Centaur Rising

  Magic! This time I was certain of it. Magic should never be contained, I thought. It should run free in this world. I was smiling so broadly my lips began to ache, and I didn’t care a bit.

  Stopping, Kai leaned down and plucked some of the long grass near the fence and put it in his mouth.

  He spit it right out. “Poo, Ari,” he said, immediately trying another handful, but spitting it out as well. “No, no, no!” His voice rose, like a two-year-old having a tantrum. “No, no, no!”

  I put my finger to my lips. “Shhhhh,” I said, “or we’ll have to go back inside.”

  He mimicked me and held his finger up, touching his lip. And as he did, something flashed.

  I looked up at the sky.

  No stars falling, though a lot of them glared down at us.

  The flash came again. This time from beyond the fence.

  Then another. And another.

  I spun around, screamed, “Run, Kai, run back to the barn! Run! Run! Run!”

  16

  Lemons

  KAI MUST HAVE HEARD the terror in my voice, because he immediately galloped away, heading for the safety of his stall, his hair and mane flagging out behind as he ran.

  Once he was in the barn, I could hear his feet scrabbling on the concrete floor and was afraid he was going to fall and break a leg. A horse with a broken leg is a doomed creature. If the horse can’t stand on the leg, then he can’t maintain normal blood pressure. Death is only a matter of time. That’s why a vet will put down a horse with a badly broken leg—so as not to prolong its suffering.

  I tried not to imagine it. Gasping in fear, I followed Kai into the barn, making enough noise to wake up anyone.

  But it was far too late to worry about that.

  The flashes behind us had come in steady succession, like July Fourth fireworks.

  Then someone on the Suss side of the fence had called out, “Run here, Kai, come here, Kai.” Then the voice cried, “Look at the birdie, Kai!”

  But thankfully, Kai was already gone.

  And I wasn’t far behind.

  * * *

  By the time Kai was in his stall, the house and barn lights were blazing. Martha was there with her pitchfork, her nightgown flapping about her boots. Mom had taken up guard duty in front of Kai’s stall, holding on to a rolling pin I didn’t even know we owned.

  Hair standing up in sleep-spikes, Dr. Herks was already by the fence, glaring into the darkness. He had a pistol in his hand.

  “We’re calling the police,” he shouted. “In the meantime, I’m armed. And as a captain in the army, I have a gun permit. Trust me, I know how to shoot!”

  A pistol!

  A threat of violence!

  Try explaining that in our Quaker meeting. We’re all supposed to be pacifists, a fancy grown-up way of saying we’re against war in all its forms and against weapons entirely. But Dr. Herks had been a soldier before he was a Quaker.

  There was a sudden flurry on the other side of the fence, a car door slammed. Tires squealed out of the field.

  Behind me our horses were kicking at the stall doors, whinnying their distress. Bor was bugling, Hera practically screaming.

  As for Agora, she’d backed Kai up against the far wall of their stall and pushed him down so she could stand over him. Her lips were drawn back over her yellowed teeth. No one—not even me—was going to get near him again this night.

  Beneath her, Kai was sobbing as if his heart was breaking.

  And maybe it was.

  * * *

  It was all my fault. I was the one who had taken him out, who encouraged him to run about in the open field—the one who’d let him be exposed. There was no wriggle room in my conscience to explain away my guilt.

  “Sooner or later, we were gonna have to face it,” Martha said. “And as I’d fallen asleep on watch, this was really my fault, Ari, not yours.”

  Arms around me, Mom said, “It was bound to happen, honey.”

  “But this was too soon,” I mumbled into Mom’s arms. “Kai wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready.”

  Pacing back and forth and thinking out loud, Dr. Herks said, “It must have been that Fern guy. So, how good are his photos? If he was rushed, frightened, maybe not so good. And it’s night. Night-vision cameras are mostly army stuff. Not really in public use. And used for spying, not taking pictures. With a regular camera the lighting’s nonexistent. Yet, there’s the moon. Maybe he only got shots of Kai’s back.… Should we call the police?”

