The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “It was supposed to have been delivered yesterday,” she hissed at the delivery workers.

  “Well, it’s here now,” said the one holding the clipboard; evidently, with such a powerful prop, he was the man in charge. “You gonna let us set it up?”

  Lana moved out of the doorway, and they all filed out of the empty office, laptops still in their shoulder bags.

  The team set up morning shop at a nearby Le Pain Quotidien, where strollercise moms were crowded around the big community tables, drinking green tea lattes and making lactation jokes. Lana stalked past their oversized jogging strollers, shoulder pads bobbing (Jenny wondered if she’d worn the nineties-style power suit for some sort of joke, or if she was being deadly serious), and found a corner table near the kitchen doors where they all squeezed in on top of each other. The scent of baking bread wafted deliciously over their workstation every time the doors swung open, and Jenny thought they had the better end of the deal despite the cramped conditions.

  Lana bent her head over her laptop while Aidan retrieved coffees and muffins, quietly clicking through the site, auditing all of the pages. Jenny watched her nervously. She’d looked at the site first thing this morning, and thought it looked beautiful: the banner at the top, the clean interface, the stunning photo galleries from Aidan, and, of course, her name at the top of half a dozen stories, including one about the Central Park carriage horse who had once raced at Aqueduct. Aidan had gone back to the park the next day and shot several photos of Cherry posing elegantly in the golden evening light, Janice sitting proudly on the carriage box. They were simply beautiful.

  “A few links need fixed, but it’s nothing serious,” Lana said finally. “We did a good job, guys. We launched our site!”

  They looked at each other over their lattes with blank expressions, none of them sure how to process this information. Jenny thought the moment was rather anti-climactic. There should be champagne, she thought, and jumping up and down. But maybe they’d do that later. After they’d gotten a little feedback. The site looked lovely to her, but maybe the rest of the Internet wouldn’t think so. Better to sit tight and wait for the public response before they did too much celebrating.

  “We should celebrate properly,” Aidan said, just as Jenny had privately decided there was no cause to celebrate yet. “Let’s go to the park and drink a bottle of wine.”

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” Lana said, but she looked excited at the idea. “Are we a bunch of winos?”

  “I am, definitely,” Aidan said. “I’ve been a wino since junior year.” He looked at Jenny for back-up. “What do you say, Jen, are you in?”

  Jenny wanted to drink her latte and eat her muffin, but Aidan’s sparkling eyes and imploring expression were too much for her to resist. Besides, she thought, she could finish them both on the way to the park. “I’m in,” she agreed.

  Aidan and Lana closed their laptop lids with resounding thumps. “I can’t believe we were going to work today,” Aidan laughed.

  A flannel sheet from a dollar store served as a picnic blanket, as Lana’s expensive al fresco dining kit was stranded downtown in her apartment, and a bottle of soda had been purchased and dumped down the gutter for the express purpose of camouflaging the Prosecco they’d bought on the way to the park. Aidan stopped into a bodega and bought big bags of potato chips. “It’s not a party without chips,” he argued, looking so disarmingly boyish that Jenny had to bite her lip to keep from smiling at him with an expression that would have given her away forever.

  They settled into a shady corner of the Sheep Meadow, and on that broad green pasture they toasted one another with red solo cups. Jenny leaned back and squinted at a kite flying in the sunshine, its plastic wings flapping as it fought the stiff breeze funneling between the nearby skyscrapers. “I never understood the point of kites,” she said dreamily. “You just stand there and hold a string?”

  “You were probably always in motion as a kid,” Aidan said affectionately. “Little Jenny the jockey.”

  “I thought I’d be a jockey,” she admitted. “Until I was maybe twelve or so, and I was as tall as some of our exercise riders.”

  “Just as well.” Aidan patted her on the hand, his touch bringing tingling goosebumps to her bare arms. She hoped he didn’t notice. “We like having you here with us, all in one piece.”

