Dream Country by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

Sage had found the raisin bread and ice cream gone, replaced by whole wheat bread and fat-free yogurt.
    So Sage needed a lot of prayers. She said one now, to her brother Jake. With the train rattling west, with her boyfriend anxiously waiting across the dark, hot car, she touched her twin’s carved face and prayed her heart out:
    “Let me have a boy,” she said in the tiniest voice.
    Her brother had been lost in a canyon, and her father had disappeared from Sage’s world. Even before her mother had made the decision to move east, her father was gone. Sage had a long memory, and she remembered the day her big, wonderful cowboy father had become a ghost.
    For years, Sage had prayed for Jake to return. If he did, maybe her father wouldn’t stay a prisoner on his ranch. He told her he was herding cows, growing feed, but Sage knew otherwise: Her father was riding trails, scouring the long hills, searching for the little boy he had lost.
    “A boy,” Sage prayed, touching her belly with one hand and her necklace with the other. “Let it be a boy.”
    “What?” Ben asked. “I can’t hear you.”
    “Nothing,” Sage replied from across the car. “I’ll be right there.” She stayed where she was, crouched in the corner, concentrating with all her might on the medallion she held in her hand. She could feel the small bone face pressing hard into her palm, and her lips kept moving in prayer.
    Maybe if she brought a boy into her family, everyone could be happy again.

Chapter Five
    T he morning after she’d found Sage gone, Daisy stood on the back porch watching gold leaves shower down from the birch trees on the hill. They sparkled in the shadows, a constant flow of tiny leaves falling down to the cold ground. She hadn’t slept much. Now, as she stared at the leaves, she thought of Sage out there in the world.
    The sugar maple at the end of the driveway had turned scarlet, as bright as Daisy had ever seen it. The colors were late this fall, owing to an especially cool, rainy summer. She and Sage waited for “the peak” every year: the day when the fall colors were the brightest, the most spectacular. She held herself tighter. Today was the peak, and Sage wasn’t here to see it, and the sharpest pain she’d ever felt stabbed Daisy in her chest.
    “It’s cold out here.” Hathaway came to stand beside her sister. “What are you doing without a sweater on?”
    “I’m warm enough,” Daisy said.
    Hathaway took her hands and rubbed them. They were numb and stiff, and Daisy hardly noticed her sister’s warm fingers, the gentleness with which she put her arm around Daisy’s shoulders and led her through the kitchen door.
    “Where is she?” Daisy asked. “I can’t stand not knowing, Hath. What if she’s cold?”
    “She’s taking care of herself,” Hathaway said. “That’s what this is all about. She had to run away so she could figure out what she’s going to do. When she’s clearer, she’ll come home.”
    “But where
is
she?” Daisy asked, feeling thick, not hearing. She had called the ranch to ask James if he had heard from her, but the telephone had just rung and rung. He didn’t have an answering machine, but someone—Dalton, Louisa—should have been there. “I thought maybe she’d try her father. Whenever she’s this mad, she talks about going to him—”
    “She wouldn’t go to him right now,” Hathaway said gently.
    “Because she’s pregnant,” Daisy said, holding her head in her hands.
    “Yes,” Hathaway said.
    How had Daisy not known? She and Sage had always had such a strong connection, sometimes Daisy would know what was happening before Sage told her. The night Sage had come down with chicken pox, Daisy had walked into her dark bedroom and known that when she turned on the light she would see spots. The time Sage had rescued a skier caught in the rope tow at Sugardust Mountain, Daisy had had a premonition of her saving a boy’s life.
    “I wish she knew she could have told