The Horsewoman(4)

“I’ll try,” I said, gently squeezing her hand again. “But you know how hard it is for me to hold back the funny.”

“None of this is funny!” my grandmother said.

She was on the other side of Mom’s bed. In a gallant attempt at affording us privacy, Daniel stood in the corner.

“You’ll ride him for me tomorrow?” Mom said to me.

“Don’t worry about that right now, Maggie,” Grandmother said.

“You worry about me,” Mom said. “I’ll worry about Coronado.”

“I got you,” I said.

“Could we stop worrying about the goddamn horse for one minute?” Grandmother snapped. “Good God, Maggie. He threw you. He fell on you. It wasn’t the other way around.”

“But then he led me right to her,” I said.

Grandmother made a snorting sound, not unlike one of her own horses.

“Great,” she said. “Million-dollar rescue animal. Just what we needed to bet the farm on.”

“Mom,” Maggie said, “that’s a little dramatic.”

“Maybe,” Grandmother said. “But if not now, you tell me when?”

My mom closed her eyes now. For a moment, I thought she’d gone right to sleep with the rest of us still in the room.

“She needs rest,” Grandmother said.

My mom opened her eyes.

“I need to get better,” Mom said. “I asked Dr. Garry about the recovery time.”

“Probably asked before the anesthesia wore off,” Grandmother said.

“I asked how many weeks,” Mom said. “Doc gave me one of those patronizing doctor smiles and said, ‘You mean months.’”

She squeezed my hand now, hard enough to surprise me.

“I told him I don’t have months,” she said.

My whole life, I had been watching Mom in and out of the ring. I’d seen her compete from here to Calgary and back. Seen her take on the most famous riders in the world and beat them, men and women. I knew how much pride she took in not showing her emotions, win or lose, especially after she lost. She was every bit as tough as her mother, even though she didn’t feel the need to broadcast that.

But I thought she might cry now.

“This was the one,” she said.

I didn’t have the words to make her feel better, or hurt less. Maybe no one did right now. I stood there holding her hand and wished it had been me who’d gotten thrown and not her. Wished that for once in my stupid life I’d been on time.

“Doctors can be wrong about the speed of athletes’ recovery time,” I said.

That was all I had.

She looked up at me and said, “Told you before. Don’t make me laugh, kiddo.”

Then she closed her eyes again. A few minutes later she was asleep. Grandmother led Daniel and me out of the room.

Once Daniel had gently shut the door behind us, Grandmother said, “I hate this sport.”

I looked at her.

“You know you don’t mean that,” I said.

“Don’t tell me what I mean,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You want to be sorry about something?” Grandmother snapped. “Be sorry you weren’t there.”

Then she walked away.





FIVE

Maggie



HAPPY NEW YEAR to me, Maggie Atwood thought bitterly.

No one in the room had spoken of the multiple Olympic qualifiers over the next several months that would decide which four riders—one an alternate—would represent the United States in jumping in Paris. Nobody had even spoken the word Olympics. But it was the thousand-pound horse in the room. Like her dream horse had tried to crush her whole world.

She’d gone out for a trail ride, an equestrian walk in the park, and ended up here.

Broken.

She’d been bred to her sport the way horses were bred to it. She aced the fractional calculations that made the difference between winning and losing—the split seconds of timing, the measure of an inside turn, the pressure of a horse’s back leg on a rail that stayed in place versus one that fell, the numbers that measured the distance between first place and fifth. When she made mistakes in the ring, she owned them. Somebody else won. You lost.

And sometimes being the better rider was less important than riding the better horse. The more expensive horse. Simple, basic economics.

Then Coronado came along, and she was the one with a top-tier horse, one that really did change everything, for all of them. He was a Belgian warmblood, sired by a famous stallion named Chaco-Blue, who had been an FEI champion—International Federation for Equestrian Sports—in his career. The mare was a Belgian warmblood who had one of those fancy show names that Maggie loved: Hypnose Van Paemel. She had won a half dozen FEI events in her career.

Atwood Farm had a solid enough reputation. Caroline Atwood liked to tell Maggie that she never imagined herself getting rich in the horse business. But now they were just getting by, struggling, even. Her mother once told her that she’d retire the morning a groom or trainer found her facedown in a stall, because she planned to work until she died. In the past they’d travel with the horses to all the best shows—now it was only some of them.

“You know how they call equestrianism the sport of the rich and the poor rich?” Caroline asked Maggie, then answered her own question. “Sometimes I feel like we’re just poor.”