The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Mister would be one of those rising stars. He’d matched the track record today, and he hadn’t even been in a drive. He’d cantered home, a cocky two lengths in front of the straining second-place horse, Manny sitting chilly with his whip flipping carelessly in his right hand, the stick nothing but a fashion accessory to bring out the shine in his patent-leather boots. Andrea had scolded him for showing off, but Manny swore Mister liked to look the other horse in the eye as he was beating him home. “You let him pull away, he just stop,” the jockey told the turf writers after the race. “He’s a heartbreaker.”

  Mister peered hopefully into the tack room. The chatter tapered off as Andrea waved her hand at her horse and daughter, urging them to keep moving, then turned back to the men in the room. Jenny knew when she was being dismissed. There was something important going on in there, something Andrea wasn’t willing to allow to get sidetracked for a single moment by a silly colt posing for cell phone pictures.

  “Come on,” Jenny told the colt, tugging at his lead-shank. Mister tossed his head against the pressure, and the clink of the chain against the halter fittings seemed loud in the quiet shed-row.

  Not as loud, though, as the voices in the tack room. “You know he’ll be a great fit if he stays right here in Florida,” a man with a sharp New Jersey accent said, his tone wheedling. “Just think about sending him to us. We’ll support him with our own mares, plus market him all over the state. With Florida-bred incentives, you’ll clean up—”

  “Come on, Andrea, you don’t want to do business with Charlie!” A new voice interrupted, a slow Southern drawl dripping vowels all over the place. “Send him to Kentucky and I swear if he wins the Breeders’ Cup I’ll give you—” and the man named a sum that made Jenny’s jaw drop.

  It must have been enough to astonish everyone in the little room, and beyond, because there was a sudden hush that extended out of the tack room, across the shed-row, through the stalls of still and silent horses, into the hedges where mockingbirds crouched quietly, their stolen songs quenched as if by cold rain. Mister alone was unaffected by the promise of paid-off loans and silenced creditors, new black-board fences and a resurfaced training track. The colt tossed his head, the brass chain sliding musically through the halter’s rings, and then abruptly set off down the shed-row again, as if this disruption had been his plan all along.

  Jenny went with him, because that was what you did with three-year-old racehorses—you kept them moving, if movement was what they craved. It was the surest way to avoid a fight. But her steps were automatic, her hands on the lead-shank were instinctive. Her mind was busily rolling over the implications of what she’d just heard.

  That Southern drawl—that had been Foster Donahue, the owner of a vast Thoroughbred breeding farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Foster sent horses to Tampa every spring, usually the second-tier string along with any who just didn’t seem to be galloping right, subscribing to the oft-repeated proverb that the forgiving track of Tampa Bay Downs made sore horses run sound. His top horses, of course, went to Kentucky’s prime tracks: Keeneland, and then Churchill Downs.

  “Would you like it in Kentucky?” Jenny whispered to Mister as they rounded the corner. “It snows up there, would you like that? I kind of like the snow, but don’t tell anyone here.”

  The short end of the shed-row was stacked with bales of straw and hay. Jenny couldn’t see around the corner; in the day, with other horses around, she would have called out to warn anyone standing there. This late in the evening, with darkness deep around the eaves and no one left on the backside but night watchmen and the few horsemen who’d had horses in the last couple of races, she didn’t see the need to say anything.

  And so she nearly ran Mister right over Brice Lawson.

  He jumped out of the walking path, his back pressing against the wooden board that ran along the end of the shed-row. But this put him on the wrong side of Mister, and so Jenny pulled the colt up. She could feel Mister’s impatience rise as he planted his fore-hooves in the dirt and considered his next move. Brice Lawson was no amateur; he knew Jenny couldn’t walk a horse past him while he was on the right-hand side of the shed-row. It was against the most basic rules of the racetrack with good reason: when spirited, racing-fit horses decide to leap and kick, they swing their hindquarters away from the person leading them. That makes people on the right of the path prime targets for a hoof to the jaw. Some horses only kicked when they saw a person on the right. Jenny didn’t know why. She just accepted it as racetrack law: nobody stands to the right.

