The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “He wouldn’t be kicking if you hadn’t taken down the ramp already,” her mother hissed as she passed, clambering up the ramp to take down the steel bar that acted as a second barrier between the horse inside and the waiting world. Mister, standing in the front stall of the slant-load trailer, lifted his head to look over the divider. His eyes rolled back in his head as he tried to get a good glare in at Andrea. “You just stand still and wait,” she scolded, and looked around for Marco.

  He came out of the barn next, and Jenny had to admit he was looking extremely well. Marco wasn’t tall, but he was graceful, with dramatic good looks. His thick black hair fell over his face, and his shirt’s sleeves had been cut off, revealing a pair of arms bulging with muscle. He walked towards her the same dancer-like stride she remembered, the same dark eyes flashing under sharp brows. Marco’s family were all actors and dancers and choreographers; he had run away from their showbiz expectations to ride horses when he was a teenager, and eventually ended up at Sugar Creek, riding their toughest horses with a surreal grace. When Jenny had started galloping with the exercise crew, Marco had been her primary teacher. They’d gotten close.

  Too close, Jenny knew now. Every time she came home, she had to work to keep him at arm’s length. Once she’d moved to New York and met Aidan, she’d known Marco would never be more than a friend, but Marco had never been willing to accept that. Avoiding him had become the hardest part of coming home.

  Mister, with no such qualms, whinnied through the window bars when he saw Marco.

  Marco held up his empty hands in the universal gesture for nothing to see here. “No grain right now, buddy!”

  Jenny handed over the lead, taking care to slide her hands away before Marco’s fingers could touch hers. “I’m sure he likes you for more than just being the guy with the food,” she said jokingly, hoping to keep things light.

  Marco gave her a knowing grin. His gaze was piercing, as if he wanted to know how much she liked him. “If only!” He reached up to the window and ran a narrow finger over Mister’s dark muzzle. The horse clicked his teeth together with a snap. “Love me and leave me, these racers are all the same.” He laughed and walked away from her, climbing up the ramp into the trailer.

  Jenny took a deep breath to steady her nerves and walked ahead of them into the barn. That hadn’t been so bad, she told herself. And once she was really gone, once everyone finally believed Jenny Wolfe had moved to New York City and wasn’t coming home, Marco would stop looking at her like that. That would make visits home so much easier.

  Jenny stayed in the training barn after her mother had walked back to the house, leaving the truck keys with Marco. He’d pull the trailer around to its parking space in the machine shed, unhitch the truck, and send a groom over to clean the trailer out. Andrea had a strict daily routine she was anxious to return to after the disruption of a race weekend. Right now, it was eleven-thirty; past her appointed time to make a ham sandwich and catch up with her training charts at the kitchen table, a glass of sweet tea close at hand. Andrea’s ability to will a normal day out of an abnormal one was catching, Jenny knew. The stakes-winning weekend, last night’s late session in the tack room being chatted up by Kentucky millionaires, the old episode of Friends they’d watched while they finished off the last of the champagne from the double beds of the motel room: all of that would recede into the past so quickly, it would begin to feel like a dream before the end of the day.

  Jenny had lived by her mother’s routine for years; now she felt excluded from its tidy checklists and reminders. She wondered if there was a stranger sensation than wandering around a busy farm without a list of chores. What was she doing here, if she wasn’t working?

  She knew she wasn’t going to find anything to do in the training barn—the twin shed-rows were a hive of activity between five and ten a.m., but the afternoons were quiet, even deserted at times, with the stalls filled with snoring, napping horses and the training barn grooms free to roam until their evening feeding shift brought them back for a few hours. But it was her favorite place, and the part of Sugar Creek she missed the most when she was back in the city. The high ceiling with its web of rafters, the open shed-rows with wide, clay aisles and horses gazing out over airy stall grills, looking towards the rolling fields surrounding them: it was a place of broad views, earthy scents and cool breezes, and it somehow felt like an encapsulation of everything she loved about life in Ocala—everything she couldn’t have in New York, everything she had to wrench herself away from anew, each time she went back.

