The Horse Whisperer (25 page)

“I don’t mean now,” he said gently. “When you’re ready. And only if you want to.” Something beyond her caught his eye and she followed his glance and saw her mother coming out onto the porch. Grace turned back to him and nodded.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

   Robert propped his glasses up on the top of his forehead, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a long time. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie lay crumpled among the layers of papers and law books that covered his desk. Along the corridor he could hear the cleaners moving systematically through the other offices, talking to each other now and then in Spanish. Everyone else had gone home four or five hours ago.
Bill Sachs, one of the younger partners, had tried to persuade him to come with him and his wife to see some new Gerard Depardieu movie everyone was talking about. Robert said thanks but he had too much work to get through and anyway he always found something faintly disturbing about Depardieu’s nose.

“It looks, you know, kind of penile,” he said.

Bill, who could have passed as a psychiatrist anyway, had peered at him over his hornrims and asked in a comic Freudian accent, why Robert should find such an association disturbing. Then he got Robert laughing about two women he’d heard talking the other day on the subway.

“One of them had been reading this book that tells you what your dreams mean and she was telling the other girl how it had said if you dreamed about snakes it meant you were really obsessed by penises and the other one said, phew, that was a relief ‘cause all she ever dreamed about was penises.”

Bill wasn’t the only one who seemed to be making a special effort to cheer him up at the moment. Robert was touched but on the whole he wished they wouldn’t. Being on your own for a few weeks didn’t justify this level of sympathy and so he suspected his colleagues sensed in him some deeper loss. One had even offered to take over the Dunford Securities case. God, that was about the only thing that kept him going.

Every night for nearly three weeks now he’d been up till way past midnight working on it. The hard disk on his laptop was almost bursting with it. It was one of the most complicated cases he’d ever worked on, involving bonds worth billions of dollars being shuffled endlessly through a maze of companies across three continents. Today he’d had a two-hour conference call with lawyers and clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, London and
Sydney. The time differences were a nightmare. But curiously it kept him sane and, more important, too busy to dwell too much on how he missed Grace and Annie.

He opened his sore eyes and leaned across to press the redial button on one of his phones. Then he settled back, staring out of the window at the illuminated coronets on the spire of the Chrysler Building. The number Annie had given him, for this new place they’d moved into, was still busy.

   He’d walked to the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth before he flagged a cab. The cold night air felt good and he’d toyed with the idea of walking all the way home across the park. He’d done it before at night though only once did he make the mistake of telling Annie. She’d yelled at him for a full ten minutes and told him he was insane going in there at night, did he want to get himself disemboweled? He wondered if he’d missed something in the newspapers about this particular hazard, but it didn’t seem the right time to ask.

From the name posted on the dashboard of the cab, he could tell the driver was Senegalese. There were quite a few of them nowadays and Robert always enjoyed blowing their minds by casually addressing them in Wolof or Jola. This young man was so amazed he almost drove smack into a bus. They talked about Dakar and places they both knew and the driving got so bad that Robert began to think the park might have been a safer bet after all. When they pulled up outside the apartment building, Ramon came down and opened the cab door and the driver said how grateful he was for the tip and that he would pray that Allah bless Robert with many strong sons.

After Ramon had given him an apparently white-hot
piece of news about a star player just signed by the Mets, Robert took the elevator and let himself into the apartment. The place was dark and the clunk of the door as he shut it echoed through the lifeless labyrinth of rooms.

He walked through to the kitchen and found the supper Elsa had cooked for him and the usual note saying what it was and how long it needed in the microwave. He did what he always did and scooped it guiltily into the garbage. He’d left her notes thanking her but saying please not to bother cooking for him, he could get takeout or cook something himself. But there it still was every night, bless her.

The truth was, the aching emptiness of the apartment made him morose and he avoided being here as much as he could. He felt it most acutely at weekends. He’d tried going up to Chatham but the loneliness there had been even worse. It hadn’t been helped by arriving to find that the thermostat on Grace’s tropical fish tank had failed and all the fish had died of cold. The sight of their tiny, faded corpses floating in the tank had upset him profoundly. He hadn’t told Grace, nor even Annie, but had pulled himself together, made careful notes and ordered identical impostors from the pet store.

