The Horse Whisperer (32 page)

   Tom said good-night to Diane outside the barn and went on in to check the sick filly. Walking down from the creek house, Diane had gone on about how dumb Joe was to take the girl riding like that without telling a soul. Tom said he didn’t think it was dumb at all, he could understand why Grace might want to keep such a thing secret. Joe was being a friend to her, that was all. Diane said it was none of the boy’s business and frankly she’d be glad when Annie packed up and took the poor girl back home to New York.

The filly hadn’t gotten any worse, though she was still breathing a little fast. Her temperature was down to a hundred and two. Tom rubbed her neck and talked to her gently while with his other hand he felt her pulse behind the elbow. He counted the beats for twenty seconds, then multiplied by three. It was forty-two beats per minute, still above normal. She was clearly running some kind of fever and maybe he’d have to get the vet up to see her in the morning if there was no change.

The lights of Annie’s bedroom were on when he came out and they were still on when he finished reading and switched off his own bedroom light. It was a habit now, this last look up at the creek house where the illuminated yellow blinds of Annie’s window stood out against the night. Sometimes he’d see her shadow pass across them as she went about her unknown bedtime rituals and once he’d seen her pause there, framed by the glow, undressing and he’d felt like a snooper and turned away.

Now though, the blinds were open and he knew it meant something had happened or was happening even as he looked. But he knew it was something only they could resolve and, though it was foolish, he told himself
that maybe the blinds were open not to let darkness in but to let it out.

Never, since he first laid eyes on Rachel so many years ago, had he met a woman he wanted more.

Tonight was the first time he’d seen her in a dress. It was a simple cotton print, black dotted with tiny pink flowers, and there were pearl buttons all down the front. It reached well below her knees and it had little cap sleeves that showed the tops of her arms.

When he arrived and she’d told him to come into the kitchen to get a drink, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He’d followed her inside and breathed deep the waft of her perfume and while she poured the wine he’d watched her and noticed how she kept her tongue between her teeth to concentrate. He noticed too a glimpse of satin strap at her shoulder which he’d tried all evening not to look at and failed. And she’d handed him the glass and smiled at him, creasing the corners of that mouth in a way he wished was only for him.

Over supper he’d almost got to believe
it
was, because the smiles she gave Frank and Diane and the kids were nothing like it. And maybe he’d imagined it, but when she talked, no matter how generally, it always seemed somehow directed at him. He’d never seen her with her eyes made up before and he watched how they shone green and trapped the candle flame when she laughed.

When everything had exploded and Grace stormed out, it was only Diane being there that had stopped him from taking Annie in his arms and letting her cry as he could see she wanted to. He didn’t fool himself that the urge was merely to console her. It was to hold her and know closely the feel and the shape and the smell of her.

But nor did Tom think this made it shameful, though
he knew others might. This woman’s pain and her child and the pain of that child were all part of her too, were they not? And what man was God enough to judge the fine divisions of feeling appropriate to each or all or any of these?

All things were one, and like a rider in harmony, the best a man could do was recognize the feel and go with it and be as true to it as his soul let him.

   She switched all the downstairs lights off and as she went up the stairs, she saw Grace’s door was closed and beneath it that her room was dark. Annie went to her own room and switched on the light. She paused in the doorway, knowing that crossing the threshold somehow had significance. How could she let this pass? Allow another layer to settle unquestioned with the night between them, as if there were some inexorable geology at work? It didn’t have to be so.

Grace’s door creaked when Annie opened it, pivoting light into the room from the landing. She thought she saw the bedclothes shift but couldn’t be sure, for the bed was beyond the angle of light and Annie’s eyes took time to adjust.

“Grace?”

Grace was facing the wall and there was a studied stillness to the shape of her shoulders beneath the sheet.

“Grace?”

“What.” She didn’t move.

“Can we talk?”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“So do I, but I think it would be good if we talked.”

“What about?”

