“When do you want me to go?”
“You can drive down with your father on Friday,” Andrea decided. “He’s running a horse on Saturday, so he can get you situated at the track as well as at the training center.”
Jenny nodded and turned away, waving the itinerary as she went, showing her mother how dutiful she was, how appreciative of the direction. She went into her room and shut the door. She sat on the bed, surrounded by her model horses and her frills, and considered her options.
August always passed in such a rush. Saratoga would end in just a few short weeks, and Belmont would open. Everything would change, all at once. Aidan would be coming home. The leaves would be changing in the parks and city streets. The evenings would be cool, the dark drawing in more quickly. An entire personality change would come over the city.
In Florida, it would just go on being summer.
She brushed the sweaty hair back from her forehead and considered her options. She’d been here for ten days; her summer rent was paid, but next month she’d have to find a sublet for her Brooklyn apartment.
Or she could just go back to it. Do something different. Try a new kind of life. Was she really ready to go back to the same old routines she’d grown up with? Wasn’t it a little early in life to give up on new things?
Jenny flipped open her laptop, opened an email draft, considered her words carefully. By the time she’d finished typing, her fingers were chilly from the cold air blowing from the vent above her desk, and she was ready for a hot shower. She read over the words once, twice. They all seemed correct. She clicked send.
Dear Sergeant Wilkes…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Excuse me, miss?”
“Yes?” Jenny turned in the saddle. A young couple blinked up at her, and she remembered her courtesy training, shifting Rufus so that the sun wasn’t directly behind her head. Park patrons were short, compared to a park officer on a tall horse. She had to make their lives a little easier in whatever way she could. “How can I help?”
“The concert for global peace? We’ve never been here before—what’s the right path?”
“Oh, you’re nearly there. Just follow this sidewalk to the road and then turn right… you’ll see the line-up forming.” It was the same question she’d been answering for the past two hours. That evening there would be a massive charity concert headlined by celebrities and a variety of bands at the Great Meadow, and tens of thousands of people were pouring in Central Park to see it. The line had started around nine a.m., though the first act wasn’t going on until three.
Becca rode up with a tray of coffee cups held expertly in her left hand, leaving her right hand free to negotiate the reins. She pulled up Paulie alongside Rufus, and the two horses touched noses. “No shenanigans,” Becca warned, holding out the coffee tray. Jenny gingerly pulled the cold cups from the tray, and Becca tossed it into a garbage bin before she took her own coffee. “Such a production,” the officer said. “You’d think one of these nice citizens would offer to buy us a cold brew once in a while.”
One of the nice citizens flooding past them looked up and sneered: “I see corruption is alive and well in the NYPD!”
“I’m not in the NYPD and buying a public servant a coffee with no intent of return isn’t corruption, but thank you, sir, have a good day,” Becca snorted. She shook her head at Jenny. “New Yorkers.”
Jenny laughed at her. “You had it coming.”
“Maybe so.”
“I like them, though.” Jenny looked out over the park. They were standing on post at the big entrance near Columbus Circle, where out-of-towners tended to get out of the subway for the park. The busy Saturday crowds overwhelming after a few weekdays spent patrolling the quieter sections of the park. Jenny had known for years that the southern blocks were the least charming in the park, but after some long days in the saddle, she’d learned how remarkable the far northern reaches were. In the surprisingly remote wilderness of the North Woods and the Ravine, Central Park resembled less a city park and more a national forest, and these were the places few tourists ever stumbled. When they needed a break from questions about restrooms and Strawberry Fields and the Balto statue, they turned their horses north and disappeared for a few hours.
Jenny shrugged at the chaos. “You know, I don’t think I miss Florida at all anymore.”
Becca grinned. “Who would?”
They drank their coffees as the world spun wildly just outside the wide gates of the park, the yellow cabs and the black town cars and the ad-plastered buses and the masses and masses and masses of people bustling through Columbus Circle. Heading south, towards Midtown; heading north, towards the Upper West Side; heading east, towards the Upper East Side and the Queensborough Bridge; heading west, towards Midtown West, also known as Hell’s Kitchen, and that office where Lana and Aidan still worked, still trying to keep Full Stride alive.
Jenny had been written out of the will quickly, thanks to Mr. Farnsworth’s lawyers. She’d received plenty of paperwork, the big yellow envelopes crushed in the tiny metal mailbox she was allocated in the lobby of her building in Bed-Stuy, or tossed on the dirty tiles of the floor when the mailman simply couldn’t be bothered to try and stuff it inside anymore. She was in breach of contract, she was no longer in the employ, she was this and she was that; all it meant was she had started something but she had not been able to finish it. She had planned to do something with her life and it had not worked out. She stuffed the paperwork into a cardboard box and shoved it into the corner of her tiny coat closet, then covered it with shoes—both out of practicality (where else would she keep her shoes?) and out of denial. She didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to think about it. She just wanted it to be over and forgotten.