Since Annie and Grace had left, talking to them on the phone had become the high point of Robert’s day. And tonight, having tried for hours and failed to reach them, he felt a sharper need than ever for the sound of their voices.

He sealed the garbage bag so that Elsa wouldn’t discover the shameful destiny of the supper she’d cooked. As he was dumping the bag outside the service door, he heard the phone and he ran back down the corridor as fast as he could. The answering machine had already
clicked in by the time he got there and he had to speak loudly to compete with his own recorded voice.

“Hold on, I’m here.” He found the off button. “Hi. I just got in.”

“You’re all out of breath. Where were you?”

“Oh, out partying. You know, doing the bars and clubs and things. God, it’s tiring.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I wasn’t going to. So how’re things where the deer and the antelope play? I tried calling all day.”

“I’m sorry. There’s just the one line here and the office has been trying to bury me in fax paper.”

She said Grace had tried calling him half an hour ago at the office, probably just after he’d left for home. She’d gone to bed now but sent him her love.

As Annie told him about her day, Robert walked through to the sitting room and, without turning the lights on, settled himself on the sofa by the window. Annie sounded weary and downcast and he tried, without much success, to cheer her up.

“And how’s Gracie?”

There was a pause and he heard Annie sigh.

“Oh. I don’t know.” Her voice was low now, presumably so that Grace wouldn’t hear. “I see how she is with Tom Booker and Joe, you know, the twelve-yearold? They get on really well. And with them, she seems fine. But when it’s just the two of us, I don’t know. It’s gotten so bad she won’t even look at me.” She sighed again. “Anyway.”

They were silent for a while and in the distance he heard a wail of sirens out in the street, on their way to another nameless tragedy.

“I miss you, Annie.”

“I know,” she said. “We miss you too.”

A
NNIE DROPPED
G
RACE AT THE CLINIC A LITTLE
before nine and wove her way back to the gas station in Choteau center. She filled up alongside a little man with a face like leather and a hat brimmed wide enough to shelter a horse. He was checking the oil of a Dodge pickup which was hitched to a trailerload of cattle. They were Black Angus like the herd at the Double Divide and Annie had to fight the urge to confide some knowing remark about them based on the little she’d gleaned from Tom and Frank on branding day. She rehearsed it in her head. Good-lookin’ cattle. No, you wouldn’t say cattle. Healthy-lookin’ beasts? Fellas? She gave up. In all truth she had no idea if they were good, bad or flea-bitten, so she kept her mouth shut and just gave the man a nod and a smile instead.

As she came out from paying, someone called her name and she looked around and saw Diane getting out of her Toyota at the other row of pumps. Annie waved and walked over.

“So you do sometimes give yourself a break from
that telephone after all,” Diane said. “We were beginning to wonder.”

Annie smiled and told her she had to bring Grace into town three mornings a week for physical therapy. She was going back to the ranch now to do some work and would come back in at midday to pick her up.

“Heck, well I can do that for you,” Diane said. “I’ve got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?”

“Yes, but honestly, you don’t want—”

“Don’t be silly. It’s crazy you driving all that way.”

Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she’d better get going.

On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane’s offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.

She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn’t just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some
galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.

She’d already used up much of the month’s leave she’d asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn’t looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.

He had criticized Lucy Friedman’s lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he’d queried the design team over two front covers—not in a heavyhanded way but enough to make an impression; and he’d sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he’d copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn’t phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touché. But God, it took such a lot of effort.

When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom’s yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a
phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he’d fitted the new lines.

Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.

“Hi.” It was a man’s voice and for a moment she didn’t recognize it. “Just wanted to see if it worked.”

“Who is this?” Annie said.

“I’m sorry. It’s Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.”

Annie laughed.

“I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don’t mind him letting himself in.”

“Of course not. Thank you. You really needn’t have.”

“It’s no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.”

“Well, it’s very kind of you.”

There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she’d bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she’d kindly offered to bring Grace back.

“She could have taken her in too if we’d known.”

Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he’d leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy’s fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and
had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.

Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when, Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.

“The answer’s no,” she said.

“You don’t yet know what the question is.”

“I think I can guess.”

“You can?”

“I think so.”

“Well, I kind of reckoned seeing as you’ve just saved yourself forty minutes driving down to Choteau and then some forty more driving back and all, you might feel inclined to blow a little of it on taking some air.”