Off Course (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 12) Read online

  OFF COURSE

  BY

  CLAIRE SVENDSEN

  Copyright © 2014 Claire Svendsen

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, places or events is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  You would think that seeing my long, lost father would have been the best thing that could ever happen to me. Well it wasn’t. I’d come to terms with the fact that he abandoned us after my sister died. I’d even come to terms with the fact that not once in those nine years had he ever called or written or sent a birthday card. I’d given up holding on to the one faded photo that still remained in our house and the t-shirt that once smelt of him. He was dead to me and yet he so totally wasn’t. He was standing there in the ring at the Halloween horse show, telling me I should have won the open jumper class when my pony just came in second against horses that were a lot bigger and had a lot more experience than he did.

  For a moment I thought that I was dreaming. That I must have fallen and hit my head. It was the only explanation. Why else would my dad be standing there, the anonymous donor who sponsored the class to draw out local talent? If he really was my father, wouldn’t he have called first? Stopped by the house? Come to talk to me before now?

  Missy Ellison looked from me to my father, smiling like it was some kind of joke but I knew that it wasn’t. He looked different. Older. Weathered in a way I hadn’t expected like leather that had been left out too long in the sun but I knew it was him.

  I closed my legs around Bluebird’s sides and backed him out of the line.

  “But you haven’t got your ribbon,” Missy called after me. “Or your check.”

  “You can keep it,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

  I took Bluebird back to the trailer, heart pounding in my chest. I half expected my dad to follow me. To grab my arm and pull me into a hug and tell me that he was sorry for everything that had happened but that would have been too easy and I wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Besides, who did he think he was?

  “Can we go?” I asked Esther. “Please?”

  Mickey and Ethan had followed me back to the trailer, confused and curious. They hadn’t heard me call that man my father and for that I was glad.

  “Where is your ribbon?” Faith asked.

  “I’ll get it later,” I said.

  I untacked Bluebird, hoping silently that no one would ask me any questions because I didn’t think I could even talk about it without bursting into tears but I should have known that Mickey would never let it slide. She was like a dog with a bone. Once she stuck her teeth into something, she didn’t let go until she had all the answers.

  “What really happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “But you have to,” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  I put my tack in the trailer and grabbed Bluebird’s shipping boots, pulling bits of shavings off them so that they didn’t stick into him on the way back. Concentrating on it like it was the most important thing in the world so that I wouldn’t cry. Mickey stood there glaring at me.

  “I tell you everything,” she said.

  “I can’t talk about it right now,” I said. “You have to let it go.”

  “If you were really my best friend, you’d tell me,” she said.

  I brushed past her standing there with a hurt look on her face. Why couldn’t she understand that some things were too bad to talk about?

  The trailer ride home was full of awkward silences from everyone except Faith, who was on cloud nine because she and Macaroni won the costume class. She was still clutching her blue ribbon when we got back to Sand Hill and unloaded the horses.

  “You can hang it on his stall if you like,” Esther told her.

  “Oh no, this is going in my bedroom,” she said seriously. “Besides, he might eat it.”

  “She’s probably right,” I said because on the way back Macaroni had started to eat Bluebird’s halter and now the leather had ugly teeth marks in it.

  Esther pulled me to one side after I’d put Bluebird in his stall. The others were in the tack room, I could hear them laughing about something. The sound was foreign, like I’d never laughed before and would never laugh again.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “And you don’t have to tell me but I just want you to know that everything is going to be okay.”

  “Nothing is going to be okay,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I rode my bike home with a mixture of dread and fear swirling around in my stomach. That morning Mom told me she had a dream about my father and then she said that when I got back we would talk about him. We never talked about him. Or my sister, Summer. Or any of it. At the time I just thought she was feeling sentimental or something but now I had to wonder if maybe she knew. Had he contacted her? Tried to get in touch with me? Asked her if he could come back into my life? I had so many questions and yet I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know the answers. I just wanted to forget it had ever happened. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to dig around a bit and find out what she knew, if she knew anything at all. Only when I got home, the house was dark. I let myself in and flicked on the lights.

  “Hello?” I called out but nobody was there.

  There was a note on the kitchen counter. Cat had apparently managed to cut herself and they took her to the emergency room. I didn’t see any pools of blood anywhere in the kitchen so I assumed it wasn’t serious. I opened the refrigerator and stood there looking at the food I didn’t feel like eating. Then I closed it again. I wasn’t hungry.

  I took a shower, standing under the scalding hot water for a lot longer than I normally would have because there was no one there to yell at me that I was using up all the hot water. Then I dressed in my rattiest, most comfortable old sweatpants and curled up on the couch watching reruns of Friends, waiting for them to come home. At some point I drifted off to sleep and when I woke up it was one o’clock in the morning and the house was still quiet.

