The Horsewoman(94)

The good news was that she wasn’t on the clock yet. She knew she had time to get Coronado under control, if she could, before the buzzer finally did sound. She still couldn’t believe this was happening, when it was happening. Gus had told her there shouldn’t be any surprises over the first part of the course.

What about before her course even began?

Only one thing to do. Lean forward and hope like hell he stopped. If you leaned the other way all you were doing is pulling the horse back, maybe on top of you.

But Coronado stopped rearing as suddenly as he’d started. Maggie circled him back toward the in-gate. She had no idea what had spooked him. But it didn’t matter what. Something had.

She made a wide turn around, moving him back into position. As much as her mind was racing, she did manage this one fleeting thought: Better now than when we’re out there.

Then he started to shake his head.

It was as if whatever had bothered him a few moments before was bothering him all over again. She knew she was out of time. The buzzer was about to sound. If she couldn’t get him under control, she would be eliminated before she ever got to the first jump.

Maggie kicked him then.

She’d never needed to really kick this horse. She did now. The buzzer sounded as she did. If she wasn’t in total control of Coronado, they were at least on course. They were in the game.

Get one fence underneath us.

After all the plans she and Gus had made for this course and this round, that was the only plan now.

Coronado got over the first jump. Then the next. Then came a combination. Then a rollback.

All clear.

So far so good. Still such a long way to go. Maggie wasn’t getting ahead of herself. But then they were through the first half of the course clear. Another rollback coming up, much tighter than before, a bitch of a turn. The big horse got his head turned around, though, in a good way this time, and then they were coming up on the water jump now, the pool behind the fence looking wide enough today as if it needed one of those Paris bridges over it.

Coronado got over the rail, over the water.

She had her horse under control. Finally had her breathing under control. She went clean over an oxer on the right side, was heading along the fence at the opposite end of the ring from where the in-gate was, toward some photographers, when one of them wearing a bright red vest got up and ran to another position.

He was right there in Maggie’s sight line.

And Coronado’s.

The photographer should have known enough to wait, with a horse coming straight for him. He didn’t. And that was all it took to spook her horse. Again. His head was all over the place.

Maggie kicked him harder this time. Telling herself she’d apologize to him later. It worked. Again. But he wasn’t entirely squared up yet, was drifting to the right just enough. Maggie was glad the oxer coming up on them was wide. If it was a skinny, half as wide, just one rail, she might have missed the fence entirely. But in that moment the oxer looked wide as a four-lane highway. Coronado cleared it. Made it through the combination. Up, down, up again.

Yes.

One more rollback. Two more fences after that. The last was a skinny. For a horse as big as hers, Maggie sometimes imagined trying to fit him through a doorway. But she gave him a perfect distance. His head was screwed on straight now.

With all that, she still felt him catch the rail with one of his hind legs.

Felt herself holding her breath as she waited for the crowd to tell her if the rail had come down. One of those moments in riding, less than a second, that always felt like an eternity, especially this close to the end.

The cheer she heard told her she’d gone clear.

She didn’t need to go clean today. But she wanted to. She wanted to post a time this early in the round, set a tone, for everything that would come after this. And give herself confidence in the process. Mission accomplished. Nightmare beginning today. Pretty much a dream finish.

As she rode past Gus, he grinned at her.

“Interesting ride,” he said.

“Yeah,” Maggie said, “if you like roller coasters.”





ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN



MAYBE IT WAS WATCHING Mom’s near calamity with Coronado. Or maybe all the waiting for this round had finally gotten to me, on a night when I actually wished I had been able to go early the way Mom had, post what was still the best time, then be sitting around watching everybody chase me.

But suddenly all the doubts I’d had about myself in the run-up to the selection show—all the self-doubt that was still in my DNA despite the year I’d had, despite being here—was hitting me like this huge wave, one I didn’t see coming, like I was standing on the beach and had turned my back on the ocean.

How many times had Gus drilled it into my head that I needed to act like I belonged?

But what if I didn’t?

There was a screen in the schooling ring that listed the next riders in the order. I wasn’t on it yet. The round seemed to be taking forever. Sky still hadn’t left her stall. I went and grabbed a folding chair from the viewing area some of the trainers used back here and carried it out of the ring and behind the scoreboard and sat alone and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t having a panic attack.

I’d had them occasionally as a teenager, when I first started competing. The last one had been at Tryon, in Carolina, the first time I competed outside of Florida. I didn’t tell anybody about it. I hadn’t told anybody about the previous ones. Just got my shit together and told myself I was being an idiot and got on my horse and finished third. And told myself I was never going to feel that way again. And hadn’t.