The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Bored already?” Aidan smirked. “Can’t wait to get back to the city?”

  “You have no idea.” Jenny tilted the phone so he could see the expanse of empty barn aisle behind her. Even the horses had retreated inside their stalls. “All the grooms went home and it’s just me. I’ve been waxing philosophical. I think I need to find a bar before I have a breakdown. Why am I not at Fargo with you?”

  “You’re all alone? Where are your parents?”

  “At the house, I think. Probably waiting for me. So they can berate me about my post-grad plans. I’m so scared to tell them.”

  “Well, they love you,” Aidan said, believing it with all his heart, because his own mother was a lovely, sweet woman who treated her son and all of his friends like they were still darling, helpless little toddlers who must be constantly adored and given homemade cookies, and Aidan had never experienced life as the only daughter of two exhausted farmers who never had enough help around the place.

  “Fine—they berate out of love, then,” Jenny snorted.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jenny said, thinking of how odd it was to call a flight back to New York coming home, when she was standing in her own barn, on the farm where she’d lived since the day she came home from the hospital. “One-fifteen at LaGuardia. Think Lana will pick me up?”

  “LaGuardia? In the middle of a Monday afternoon? Not even Lana is that good a friend. Take a town car if you’re going to fly into that dump.”

  Jenny shook her head at him. “Shut up! It was thirty bucks cheaper than JFK. Taking a car would defeat the purpose. I’m still asking Lana.”

  Aidan gave her a knowing smile. “Just remember you won’t be a poor student forever, Jenny. Our ship has come in! It’s all happening!”

  “You’re so right! Soon, I’ll be a poor journalist. I have so much to look forward to.”

  “Speaking of which,” Aidan said, “can you update the Instagram account with some stuff from Tampa yesterday? Maybe post a couple of stories? And do some of the horses on the farm, too. Let’s go ahead and get the Full Stride account really busy.”

  “Of course,” Jenny agreed. “And we should make sure we get out to Belmont quickly, and get as much of the summer meet as we can. We can start our coverage there.”

  Behind him, his apartment door opened and closed. A petite girl, with black hair in tight pigtails, wearing a frilly blouse trimmed with dozens of pink bows, had come in. She waved tentatively at the phone screen. “Hello, Jenny!” she called. Her childish voice grated at every nerve in Jenny’s body. Lily’s Lolita aesthetic was, frankly, disturbing.

  “Hi, Lily,” Jenny called back, forcing a smile. To Aidan, she said, “I should let you go.”

  “Yeah, we’re going to grab dinner over by the High Line and take a walk. It’s too nice an evening to stay inside.” He paused, and his expression grew serious for a moment. Jenny waited expectantly, hoping he’d have something private and thoughtful to say to her. But after a moment, he just let the corners of his mouth trail up again, that habitual smile she’d seen in the baby photos his mother kept on every wall of their New Jersey apartment. “Stay strong, Jenny-girl!” he said brightly. “Just a couple more hours on the native soil, and then you’re back in New York where you belong.”

  “Right,” Jenny replied, her false smile still stretched across her face. “See you soon.”

  Aidan clicked off.

  Jenny looked at her own reflection in the dark phone screen for a minute longer. Her long, narrow nose. Her pointed chin. Her round face. Her full lips. Her brown eyes, and her darker brown hair, curly in the evening humidity. She was twenty-two, and she felt younger, though she looked older than many of the other girls her age at school. The childish roundness which still clung to their chins and cheeks had melted away from her face in the past year or two, and she could see cheekbones, only just, defining the curves of her face. Her mother had groaned at Christmas, and said: “you always looked like an adult to me, but now you look like a woman!” And to Jenny, who knew Aidan’s current penchant for pink bows and baby-doll lips, the words had come like a punch to the gut.

  A young horse pushed his head and neck over the V of his stall screen and leaned over to take a good look at the girl in his aisle. He whinnied to her; probably reasoning that a nice girl like that might be carrying carrots. Jenny walked down to him and held up her hand like a salutation. The colt, chestnut with a fat white blaze and a scruffy forelock, flared his nostrils at her palm, then gave her fingers a long, wet lick with his pink tongue.

