Read You Are Here Online

Authors: Liz Fichera

You Are Here (7 page)

Chapter 16

Two Hours Before

A
n hour later, Mom padded into the bathroom to splash water on her face. I’d asked her if she wanted me to stay home but she was insistent. “Absolutely not! I’ll be fine. Just call me—there are still pay phones at the mall, right? Call me and leave a message on the community phone if you decide to stay later than, say, two o’clock, okay?”

“Of course,” I’d said, but then had felt guilty all over again. I wasn’t going to the mall. I was going back home. Yeah, there would be pay phones somewhere along the way, but it was still all a ruse. Unfortunately, now was not the time to come clean, especially after all of the crying and opening up and heaviness that had vanished a little from our world.

There was a knock at the front door.

I kissed Mom’s damp cheek and said, “Later, Mom! Love you!”

Before I changed my mind, I grabbed my purse from the kitchen table and then opened the front door. I didn’t invite Marisela inside. Instead I grabbed her elbow and steered her toward the courtyard.

Marisela dug in her heels and stopped on the narrow sidewalk just outside our apartment, her eyes wide. “What. Is. Wrong. With. You? What’s the rush?”

I exhaled. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. Can we please go now?”

Marisela jingled car keys in front of my face. “All gassed up and ready to fly!”

Just hearing those words lifted my shoulders. “I love you.”

“I know.”

Two minutes later, we were inside a car that could double as a barge. The seats were deeper than the ones in Mom’s SUV. A green cardboard saguaro dangled by a string from the rearview mirror. It smelled of mint and old cigarettes. When Marisela pressed the accelerator, the car coughed deep and raspy, as though it were trying to clear its throat. Before I knew it, we were buckled up and driving north on Central Avenue. Gray-blue sky peeked between the office and apartment buildings, the sky growing bluer the farther we drove from the city.

“So who’s the guy we’re gonna meet when we get there?” Marisela said, looking straight ahead. The tiniest of smiles lifted her lips.

I looked away and stared out the passenger window. “Don’t forget to thank your cousin for me. About the car, I mean. This is really nice.”

“Don’t change the topic.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You totally do.”

I turned to her with my best clueless expression. “I totally don’t.”

Marisela chuckled as we reached the next red light. “You are such a liar.” She paused to turn to me. “Then why are you wearing lip gloss?”

My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“I practically have to force you to wear any makeup whatsoever to school. Now, on a perfectly good Saturday, when we’re going to mess around with horses and pigs and God knows what else, you suddenly decide to get your fashion on? Please. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

“Pigs?”

“Horses. Cows. All the stuff that dwells in barns. You know what I mean.”

“I’m not. I—I’m—It’s—” I stammered as the light changed to green. “I’m here about my horse, remember?”

“Uh-huh,” Marisela said, patronizing me, flashing a fake pout.

“It’s complicated.”

“Boys always make life complicated. Especially the cute ones.” She snapped her gum. “So. He’s cute, right?”

I didn’t answer, not right away.

We turned onto Camelback Road. I could see the top of Camelback Mountain. I hadn’t seen it in weeks. I used to see its familiar three humps every day from my backyard without realizing how magnificent it really was. Seeing the mountain loom in the distance made me miss home and all of the wide-open spaces a thousand times more.

“Look,” Marisela said, after I’d done a fine job of not answering the boyfriend question, “we’ve got, like, a million stoplights before we reach Paradise Valley and the radio doesn’t work.”

I glanced down at the dial, avoiding her eyes because I knew exactly what would follow.

“Oh, come on, Abby. Be a
girl
for once in your life and spill it. Details! I demand details! Tell me what you’ve been running from. At least let me know what I’ll find once we get there. And he so better be worth it.”

Chapter 17

Twenty Minutes Before

I
probably should have warned Marisela not to wear heels. Why had I assumed she’d wear boots? Why had I assumed she had a pair? At least she wore jeans.

I would have loved to wear my cowboy hat but it was packed away in storage, along with all of my boots except for the one pair I’d slipped on today. How I’d missed the thick heels and the way they curved around my calves like a second layer of skin.

“Where the heck are we?” Marisela said as she pulled the car off Lincoln Drive onto a dirt road. She peered out the windshield at the saguaros and mesquite trees and smattering of houses that snaked up the mountain. We were close to the city but far enough to notice a difference. Driving into the shadow of Camelback Mountain, it felt as if we’d crossed into another dimension.

“It’s called the desert, Marisela. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” I grinned at her, rolling the window all the way down, inhaling deep gulps of crisp air and creosote still damp from the early morning. I decided right in that moment that I missed the creosote most of all, a pure earthy, deserty smell, especially when wet and dewy.

