Sacred (2 page)

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.”

“Scarlett,” he answered. “It’s me—Andy. What the hell? Are you all right?”

Suddenly, the ever-present weight on my chest grew just a fraction heavier and I sank to my knees, the hose next to me spraying uselessly into the dry earth.

Andy rushed over, uncertain what to do with this much
grief—with my tears, my wailing, my hands pulling my hair out of its braid. His hand hovered above my head for a while before he kneeled next to me, before he untangled my fingers from my hair and folded them in my lap.

“It’s all right,” he murmured, a terrible lie, but it was the best he could offer, and so I turned to him awash in grief, wiped my tears on the front of his blue-and-white Dodgers tee, and sobbed in his arms as he stroked my hair.

After a time, Andy kissed my forehead, then my cheeks, and then his lips found mine. I pressed my breasts into his chest, winding my arms around his neck, my teeth pushing hard into his lips as I took what comfort I could from his embrace.

He seemed surprised by my response, and I could feel him vacillating between pulling me closer and pushing me away. The part of him that was a sixteen-year-old boy won out, and he clutched me to him, his hands wandering up and down my back as he kissed me more deeply, his tongue exploring my mouth.

But it was as if his desire had flipped some switch inside me, and I was suddenly achingly cold. Andy realized that I was no longer returning his kiss, that I was sitting in his arms like a rag doll, and with some measure of self-control, he pulled away from me.

His arms were rigid, and his eyes, usually a bright blue, looked cloudy with a mixture of emotions I couldn’t read. He stumbled to his feet, off balance, unusual for him, and cleared his throat.

“I don’t know, Scarlett,” he said. “Maybe you need some time.”

Then he’d walked away, though over his shoulder he threw “Call me whenever” before climbing into his pickup and driving off.

Next to me, Delilah pawed the earth, her breath warm and moist in my hair. Sitting with Delilah under the tree, for the first time all summer I had the beginning of a desire to do just that—call him. It was like some part of me yearned to pick up my life where I’d left it.
Could I do that?
I wondered. Could I go back to being Scarlett Wenderoth, ace student, girlfriend, BFF? Or was that part of my life as dead as Ronny?

I sighed and stood, stretching my arms over my head. “All right, girl,” I said, patting Delilah’s neck. “Let’s go home.”

I chose a different route back to the stable. I was in no hurry to return to the B&B for dinner with my parents, so I opted to take the circuitous route through the valley toward the barn.

Delilah’s barn was my second home—El Rancho Escondido, “the hidden ranch,” a breeding facility begun by the Wrigley family way back in the 1930s. It was a private establishment, nestled in a valley twelve miles outside of Avalon. The only reason I could keep my mare there was that my mom was best friends with the manager of the ranch. I got my love of riding from my mom, Olivia, though she’d stopped riding when she got pregnant with Ronny. Her good friend Alice ran the ranch now, greeting the busloads of tourists that came by to see the horses and explaining the ranch’s history.

My job was to stay out of the way when I was at the ranch, and not to brag too much around the island about
my special privileges. It didn’t hurt that my Delilah had been bred and born right here on Catalina, just like me. She and I were two of a kind—trapped on this island, at least for now.

Delilah didn’t seem to notice this truth, much less mind it. For a fairly young mare—just five years old—she was remarkably calm. Before she had even been born, she’d been earmarked for me. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but they’d always been dedicated to giving their kids what they needed.

Ronny had needed lots of interaction with the outside world, so our parents had sent him away for part of each summer to stay with friends on the mainland. I needed a horse.

I didn’t
want
a horse the way some girls ask for a pony; I
needed
a horse. All my drawings, all the little stories that I’d written as a kid, all my Christmas lists had been about one thing—horses.

And it had never been enough just to be around the Arabians at the stable. I’d felt a pressing need to have a horse of my own.

Delilah was a beautiful foal. I was there to see her birth. She was sired by a tall chestnut Arab named Nomad, and she was out of an unusually large mare named Rainbow. I watched as she emerged from her mother, slick and wet and beautiful, and I watched as she stood on shaky legs and searched under her mother for her first sip of milk.