  “I don’t even know your name,” Jenny told him. “That’s how rarely I’m here anymore. You’re in my own training barn and you’re a stranger.” She cocked her head to see the halter hanging on a hook next to his door, but it was missing the brass nameplate; a ghostly rectangle of clean leather showing where it had been torn off by some random act of equine foolishness. “I guess you’ll stay a mystery,” she said, taking her hand away and wiping it on her jeans.

  The next horse down was Mister; he had come to the door as soon as he heard the chestnut colt’s whinny, and was shoving at his stall screen with impatience, his knee making the metal shake with a metallic rattle.

  “You need to stop,” Jenny commanded, but there was no commanding Mister. You asked him, and he ignored you: that was how it usually went down when he was in a mood, and the big colt was nearly always in a mood. He shoved his head down as far as he could reach over the stall screen, trying to get his nose at her jean pockets, while a few other horses poked their own heads over and began to nicker their encouragement. Within a few moments, the training barn was erupting with kicks and neighs, as word spread that Jenny was in the house and might be bearing treats.

  “I have nothing, you idiots!” Jenny insisted, but once a barn full of young racehorses has started talking, almost nothing will shut them up for a solid ten minutes. When Jenny looked over her shoulder, it was to confirm what she already knew: her parents were coming up the driveway on their golf cart, alerted to her presence by the song of so many greedy Thoroughbreds.

  “Jenny,” her mother said when they’d pulled up in the training barn aisle, not bothering to get out of the golf cart, “you’re not coming down to the house tonight?”

  Her father coughed and said nothing. He was getting over a cold. He was always getting over a cold; at least, he had been since Mister had started running well and her mother wanted Jenny to come home to help run him.

  “I was just seeing the horses a little bit while I have the chance,” Jenny lied, holding her hand up to let Mister lap at her fingers with his tongue. “Since I have to leave for the airport pretty early. My flight’s around ten, you know, and it will be rush hour around Orlando when I get there…”

  “You’ll be back in a few weeks,” Andrea said comfortably. “So it’s okay. Come back to the house. There’s too much pollen out here for your father.”

  Joseph Wolfe coughed again, but added a smile on as an afterthought.

  Jenny knew she had to say something about that whole “back in a few weeks” thing. This wasn’t summer vacation coming up; this was life after graduation. She had to get to work.

  But she couldn’t say anything while her mother was staring her down like that.

  So she climbed onto the back seat of the golf cart and let her father start driving back down the driveway. Instead of turning towards the house, he took a right down another lane and they rattled over to the broodmare barn.

  “Why aren’t we going in, Joe?” Andrea asked irritably. She was the only one who called Jenny’s father anything other than Joseph, and she did so with an air of ownership, as if the name was hers by right and no one else could claim it. “I want to get dinner started.”

  Joseph held up one finger. “Visit one mare,” he said hoarsely, and then he coughed.

  Jenny immediately knew who they were going to see, and the knowledge filled her heart, pushing all of her own problems to the s
ide. She chewed at her lip as she climbed out of the golf cart, and followed her father over to the gate behind the barn. He opened up the pasture gate and they walked out onto the sunburned May grass, where broodmares grazed while their foals slept nearby, exhausted from a day of play. One by one, the wary old women lifted their heads and watched the humans cross through their territory.

  Only Saint Jenny kept on chewing as Joseph stopped before her and reached out, placing a gnarled hand against her broad neck. The faded chestnut mare was nineteen years old this spring, and looked every year of it, with a sagging back and round barrel from the nine foals she had borne. Deep hollows had sunk into the skin above her wise eyes. Joseph looked down at her head as she grazed, silent for a long moment, until Jenny finally said the words he couldn’t get out.

  “You’re a good girl, Saint Jenny,” she told the mare, running a hand along the tangles of her red mane. “Your boy won his race yesterday. Thank you for Mr. November.”

