Centaur Rising (14 page)

“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

T
HE 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 head, 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.”

“I get it. I get it! Now we're going out to the barn, and I'll bring you some breakfast in a few minutes. Better to eat it out here and not in the kitchen in front of the reporters. The company will be better in the stall.”

“A lot better,” he agreed.

*   *   *

When we got to the barn, everything was quiet in the stall. Kai was still asleep, nestled up against Agora's rump, thumb in his mouth.

I left Robbie by the door in the stall with his books,
The Olive Fairy Book
and a biography of General Custer. He'd already opened it and was deep into the introduction. As I turned the corner at the end of the corridor, I heard a tiny
snick
. Robbie had locked the door behind me. I breathed out, suddenly aware I'd been holding my breath.

By the time I got back to the house, the coffee meeting was over, a bunch of cards were on the kitchen table with the reporters' names and phone numbers, and they were leaving in their various cars.

“What did you tell them?” I asked.

Mom smiled. “I said we had a desperately ill animal here, but by next Sunday, if it was well enough, they could come see for themselves whether the pictures their Mr. Fern was shopping around were real or not.”

“So it
was
Fern,” I said. “And he
did
get pictures.”

Mom nodded. “Not great pictures,” she said. “They were pretty gray and fuzzy, but enough to make the reporters very curious.”

“They seemed okay with your mom's proposal,” Dr. Herks said. “Especially since I told them I'd been up all night with the horse.”

Martha snorted. “It was the straw in your hair that cinched it.”

“Yes, the old hayseed trick,” Mom said.

I gaped. “How did that get in your hair? You were asleep in the chair when I woke you.”

He grinned. “Professional secret.”

Clearly he'd been in to check up on Kai sometime during the night, maybe even slept in the straw, which had to be more comfortable than the chair.

“Robbie needs breakfast.”

“Oh, right!” Mom began bustling around the kitchen and put together a hard-boiled egg, some toast with jam, and a large glass of milk. “You find something for yourself, Ari. I'll take this out to him.”

“I'm off to the office,” Dr. Herks said. “Don't want them to forget I'm the Big Dog. But I'll be back soon.”

*   *   *

I grabbed a bowl of cereal with bananas and wolfed it down, took a glass of milk with me, and finally went back to the stable. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I started eating.

Mrs. Angotti was already out in the ménage with Joey. She was never this early, which was odd. Joey was up on Bor, who was still much too big for him to handle, so his mother, in her jodhpurs, was leading them around the ring.

Mom was standing by the fence watching, a letter in her hand. When she noticed me, she handed me the letter. “Mrs. A came super early to give me this. What do you think?”

Dear Mrs. Martins,

I meant no harm, really. And I told Zoe it was a secret. She didn't actally believe me anyway. So it wasn't really my fault her teacher sent it to the contest. But I'll take the blame. I'm really and truely sorry for any inconvenience I caused.

Angela

“So?”

“She misspelled two words,” I said.

“I mean what do you think of what she says?”

“She's afraid of being told off, she's afraid of being banned from the farm, and she's never had to take the blame for anything in her life.” I reread the letter quickly. “Also she doesn't know how to spell, which, for a junior in high school, is pretty bad.” I took a deep breath. “Or else she just wrote the letter in a hurry because her mother made her, and she didn't take time to revise it. After all, she did spell
inconvenience
right!”

“Just because she's a lousy speller doesn't necessarily make her a bad person, honey. Maybe she really does feel sorry. Maybe she wouldn't hurt Kai for all the world.”

I shrugged but didn't argue. It
could
be true. Stranger things had happened. I mean—we just had a centaur born in our barn.

Then I realized: Mom had confided in me and asked my opinion about something. I handed the letter back to her and smiled.

She folded the paper three times and put it in her pocket. “Angela said she'd take the blame.”

“Then hold her to it.”

Mom nodded. “I plan to. Nothing more needs to be said. And you have chores to do.”

I saluted her, and we both laughed. Then I went to the barn to start mucking out the first of the stalls.

 

18

Kai's Run

F
OR HALF A WEEK
, things seemed to get back to normal, or at least to the
new
normal, which meant having less than half our usual riders and horses. Mom said we'd be all right, and maybe even more than all right once Kai had grown a little more and could hold his own with visitors.

He was already a huge hit with everyone in on the secret. So much so, we had to ration his visiting time. And the visitors had to be cautioned about feeding him too many apples and sugar cubes, especially the Angottis. He might have looked like a seven-year-old boy on the top, but he was still part foal and occasionally goofy.

Joey and Angela were allowed to visit Kai only with supervision, but the Proper kids were let in anytime they wanted to read to him.

Kai had to stay
in
the stall because we didn't dare let him out for a run again, and the only thing he liked more than running turned out to be books. Robbie was reading him nonfiction about stars and constellations, about the history of the Morgan horse, and some novels as well. Kai couldn't seem to get enough of it.

“Can we bring a TV into the barn?” Robbie asked one night at bedtime. “Please, Mom—I think he'd especially like
Mister Ed
.”

She smiled but shook her head. “We don't have the right kind of outlets to plug it in and no proper aerial out there. Also, we can't chance a TV man or an electrician in the barn asking questions, poking about. But I'll talk to Gerry. Maybe he'll have some ideas.”