  After walking down one shed-row, leaving boot prints in the carefully-raked clay, visiting with each horse as they put their heads over their grills and nickered suggestively to her, she stopped in the center aisle and put her hands in her pockets, considering the view in either direction. Pastures, hills, fences, barns; mares, foals, yearlings, long-legged egrets. The training track, its fading rails mostly hidden by a scrubby hedge. Heat rippling over the crushed white shells of the driveway. Home, she told herself, just to test the ache she’d find in her heart at the word, and found it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The sounds of horses pulling at hay-nets was blissful, but somehow she was still missing the rattle of traffic, the bass beats shaking out from tinny bodega speakers onto the crowded sidewalk, the rumbling of trains beneath her feet. The barns and fields and huge, ancient oak trees were as close to her heart as family, but she missed the narrow stairs of Aidan’s apartment building, the noble lines of apartment houses lining the oasis of Central Park, the glowing green globes of subway entrances.

  Jenny shook her head at herself. She wanted it all; she’d known that since the first time she’d visited New York City. She’d been thirteen, and they’d had a big horse running at Belmont that summer—the last big horse Sugar Creek had seen, until Mr. November. Her father had taken her into Manhattan—Andrea had stayed behind at the track, not interested in anything beyond its fences—and they’d ridden the subway, eaten a hot dog in Battery Park City while gazing at the Statue of Liberty, and jostled their way through Times Square. They’d wandered through a residential street on the Upper West Side, past graceful brownstones, shaded by green London plane trees, and watched a dog-walker wrangle a pack of seven or eight happy canines of all sizes. Jenny had fallen in love that day. Maybe it had started as just a crush, but she’d never gotten over it. Something about the city had touched her, and from that day on, there’d been two sides to her: the country Jenny, the city Jenny.

  Jenny stretched her arms over her head, smiled at the green fields, the white cotton clouds drifting through the endless blue sky. “Maybe I can have both?”

  “Who’s out there?”

  The voice drifted out from the feed room behind her, and Jenny jumped. Then she walked across the center aisle and poked her head through the open doorway.

  It was a dark, cool space. Two massive chest freezers, their plugs cut off and their shelving removed after they’d been liberated from a closing country store, dominated the rectangular room. Against one wall, Marco was sitting on a stack of sweet feed bags, his back against the cinder-blocks, thumbing through his phone. Or rather, he had been. Now he was looking at her with a kind of intensity she’d rather not see.

  “Marco?” Jenny hung back in the doorway, unwilling to share the room with his dominating personality. “Aren’t you going back to your apartment for the afternoon?”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t in the mood today. Thought I’d stick around. You don’t have to wait around for evening feeding with me. I know you’re very busy.” His gaze turned furtive. As if he could still hide his feelings around her.

  “I’m not doing anything,” Jenny admitted, leaning a hip against one of the freezers. “Just trying to stay out of the house. I don’t want my mom to get me started on a project I can’t finish.”

  “Good idea.” Marco stood up, stretching, and managed to finish up just a hairs-breadth too close to her. Jenny wouldn’t have expected him to behave any other
way. Ever since she’d joined the exercise crew, Marco had been standing too close to her. But—and this was the reason she couldn’t quite push him out of her life—he’d also looked out for her out there. When she’d get assigned fractious young fillies for pasture rides or strong older horses for gallops, Marco kept his horse, and occasionally a helping hand, close by. Joseph Wolfe had thought his daughter needed toughening up and gave her difficult horses, but Marco was the one who stood between her and the hard ground when the going got tough. She remembered that now, instead of the years in between, the things they’d done behind barns and in empty stalls; all the flings she’d tried to brush off as teenage experiments, and which Marco had hung onto as evidence of her everlasting love.