  Jenny gazed at him until he looked back at her, and then she dropped her eyes to her phone. She picked it up and squinted at the screen, shielding it from the sun. The app running the website’s social media accounts had a ton of notifications, she realized.

  “Hey, we have notifications,” she announced, tapping the icon. “Let’s see what people have to say about us.”

  She tapped the icon. Her breath caught.

  “Oh, no.”

  Lana was on top of her in a second, nearly tearing the phone from her hands. “What happened? What are they saying?”

  “Wait, just wait and let me see what’s going on here.” Jenny flicked through the mentions and tags, trying to understand why there were so many angry responses tagging their channels. Finally she got to a tweet that was specific.

  “‘We will not rest until every carriage horse is freed of bondage! Tell @fullstridenews what you think of them!’” Jenny read aloud. She looked up at Lana, her face crumpling with horror. “This is about the retired racehorse post, Lana. Cherry and Janice.”

  Lana succeeded in pulling the phone from Jenny’s hands. She ran her finger down the screen, her eyes moving furiously across the words there. Then she looked back at Jenny, and her expression was icy. “I said to do my friend’s hunter,” she said tightly. “The one in Connecticut doing schooling shows. A nice, feel-good story no one could possibly get mad about. But no, you had to go and find a carriage horse. The lightning rod of New York City.” Lana shook her head, then downed the contents of her cup and poured another generous helping from the soda bottle. “These assholes have filters set up for this kind of thing. Let me guess: you set up tweets that read something like ‘retired racehorse gets new life as NYC carriage horse’ when you were scheduling the social.”

  Jenny nodded slowly. Why hadn’t she seen this coming? She wasn’t completely ignorant of how social media worked. She was actually quite savvy at it, which is why she’d been entrusted with that part of the business—at last, she’d thought she was. Still, she’d done her research, and she was protective of her work. “Come on, Lana. We had to expect some trolling from animal-rights activists just for covering horse racing at all.”

  “Carriage horses are another beast altogether.”

  “But how can we just ignore an entire facet of the horse business? Especially if they’re creating jobs for retired racehorses? Carriage horses are perfectly legal.” She pointed across the Sheep Meadow, where a horse and carriage were making their way up the West Drive. “There’s one right now! We know they’re well cared for. There are strict laws enforced to protect them. It’s all in the post… if anyone cares to read it.”

  “It’s not heat we can take right now,” Lana said tersely. “This is something we can do later, maybe even in a week or two to make a splash, but for our literal first impression? Not great. Let’s go find some wi-fi and take this post down.” She got up and started tugging at the sheet. Aidan sat firmly on it and looked up at her with doe-like eyes.

  “Oh, do you want me to get up?”

  “Come on, Aidan. Celebration’s over. We have our first fire to put out.”

  He sighed and struggled up, sliding his sock-clad feet back into his sleek brown oxfords. “If we take down a post every time someone has a problem with it, we’re going to be pretty busy destroying our own work,” he said. “You do remember we’re writing about horse racing, right? Literally the least popular of all sports?”

  Jenny resignedly picked up the bags of chips and shoved them into her tote bag, letting them fall on top of her laptop case. They hadn’t even had time to dig into them yet. She thought Lana was
overreacting, and that Aidan was right: horse racing wasn’t exactly universally beloved. There were going to be problems. Why couldn’t they just let this blow over?

  Lana turned and faced them at the meadow gate. “We’re going to fix this and we’re going to get back on track, got it? It’s not the end of the world.”

  Jenny bit the inside of her lip. No one thinks it’s the end of the world but you, she wanted to say.

  But something had changed in the past week. Lana had gotten more ferocious, more untouchable, as the days had gone by. Her easy smile had vanished, her chin had taken on a distinct jut. And Jenny didn’t feel like this was her closest friend anymore, the person she could say anything to and watch the words slide right off her unbothered back.

  The dynamics of their little trio had already started to shift.

  She glanced at Aidan, saw him gazing off into the distance, his eyes fastened somewhere east of Lana’s right shoulder. “Sure,” he said absently. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Jenny wondered where his brain was wandering.

