The Horsewoman(12)

“Well, kiddo,” Mom said, “we might be about to find out.”

Then she said to leave her alone, maybe by some minor miracle she might get some sleep tonight.





ELEVEN



THE NEXT MORNING Grandmother sat at the kitchen table eating her usual breakfast of nuts and berries and oatmeal. I was having coffee and toast.

“Your mother said you went to see her,” she said.

“She wants me to ride Coronado,” I said.

“So I heard,” she said.

She sipped tea. I sipped my coffee, happy that I’d only taken a few bedtime hits of tequila, sleep having come to me more easily than I’d expected on one of the longest days of my life.

“If you don’t want me to ride Coronado, go find another rider.”

“It wouldn’t be difficult.”

“So what’s stopping you?”

“Your mother is stopping me!” She spoke even more loudly than usual now. “She wants the horse to stay in the family and she actually believes you can pull this off.”

“So does Daniel,” I said, taking a self-consciously defensive stance.

“Stop taking a goddamn poll about whether you want to do this!” she said, as if trying to out-shout me. “However you got here, you’re being given a chance to ride a goddamn Olympic horse all the way to the Olympics in Paris goddamn France.”

She was leaning forward now. I’d done the same without realizing it. “You want to ride this horse or not?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at her watch. She said she needed an hour to meet with Doc Howser over at WEF about another horse of ours he’d just vetted for sale.

“And when I get back,” Grandmother said, “I want you to get your skinny ass up on that horse and act as if you belong there.”





TWELVE



DANIEL HAD SET up the course for ten jumps, not the sixteen I’d encounter if Coronado and I did make it to the International Arena for the Grand Prix, the Sunday after next.

Once he set the course, we walked it, just as if we were showing for real, pacing off the distance between the jumps, six or seven strides for the horse, except for the triple Daniel had set up in the middle. He’d also thrown in a couple of tough rollback turns, where the trick was to come out of one jump already making a sharp turn into the next, a simultaneous challenge of speed and distance.

When we finished the walk, I turned and looked back at the course, picturing the order of the jumps in my head, waving my right hand in the air in front of me, as if I were conducting an equestrian orchestra.

“You know how to get a horse around,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, but the horse is Sky,” I said.

“Horses for courses,” he said. “And only one course matters in the next few minutes, and one horse.”

“This shit is about to get real,” I said.

“En el nombre del padre y el hijo y el Espíritu Santo,” he said as he made the sign of the cross.

“Do I need divine intervention today?”

He smiled and said, “I want the good Lord on our side even if your grandmother is not,” he said.

“She probably thinks she could take God in a fair fight,” I said.

“Attitude,” Daniel said.

“Grandmother thinks it’s a bad thing.”

“Maybe not so much today.”

We walked back to where Emilio was standing with Coronado, just inside the gate. Grandmother was back and hanging over the fence at the far end of the ring—the schooling ring at our barn.

“Let’s do this, Maverick,” he said.

Baby steps, I told myself, on an animal whose normal stride was about ten feet long. Maybe more on a horse as big as Coronado, so significantly bigger than Sky.

I got into the saddle, patted the side of Coronado’s head, and leaned over and said, “Just you and me today, big boy.”

The worst thing I could do was transfer my nervous energy to the horse. He’d been Mom’s horse the way Sky was mine. Today I had to start making him my own.

It was just Coronado and me and Grandmother and Daniel and the grooms who’d come out of the barn to watch. And a video camera. Mom had called from the hospital and told Daniel to have somebody video my session on Coronado. But as I began to walk Coronado around the ring, I heard the slam of a car door.

I stopped Coronado and watched Mr. Gorton get out of his Porsche and stand in front of it, leaning on the hood. He’d parked so close to the barn I wondered if Grandmother had promised him a preferred parking spot inside. I was sure he was looking at me. He wanted me to know he was here, riding what he called his horse.

Owners didn’t belong at the in-gate. At WEF, some of them stood there for everybody to see—and to put more pressure on the riders. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do now. No way Caroline Atwood had just up and told Mr. Gorton, in time for him to blow over here from Palm Beach, that I was riding Coronado this morning. Maybe she had, or maybe it was someone else at our barn. And maybe he’d just shown up, unannounced, to see his horse.

Blinders, I told myself.

So I didn’t acknowledge his presence, not even with a nod, just turned Coronado back toward the course, stopped to show him a couple of the jumps. The next time around, still warming him up, I let him out a little so that he could get his legs underneath him while I made sure I remembered the course that Daniel had set up for us.