The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Remember what I said about the flax seeds,” Caitlin said. “Put that in your article. People love hearing what these horses eat, for some reason.”

  “I will,” Jenny assured her. “It’s in my notes.”

  Caitlin stood and held out her hand; Jenny took it and felt the stickiness of the orange still clinging to her fingers. “I meant what I said,” Caitlin said. “If you need some horse-time, just call me. I’ve got a spare vest and helmet in the tack room. You can ride anytime.”

  “Thank you,” Jenny said. “That’s really kind.”

  “We’re racetrack girls,” Caitlin said with a shrug. “We have to watch out for each other. No one else gets us.”

  “Coming in to work with me?” Aidan asked as they settled down onto the pleather cushions of a Long Island Rail Road seat. “We can use the office for as long as we can take Lana, and then we can go down to the Le Pain again. Or back to Bumblebee, whatever you feel like.” He seemed to have noticed her sinking mood as they walked back through the grounds and out the horsemen’s gate to the busy main road, where they had watched traffic pass for ten minutes before their Lyft showed up. She’d been silent in the backseat of the car, but she never liked talking in town cars and taxis, didn’t like airing her business in front of strangers. In a city of loud voices, Jenny had learned to keep quiet.

  Now they were settled in the relative solitude of a midmorning commuter train, with a few suburban women sitting alone, watching soaps on their phones, and one snoring gentleman stretched luxuriously across three seats, his feet propped up on the wall. The train doors closed with a whirring sound, and there was a ding over the P.A. “This is the 11:36 train to Atlantic Terminal, Brooklyn,” a recorded voice informed them. “The next stop is Hollis.”

  “I’m going home today,” Jenny said finally. “I need some quiet time to get this article written. I’ll work in the office tomorrow.” She looked out of the window, watching eastern Queens roll past. The grid was different out here: gambrel-roofed houses with tiny yards and above-ground pools, gritty little main streets a few blocks long with two-story brick buildings housing a few nail salons, fried chicken joints, and pentecostal churches, then some factory buildings housing who-knew-what behind their grimy louvered windows. Not all of New York, not even half of New York, was towers of glass or brownstone blocks. Much of it was just very tight suburb which had gotten roped into the city as more and more people swelled its ranks.

  “This is Hollis,” the P.A. informed them, as the train squealed and lurched its way into a shuddering halt.

  No one got on or off.

  “Come on, Jenny, you can work in the office. It’s just the three of us, how noisy could it be?”

  Jenny didn’t want to get into how betrayed she felt by their little business right now. She’d spent the weekend wrapped in a little bubble, getting her studio set to rights, putting together a few pieces of IKEA furniture, learning her neighborhood streets and shops. On Sunday evening, crumpled on her new couch, she’d finally had ample time to look over her social media kingdom, and seen how trampled both her personal accounts and the Full Stride accounts had been by animal rights activists. By Monday, she’d recovered sufficiently to head into the office with a clear head, an upturned chin, and a reasonable plan to recover their social reputation—only to find Lana was on the warpath about the negative hit they’d taken in their very first weekend and was demanding an instant turnaround.

  “We stay controversy-free, do you hear me?” Lana had snapped while Aidan and Jenny looked at her blankly from over their coffee cups, having barely put down their bags and flipped open their laptops. “When you go to the track this week, bring back good news and vet every single word you choose five times… there is no room to slip-up, guys, none at all! We need chipper, we need cheerful, we need the kind of stuff those viral pet channels will pick up and share on their Facebook pages. Get me ponies who sleep with stuffed teddy bears. Take one along and use it as a prop, I don’t care.”

  Then Lana had stomped into her glass-windowed office and slammed the door, which was the first time Aidan and Jenny realized that Lana had actually taken ownership of the space’s office. They’d assumed she’d be working out at the communal tables, with them, and that the office was just for taking calls or doing interviews.

  “The next station is Jamaica.”

