of a briefcase, printouts, brochures, and a box of business cards.

“Just throw your stuff on top. We’ll move it later,” Dad said. “Wait, hand me one of those business cards.”

I opened one of the boxes and pulled out a card, then handed it to Dad, who ceremoniously presented it to Mom. “How about we meet at the resort where the conference is? You know where?”

“Yes. Five o’clock, then,” Mom said in a firmer voice than usual. “At the resort. And we all have each other’s cell numbers. Diana, be sure and give your dad Norm’s number.”

“I will, Mom.” Her nervousness was making me nervous. I couldn’t wait for her to leave. She came over and looked like she was going to hug and kiss me, but I gave her a warning look, so she just kissed her index finger and put it on my forehead, smiling at me with searching eyes.

And within moments, Dad and I were alone.

“Okay,” he said. “We sign up for hang gliding lessons down this path here.” He squeezed my shoulder again. “So, tell me what’s going on in your life, dudette.”

He’d never asked me that before. I took a deep breath, felt a little tingle run down my spine, and began telling him about life at the barn, Josie the barn manager, and the personalities of the different horses there. Started to tell him what it was like to live with Norm, and parttime with Stephanie.

Dad’s phone buzzed. “Hang on,” he said, then answered. “Yeah? No, I should get commission on those. Absolutely.” He held up a finger to me to say “wait one minute,” and then stopped on the path. “I did all the legwork on those cases. Those sales should be mine.”

We stood aside for two people to pass us. Dad finished his conversation, then turned back to me. “What were you saying?”

I picked back up where I left off, and as we followed a winding path to the visitors center, I told him about Stephanie coming to my school, and how popular she’d become. I told him how lame it was that we had to memorize poems over spring break. I was about to tell him about some of the kids calling me “animal” in the hall, but then we arrived at the visitors center. Two people stood in line ahead of us to sign up for hang gliding lessons.

For hang gliding you have to go to “ground school” first. I went in a movie room with a bunch of other
people—kids and adults—and we watched a video where a guy talked to us about how to control the glider.

“The dunes are a great place to learn because if you wipe out you land in the soft sand. It’s almost impossible to get hurt,” the instructor said.

Dad didn’t go with me to ground school, and when it was over, I couldn’t find him. Finally I found him standing outside the visitors center talking on the phone. I told him we were supposed to hike out to the dunes and meet my instructor, who was taking the glider up the hill. There would be four other people in my class, and we would each get five turns at hang gliding.

“So, are you excited? This is the chance of a lifetime,” Dad said as we headed across the sand. “Yeah!” As we climbed the first dune, the wind picked up, whistling in my ears, plastering my T-shirt against me, and whipping my ponytail around. The view from the top of the ridge, from one side, looked like we were walking through a desert. Then, when we crested the ridge, on the other side were acres of dunes, Highway 158, rows of houses, and beyond those, the deep blue of the ocean. Both adults and kids ran along, harnessed under the blue and white glider wings, with an instructor running alongside, holding on to a rope attached to the glider, to launch them. Someone had brought along
their golden retriever, which excitedly galloped along, racing the gliders as they skimmed the landscape. A couple of kids were rolling all the way down the side of the biggest dune. It looked like a blast. As Dad and I climbed the ridge, I watched one guy about my age take off and get a long ride—probably eight to ten whole seconds—from the top of the dune all the way to the bottom. Then I watched another boy tip forward and wipe out in the sand within ten feet of taking off.

I wasn’t going to wipe out. I would show Dad what a good athlete I was.

Someone had written “SOS” in huge letters in the sand on the side of one dune that could be read from the sky.

That was when I remembered that the whole morning had gone by and I hadn’t gotten in touch with Stephanie. I quickly texted her and told her that I had Mom’s phone and to text or call me and let me know how things were going.

“You go, girl!” Dad said, giving me another hard pat on the shoulder as the other students and I gathered around the instructor.

My instructor was a guy named Al, about sixteen or seventeen, with curly brown hair to his shoulders. He’d been hang gliding for six years. We hiked across the sand behind him to a flat spot for our first ride. I
was a little confused how we were going to hang glide on a flat area.