  Over my head, Mom said to him, “No police. Not now. It will just make things worse.”

  “I wasn’t planning…” He stopped, and I could hear him take a deep breath. “Just talking things through. I see things clearer when I hear them. It…” He stopped, drew another big breath. “I take some getting used to.”

  Mom put her hand on his arm, which stopped his pacing. “We all take getting used to, Gerry. Now more than ever.”

  I asked everyone’s forgiveness again, but couldn’t forgive myself. Any time there was a lull in the conversation about what to do next, I mumbled, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” until finally after about an hour of it—or so it felt—Martha broke into one of my apologies with a voice like broken glass.

  “No apologizing for lemons, girl. We gotta make lemonade. So says Dale Carnegie, and I agree.”

  That made Mom and Dr. Herks laugh, but I didn’t understand what she meant. “Who’s Dale Carnegie, and what does she mean?”

  “He. That Dale’s a he. And he means, we are stuck with the lemon, so deal with it.” Martha was unstoppable. “It’s a big lemon of a moment. Plenty of sour to go around. So what do we do with it? You can’t eat it. So how are you going to use it?”

  Finally, I got it. “Make lemonade.”

  “We’ve got to think about containment,” Dr. Herks said.

  I shook my head, because I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Circle the wagons,” he added, which just made things murkier.

  “Say it straight,” Martha told him.

  Mom sighed. “He means we’ve got to control the story.”

  “What story?” Martha gave a short, sharp laugh. “This isn’t a story.”

  “It’s a story now, Martha,” I said. “It’s going to be in the papers and maybe even on the news.”

  “Oh, that!” Martha shrugged. “Lemons.”

  “But how do we make the lemonade?” My voice sounded whiny. I felt as if I was five years old again.

  “Squeeze out the juice, water it down, add sugar.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  Mom answered for her, “We take the essence of the story and doctor it. We put our own spin on the story. We control the lemon and the lemonade.”

  “Not my job,” Martha said, letting herself into the stall where Kai had sobbed himself to sleep. She closed the door to the rest of us and locked it behind her with a snick. It was as if she was saying we were the enemy as well.

  And maybe we were.

  * * *

  Dr. Herks wrestled a table out of the office and put it outside the stall. Mom and I brought out four chairs, though only three of us were sitting and talking.

  We spoke in hushed tones about circuses, movies, Disney animal documentaries, and more, until Martha—in a fit of nosiness—came out of the stall. She didn’t sit at the table with us, but instead paced up and down the corridor.

  Dr. Herks kept slapping his hand on the table like some kind of punctuation. “There’s always the local zoo,” he said. “The one in Springfield.”

  I stood angrily. “That’s just another way of saying Kai’s a freak. I veto all these ideas!” My voice was harsh with lack of sleep. Dr. Herks hushed me with a finger to his lips.

  “We’re trying to think of ways to protect him, honey,” Mom told me. She put out her hand and grabbed mine, but I shook her off.

  “You’re trying to find a way of displaying him, not containment but entertainment. He may be a freak—but he’s our
freak!”

  “We’re trying to keep him—and the farm—safe,” Dr. Herks said. His pistol sat on the table, a reminder of how dangerous this all was becoming.

  “Ari’s right. Display is not protection,” Martha said, coming out of the stall to sit in the chair put out for her.

  I sat as well, too tired to remain standing.

  “Keeping him in a stall forever is not good for his health,” Dr. Herks reminded her. “He needs to run.”

  I nodded my agreement to them both, no longer trusting my voice.

  The wind had picked up, and there was the sound of its swooshing through the tree limbs. We started to wrestle with the idea of getting onto radio and TV talk shows, the kids’ shows, news shows. Mom and Dr. Herks sent ideas across the table as if they were playing a fast game of Ping-Pong.

  All through the conversation, arms folded, Martha breathed noisily, like a winded horse, but made no suggestions. From the other side of the barn, a horse answered her back.