Annie walked over to the bed and sat down. The prosthetic leg was propped against the wall by the bedside
table. Grace sighed and turned over on her back, staring at the ceiling. Annie took a deep breath. Get it right, she kept telling herself. Don’t sound hurt, go easy, be nice.

“So you’re riding again.”

“I tried.”

“How was it?”

Grace shrugged. “Okay.” She was still looking at the ceiling, trying to look bored.

“That’s terrific.”

“Is it?”

“Well isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

Annie fought the beating of her heart and told herself, keep calm, keep going, just take it. But instead she heard herself say, “Couldn’t you have told me?”

Grace looked at her and the hate and hurt in her eyes almost took Annie’s breath away.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Grace—”

“No why? Huh? Because you care? Or just because you have to know everything and control everything and not let anybody do anything unless you say so! Is that it?”

“Oh Grace.” Annie suddenly felt she needed light and she reached across to turn on the lamp on the bedside table but Grace lashed out.

“Don’t! I don’t want it on!”

The blow hit Annie’s hand and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. The ceramic base broke into three clean pieces.

“You pretend you care but all you really care about is you and what people think of you. And your job and your big-shot friends.”

She propped herself up on her elbows as if to bolster
a rage already made worse by the tears distorting her face.

“Anyway, you said you didn’t want me to ride again so why the hell should I tell you? Why should I tell you anything! I hate you!”

Annie tried to take hold of her but Grace pushed her away.

“Get out! Just leave me alone! Get out!”

Annie stood up and felt herself sway so that for a moment she thought she might fall. Almost blindly, she made her way across the pool of light that she knew would take her to the door. She had no clear idea of what she would do when she got there. She merely knew that she was obeying some final separating command. As she reached the door she heard Grace say something and she turned and looked back toward the bed. She could see Grace was facing the wall again and that her shoulders were shaking.

“What?” Annie said.

She waited and whether it was her own grief or Grace’s that shrouded the words a second time she didn’t know, but there was something about the way they were spoken that made her go back. She walked to the bed and stood close enough to touch but didn’t, for fear her hand might be struck away.

“Grace? I didn’t hear what you said.”

“I said . . . I’ve started.”

It came amid sobs and for a moment Annie didn’t understand.

“You’ve started?”

“My period.”

“What, tonight?”

Grace nodded.

“I felt it happen downstairs and when I came up
there was blood in my panties. I washed them in the bathroom but it wouldn’t come out.”

“Oh Gracie.”

Annie reached down and put a hand on Grace’s shoulder and Grace turned. There was no anger in her face now, only pain and sorrow and Annie sat on the bed and took her daughter in her arms. Grace clung to her and Annie felt the child’s sobs convulse them as if they were but one body.

“Who’s going to want me?”

“What, honey?”

“Whoever’s going to want me? Nobody will.”

“Oh Gracie, that’s not true. . . .”

“Why should they?”

“Because you’re you. You’re incredible. You’re beautiful and you’re strong. And you’re the bravest person I ever met in my whole life.”

They held each other and wept. And when they could speak again, Grace told her she hadn’t meant the terrible things she’d said and Annie said she knew, but there was truth there too, and how as a mother, she had got so many, many things wrong. They sat with their heads on each other’s shoulder and let flow from their hearts words they’d barely dared utter to themselves.

“All those years you and Dad were trying for another baby? Every night I used to pray this time let it be okay. And it wasn’t for your sake or because I wanted a brother or a sister or anything like that. But just so I wouldn’t have to go on being so . . . oh I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“So special. Because I was the only one, I felt you both expected me to be so good at everything, so perfect and I wasn’t, I was just me. And now I’ve gone and spoiled it all anyway.”

Annie held her more tightly and stroked her hair and told her this wasn’t so. And she thought, but didn’t say, what a perilous commodity love was and that the proper calibration of its giving and taking was too precise by far for mere humans.