  “Is this about Lana?” Aidan asked.

  It’s about Lana, Jenny wanted to say, and it’s also about you, and it’s also about Caitlin and just about feeling utterly confused about my place here and where I really belong.

  “It’s definitely not not about Lana,” she said cautiously.

  A massive crowd of people shoved onto the train at Jamaica, most of them sweating from waiting on the hot platform. A large woman wearing a skimpy halter-top and shorts settled onto the seat next to Aidan, and he crammed a little closer to Jenny, forced out of a good third of his seat. They’d sat on the three-seaters so they could have a little more space between them, but now Jenny regretted not settling into the two-seaters on the other side of the aisle.

  The train lurched on, now considerably warmer and more odorous than it had been a minute before. “The next stop is East New York,” the recorded voice calmly informed them.

  Aidan struggled to keep his camera bag balanced on his lap without falling over onto Jenny. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got to separate boss-Lana from buddy-Lana. We all have to figure out new ways to compartment work and friendship, or we’re going to end up hating each other. If we figure out how to be good coworkers, we’ll have the best of both worlds. We’ll be unstoppable.”

  “And if we don’t?” Jenny met his gaze until she couldn’t take looking into his green eyes a moment longer. She flicked her eyes back to the scratched plexiglass window, the passing bricks of New York. “What if we end up hating each other? I think it’s best if I just keep my distance until Lana works her kinks out.” And I work my own kinks out, she added silently. Whatever they are.

  “I just… I don’t want you to think you’re not doing a great job, just because Lana is freaking out. She’s only freaking out because her dad told her to, and you know she’s always been Daddy’s Girl.”

  “Of course she has, and that’s how we got the money. I get that. But it doesn’t make it easier to take, especially with everything else going on.”

  “Everything else?”

  Why had she said that? This was exactly why she needed to be alone for a while. To put a lid on emotional outbursts that would wind up exposing all of her secrets. “Just… you know. Moving. Dealing with my mother wanting me home, that kind of stuff. It’s just very unsettled right now.”

  The view out the window grew more dense. Brick apartment buildings mingled with garages and stores specializing in second-hand office furniture, car alarm installation, and industrial-grade kitchen supplies. Along one side street, a piebald pit bull trotted confidently down an empty sidewalk, his gaze focused firmly on the future. Jenny felt a sudden lurch of longing for green fields and the quiet of an afternoon barn full of snoozing horses. East New York had always unnerved her, with its razor wire and trash-strewn streets, teens leaning against the chain-link fence of the MTA bus parking lot, next to an automated gate festooned with a gruesome sign showcasing how its mechanism could kill you.

  “Let me come back to your place with you,” Aidan offered. “I’ll keep you company, and we can get lunch. You’re spending too much time alone since you got your own place.”

  “I’m fine, Aidan,” Jenny said, but she kept thinking about the pit bull heading off on his own, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks. She put her face in her hands and choked back a wail that was threatening to come out of nowhere. What was she supposed to do? Just ignore Lana’s casual cruelty? Just go on sitting next to Aidan like he wasn’t the love of her life? Just pretend she wasn’t missing the feel of horses with every breath? Just turn her back on her goals and give up on journalism before she’d eve
n gotten properly started?

  There were no right answers; each question cancelled out the next. She had to stay and be the turf writer she dreamed of becoming, and that meant putting up with Lana, and sitting next to Aidan, and living without horses as more than a weekly treat, and the combination of all those things was suddenly killing her.

  Aidan had his arm wrapped around her, which was difficult considering how tightly she’d pressed against the window, and as the train went into a tunnel, the windows shuddering with the change in pressure, she leaned against him in a moment of delicious surrender. She let the tears fall for a few minutes, while the train roared through the tunnel under Atlantic Avenue and the people around her shouted and laughed and cursed, drowning out her shuddering breaths.

  Daylight returned in a cross-hatching of fence slats.