“Yeah. But...well, this is
way
out here.” She took a deep breath from her opened window. “It even smells different. Reminds me of when I was a kid in New Mexico.”

“It’s called fresh air. You’ve just forgotten what it smells like.”

She play-frowned at me. “I know that. It’s just, well, different.” She hesitated. In a quiet voice, quiet for Marisela, she said, “You lived somewhere out here?”

“Not far from here. Yeah.” I didn’t want to think about our home with the orange sticker staining the front door. With new owners. Not now. I had to concentrate on Honey.

“Was your house big like one of those?” She pointed to one of the estates near the top of the mountain that had its own private mountain access.

“Not quite that big.”

“But close?”

I didn’t want to answer that. Instead I said, “It was big enough for Jack, Mom and me. It was our home, the only one we’d ever had. I never thought of it as big or special or even different.”

“Okay, that’s cool,” she said, sensing that it was not one of my favorite things to talk about. “Well, where to now?”

“The stable is down this road. Let’s leave the car here and walk the rest of the way. It’s just up a bit. This road is a back way to the stable.”

“It’s so deserted. So...quiet. Is it safe to leave the car?”

I chuckled. “Never safer. I promise. Only things out here are rattlesnakes and coyotes.”

She shrieked and lifted her heels off the pedals. “Snakes?”

I laughed—as if there’d be rattlesnakes crawling in the car. “Seriously, you leave rattlesnakes alone, they leave you alone. We’ll be fine.”

“But what about when we get there? What happens then?”

I opened my door. “Haven’t figured that out exactly.” And that was the truth. The only thing I wanted to focus on at the moment was seeing Honey again, making sure she was okay. I figured the mechanics of everything else would work themselves out somehow. If I had to, I was ready to beg Mrs. Finnigan to keep Honey, at least until I could pay her back. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

We parked the car off the side of the dirt road in the shadow of a paloverde tree. Marisela even locked it, not as if that mattered much. This was the back way to the Finnigan Boarding Stables—the way that most people didn’t know about, not even the ones who boarded. I only knew because Finn had shown me when he learned that sometimes I walked to the stables from home. And one time he even waited for me by the back door of the barn.

Marisela wrapped her hand around my arm, mostly for balance. Her six-inch heels kept getting stuck in the soft dirt as if they were stakes, which they totally were.

“Have you thought about what you want to say when you see him?”

“Not really,” I lied, wondering again whether it was smart of me to have shared anything with Marisela about Finn. But she was persuasive when she wanted to be and I had been a willing captive in her car. I’d even told her about Nobody, whom she’d promptly labeled a
skank.
“Mostly I just want to make sure Honey is okay.” That part was true. I had to see my horse, first and foremost.

But what would I say to Finn if I spotted him? I played and replayed a conversation with him in my mind with the biggest question simply being, Why? Why did he lead me on? Why did he kiss me as if I mattered? Why did he let me drone on and on about Dad and Mom and Grandma and everything bad that had happened in the past two years? I could answer that question easily enough: because I was a fool.

Marisela and I could hear the horses in the stables before we actually saw them. They neighed and whinnied whenever someone approached or if there was an unfamiliar sound. The Finnigans boarded twenty-four horses, each having a private stall inside their red metal barn that was as big as a circus tent. The horses would have already been fed by now, so it was the perfect time for sneaking inside.

In the distance, I could hear the
clump-clump
of a horse being exercised in the corral adjacent to the barn. My heart went into overdrive thinking about the identity of that rider.

“This way,” I whispered to Marisela as I guided her to the back door. It was propped open by a silver pail filled with water.

“Oh, dear God. What is that smell?” Marisela covered her nose.

“Hay?”

Her face crumpled. It became a struggle for her to speak. “No. It’s way worse than that.”

“Horse piss?”

She swatted away a fly in front of her nose. “That is so gross.”

“Well, what can I tell you? Kinda goes with the territory. And this is a barn.”

I turned back toward the door and held my breath, not from the dust and sharp smells but because I was afraid of what I would find, reliving the nightmare all over again of when I last stood in this spot. I peeked inside the door and squinted into the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Six horses closest to the door all turned in their stalls toward Marisela and me, their ears popping up like tents. They twitched their tails, hitting the stall walls, waiting. Watching. One neighed softly. “It’s okay,” I whispered to the horses.

Once my eyes adjusted, I stepped inside. Light streaked across the floor from the opened windows on the south side of the barn. Dust twinkled inside the rays. Honey’s stall was at the opposite end, closest to the double doors that led to the corral. I cocked my head and waited for other sounds, people sounds. Finn sounds.