How long they sat there Annie couldn’t tell. But it was long after their crying had ceased and the wetness of their tears had grown cold on her dress. Grace fell asleep in her arms and didn’t wake even when Annie laid her down then laid herself beside her.

She listened to her daughter’s breathing, even and trusting, and for a while watched the breeze stirring the pale drapes at the window. Then Annie slept too, a deep and dreamless sleep, while outside the earth rolled vast and silent under the sky.

R
OBERT LOOKED OUT THROUGH THE RAIN-STREAKED
window of the black cab at the woman on the billboard who’d been waving the same wave at him for the last ten minutes. It was one of those electronically animated jobs, where the arm actually moved. She was wearing Ray-Bans and a bright pink bathing suit and in her other hand had what was probably meant to be a piña colada. She was doing her best to persuade Robert and several hundred other traffic-snarled, rain-soaked travelers that they’d be better off buying an air ticket to Florida.

It was debatable. And a harder sell than it seemed, Robert knew, because the English newspapers had been going to town on stories about British tourists in Florida being mugged, raped and shot. As the cab crawled forward, Robert could see some wag had scrawled by the woman’s feet
Don’t forget your Uzi
.

He realized too late that he should have taken the Underground. Every time he’d been to London in the last ten years they’d been digging up some new section of the road out to the airport and he was pretty sure
they didn’t just save it up for when he came. The flight to Geneva was due to leave in thirty-five minutes and at this rate he’d miss it by about two years. The cabdriver had already informed him, with something suspiciously approaching relish, that out at the airport there was a “right peasouper.”

There was. And he didn’t miss his flight; it was canceled. He sat in the business-class lounge and for a couple of hours enjoyed the camaraderie of a growing band of harassed executives, each pursuing his or her own self-important path to a coronary. He tried calling Annie but got the answering machine and he wondered where they were. He’d forgotten to ask their plans for this first Memorial Day in years they hadn’t spent together.

He left a message and sang a few bars of the “Halls of Montezuma” for Grace, something he did over breakfast on this day as a cue for groans and missiles. Then he took a final look at the notes of today’s meeting (which had gone well) and the paperwork for tomorrow’s (which might also if he ever got there) and then he put it all away and went for another walk around the departure area.

As he was looking idly and for no good reason at a rack of cashmere golf sweaters that he wouldn’t have wished upon his worst enemy, someone said hello and he looked up and saw a man who came as close to that category as anyone he knew.

Freddie Kane was something medium-to-small in publishing, one of those people you never questioned too closely about the exact nature of their business, for fear of embarrassing not them but yourself. He compensated for whatever deficiencies might lie in that murky area by making it clear that he had a personal fortune and furthermore knew every piece of gossip
there was to know about anyone who was anyone in New York. By forgetting Robert’s name on each of the four or five occasions they’d been introduced, Freddie had made it equally clear that he didn’t count Annie Graves’s husband among this number. Annie, on the other hand, he very much did.

“Hi! I thought it was you! How’re you doing!”

He thumped one hand on Robert’s shoulder and Used the other to pump his hand in a way that somehow managed to be simultaneously both violent and flaccid. Robert smiled and noted that the man had on a pair of those glasses movie stars were all now wearing in the hope that it made them look more intellectual. He’d clearly forgotten Robert’s name again.

They chatted for a while over the golf sweaters, swapping information on destinations, estimated arrivals and the properties of fog. Robert was oblique and guarded about why he was in Europe, not because it was secret but because he could see how frustrated it made Freddie. And so it was perhaps revenge for this that motivated the man’s closing remarks.

“I hear Annie’s got herself a Gates problem,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

Freddie put a hand to his mouth and made a face like a guilty schoolboy.

“Oops. Maybe we’re not supposed to know.”

“I’m sorry Freddie, you’re way ahead of me.”

“Oh, it’s just a little bird told me Crawford Gates is out headhunting again. Probably not a word of truth in it.”