  It was a ritual of Joseph’s, with all of their home-breds: he went out and thanked the mare for her hard work. With Saint Jenny, though, there was an extra layer of emotion. Everyone was attached to the old mare.

  Even Andrea walked over at last, her cracked leather boots crunching over the blanched grass. “Remember when we brought her home? Two years old and mean as a snake until she met Jenny. We thought she was going to kill you when you opened her stall door,” she went on, favoring Jenny with a nostalgic smile. “We couldn’t get down the aisle fast enough to stop you. But we didn’t know you had an apple in your hand. It took her so long to eat that damned apple, we had time to get you out of her stall before she remembered she hated humans.”

  “Fired the babysitter,” Joseph said dreamily, his voice husky with coughing and memories. “Had to hire a girl from Ireland who understood horses.” He smiled at Jenny as well. “And horse-girls.”

  Jenny had heard the story a thousand times, forced to relive it at family gatherings and when racing friends came to visit: the legend of Jenny and her filly, how she had become the namesake of a fiery chestnut racehorse who apparently softened into sainthood whenever her favorite little girl toddled into the shed-row, apple in hand. It had made her squirm since she was seven. Still, she smiled back at her parents, suddenly grateful they’d brought it up again.

  Because somehow, she’d just realized, this legend of Saint Jenny and the little girl with the apple was at the heart of what she was setting out to do in New York. Their website was going to be about more than Pick Six pay-outs and racetrack gossip. They were going to show the world the true faces of horse racing: the good people and the happy horses. They were going to tell the stories of horses like Saint Jenny and horse-crazy girls like Jenny herself. And with those stories, they’d reveal the behind-the-scenes reality that just because they kept different hours, horse show people and horse racing people weren’t so different, after all.

  Jenny, Aidan and Lana were going to change the world—the horse racing world, anyway.

  And it had all started right here, with this sunburned chestnut mare… and these two proud parents.

  The time was now.

  “Mom, Dad,” Jenny began, her fingers still tangled in Saint Jenny’s mane, “I’m staying in New York after school. We’re going to start a horse racing website, and it’s going to be amazing.”

  Her race-day khakis and blouse were thrown across her bed when she came in that evening, cleaned but not folded—Andrea was a little inconsistent about laundry, and her general willingness to perform household tasks changed from day to day. Jenny smiled when she saw the trousers sprawling lazily across the floral pattern of her bedspread. Those boot-cut khakis were definitely not going back to New York with her; they were strictly for fitting over her paddock boots when walking a horse to the paddock. Even if the cut had been stylish, the fabric was dotted with spots from muddy days at the races. The blouse’s condition wasn’t much better: its contrasting stripes helped cover up a multitude of stains from slobbering horses, dirty wash-rags and accidents involving Diet Cokes and pushy crowds, but the mess was starting to overpower the pattern. Well, she wouldn’t be running a lot of horses in the near future; these could sit around and wait for an emergency. She opened her closet door to put them both away, and heard a rustling in the pocket of the pants as she tossed them onto a shelf.

  Jenny slowly tugged the paper, softened by wash-water but not ruined, out of the pocket. She unfolded it gently: it was the past performances page for yesterday’s second race. Why had she kept it? She skimmed the names of horses and trainers, and it came back to her.

  “That Lawson horse,” she remembered out loud. “I better hang onto this.” There had really been something about that horse she’d liked. And he could be the next hunter prospect she funneled to Lana’s trainer, a talented horseman who was languishing at Lana’s family farm in Connecticut while she gadded around Manhattan. Ryan was always desperate for some fresh horses to shake up his routine. If she kept an eye on this horse’s career, she might be able to help Lana take him off the Lawsons’ hands once they were ready to give up on him.

  “A good day at the races,” Jenny said to herself, putting the wrinkled sheet of paper on her dresser and tucking the khakis onto a closet shelf. “And now, to pack all this up, and go home.”

  Outside, the sun was sinking over the Ocala hills. Down the hall, her parents were rattling pans, opening and closing the refrigerator doors, making a general racket as they fixed dinner together. It could have been any year, Jenny could have been any age—that was how long it had been since anything had really changed at Sugar Creek. But without even meaning to, Jenny had called New York home. And that, she thought, had to be a sign.