  Back at a handy Starbucks on Columbus Avenue, Aidan pulled up the site’s analytics page and started clicking around. He showed Jenny the site stats while Lana was in the restroom, washing sticky wine from her hands. “The retired racehorse column is getting all the views. Look at these numbers! People aren’t just getting angry, they’re clicking. That’s something.”

  “Maybe,” Jenny sighed. “But are they looking at the rest of the site?”

  Aidan looked at the pages per session and shook his head. “No. They’re scrolling and leaving.”

  “We could still target them with advertising,” Jenny suggested. “It’s not a total loss. We could get them to come back.”

  “Not if they have no interest in racing,” Lana said, leaning over their shoulders. “It’s the wrong audience.”

  “I thought it was the perfect audience. I thought we were bridging the gap between racing and sport.” They’d repeated those words again and again—it was in their mission statement, for heaven’s sake.

  “Racing and sport, not racing and animal-rights activists,” Lana clarified. “There’s no bridging that gap.”

  “There are good stories we can tell them!” Jenny protested. “That’s what my column is supposed to be about, the good stories of racing! Why can’t this be the start? Why can’t this be exactly what we wanted?”

  Lana looked at her with narrow eyes, and Jenny felt the full force of her friend’s powerful personality. Lana had always been frivolous in her eyes… but she had also been raised to lead companies and command household staff with the same iron fist. Jenny and Aidan had privately wondered if agreeing to work for Lana had been the wrong thing for their friendships. Now Jenny was wondering if it had been the wrong thing for her career. She couldn’t write for someone who tore apart every idea she stood up for. Her self-esteem wasn’t exactly iron-clad.

  “Aidan, how many hits for the backside column?” Lana snapped, not taking her eyes from Jenny’s.

  Aidan sighed and clicked.

  “Twelve,” he said.

  “And for the carriage horse story?”

  “Two hundred thirty-seven.”

  Lana nodded. “So maybe the retirement angle is going to be the best way to tell your stories,” she said, “but this isn’t the right way to start.” She turned to Aidan, and Jenny felt the release of her gaze with physical relief. “Take it down, please.”

  Jenny went to the counter and ordered iced coffees for everyone, light and sweet to combat the midmorning wine break. She knew her story wasn’t being destroyed, just hidden from the public eye, and yet it felt like a death, as if Lana was overseeing the execution of something deeply personal to Jenny. She hadn’t even wanted to write the story, preferring to spend her time on the backside column, and yet here this article was, getting attention and traction which could be used to boost the site, while her backside column was doing nothing. She couldn’t help but feel proud and protective of it, and fiercely angry with Lana for not seeing the article as anything but a triumph. Clicks were good. Passion was good. If people read that story, they’d learn something. Without it, all they had was their own carefully nurtured anger.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lana’s father had picked an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side for their opening night dinner, the decor all dark wood and linen tablecloths. Jenny walked into its shadows from the sunlit summer evening, and felt her presence drop the average age in the room by thirty years. Out on the street, the sky said to stay out late, because it was seven o’clock in summer and that left hours of daylight yet to enjoy. Inside the cramped confines of the dining room, the sweater-draped diners picked at their pasta and chatted drily about museum board drama and brownstone improvements.

  Mr. Farnsworth swept in while she was still lingering in the vestibule, wondering if she was the first to arrive, wondering if she could still escape to a sidewalk cafe somewhere sunny. “Jenny!” he announced. “Welcome to the retirement home.”

  “This is a little different from the brewery in LIC,” Jenny teased. “Did we miss the early bird special?”

  “I was at a meeting just upstairs, and this place does a mean antipasti,” Mr. Farnsworth explained. “I have a favorite restaurant on every block in this city. Well, in Manhattan. I hear you just moved to Brooklyn?” He opened the vestibule door and escorted her inside, where a seater, looking relieved that the crazy girl lurking between doors had finally entered the restaurant, was waiting to check their name off the list.