  I sat up, feeling worried and mad at the same time, then checked my phone. They hadn’t even called to let me know what was happening or to see if I got home okay. For all they knew I could have fallen off at the show or been hit by a car riding my bike home from the barn. Not that Mom would care. Nowadays she only cared about Cat, the perfect daughter who had probably cut herself in the kitchen while helping Mom cook dinner. She’d gone from being parental enemy number one to world class daughter in one year. I knew Mom wished I was more like her.

  I went upstairs to bed. At some point my phone woke me. I looked at the screen and saw that it was my mother but I didn’t answer. Let her worry and think maybe I was lying in a ditch somewhere but the next morning when I listened to her message, she wasn’t worried at all. She just said that they were keeping Cat over night for observation because she had lost a lot of blood and that they were both going to stay with her. What on earth did she cut herself on, a chainsaw? I didn’t bother and call Mom back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning I rode my bike back to the barn. A cold front had swept in and an icy wind was blowing. The temperature had dropped about twenty degrees in one night. I wrapped my hoodie around me and wished I’d been able to find
my gloves because my fingers were frozen by the time I got to the barn.

  Bluebird was standing out in his field, his hair standing straight up in the breeze. He saw me and nickered, then galloped to the gate, sliding to a stop at the last minute and sending sand flying up into the air.

  “Someone is feeling frisky,” I said, grabbing his halter and slipping it on. “I guess you’re not really tired after your big day yesterday then?”

  He shook his head and snorted like he was saying of course he wasn’t.

  “So do you think you want to go for a ride?”

  I took him into the barn and put him in his stall. I felt on edge, half expecting my father to jump out at me. He had to know where I rode by now. It would have only taken him five seconds to figure it out and since I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t want to risk coming to the house and seeing my mother, the barn was the next logical place he’d pop up but he wasn’t there. There was only Esther, cleaning stalls with three wooly hats piled on top of her head.

  “I’m not going to miss this one bit,” she said when she saw me. “Cleaning stalls in the freezing cold? I can barely even feel my fingers.”

  “I know,” I said, rubbing mine which were still numb from my bike ride. “But you will miss it, won’t you?”

  “I’ll miss some of it,” she said, stopping to lean on her pitchfork. “You guys and these guys.” She rubbed Saffron’s head.

  “But what are you going to do?”

  She was silent for a minute like she didn’t want to tell me, then she finally said,” I’m going back home to Sweden.”

  “No,” I cried. “You’re leaving the country? But that means I won’t ever see you again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Esther brushed off my touchy, feely words like they were bugs. “I didn’t say I was going forever but my dad is sick. He has cancer. Stage four.” She paused. “He’s not going to get better and if I don’t spend this time with him, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

  Suddenly the pieces all clicked into place. Why Esther had been so distracted and why sometimes it looked like she’d been crying. Her father was dying and she wanted to be with him and felt guilty about all the time she was stuck here. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to ride. Her heart had been somewhere else all along. And I also felt guilty for pretending that my own father was dead when Esther so obviously wanted hers to live.

  “I guess you have to do what you have to do,” I said. “I’m going to go for a ride.”

  “Emily,” she called out after me. “We all have stuff that we don’t want to deal with but you can’t turn your back on things. You have to face them.”

  “I know,” I said.

  And it felt like she was talking about moving barns but it also felt like she was talking about my dad. Did I really have to face him? Why couldn’t he just go away again? I didn’t even know why he’d come here in the first place.

  Bluebird was fresh. He skittered sideways as leaves blew in front of him and snorted at the shavings bin as pieces were whisked out from under the tarp and blew away like fresh snow.

  “Cut it out,” I said through gritted teeth, holding him somewhere between my legs and my hands. “You’re not a racehorse.”

  Bluebird thought that he was. I let him canter up the trail to blow off steam but it just seemed to make him even more excited. By the time we got to the top of the ridge he was plunging and fretting beneath me, eager to gallop.

  “We can’t,” I told him. “We’re not allowed.”

  The fields stretched out in front of us, begging to be galloped across but we’d been forbidden from riding on them now that the old farm had been sold. I wasn’t too keen to have the bald construction worker yelling at me again or calling the cops but it was Sunday. I didn’t think they worked on Sundays. I strained to hear the sound of hammering or digging over the whistling of the wind but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “Oh who cares,” I finally said. “He can call the cops if he likes. Besides, by the time they got here, we’d be long gone.”

  We cut through the fence and I let the reins slip through my fingers, giving Bluebird his head and the freedom he so desperately wanted. He galloped down the hill and the wind whipped tears from my eyes, blowing all the horrible thoughts about my father out of my head so that the only thing that was left was the way we galloped with the wind.