  She took a step back into the aisle, not bothering to disguise her retreat. Marco knew he was always in her personal space, and he would make no apologies. He had always had a brashness about him, which he had ramped up since she’d first started coming home from the city. She suspected he wanted to show her what a worthy alpha-male he was when compared to those pretty boys back in Manhattan, the ones who showed up in her Instagram pictures. Marco didn’t post much to social media, but he sure as hell stalked it. It was how he knew to tease her about Aidan, but what he didn’t know was that Aidan always seemed to have a new girlfriend, and her name was never Jenny.

  Jenny squared her shoulders to help push the thought out of her mind. It was always easier to be tough with good posture, Lana liked to say. Something her fancy Connecticut girl’s school had taught her—a place which, from her stories, seemed to be half Jane Austen novel, and half Fight Club. “So, you got any busy work going on down here?” she asked. “Something to pass the time and make me feel less like a lazy brat?”

  “We can groom yearlings if you want.” Marco shrugged. “Or go up in the hay barn and catch up a little.” He smiled suggestively.

  Jenny went back to her favorite response to his come-ons: taking out her phone and pretending she was getting a call. “Hello? Aidan? Yes I was just talking about you!” She stuck her tongue out at Marco, acting as if she was listening intently. “What’s that? Oh, I miss you too!”

  “Haha,” Marco said. His smile did not match his tone. “I get it, I get it.”

  “Do you get it, Marco?” Jenny changed her tack; she pushed into the feed room and hoisted herself up on the freezer. She swung her legs idly, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. As if he didn’t make her nervous with his dark looks and moods. “Because it would make our lives easier. We could stay friends.”

  “Yes, I get it. You got your New York boyfriend, you don’t want to go cuddle with me no more.” Marco shook his head at her, but he was still smiling. “Maybe when you graduate, you come back to me. I can wait.”

  “Well, I graduate in a few weeks,” Jenny pointed out. “And then…” She hesitated. She wasn’t ready to tell him. She hadn’t told her parents yet. She hadn’t told anyone.

  “And then what?” Just like that, Marco was too close to her again.

  Jenny slipped off the freezer and ducked past him, heading back into the barn aisle. The blue sky sat over Ocala’s green hills like a dome, sealing their farms away from the noise of the real world. She had to push through it; she had to push past Marco. She had to be out there beyond the hills and the horses, making things happen. The training track winked at her, the faded white railing crinkling in waves of heat. Words she’d written for their project mission statement came back to her. There was more to horse racing than just racing horses. There was more to a country lifestyle than just living it. Every sport, every passion, needed a really good ambassador team, to take the message to the rest of the world.

  “And then I’m going to live in the city,” Jenny said, her eyes still on the track. “I’m starting a racing website with Aidan and Lana.”

  From behind her, Marco sighed heavily. Jenny felt bad despite herself. She really didn’t think she’d led Marco on. They hadn’t done more than work together since she’d gone away to school, four years ago. Even before that, they’d never done more than fool around in dark corners of the farm. And yet, Marco had always seen himself as The Man in Jenny’s life—even after she’d begun pretending to him that she was dating Aidan. He’d always believed that she’d come back to Sugar Creek for good, and that they’d be together. Now was he finally going to see it, was he finally going to believe her?

  “You shouldn’t do this,” Marco said roughly. “You belong here. This is your family’s farm! What I would give to have a farm like this—” He broke off, too angry or too sad to continue. Jenny didn’t know. She didn’t turn around to find out.

  “I have to go,” she said simply. “My life isn’t here.”

  The words were the truest things she could say. They fell out of her so simply, she wondered why she’d been afraid to say them before.

  If only it would be that easy to say them to her parents.

  Chapter Four

  At Sugar Creek, there were only so many ways to hide from her parents, and Jenny had exhausted all of them by five o’clock. She’d tried to while away some time helping Lanie and Maria drive around in a golf cart to feed the outside horses, scooping from a cart filled with sweet feed, but Thoroughbred farms close up shop early, and there was still a yawning gap of empty time before sunset and the human dinner hour to fill once they had finished making the rounds, dumping grain in dozens of feed buckets to all the pastured broodmares and weanlings. Maria dropped her off at the training barn, which was already finished for the night. The horses were pulling at their evening hay-nets. The evening was hot, the sunlight slanting and golden, shimmers of dust lazily floating through the center aisle. May in Ocala was always stiflingly warm.