  “Prospect Heights,” Jenny agreed, deciding Mr. Farnsworth wouldn’t be pleased if she admitted the place was really in Bed-Stuy. She’d noticed the older generation of New Yorkers didn’t accept that Brooklyn was basically Manhattan on Miracle-Gro.

  The seater showed them to a table in the front corner, where a plate glass window, shaded by a white curtain, showed tantalizing glimpses of the bustling Amsterdam Avenue street-life. The restaurant was a little too warm, and Jenny wished they could walk the couple of blocks back to the park, find the nice spot where they’d sat this morning, and drink Prosecco poured from a soda bottle again. Wasting lovely evenings indoors had become a hardship for her since she had come to New York; these long summer days were the reward for the endless night of winter and the short, slanting rays of spring and fall sunshine. She was constantly craving the bright, tropical sunlight of Florida, and New York was forever falling short.

  “Lana’s running a few minutes behind,” Mr. Farnsworth noted, putting his phone down on the table. He asked the hostess to bring them a very specific bottle of wine, which Jenny suspected would be nice but not too nice, in keeping with his juvenile company, and then turned back to her. “The carriage horse story, Jenny.”

  She swallowed, her heart speeding up. “That was… not the reception I was expecting.”

  “This isn’t how you want to debut a publication.”

  “I agree, and—”

  “Stay away from controversy for the first six months. After that, carefully choose your battles. Opinions from both sides, an editorial from someone in the industry, fine. Carriage horses? Don’t touch them again.”

  The bread arrived, thin sticks and warm rolls in a linen-lined basket, with a dish of olive oil, sprinkled with herbs. Jenny wanted to eat all of them in very quick succession. Bread was possibly the only thing that could make her feel better right now. “You’re saying, no articles about carriage horses, ever?”

  “That’s right.” Mr. Farnsworth reached for a roll. “They’re the third rail around here. They’ve literally destroyed mayoral candidates. Just leave them out of the discussion, okay? Here, have some bread.”

  Jenny took a roll from the basket and pulled it open, letting the steam spill from its soft insides. She tore off a bite and put it into her mouth slowly, feeling as if chewing would almost require too much energy. Lana’s father was the website’s owner. He had the power to tell them to stay away from subjects. But did he h
ave the right?

  She didn’t think so.

  Lana came sweeping into the corner and flung herself into a chair, tossing a pastel-colored shopping bag over one corner. “Sorry I’m late! The traffic is crazy. I ran down to Soho for a few things and forgot the time.” She looked around. “And where is Aidan?”

  Jenny shrugged. “I haven’t heard from him.” He’d left the office at four, laptop back in his shoulder bag, and said he’d be back uptown in time for dinner.

  “Did you text him?”

  “Should I have? I’m sure he’ll get here.” Arriving anywhere on time in New York City was an extreme sport of balancing travel times, transit delays, and adding up long versus short blocks when computing walking distance. Jenny really thought there should be a twenty-minute window in either direction before a person was considered too early or too late.

  Lana seized a breadstick and waved it at her. “I’m starving. I’m not waiting for him.” She bit into the breadstick with a crack.

  Mr. Farnsworth eyeballed his daughter. “Congratulations on the site launch, my dear,” he said finally, looking mildly perturbed.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Lana laughed and leaned over to hug him. “Thank you.”

  Forgotten, Jenny felt free to look out the window while Lana and her father caught up on the day. She twitched aside the gauzy curtain and watched the city go by. Women in sundresses and flip flops, men in shorts and t-shirts, everyone carrying sweating cups of iced coffee. The windows let in the sounds of their chatter and laughter, the traffic on the street. Then, ringing above it all, she heard hoofbeats. She blinked, astonished, as a small chestnut horse, a pony really, appeared on the street. He had a white star and stripe, and a thick blonde forelock between his dark eyes. He was the cutest horse Jenny had ever seen in her life.

  “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed, jumping up to run to the door and out onto the pavement, just as the waiter appeared with the freshly uncorked bottle of wine.