  “You have to move,” Jenny said impatiently, tugging back at Mister as the colt yanked on her.

  Brice ducked under the railing and backed away a few paces. “There,” he spat. “Are you happy?”

  “Why are you acting like I made the rules?” Jenny snapped, letting Mister step forward again. She wasn’t usually rude to Brice, since he was her parents’ age. It felt like snapping at one of her high school teachers—wrong, but also richly deserved, as if she’d been sitting on the desire for a long, long time. “What were you even doing in our barn?”

  Technically, it wasn’t their barn, just a receiving barn for horses who trailered in, but Brice had his own shed-row and he had no business in this one. Jenny could call security to run him out if she wanted to, and he knew it.

  “I was coming to congratulate your mother,” Brice growled. “But she already had plenty of company.”

  Jenny knew then that Brice had been down here listening to the breeders making their cases to her mother. But she was already rounding the corner with Mister; she couldn’t stay and make any accusations against him. “Fine,” she called, trusting her voice to carry back to him as Mister dragged her down the next long side. “I’ll let her know you stopped by.”

  Mister’s steps slowed for a moment as he spotted a horse outside the barn, walking in their direction. The sunset was fading fast, but in the last luminous glow of blue twilight, Jenny could see Laura, Brice’s wife, walking a rather thin bay horse. She looked over the horse curiously as they grew closer. He had a cute blaze, beginning with a big star between his eyes and spilling into jagged zig-zag of a stripe below, before it pooled over one nostril in a big splash of white. The horse pricked his ears at Jenny and Mister, turning a pretty head to watch them as they passed. She admired the way the horse’s black forelock fell over the eye closest to her, turning his expression flirtatious.

  “So cute! Who is that?” Jenny called. Laura had always been kind in her own rough way, despite the long feud between their families, and Jenny felt secure talking to her without Brice around to make things uncomfortable.

  But Laura shook her head in disgust, as if the horse wasn’t worth complimenting. “Just another slow-poke,” she snorted. “He’d still be running in the second race if they hadn’t needed the track for all the other horses. I’m taking him home. I could stick a Shetland pony in his stall here and get more bang for my buck.”

  Jenny remembered the horse then; she’d actually looked him over in the paddock and thought he’d look good with some groceries and some proper conditioning. That had been early afternoon—amazing to think she’d forgotten the horse’s sweet expression already, but those hours in the sun felt like a hundred years ago now, with dusk settling over the backside and a stakes winner at the end of her lead-shank.

  “Well, better luck next time,” she told Laura as the distance between them began to grow. The words were automatic, one of a thousand similar backside exchanges. Better luck. You’ll get them next time. It wasn’t the right spot. His race is coming. The things they said to their rivals, and heard themselves, in a sport with more disappointing days than thrilling ones. She walked on, but kept turning her head to watch the bay gelding walk away. He had a nice swing to his hindquarters, and that stride, along with the friendly expression on his face, made her think he’d make a very cute hunter. She wondered if the Lawsons were thinking of retiring him. She’d have to get in touch with Laura later. Maybe L
ana’s trainer up in Connecticut would like to have him for a project horse.

  When she’d looped around the shed-row again, Foster and her mother had stepped out into the wide drive between the stable blocks, conversing in low voices, and the tack room was deserted. Perhaps they’d known they were being listened to, and had gone out into the open where no one could lurk close enough to hear them. Whatever their reasons, Brice Lawson was nowhere to be seen. Andrea was swinging her arms back and forth, clapping her hands lightly as she spoke, more at ease than Jenny had seen her in a long time.