  Chapter Five

  Jenny was lost in Long Island City.

  She’d thought there weren’t too many corners of the navigable city she hadn’t met yet, but like a lot of impressionable young girls wandering New York City and feeling like they’d achieved New Yorker status, she’d only been learning the fairly easy-to-conquer neighborhoods.

  The Lower East Side and the shining Federal-era streets around Washington Square were her college haunts, with squeaky-clean bars and clubs dressed up in punk outfits and splashed with old paint to make them look as rough as their predecessors. Further afield there was Midtown and Central Park and occasional forays up Central Park West or Fifth Avenue for the museums north of Fifty-ninth Street: the Met and the Guggenheim and the strange, cavernous halls of the Museum of Natural History. Once she had gone to Hamilton Heights to have a look at Alexander Hamilton’s house. A few times she had stayed on the A train all the way up to Inwood and found her way to the Cloisters, where a reconstructed medieval abbey looked over a protected strip of New Jersey’s riverside cliffs, a theme park-level effort of place-making created by twentieth-century millionaires—and frequented not by the neighborhood locals, but by tourists and downtowners like herself.

  She’d left Manhattan Island, too, just enough to feel adventurous. There were outings to Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Industry City and Sunset Park, where in-the-know friends introduced her to the best local taco trucks and the lofty views of the city from the park’s litter-scattered lawns. She’d gone to Green-Wood Cemetery to see the statue of Minerva gazing across the harbor at the Statue of Liberty. Once, she’d joined a group on the long N train journey south to Coney Island, where she’d eaten fried clams from Ruby’s and gotten sick under the boardwalk, sand sifting down on her sweaty face from the footsteps overhead. Afterwards, Jenny told herself she’d passed through some sort of ancient rite of passage of New Yorkers, the Food Poisoning of Sea Beach.

  Now, Jenny stood on a narrow street somewhere in Queens, surrounded by a strange mixture of 1950s manufacturing buildings with small, grimy windows and towering twenty-first century apartment towers with gleaming glass walls, and focused on the one thing she did know: the Empire State Building. It was right there in front of her, albeit down several blocks, across the East River,
and then a few more long Manhattan blocks away from her. Perhaps not the most handy address for her current situation. Still, it was the only landmark she had.

  She looked at her phone again. Lana’s text said: You’ll see the Empire State Bldg then turn left, walk a block, and it’s the blue door on your left.

  Jenny supposed that was enough information for Lana, but she preferred somewhat more detailed directions… especially in a place where the principle business model seemed to be the manufacture of injection-molded plastics from the atomic age, an area of commerce which did not require much foot traffic. Or car traffic, she thought wryly, since she was standing in the middle of the street, and not a single motor vehicle had contested her right to be here. She started to cross back to the sidewalk, then wavered.

  “Yeah, better get the shot,” she told herself, and held up her phone for a quick picture of the Empire State Building against the shining summer-blue sky, its Art Deco angles perfectly framed between the buildings at the river’s edge a few blocks away, a few dangling branches from a green-leaved London plane tree, and a glass block tower that was dominating the skyline from its moors around the corner. Of course it was perfectly framed—this was what Jenny did, she made beautiful, disposable things for social media. Words and pictures that were meant to make a scrolling person linger for a moment, maybe even click for a better view, before moving on to the next thumb-stopping moment.

  It’s funny where a journalism degree will take you.

  An ambulance sounded its alarm at the end of the street, turning onto the road and heading directly towards Jenny. She stepped between the cars parked along the sidewalk without hurrying, and put her phone back into the pocket of her light blazer. She’d put the picture onto her Instagram later, when there were people around, and if the meeting she was about to join had any moments worth sharing on their website’s feed, she’d add it there in the evening, a more lucrative posting time when she could catch the after-work crowd as they settled down onto couches or leaned their heads against the head-rests of their commuter train seats. The methodology of social media: knowing when to find captive eyeballs and restless, scrolling thumbs.