  “Maybe what we need is a lawyer,” Mom said. “I only have John Banks from town. He handles divorces. Not sure he’s up to this.”

  “Maybe what we need is a publicist,” said Dr. Herks. He said the “we” softly, as if he hadn’t the right to use it and wanted Mom to know that he knew. Then he turned to me in case I didn’t know what a publicist was. “Someone to help us sort through publicity and make sure it’s good publicity, not bad.”

  Martha snorted again.

  “Like it or not, Martha,” Mom told her, “someone’s going to try to exploit Kai. That’s why we have to find ways to protect him.”

  And that’s when I finally got it. Either he was taken care of by us, or he’d be taken over by people who only wanted to make money from him.

  “We’re going to need the backing of top veterinarians, folklorists, psychologists, professors…,” Dr. Herks said.

  “Quacks, nuts, and academics.” Martha stood up, shoving her chair roughly to one side.

  “Don’t you walk away from this, Martha,” Mom said as Martha started down the corridor.

  “Not walking here,” Martha called back. “Running!”

  Their voices were getting loud.

  “Shhhh,” I said, pointing at the stall. “You’ll wake him.” I spoke slowly, as if talking to children. “He needs time to grow up. He needs Robbie and me to play with him. He needs to learn.”

  “Learn what?” Mom asked.

  “Learn what he likes—learn what he wants to be. And what he doesn’t want to be. What if he became one of the bad centaurs in the Greek stories when he could be more like Chiron, who was a great teacher?”

  “Ari’s right, you know,” Dr. Herks said. “We’ve been thinking too much about keeping Kai hidden when we should have been thinking about what he could do to help himself once he’s discovered.”

  Mom looked at him. “Oh my Lord!”

  “What is it? Are you all right, Hannah?” He looked entirely stressed out. I wondered if he was going to faint again.

  “I just realized that’s what I’ve been doing with Robbie.” She looked past Dr. Herks to me. “Keeping him hidden when I should have been thinking about—”

  “Hannah, I never meant any such thing,” Dr. Herks told her.

  But I knew what to say. “Mom, Robbie needed that time with us here at the farm to do his learning, and now he knows how to talk to grown-ups as well as kids. He knows who he is. Maybe he should go to school next year. Doesn’t Kai deserve the same?”

  “She’s right,” Dr. Herks said. “Maybe we need to think about finding someone to teach and train him. Both of them, actually.”

  “Horse pucky!” Martha was back, shaking her finger at us. “There’s no one who’s got a horse like Kai, so how are they gonna train him better than I can? Or Hannah can? In fact, they probably can’t train him any better than Ari can.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I muttered. But then I looked up. “That’s it. We shouldn’t train him as we do a horse. Because he’s not a horse. And he’s not a boy. He’s both.” I smiled for the first time since those flashes in the night. “Robbie saw that first. We have to teach Kai what we can. And he’ll teach us the rest.”

  “I already knew that,” said Martha, and once again she walked away.

  17

  Reporters

  THE NEXT DAY WAS A GOOD DAY, or at least as good as a day can be when you believe something bad is about to happen and nothing does. We kept expecting phone calls that didn’t come, riders who never showed to take their horses out for exercise, knocks on the door by police wanting to talk to the doctor with the gun, or groups of folks arriving to demand a viewing of the centaur.

  But when nothing happened by the end of the day, we all started to relax.

  Martha and I had let Kai run in the enclosed corridor until he was tired out. After a nap, we had him run again.

  “Best thing for a young one,” Martha said. “Get the jim-jams out.”

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  “Oldest of six,” she said.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her mention a family. I waited to hear more. But she was done with her surprises.

  * * *

  Once dinner was over, Robbie and Kai read books together and then, with my evening chores finished, Robbie and I taught Kai how to play Monopoly. Since Kai had no idea what money was, or houses, hotels, jails, or trains, there was a lot of teaching and very little playing. It frustrated Robbie, who loved games, and I got really tired of explaining stuff that I thought everybody already knew, but Kai just took it all in eagerly.