  The backside was dark at last, a Florida half-light sounding of frog song and colored by orange street-lights burning against the azure blue evening, moths of unbelievable size throwing themselves against the plastic shades. Mister was cooled out now, his breathing back to normal, and he’d had a bucket of water. Jenny put him into his stall and tossed him a scoop of grain, then tugged down his blue leg wraps from the clothes-line. She’d have to do his legs up in cooling clay for the night, and make sure his hay-net and water buckets were full, before heading out to the motel.

  While she was rolling up the long lengths of standing wraps, she glanced through the day’s racing program, left open across the tack room desk. That cute bay horse had been in the second race, Laura had said. She had just turned to that page when her phone buzzed.

  It was a FaceTime from Aidan; the sight of his smiling face pushed the bay gelding far down her priority list. As she accepted the call, tilting the phone to rest against a bucket so she could keep working, she tore the pages with the second race out of the program and folded them up, sliding them into her khaki’s pockets for later.

  “Hey you,” she told Aidan happily. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to tell you congrats,” Aidan replied, his eyes dancing as he watched her wind the leg wraps in her hands. She figured she must be showing up at an odd angle on his phone, but he didn’t complain. Aidan knew that when she was at the barn, work came first, always.

  “Congrats? You mean on the race? You already did!” She’d put them on in the winner’s circle just in time for the awards presentation, and even Mike had cheered at that.

  “On your new job,” Aidan corrected her, grinning devilishly. “Lana’s father is going to be the publisher and produce our website. After graduation, we’re all staying in New York.”

  Chapter Three

  Driving back up the barn lane of Sugar Creek Farm always gave Jenny the same feeling: an anxious, butterfly flutter in her stomach. Not the sort of feeling one wanted when heading up the driveway of one’s childhood home, of course, but there was so much to worry about at a big farm like Sugar Creek. Horses could be loose, or injured, or sick. There could have been a barn fire. One of the dogs might have eaten something poisonous. There might be a gas leak in the kitchen. Jenny worried about all of these things with a fierce devotion, turning each potential disaster over in her mind until she was out of the truck and could look around her, see that every horse was in its place and every barn was whole and good, and only then would she feel the peace of the farm sink into her bones.

  Because despite all of its possibilities for disaster, Sugar Creek was a peaceful place. At first glance, the farm’s physical charm more than made up for the emotional drain that came of simply living there. Drama happened on farms, certainly, and her mother left a trail of thoughtless criticisms behind her every time she left a room, but all in all, it was bound to be peaceful. What else could you say about a farm with more than a hundred acres of gently rolling pastures, plantations of massive granddaddy oaks murmuring in warm breezes, breathlessly still ponds where tall white egrets crept through the cattails, and horses of all ages scattered everywhere? It was quiet here, a deep, contented silence which seemed to emanate up from the land, a country quiet of bird chirps and frog song and snorting horses. The farm’s innate tranquility suffused every man and woman and horse and dog with a sense of home. People came to Sugar Creek on temporary jobs and wanted to stay forever. Jenny, Andrea often said with a sigh, was the only one who had ever wanted to leave.

  And Andrea thought she was insane to want to leave, to go to the clatter and clamor of the city, to abandon the quiet chatter of nature. This was a place where house guests came for a few days and promptly forgot the real world even existed. There was no buzz of traffic floating over the hills of Sugar Creek, and airplanes only rarely flew over. The sounds here were seasonal. Spring winds rustled the live oaks and sent their browning winter leaves rattling down the barn aisles and across the white-sand driveways. Summer storms rumbled all afternoon and late into the nights, drifting across the Florida peninsula in flickering towers of blinding white cloud. In fall, the hills spent a few melancholy weeks absorbing the plaintive whinnies of mares and foals, as the new weanlings grew accustomed to life without their dams. And in winter, while the north fell into a deep, bloodless slumber, Sugar Creek’s hedges and trees and barn eaves were a constant riot of wings and song as flocks of tiny birds arrived, warblers and flycatchers and songbirds who chose the hills of north-central Florida to wait out the snowy months back home.