  “You staying here long?” Maria asked, checking the lock on the feed room door.

  “No, I have another two weeks before graduation.”

  Maria glanced at her. “Then what?”

  She couldn’t tell everyone on the farm before her parents knew. She shouldn’t have told Marco. “Not sure,” she said.

  “That’s OK.” Maria winked at her. “You don’t have to know yet.”

  Jenny watched her drive the golf cart back to the machine shed. When Maria finally left, she’d be all alone, standing in the middle of one hundred acres, without a damn thing to do. Maybe she didn’t have to know what she was going to do next, but the feeling of not knowing was unbearable, even for a few minutes. She had been raised to check all of the boxes in a never-ending list of chores.

  She remembered bringing home a friend for a rare slumber party, back in fifth or sixth grade. Samantha Bedincourt, a grand-sounding name for a small girl, but Samantha wore it well. She rode hunters at a high-end show barn; back then she’d still been mounted on a white Welsh pony, her pigtails bound with blue ribbons. An outsider would have thought Jenny and Samantha would have had a lot in common; they were both horse-girls, after all. But in reality, they might have come from alien planets. Jenny remembered Samantha looking around the quiet training barn with confusion. “But it’s only six o’clock,” she’d said. “Where is everyone?”

  “We’re done,” Jenny explained. “The horses work in the morning. The rest of the day is for the horses to just chill out. There’s just regular farm work in the afternoon, mowing and chores and things. Then everyone goes home.”

  Jenny remembered Samantha Bedincourt looking at her in horror. “So you have, like, no friends to hang out with at the barn?” Samantha gasped in dire tones. “Aren’t you bored?”

  And for the first time in her life, Jenny had wondered if she was. Bored, lonely, and looking for something more… all while surrounded by a hundred acres of land and half a hundred horses, with her family’s name on all of it? Even as a ten-year-old, Jenny had seen the absurdity of the premise. And yet, there was something there.

  After that day, she’d realized how different her life was from the other equestrian girls. And she’d sometimes wished she’d had a normal equestrian childhood
: a show horse boarded at a barn half an hour from home, a tribe of half-feral horse-girls to play and ride and fight with, evening rides and late gossip sessions in the barn aisle afterwards. As Ocala changed, shifted from a racehorse-only community to more of a sport-horse center, more and more of her schoolmates lived that lifestyle. Over the years, plenty of horsey school friends had come home with Jenny to take the farm tour and see how the Thoroughbred half lived. They all looked around the shed-rows and the training track as if they’d landed on an alien planet.

  Jenny had begun to understand then that even though they were all horse-people, the show-horse girls didn’t see her as a peer. Horse racing was simply another world to them. A few of the bolder girls would get galloping jobs when they turned eighteen, earning their college and horse show money by getting on racehorses before school each morning. But most of them stuck to their center-aisle barns, their after-school riding lessons, their oval arenas and their long weekends at monstrously expensive horse shows. All of them riding in big gossiping groups of friends, or what passed for friends in their cutthroat society of ribbon-chasing, while Jenny rode with the exercise riders and threw grain with the grooms.

  Her version of equestrian life was so different from theirs. That knowledge sat beneath all of her other noble words about bridging the gap between horse racing and the rest of the world. She wanted them to know that she was a horsewoman, too. That they were no more, and no less, for training fast horses instead of jumping horses, or dressage horses, or even cow-horses.

  Jenny sighed, looking out over the sunny meadows. This was too heavy a topic for a sultry Sunday evening. She was relieved when her phone chimed with a text from Aidan: Up for a call?

  Yes please! she texted back. A second passed, then Aidan’s face was grinning at her from her phone screen. Her heart lifted at the sight. “Oh my god,” she sighed. “I am so freaking glad to see you.”