Working full-time in the parks department helped. The sergeant had called her on Friday morning, just a few hours before she was supposed to leave for south Florida with her father, and let her know they had room for her on the team, if she wanted to join up. Telling her parents she was heading north again had been difficult, with more than a little ranting and raving from her mother, but her father had understood. And so instead of driving to south Florida, she booked a flight and came back to New York, which was where she had decided her life really was.
Although it wasn’t the same without Aidan.
He’d messaged her, sure, but she didn’t tell him she was back in New York. Maybe, if things had been different that night… but they hadn’t been, and he wasn’t exactly chasing her down, making grand romantic gestures. For all she knew, he was still with his girlfriend, still same old Aidan, happy to be her friend—that just wasn’t enough for her now, and she doubted it ever would be.
So, she’d live without him.
Lana had been more silent; she’d clearly taken Jenny’s behavior in Saratoga as a personal affront, and apparently their friendship was over. Jenny hadn’t heard from her outside of legal documents with her signature on them.
“Hey—who is that?” Becca asked, pointing her coffee in the direction of a bearded man entering the park from the Columbus Circle entrance. “He looks like someone famous.”
Jenny squinted, but she was terrible at celebrity-spotting. “I don’t know. Someone in the movies, or TV?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm.”
They watched the famous person get stopped by tourists, sign an autograph, then plunge deeper into the park. He walked past them and they studied his famous face as he strolled by.
“So who was it?” Becca asked when he’d turned a corner and disappeared.
“No idea,” Jenny sighed.
This was the way it usually went. New York was filled with famous people, but they didn’t look the same on the street, or in the park, as they did on the screen. It was funny, when you considered the film-set they spent their days in. The buildings, and the streets, and even the food and the characters serving it: those things all looked like they’d stepped just out of a television show.
And so, for that matter, did Jenny and Rufus, Becca and Paulie. The tourists who had stopped the famous person were now approaching them, cameras at the ready. Jenny and Becca hid their coffees at their hips and arranged their faces into accommodating smiles for the selfies that followed.
Sometimes Jenny found it hilarious that she’d blown up her life on social media and deleted all of her accounts, only to get a job where her smiling face was uploaded to the web dozens of times per day. And yet she was unrecognizable. In a green uniform and a white riding helmet, her last name pinned to her shirt, she was still somehow anonymous. The girl who rode the big black horse in Central Park. Her name too small to read. Her face too forgettable to recognize. She was no one. She loved it.
Besides her, Becca sighed. Jenny recognized the sound. “Spotted a hottie?”
“Hipster hottie,” Becca whispered, gesturing. Jenny followed the general fling of her fingers and saw a tall, skinny man in tight jeans and a light brown sweater, a soft beige scarf wound around his throat, a camera bag over his shoulder. She swallowed and tried to turn away, afraid he’d see her, but she couldn’t take her eyes from his face.
“I know,” Becca agreed, misunderstanding Jenny’s locked gaze. “Now, I need a guy like that. I gotta stop dating all these cops.” Becca’s enthusiasm for their NYPD Mounted Unit counterparts had resulted in some memorable next-day date stories, including a fight at a Village pizza counter over the correct use of the curb rein. Most of the officers had never ridden before they entered the program, and their riding academy skills were usually no match for Becca’s twenty-five years of born-and-bred equestrian know-how. “A nice boy from the flyover states with an agenda to make his mama sorry for all the things she said, that’s what I want.”
“He’s from New Jersey,” Jenny said thoughtlessly. “He’s not a Shaker Heights boy, even though he dresses that way.”
“You know him? Oh, Jenny, do tell!”
She shook her head, turning Rufus away so that the horse faced the park road behind them. “We went to school together,” she said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
It was wrong to reduce her relationship with Aidan to those stilted few words, but it was all she could do. If she was ever going to build a wall between them, forget the way she had felt for the past three years, she was going to have to believe it. Believe that there was nothing to tell.
So why was she here again on the following Saturday, horses standing bored on post duty, back at the same spot near Columbus Circle? She told herself there was no reason to think Aidan would pass this way again. He was probably going to the concert last week; he liked a couple of the headlining bands, at least ironically. Or he was cutting across the park to meet Lily at a gallery on the East Side. Or he just needed a break from long hours at the office, and this was the closest park entrance.
Why believe this would be a regular thing, Aidan appearing out of the hordes of faceless passersby and walking right past her horse?
The people swirled past in their endless waves, and Becca made her jokes and rode off to get them coffee, and they posed for pictures, and the trees turned yellow and orange, and Aidan walked by, and she turned her face away again.
“He paused,” Becca reported. “He looked over this way, saw the horses, and paused.”
“He likes horses,” Jenny said wearily. “It has nothing to do with me.”
But Becca was on to her.
After the morning patrol, they sat in the command eating a late lunch of sushi rolls, the horses tugging at hay-nets in the stable next door. Becca was flicking through her phone aggressively; Jenny was turning the pages of a book, as she’d started doing since she’d given up social media. She noticed Becca’s glances at her growing more and more pointed, until the officer finally pushed aside her phone and leaned across the card table where they ate. “Why aren’t you online?” Becca asked urgently. “It’s so weird. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“I’m just taking a break,” Jenny said. “Getting more reading done.”