  Of course, Sugar Creek’s barns were filled with the typical sounds of a working farm: a radio playing raggaeton in the distance, buckets rattling on the back of a golf cart driven over a rutted dirt road, surprised neighs from horses who woke up from dreams of the herd to find themselves all alone on a sunny hillside, the idling rumble of a tractor left running somewhere, because everyone knew it was more expensive to turn a diesel tractor off and on than to leave it idling between jobs, though no one seemed to know precisely why this would be.

  Jenny hopped down from the farm’s big white truck the moment the cab had stopped rocking, her boots hitting the hard-packed white sand of the training barn’s parking lot with two tiny puffs of silica dust. She looked around, taking in the little compound of barns, and the house a short distance away, shielded from view by a grove of oak trees. It was all there. Everything was fine. Everything was just as she’d left it two days before. The old feeling of panic drifted away, as it nearly always did—the only exceptions being the times she had come home to find broken fence-boards, loose horses, unlatched stall doors, a stray dog in amongst the yearlings. But no such calamities were present today… just the peace of the farm. She took a deep breath, soaking in the safety of home, and then reached back into the truck for the leather lead-shank she’d carried with her in the cab.

  Her mother was already walking into the training barn, welcomed by a symphony of whinnies from curious horses, looking for a groom to help unload Mister. Jenny was instantly annoyed; she was sure she could manage him on her own, and why bother the grooms for something as trivial as bringing a colt home? After all, Mister was a seasoned racehorse now, and no stranger to shipping; he knew how to step down the ramp without killing anybody, and after that it was just a question of leading him to his stall while he looked around with the same eager, questioning attitude that Jenny had given the property when she’d gotten out of the truck: was everyone still here, was the barn still the same, were the fences up, had anything changed, should he panic or just relax?

  She rubbed his nose through the bars of his open window, and he wiggled his lip on her fingers in response. Then he snorted, hard. Evidently there had been a lot of road dirt to clear from his nasal passages.

  Jenny winced, wiped her dirty face on the sleeve of her t-shirt. “Thank you for that,” she told Mister. “Thank you very much, no, really.”

  She’d already dropped the ramp of the trailer when her mother came hustling out of the barn, her wiry frame moving jerkily as she speed-walked down the little slope from the shed-row. “Wait for Marco!” she yelled. “Just wait for Marco, he won’t take a second.”

  And just like that, Jenny’s peace deserted her. She suddenly felt a little ill, her nervousness flaring up like a fever. Marco. She’d started to think maybe she could get through this trip without running into him at all—she’d certainly hoped so. He ha
dn’t been at the farm on Thursday night when she’d first arrived from New York, and they’d gone straight to Tampa on Friday morning, skipping morning training. Flying out the next day, she’d really believed she could escape without facing Marco… or telling him that she was leaving the farm for good. She scrunched up her toes in her boots.

  Her parents were going to be bad enough when she told them, but Marco was going to be… what was he going to be? Angry? Reserved? Dismissive? All of these years, and she still didn’t know his depths. She figured she’d come as close as anyone else, though. Marco kept his life away from the horses hidden away, if he had such a life at all.

  Marco was technically just the head exercise rider, but he had become wrapped up in the running of Sugar Creek during the years Jenny had spent in New York. The last she’d heard, he’d been working with Joseph and Andrea towards becoming an assistant trainer. When that happened, Jenny hoped, he’d get sent down to Palm Meadows to help manage the south Florida string, getting him out of her hair forever. She’d be able to come home for visits without his presence lurking around the barns, without him waiting for her in a tack room or an empty stall. If she’d known, when she was a teenager, that Marco hadn’t just been playing a game, she never would have let things go so far.

  Or maybe she’d never had a choice in the matter.

  Well, there was no way to avoid seeing him now. Jenny folded her arms and leaned against the sun-warmed aluminum skin of the horse trailer. Mister, detecting a delay in his immediate removal to his stall and the fresh shavings he wanted to pee in, kicked the trailer wall. “Knock it off,” Jenny said lazily.