The Horsewoman(3)

There was always a mystery, even some magic, to what horses knew. And didn’t.

Now I wanted Coronado to know where Mom was, and take me to her.





THREE



I’D RIDDEN CORONADO plenty, worked him out when Mom and Caroline traveled to look at horses for the barn, even jumped him one time when Mom was down with the flu.

This time I was just along for the ride, headed back out the trail along the Palm Beach Point canal, past the Nason barn next to the huge new barn being built by Wellington newcomers, a Kentucky family with money to burn.

Usually I loved being out here, loved the solitude of it and the quiet and the open space. Mom said she did, too, though sometimes I got more enjoyment when Mom wasn’t with me.

Not now. All I could think of was the question she’d once asked me about people who don’t ride. “How can they really feel alive?”

Please let her ask me again.

If her horse came back to the barn alone and she was somewhere out here, it had to be bad.

Coronado and I weren’t going fast. It’s one of the myths of our sport that a horse has to be going fast to throw its rider.

We were out into one of the last undeveloped parts of Wellington. Someday there would be barns out here, too.

Where was she? Was she badly injured? I could feel the panic building inside me. If somebody hadn’t found her by now, put her in a golf cart, or an ambulance, I was going to be the one. There had to be a damn good reason why she had ended up off her horse.

My eyes kept searching the narrow canal as we moved north, not wanting to see her down a glorified ditch.

If I hadn’t been late this morning, none of this would have happened.

I saw her then.

Saw her and felt the air coming out of me all at once, as if I’d been the one who’d gotten thrown. She was maybe fifty yards ahead, between the trail and the canal, on her side.

Motionless.

Except that her body seemed to be going in two different directions at once. The boots I’d ordered special from New York City, for her birthday a few weeks ago, were pointing toward the water, and her upper body was pointing toward the trail.

I was afraid my mother might have broken her neck. I’d seen it happen once before, in person, a Grand Prix event. A horse had refused a jump and threw his rider, who’d gone down and had stayed down until the ambulance was in the ring. He recovered from the injury to walk again, eventually. But he never rode again.

I walked Coronado to her, knelt down. Her eyes were closed, but I could see that she was breathing. She was still wearing her helmet, caked with dirt, like the rest of her.

I knew enough not to move her. I just leaned close.

“Mom,” I said. “I got you.”

Then I took the phone out of my back pocket and dialed 911 thinking, Yeah, Becky, you got her.

A half hour too late.





FOUR



AWAKE, IF NOT ALERT, Mom was telling us about the fox that had appeared out of nowhere.

She had come through the surgery to repair the small fracture in her pelvis and the torn medial collateral ligament in her left knee. She had narrowly missed puncturing a lung, but there was no treatment but the passage of time to heal the two broken ribs.

They had been going slowly, she said, but suddenly Coronado had reared up on his hind legs, making an unfamiliar, guttural sound. He threw her off to the side, then fell on her before she had the chance to roll away. She said she felt as if she were drowning. She tried to breathe, but couldn’t, as if she were underwater, not underneath her horse. The last thing she remembered was the day going completely dark.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Grandmother said, barely hiding the fear beneath her anger.

Daniel liked to say that Caroline Atwood wasn’t just any tough old bird, she was the toughest of them all. Not tonight.

“I don’t feel lucky,” Mom said, her words dying in the air a few inches from her mouth.

“Well, you are,” her mother said.

“People talk all the time about being strong in the broken places,” Mom said. She paused, wincing as she took in a breath. “Except I feel like all my places are broken places right now.”

She reached out. I took her hand, gently, afraid of squeezing hard enough to break it.

“Finally found something I can’t fix myself,” she said. “Me.”

She managed a small smile then, though it appeared to take all the energy she had in her. I’d never seen her strength at such a low point.

I’d been lucky in my life, luckier than a lot of other riders I’d visited in the hospital when they had gotten hurt. Even with my share of spills, I’d never broken anything.

I remembered the first time I fell off a horse. Grandmother had been in the practice ring that day. She hadn’t even made a move in my direction. When I’d finally cleaned myself off and walked over to her, she’d seen my red eyes and said, “If you want to cry, go watch a sad movie.”

We’d always been big on tough love in our family, but now the injured rider was Mom.

“How’s my horse?” Mom said now.

Now I felt myself smiling, for the first time since I’d found her.

“Pissed,” I said. “He couldn’t understand why he didn’t get to come to the hospital, too.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” she said, “or they’ll be wheeling me back into surgery.”