Becca narrowed her eyes. “What are you reading right now?”
Jenny held up the book so Becca could see the cover. “Happy?”
“Didn’t that guy write The Great Gatsby?”
“Yes,” Jenny said patiently, “and he also wrote a lot of other books, including this one, which are really interesting and worth your time.”
“I saw the movie,” Becca said, dismissing the topic. “Fine. Enjoy your book. But you’re missing out. I just saw the cutest picture of Officer Meckle and his new horse up by the Reservoir. We should ride up there this afternoon. Maybe they’ll stick around.”
Jenny nodded and shrugged and smiled all at once, turning back to Tales of the Jazz Age. She knew they weren’t taking the horses back out this afternoon. It was already past two o’clock. They’d sit in the office, do some admin work, pick out stalls, and feed up at four thirty before going their separate sides of the subway platform at Fifth and Fifty-ninth—Jenny heading downtown, Becca up.
The reliable routine of life this autumn was starting to feel a little choking, but Jenny tried not to think about it too much. Becca lived in a tall building on the Upper East Side, close to her friends from college who had gotten parent-guaranteed leases in their senior year and simply never moved on, slipping into public relations or marketing or reading manuscripts for their uncle’s publishing house with the same ease with which they’d transitioned from the Main Line or the Connecticut suburbs to Manhattan. Jenny had succumbed to Becca’s pleas to go out drinking with them one night, and although as a group she knew they weren’t much different from the kids she’d hung out with in college, there was a reason she hadn’t kept up with most of those guys outside of Aidan and Lana. Even after four years in the city, even after pledging her allegiance to the streets of this town over the country roads of her home, Jenny still didn’t have many threads in common with most of the people she met here. Sometimes, stirring soup in a pot on the tiny front burner of her tiny stove in her tiny studio, she thought that was what she liked about New York so much.
The ease with which she’d slipped into anonymity was definitely a blessing.
“So, who was that guy?” Becca asked as they cleaned up their lunch mess. “The one by Columbus Circle.”
“There were hundreds?”
“Only one who caught your interest… and no I do not mean the pedicab driver you yelled at for riding on the sidewalk. The Shaker Heights boy, from last week. He was there again today, and you looked like you wanted to climb a tree to get away from him.”
“I didn’t even see him.” Jenny flushed; she knew it was a terrible attempt at a lie.
“Jennifer Juliana Wolfe!”
“That’s not even close to my middle name.”
“You like that boy.”
Jenny flopped down in front of the tired computer in the corner of the command. “He’s just a guy I knew at school. I don’t like him. I just didn’t want to talk to him.”
Becca dropped a glass bottle into the recycling bin with an unholy crash. “Oh, you don’t want to talk to him… I know that much is true.” She cackled. “Girl, are you having impure thoughts about the Shaker Heights boy? You can tell me, I’m a priest.”
Jenny knew that once Becca was truly on a scent, there was no shaking her. “He’s my old colleague from Full—from a thing I worked on over the summer. We slept together in Saratoga. He made it really clear it was a drunken mistake. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I disagreed.”
As soon as she’d said that last sentence, she realized she bore some of the blame. This wasn’t all on Aidan. She should have told him it wasn’t a mistake to her. Maybe he’d been operating under the same marching orders from Lana. Maybe he’d believed she would put the website first, as Lana had told her to. Maybe he’d told her it was nothing so that he wouldn’t ruin her chances at making a mark in turf writing.
Well, she hadn’t needed Aidan’s help to make that mistake.
If anythi
ng, she could congratulate herself for not letting a man wreck her career, when she was fully capable of managing that sort of destruction on her own.
Becca gasped. “Wait—this is the guy who took your picture when you were doing your test ride!”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t I see it before? Oh, he’s got more of a beard now. Very tricky, Shaker Heights boy.”
“His name is Aidan,” Jenny said, annoyed at the nickname. “And he’s from New Jersey.”
“Easy there, I don’t know if I’d defend that hometown quite so strongly. Shaker Heights might be a better back story. He doesn’t really have an accent, as I recall.” Becca was taking this very seriously now, as if Jenny and Aidan were going to get together after all, and she was rehearsing how she would introduce them to her friends.
Jenny was saved from the conversation by her ringing phone. She held up a finger. “Shush—it’s my mom.” Usually she wouldn’t be so eager to take a call from her mother, but Mister was in a good race in a few days, and her mother had been calling with updates on his condition. And also she was done with this conversation.
“Your horse is a pain in the ass,” Andrea Wolfe declared from Florida.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I will try to train him better.” Jenny scowled; was she already getting in a fight? What was wrong with her? Were all girls this combative with their mothers? “What did he do?”
“He bit Rico while someone from The Blood-Horse was here to talk about him. The photographer caught it. It’s all over Twitter. You didn’t see it?”
“I haven’t been on social media in a while.”
“No one’s talking about you anymore, Jenny. You can get over the hermit-thing.”
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 27