I took a deep breath, relieved. We were alone.

I turned back to Marisela. “Got the place to ourselves. This shouldn’t take long,” I said, but I wasn’t sure about that. What would I do when I found Honey? It wasn’t as though I could ride her back into the city, but could I abandon her again?

Marisela gave me the thumbs-up with one hand; with the other, she reached back to release a clump of dirt from her heel. Her bangs clung to the perspiration on her forehead.

Slowly, we crept deeper into the barn. The air grew cooler but thick with the smell of hay, dirt and two dozen horses. Marisela stayed a breath behind me, as if we were creeping into a haunted house instead of a dusty barn filled with horses, one pony, a goat and it was anyone’s guess as to the number of stray kittens.

My free hand brushed against the stalls. Each one had a painted handmade sign in black letters. I cooed a greeting to each horse as we passed.

Penny.

Chief.

Rowdy.

Cisco. His snout lifted in the air as we passed, followed by a soft whinny.

“Good boy,” I whispered to him. “How’ve you been?” I wished I had a treat. Cisco loved apples—green ones, to be exact. The only thing I could do was pat his neck when he stuck his head over the stall in greeting.

“Who are you? Doctor Dolittle?” Marisela hissed behind me, stretching away from Cisco’s curious wet nose as far as her neck would allow while still clutching my arm.

I bit back a nervous chuckle. “Just saying hello, Marisela. They don’t bite. Well, most of them don’t.” I knew all of the horses. I’d ridden many of them, too. I felt more at home inside this barn than just about anyplace else in the world. Someday I wanted my own barn, my own stable. Finn knew that, too. I wanted as many animals as possible. This place had been my second home for so long and now I felt like a trespasser. That realization sank like a rock to the bottom of my stomach.

“Well, where’s Honey Dew?”

“It’s just Honey.”

“Okay.
Honey.

“Just past the double-doors,” I said, lifting my forefinger to my mouth.

“Okay,” she mouthed. “I’ll whisper.”

We had to walk past the opened doors to reach Honey’s stall. The closer we got, the brighter the barn became. I could see the tops of Honey’s ears. They twitched and my heart raced even faster. I stopped by the opened doors, Marisela stopping short at my heels. I peered outside into the corral. It was empty. I turned to Marisela and mouthed, “Now!”

We tiptoe-ran past the opened doors to the next set of stalls. This time I didn’t creep. I sprinted the rest of the way to Honey’s stall.

I didn’t know how much time I’d have. I fumbled once, then twice, with the stall latch until finally I threw open the door and went inside. First I reached for her snout, letting her smell me. Then I threw my arms around her neck.

“Honey!” I whisper-squeaked. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Honey whinnied into my neck. I was so relieved to find her in her stall. No one had sold her or auctioned her away from me. I stroked her face, then her neck, the side of her coat and then that special spot between her eyes. She backed up a few paces in her stall, her hooves scraping against the dirt and loose straw in her excitement.

“I’ve missed you, too!” I whimpered. Being alongside my horse, after everything that had happened, I wanted to bury my head in her neck and disappear. Honey was home. She was my home. “I’ve missed you so much!” My voice choked on the words. “So, so much!”

“She’s pretty,” Marisela said from outside the stall.

I wiped my hand across my nose. “Do you wanna pet her?”

The whites of Marisela’s eyes widened. Her knuckles tightened over the stall. “I’ll leave you to get, er, reacquainted. Maybe in a bit.”

I looked around the stall. Everything was as I’d left it. Honey’s saddle hung from a hook. A pail in the corner was filled to the brim with water. Hay was strewn in bits near the water. My extra pair of rubber boots were in the corner for when I mucked her stall. I could see lines in the hay and dirt, as if it had been swept recently. Most of all, Honey was still there. Brushed and fed. Healthy. Standing in front of me, her black eyes shiny and bright. I squeezed her neck again, reaching as much of her as I could on tiptoe, too happy to care that my tears wouldn’t stop falling.

“Um, Abby?” Marisela whispered. “Abby?” Her whisper sharpened.

I sniffed back my tears. “Yeah?”

Marisela’s gaze turned toward the door. “I think someone’s coming.” And with that, she crept into the stall, releasing her death grip from the stall door, surprising me. I didn’t think she’d want to get within two feet of my horse, all one thousand cuddly pounds of her.

She closed the stall door till the latch clicked with a gentle
clunk.

Without speaking, without breathing, without blinking, we sank below the stall door, one vertebra at a time, our backs pressed against the cold wall.

And waited.

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