My group, which consisted of three other kids my age, and a grown-up couple, all put on harnesses and helmets, the way Al showed us. My first ride was not what I expected. It wasn’t really even a ride; we just had to balance the glider as we ran along a flat area of sand. But balancing the glider wasn’t as easy as it looked. The glider wasn’t that heavy, but you couldn’t let it tip either forward or backward. Tipping it back before you were ready would make you start to take off, and tipping it forward tended to “stall” it, or make it dive into the ground.

Then Al showed us how to foot launch along that same flat area, by running along with the glider balanced but angled slightly up to catch the wind and then picking up our feet and letting the glider carry us. For hang gliding, you have to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing so that you launch with the wind, not against it. I got only about a foot off the ground for the first ride, and only flew about twenty feet or so.

To turn the glider right, you have to move your hands to the right side of the glider bar and push your hips and legs to the right so you’re actually shifting your weight. To turn the glider left, move your hands over
to the left side of the glider bar and shift the weight of your hips and legs to the left. When you land, you’re supposed to be flying into the wind and uphill, so that you’re slowing down.

Finally, on our fifth flight, we had to practice taking off with the wind and flying downhill for about eighty yards. Al carried the glider back uphill for all of us.

I got in line last because I wanted to watch the others and learn from their mistakes. The boy who went before me smoothly executed the entire ride, landing on his feet at the bottom of the hill. He dropped the glider and held his arms up in victory, and we all cheered for him.

Then it was my turn. I planned to do exactly what that boy had done. I really wanted Dad to be impressed.

I lifted the glider by the front bar and made sure it was centrally balanced over my shoulders. I didn’t look back at Dad. I ran along carrying the glider with my hands evenly spaced on the bar, and then ran the first few feet down the dune and launched myself, pulling my feet up under me and tipping the glider slightly backward to catch the wind. It caught! I sailed about ten feet off the ground toward the bottom of the dune.

What a fantastic feeling! I was flying! The wind whistled by, and the ground gradually dropped farther and farther away. But for some reason—maybe
because I’m left-handed—the glider started diving toward the left. Suddenly I heard Al beside me yelling, “Straighten up!”

I tried to react quickly, but I overreacted, and the glider lost momentum and stalled, hooking left and diving into the sand three-quarters of the way down the hill. I landed on my feet but then fell down, crashing the glider into the sand. I wasn’t hurt—just mortified that Dad had seen me wipe out.

Al took the glider from me, telling me not to be embarrassed, stuff like this happened all the time. He dragged the glider back up the hill, and I trudged back up behind him, with sweat rolling into my eyes and sand filling my running shoes.

When I got to the top of the hill, the two boys my age were laughing at me, and Dad was nowhere in sight.

Al called me a trouper and then said that our lesson was over, encouraging us to rent a hang glider sometime soon and practice the skills we’d learned. I trudged past a couple of other groups getting lessons and finally found Dad on the phone again. He was arguing with someone. “So did you talk to them? Somebody needs to talk to them.”

I waited for a while, until he hung up.

“So? How’d it go?” he said.

I realized that he hadn’t been watching me at all. “Great!” I lied.

“Come on,” Dad said. “We’re out of here.”

We trudged down the hill and through the valley.

“Sorry,” Dad said. “Business is tough these days. I’m in a very competitive line of work.”

It was a long walk back to the parking lot, like hiking across the desert. Wind swirled sand so it stung my calves, and the sun glared in my eyes.

My stomach growled, and I felt light-headed. I had been too excited to eat early this morning before we left, and the lesson had been over three hours long. Occasional black spots drifted in front of my eyes. I hadn’t noticed until now, but I’d scraped my shin when I wiped out, and blood was running down my leg. I licked my finger and wiped off the blood.

Two seagulls flew overhead with shrill cries, and down by the visitors center, a little kid was screaming because he didn’t weigh enough to take a full hang gliding lesson and had to go in the kids’ group. A hot wind kept blowing.