  “This is Nostrand Avenue.”

  Jenny pushed back, startled, and swiped a hand across her face. “This is my stop!”

  Aidan stared at her. “Nostrand? You’re joking.”

  Several people shuffling towards the door looked back at him with annoyed expressions, and Jenny saw Aidan as they would see him, another spoiled trust fund boy treating their neighborhoods like flyover states on the way back to his gentrified version of the city. He wasn’t really like that, but it was easy to give that impression—just one more reason she’d learned to guard her tone and keep quiet in the city.

  By the time he’d gotten over his confusion and moved out of her way, the doors were starting to whirr their way closed. Jenny caught at one in desperation, and a man on the platform turned around and caught the other door one-armed, forcing it back open with one easy shove. “Thank you,” she breathed, jumping out of the train. The station platform was open-air and elevated, and the sun beat down on the concrete. The man nodded at her and continued on with his day.

  She turned around and saw Aidan had gotten up, and was watching her from the closed doors, as if he’d decided to chase after her but had left it a moment too late. Just like everything else in her life, Jenny thought sadly. The timing had to be right, and it almost never was.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jenny picked up a sandwich and a large iced coffee from the bodega on the corner of her new block, then climbed the stairs to her apartment, where she spent a very long three minutes wrestling with the sticky, antiquated door lock before it finally opened with a clunk that seemed to echo around the empty landing. The building was one of those five-story brick apartment houses that dated back to the early 1900s, with dented steel apartment doors opening onto central landings, the stairwell with its iron bannister clad in decades of chipped paint climbing between them to a dim and bug-spattered skylight, the floors tiled in tiny squares of red and blue and cream, curling in vaguely Greco-Roman designs around the heavy door sills. Somewhere in the center of the building there was a small courtyard, from whence Jenny could occasionally hear children screeching and dogs barking, but her studio’s two twin-sized windows looked over the street below, a relatively quiet block leading to the chaos of Atlantic Avenue.

  It was a good place for a building, she thought. She liked the relative quiet when the windows were closed, quiet with the potential of noise and activity if she were to stick her head out one of them and lean over the sill, or climb out onto the rusty fire escape. Atlantic Avenue was one of Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares; it was a little like living just off Madison or even Broadway. She liked to hear the buses braking and accelerating, and feel the rumble of the 2 and 3 trains rushing between the Brooklyn Museum and Grand Army Plaza. Her Manhattan apartment had been constantly loud, and this one was a cloister in comparison, but too much silence would have been chilling after spending so many years with the chatter of a roommate and the endless rumble of downtown.

  The studio was a decent-sized room with a galley kitchen and small island on the left as soon as a person walked through the door, and a tiny, improbably-placed hallway to the right which led to a small, yellow-tiled bathroom. Jenny couldn’t quite figure out how the bathroom extended beyond the perfectly squared-off lines of the apartment—it was as if it had been pulled out of the neighboring apartment’s space and added to this one after an oversight by the builders. She’d done enough reading about tenement life to suspect this was the case.

  There were a few boxes stacked against the walls, but otherwise the studio was largely empty, the parquet floor crumbling in peace. The furniture—her new pull-out couch, and a small square coffee table, and a tiny desk—huddled against their separate walls. The sofa faced the right, the desk faced the left, and the coffee table was pushed between the two windows, because Jenny couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it when the sofa-bed was pulled out. She’d wanted a rug, because the flooring was splintering in some places, but she’d been on a tight budget and had been forced to postpone that particular dream to a later date. For now, she’d wear flip flops or thick socks to keep her feet safe.

  The blinds over the windows were discolored and missing a few slats at key points, and the curtain rods above them were dressed sparingly, just one heavy sheet of beige fabric apiece, knotted in the middle because there were no tiebacks. She was sure there had never been any tiebacks, it wasn’t as if they were lost or something—there were no hooks in the wall, either. The curtains, drab and lifeless, swayed like ghosts in the breeze that slipped through the window panes. They seemed to be saying that this was as dressy as this apartment was going to get: haunted mansion shabby chic.