  “Good boy,” I cried as my pony came back sweetly to me.

  The bottom of the field by the house had been dug up. The machines sat abandoned, the earth still filling their teeth and the rake marks they’d left behind a horrible reminder that the new owners were going to destroy the old farm and make it into something else. There were piles of fresh lumber by the barn and roofing supplies stacked up by the house.

  “They are really going to town,” I told Bluebird as he snorted at a shiny new tractor. “Still, at least no one is around to yell at us but we’d better go back just in case.”

  I was turning Bluebird away from the destruction when I saw something sitting there in the pile of new wood. The shiny grill of a stall front. The new owners weren’t going to keep camels after all. They were fixing the place up to house horses. And as I walked Bluebird back to Sand Hill, I felt excited and scared all at the same time because what if I might be able to board Bluebird there? But what if the new owners turned out to be someone horrible, like Jess and her father.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The week dragged on uneventfully. I had school and Cat came home from the hospital with stitches and medications and all the attention of my mother. It was like she was the only person who mattered anymore and Mom waited on her hand and foot while Cat sat on the couch with her arm propped up on pillows, getting pretty much whatever she wanted.

  But I was happy to sink into the background unnoticed. I had been waiting for Mom to tell me about her dream and about my father but now I didn’t want to know and every time the phone rung or someone came to the door, my heart leapt into my throat in case it was him because I wanted to see him but I also didn’t.

  By the time Saturday came around I was a nervous wreck and to make matters worse, Ethan and Faith were taking Wendell and Macaroni over to Fox Run and leaving Sand Hill behind.

  “I don’t want to go,” Faith said.

  She was standing in the barn aisle with tears in her eyes.

  “You have to,” I told her. “There isn’t going to be a Sand Hill anymore.”

  “I know,” she said sadly. “But what about you and Bluebird?”

  “We’ll be fine,” I told her. “You just concentrate on taking care of Macaroni. And make sure you do everything you can yourself. I don’t want you turning into one of those spoiled Fox Run girls, okay?”

  “Okay.” She nodded solemnly. “But you will come and see us, won’t you? And you’ll try and get a stall there?”

  “I don’t know what is going to happen,” I said.

  I could have lied and told her that of course I would try but the truth was that I couldn’t afford Fox Run and I certainly couldn’t afford to train with Missy Ellison and even if I could, Jess was there and I knew that she would stop at nothing to see me fail. Did I really want to be around someone like that? It didn’t exactly make riding and showing fun when someone was always trying to put you down and see you fail. Although it had seemed like Jess had her own problems. She’d excused herself during the open jumper class just to spite her father. I was sure that hadn’t gone down very well.

  “This sucks,” Mickey said.

  She was in front of Hampton’s stall watching her big bay Warmblood eat his hay. He was going over to Fox Run too, only not this week. Mickey had made her mom promise that Hampton could stay at Sand Hill until the last possible moment but I didn’t know how much longer her mom would keep that promise and even though Mickey didn’t want to leave, I knew she was excited about starting her new adventure in the world of dressage.

  “Change always sucks,” I said.

  “But our group i
s being ripped apart. You have to find a way to come to Fox Run. You just have to,” Mickey said.

  But it was hard to agree with her when I wasn’t even sure what I wanted.

  The trailer from Fox Run arrived to pick up the horses and by the time they were loaded, Faith was actually crying. Tears streamed down her face as she ran up to me and gave me a hug.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said.

  “But it won’t be the same,” she said, her voice all muffled.

  Ethan eventually pulled her off me and shoved her into the truck. She pressed her face against the window, waving madly until they disappeared from sight.

  “You would have thought they were moving to another country or something,” Mickey said.

  And I thought about what it would be like when Esther finally left because even though we’d had our differences, I still liked her very much and would be sad to see her go.

  “Want to go for a ride?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Of course.” She grinned.

  It was kind of ironic that Mickey was completely back into riding now that she’d decided to give up jumping for good. If I couldn’t jump again, it would have felt like a death sentence. But Mickey seemed happy that her feet were going to remain firmly on the ground and so did Hampton because even though it was Jess’s fault that Hampton didn’t want to jump anymore, he’d never really been that into it either.

  “My mom said I can get a dressage saddle,” she said as we rode the horses past the ring and out on the trail.

  “And one of those dressage bridles with the sparkly browbands that you’ve been drooling over?” I said.

  Mickey had been obsessing over the ones with pink rhinestones and I knew that all too soon Hampton was going to look less like a working hunter and more like a dressage prince.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Well you should at least make sure you get a blue one. After all, Hampton is a boy. Think about how he’s going to feel.”