The old man just looked at her with absolute incomprehension.
It was at that moment she spotted the horse. The horse was saddled, bridled and unattended.
Unattended.
She could just go.
It wasn’t logical, nothing rational about her plan. She was just going to go and she didn’t know anything other than to go, just go, and let the chips fall where they may.
She climbed up, onto the blanket that served as the saddle and taking the reins she kicked at the horse, urging him to go.
The horse gave her a funny sideways glance before stretching out in an easy canter. They rode across the pale creamy sand at a quick clip, Tally’s heart racing at the same speed they were traveling.
This was crazy, foolish, dangerous. But she didn’t turn back and didn’t slow. She felt as if she were running for her very life. Or make that, running from her very life.
She wouldn’t be trapped again. She wouldn’t let others control her life or her destiny.
She’d had years of answering to others, years of giving up her own hopes, years of waiting and she couldn’t wait any more.
With the dazzling sun shining in her eyes and the heat exploding all around them, Tally tried to get a better grip, the blanket style saddle unfamiliar. Part of her brain told her to slow down and another part was just wild—frenzied—and she simply kept going at that reckless, breakneck speed.
Maybe if she’d had a different past, a different experience with life, she could sit in the camp and wait. But she wasn’t good at waiting, not when she felt as though she’d spent her whole life waiting.
Tally wasn’t an only child. In fact, she was far from an only, being the eldest in a family of five children. She’d been responsible for so much. She’d been responsible for well, virtually everything.
From an early age Tally walked her younger brothers and sisters to and from school, fed and clothed them when their mother had to return to work after their father’s back injury put him virtually to bed for the rest of his life. Tally oversaw homework, meals, shopping, laundry, cleaning. If one of the youngest needed a parent for Open House or Back to School Night it was Tally who showed up more often than Mom.
As a teenager Tally used to dream about leaving home, about the day she’d pack everything into her car and just go—flee the pressure and responsibilities—but by the time she graduated from high school her mother’s health was in decline and Tally knew she couldn’t go. Couldn’t walk away from the younger ones who wanted her, or her parents who needed her.
Instead of escaping in real life, she escaped in her mind, using books and movies, theater and photography to go places she couldn’t go in person. The Amazon? She was there! Everest? She climbed it! Egypt? On the next camel. Paris? Bring on the Eiffel Tower.
It wasn’t until the youngest one, her brother Jude, started high school that she allowed herself to dream of actually going away. But when fifteen-year-old Jude turned sixteen and earned his driver’s license and made Varsity on the football team she realized the baby Deavers was old enough, big enough and strong enough to take care of himself.
Her parents begged her not to go, pleaded that they still needed her but Tally was nearly twenty-six, had never been anywhere, had done nothing for the past ten years but take care of everyone else and she was going to go now. She’d have her turn. Even if it killed her.
And staring at the huge expanse of desert with sand and sand and more sand Tally realized her need for her turn might just kill her, too.
What the hell was she doing in Baraka—or Ouaha, or wherever she was at the moment—anyway?
Tally didn’t know if she slipped, or the horse stumbled, but one moment she was on the horse, and the next, she’d somehow lost her balance and was falling. Tally tumbled to the ground even as the horse continued on.
The fall knocked the air from her but the burning sand quickly roused her.
Gasping, she dragged herself to her feet, wincing at the pain in her side. Oh, that hurt.
Eyes damp, she lifted a trembling hand and brushed the grains of sand from her cheek and collar. For a moment she felt a surge of panic, but just as quickly she smothered it. She wasn’t going to panic. She was going to be strong. Tears wouldn’t help. Just determination. And lots of resolve.
Gathering her resolve, Tally set off, heading in the same direction the horse had gone. It was relatively easy following the horse’s hoofprints.
Ignoring the blistering sun, she walked on. This is what she’d done the past five years, she reminded herself. Ever since she left home she’d been living with a knapsack slung on her back, traveling to the most remote corners of the world, photographing the children time seemed to have forgotten.