Mayfly Melodies

Nine

Caroline

PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions—Susan Pease Banitt

Caroline was a pretty girl.

It was something she'd always known. It wasn't a conceited notion. Not exactly. More like she knew that she had the type of face that made other people turn their heads to watch as she walked by. This had been true since she was a child. People always commented on the colour of her eyes or the soft, natural waves of her perfectly gold hair. It was these comments that had caused Caroline's mother, Willa, to begin entering her in pageants all across the state of Texas.

Caroline had gone through with it all. She'd spent hours in makeup chairs, allowing her mom to apply fake eyelashes and copious amounts of makeup that made Caroline feel like she was getting ready to walk onto a movie set or down a fashion runway instead of onto a rickety stage in front of a panel of three bored looking people who judged her on everything from the top of her perfectly styled hair to the bottoms of her perfectly white shoes. She'd let herself get stuffed into a dress that made walking difficult and suffered through hours sitting around waiting for the judges to release the winners.

What was more, Caroline had been good at pageants. She'd won numerous titles, both in the glitz pageant and the natural pageant circuits. It had seemed an almost expected thing in her house for her to compete in beauty pageants. Noah was always gone with their father, Hank, on the weekends, heading off to this rodeo and that. When Aaron was old enough, he'd joined Noah and Hank and the three of them had travelled across state lines, hell across the whole damn country, just to compete in a rodeo.

And Noah was so good at it. He always had been. He'd understood animals in a way that Caroline had never seen before. She saw it in the way that he interacted with them, from the smallest chicken to the largest bull. Noah treated them all the same. He gave respect to the animals, didn't treat them like they were dirt beneath his boot the way she'd seen others do. Caroline didn't know if it was the universe's way of thanking him for his compassion, but Noah always seemed to at least place whenever he entered a rodeo. Most of the time, he won. But, her brother was modest. He would say that the bull had gone easy on him or that the steer hadn't been running as fast as the others in the roping categories. Sometimes, he'd give credit to Rafiki, stating that the only reason he'd won was because of the horse.

Caroline knew better. Noah was just good. He had a natural edge on the other competitors. It was engrained in him, right down to his very DNA. Aaron had shared this same edge. He was young but anybody could tell that the youngest of the Hartley kids was going to be a sure fire force on the circuit.

There were days, as Caroline and Willa had driven off to another pageant and the boys had gone in the opposite direction to a rodeo, that Caroline felt as if she should be have been with her brothers and father instead of with her mom. She'd always wanted a chance to prove herself, whether it be on the barrels or calf roping or on the back of a bronc or bull. She'd wanted to show that she was more than a pretty face, that she too, like her brothers, was a force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't as if Caroline was incompetent on a horse. She'd grown up with animals her entire life. She'd probably slept in hay more times than she had slept in a bed as a child. Sometimes, she swore that Gypsy could understand her. She'd look up into the horse's calm brown eyes and spill all of her secrets — boys she liked, fights with her brothers, problems at school —and she'd always felt a deep, tangible connection that told her that Gyp knew exactly what it was that Caroline was trying to tell her.

Caroline had gotten Gypsy when she was fifteen. The horse had been five years old, trained in show jumping and had been competing for a year already. While her brothers had practiced for the rodeo and Caroline had done her pageants, she'd developed another love, show jumping. Since her parents wouldn't let her train for the rodeo, she'd seen jumping as the next best thing.