  Martha watched us from the doorway and was notably closemouthed. That should have been a warning to us all.

  I began to yawn, and the yawns became contagious, so Martha shooed Robbie and me off to the house, and Dr. Herks said he’d stay the night in front of Kai’s stall.

  * * *

  Once in bed, I fell asleep and dreamed of Robbie all grown up, sitting tall on a horse, cowboy hat on his head. There was music playing in the background, and he was staring past a high fence to a green meadow beyond. A sign on the fence read CENTAUR FIELD. It was night, and the sky was filled with shooting stars. Background music swelled. Everything felt right.

  I was deep in the meadow-and-stars dream when a loud hammering made me bolt upright in bed. I woke to learn that the hammering was real and at our front door. Despite our positive attitude and yesterday’s ease, everything had all gone wrong.

  As Martha says, “Life bites your bottom when you’re least expecting it.”

  It turned out there was a gaggle of reporters at the front door, from the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, the UPI wire service, the Greenfield Recorder, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

  Gaggle was Martha’s word for it. “Like silly geese,” she said later. “All honking and with no ideas of their own.”

  By the time I’d gotten dressed and downstairs, Mom had invited the reporters in for coffee. At least that stopped the noise.

  “Oh, good, Ari, you’re up,” Mom said when I came into the kitchen looking for breakfast. “Go find Martha and Gerry, and then get your brother up and dressed.”

  I wanted to stay and hear what they were discussing, but she gave me the Look, which she reserved for special occasions. It meant I really need you to do this now!

  So I ran out to Martha’s house and banged on her door till she answered it, her hair startled into place with not one or two but three red rubber bands.

  “Reporters,” I said. “In the kitchen. Having coffee. I’ve got to get Dr. Herks.”

  Martha tucked her gray T-shirt into her jeans, slipped on her sneakers, exchanged the red rubber bands for one green, one blue, and ran past me, saying over her shoulder, “He’s in the barn.” Then she was gone, charging up the ramp and through our back door.

  In the barn, I found Dr. Herks sitting in a chair in front of the stall, staring straight ahead and looking as if he had one of Martha’s red rubber bands stretched around his hea
d, tight enough to cause a massive headache. The table and other chairs had been moved back to where they belonged.

  Grabbing him by the sleeve, I shook his arm. “Gerry, Gerry.…” When his eyes blinked, they weren’t at all muzzy with sleep but wide and fierce. “Dr. Herks, it’s Ari. We’ve got visitors.”

  “Who?” he barked. “Where?” as if he was still in the army.

  “Reporters. Having coffee with Mom in the kitchen.”

  “Right!” he said. “You stay here.”

  “Mom told me to get Robbie up and dressed.”

  He nodded, stood. “Do what your mother says, only bring him out to the barn as soon as you can.”

  “I will.”

  Then he, too, was gone at a run.

  I followed as quickly as I could, making my way past the kitchen door, where I could see a group of reporters eating Mom’s blueberry muffins and guzzling coffee.

  No one seemed to be talking. Yet.

  * * *

  Robbie was already up and in a fresh T-shirt and pants. Mom always leaves his clothes at the foot of his bed. Usually he manages to dress on his own and get into the chair and wheel into the kitchen. But his chair was up against the far wall, which meant it must have rolled away in the night. Sometimes the brake wasn’t set well enough, and the floors in this old house slope a bit. No matter how it had happened, it meant he hadn’t been able to get into the chair on his own.

  “What’s all that noise?”

  “Reporters. That’s all I know.” I pushed the wheelchair over so he could do his little bounce and roll into it, picking up a second book as he did so.

  We went past the kitchen and out the back, and I wheeled him to the barn. He had a book of fairy tales with him. The Olive Fairy Book. “To read to Kai.”

  “Isn’t that a bit over Kai’s head?”

  “Maybe today. Not tomorrow.”

  I ruffled his hair. “Smart guy!”

  “He is.”

  “I meant you.”

  Robbie grinned up at me. “Kai’s body is growing so fast, his brain must be growing fast, too.”