I’d trained her. She had known me as long as she’d been alive, and she trusted me completely. So today, when I
turned her off the main path and toward a rocky decline, her steps didn’t falter.

I live in a beautiful place
, I thought grudgingly. A fire had ravaged the island’s interior just a few years ago, but the blackened landscape was recovering. Some species of plants were actually doing better now than before the fire; there had been too much growth, choking out light, and the plants had had to compete for ground and access to the sun. After the fire, with almost everything dead, there was room. Seeds still dormant under the soil might emerge this year, with the rain. But even dry and somewhat barren, Catalina was beautiful. Native sage and chaparral danced as the late-afternoon breeze picked up, and I took in a deep breath of the clean, salty ocean air. Delilah seemed invigorated by the breeze too, and she broke into an energetic trot even as we started downhill.

I leaned back in my saddle and pulled gently on the reins. “Easy, girl,” I murmured, but Delilah tossed her head, eager to move forward.

I laughed, happy she was so spirited. After all this time, I barely noticed how strange the sound of my laughter seemed. “All right, then, if you insist,” I said. “Giddyap.”

I loosened the reins and dug my heels into Delilah’s sides. With the grace that only a purebred Arabian can manage, Delilah loped down the hill, her neck long and loose, her haunches tucked tightly beneath her. As soon as she reached a flatter space on the trail she really let go. The pounding of her hooves on the hard soil became all I was aware of, da-da-
dum
, da-da-
dum
, and I leaned forward with the joy of
the ride, my cowboy hat blown away and forgotten behind us, my heels pressed down in the stirrups, the waistband of my jeans pushing into my hips as I moved with the rhythm of her gallop. I felt my mouth pulled wide in a smile, and I felt
alive
and
free
, my heart full of something other than pain.

Then we rounded a corner defined by a wide oak tree, and my life irrevocably shifted.

TWO

H
is face was white with fear as Delilah came at him at a full-out gallop, but he stayed stock-still and as solidly rooted to the ground as the oak tree that had hidden him from my view.

His nostrils flared, not unlike Delilah’s, and even as my mare and I barreled toward him, his gaze did not waver. At his sides were his hands, clenched into fists.

His eyes were green. Not some version of hazel that people call green, but actually green—flashing green, beautiful, like the color of fresh grass in the spring.

Unflinchingly, he stared at me and held up one of his hands.

“Stop.”

It was just one word, and though his voice was not raised, it resonated somehow, and without consciously deciding to, I obeyed. I leaned back in my saddle and pulled firmly on
the reins. “Whoa!” I told Delilah. She tossed her head, unwilling, but I increased the pressure on the reins.

In front of me, the boy didn’t move. Good thing Delilah stopped, or we would have collided.

Tall and slender, but not filled out with the muscles that would probably bulk up his frame in the coming years, he looked strong. The tendons of his arms and neck were strained with tension as he stood in the middle of the trail. He wore khaki hiking pants and boots, and under his arms his gray T-shirt was stained with circles of sweat, as if he’d been hiking hard before he’d found me on the trail.

I couldn’t quite decide why it seemed that way, as if he’d
found
me, but I was certain, somehow, that he had been searching for me. As I stared more deeply into his eyes, I saw mirrored there both fear and pain, though he was no longer in any danger of being run down by Delilah. Then he raised his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I was still annoyed by his interference; Delilah snorted as if she heard my thoughts and echoed them. But I was concerned, too. The way he was acting was definitely not normal, and I found myself wondering if there was something seriously wrong with him. Maybe he was about to have a stroke or something. An image of Ronny, eyes closed, hands folded across the chest of his best suit, flashed in my mind, and I felt the beginnings of one of my panic attacks coming on.

I forced myself to breathe regularly, pushing Ronny’s face out of my mind.

“What the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the trail?” I snapped, throwing my right leg across the saddle and sliding to the ground. “You could have gotten both of us hurt.”

He didn’t answer at first, but his hand dropped from his forehead and his eyes slowly opened. He had eyelashes that any teen girl would murder for. And up close, his eyes were an even more brilliant green than they had seemed to be when I had sat astride Delilah.