  Jenny looked at all of this with a sense of accomplishment, and dropped her keys on the kitchen island. One of the peach-colored tiles lining the countertop teetered with the impact and fell to the floor. She picked up and set it beside the keys, mentally adding super glue to her shopping list. This apartment was not going to get her down with its drab, 1970s renovation or its defaced 1910s details, pretty trim details hidden under globs of what was probably lead-based paint. She wasn’t going to think about her parent’s house back in Ocala, or the thick carpet of her bedroom floor, where she used to lay on her stomach, bare feet in the air, as she flipped through horse magazines. She was going to build her life right here, make this little square of New York City her own, and love every minute of it.

  There was a squeak from behind the refrigerator, and an unmistakable scurry of little feet.

  Okay, she conceded, maybe she would not love every minute of it. But that was a lot to ask, anyway. She’d settle for loving sixty percent of her minutes here. The rest, well, it could be a blend of emotions. And she’d be sure to keep all of her food in the refrigerator until she’d worked out whether the cabinets were rodent-free or not.

  Having dragged the coffee table back in front of the sofa, opened the blinds to let in the summer light and turned the window air conditioner on to push out the summer humidity, Jenny got down to business with pleasure. Her notes from the morning were engaging, her story angle was writing itself, and her sandwich had just the right amount of mustard and mayo soaking into the soft white hero roll. The iced coffee was bodega-quality, so she’d filled it to the brim with sugar and whole milk, and it tasted like a melted milkshake. A good afternoon, she thought, looking up from her typing and letting her eyes shift around her little kingdom, the sun slanting across the parquet. A very good afternoon.

  She was deep into the story, making tweaks to the order of her paragraphs and quotes from Caitlin on the running of a racing barn, when her phone rang. She picked it up, knowing without looking that it would be her mother. No one else she knew would phone her when they could send a text. “Hi, Mom,” she said, getting up and walking over to the window without an A/C unit. She’d take the opportunity for an eyeball break. “What’s up?”

  “Your father,” her mother sighed, as if they were midway through a conversation already. “He’s going to kill himself working so hard this summer. It’s a million degrees and he’s out in the barn still. I can’t make him come inside! The grooms are beside themselves.”

 
; “Why’s he still outside? It’s almost two o’clock.” That was weird, although Jenny wasn’t sure she needed to be involved.

  “Fussing over that colt of yours,” Andrea huffed. “It’s always something. He wants to ice him. He wants him on the Thera-plate. He wants to give him an extra hand-walking. And he won’t let any grooms do it. He’s out there right now watching that colt stand in ice boots like he’s afraid the horse will keel over dead if he walks away and has a goddamned sandwich.”

  “He’s fussing over Mister? But why? Did he get hurt? Did I miss something?”

  “No!” Andrea was exasperated with her already; Jenny could hear her tension, practically see the muscle twitch in her cheek. “He’s training like a monster. He’s running down at Gulfstream in two weeks and your father just isn’t willing to let a single thing go to chance. But he’s wearing himself out and that colt is already a terror to run, so I wish you’d come down and help us. It’s next Saturday, the Casanova Stakes.” She stopped talking, and Jenny knew this was her cue to assure her mother she’d be on the next plane to Florida.

  “I can’t come to Florida next weekend,” Jenny said instead. She rolled the blinds all the way up and pressed her cheek against the glass, looking down the street. A steady whirl of traffic and humanity poured up and down along Atlantic. City buses, white and blue. Black cars and green borough cabs. Cars and bicycles and just plain people on foot. She loved them all. “I have work. There’s a huge stakes card at Belmont that I’m supposed to be covering.”

  Andrea’s voice was icy. “Surely you can let Lana and Aidan cover that while you help your parents run your colt.”