She considered this extra level of stress that had just been added to her day.
“Marco? Did you mean Rico?” she asked finally, hoping perhaps her mother had her info wrong. “Did Rico fly up to help?”
“What? No, Rico is still at Palm Meadows. He’s got too many to deal with right now to be leaving them for the weekend. I flew Marco up to help today.” Andrea shrugged, fiddling with her lanyard. “Plus… he looks great on camera. This is the biggest race of our lives. I’d like some good-looking faces in the winner’s circle photo, you know?”
It was true that Marco was as beautiful as a stalking black panther, while Rico was hilariously, charmingly ugly. He looked like he had two different faces smooshed together. His wife called him her devil-troll, with palpable affection. Jenny had to admit her mother’s line of thinking was not off-track. If Mister won, this winner’s circle photo was the one which would go up on the office wall in a place of honor, go into every trade magazine, go into his freshman stallion advertisements, and might even make it into a few newspapers of record. The ones that still covered horse racing, anyway. That was a lot of looking at a photo; might as well make it the best-looking one possible.
“I could wait for you over there,” Jenny suggested. “Meet you at the paddock.”
“Why do that?” Andrea looked at her sharply, and Jenny felt her maternal intuition working through the situation, adding in and deleting characters until she found a storyline that fit. “Is this about Aidan?” she asked finally, unfortunately landing on the same question which everyone Jenny knew seemed to ask her at some point.
“Not everything is about Aidan,” Jenny said haughtily.
Andrea shrugged. “Walk over with us, like we always do.”
Jenny got the impression that if she’d said she was meeting Aidan, her mother would have left her to her own devices. And that was so strange, she didn’t even begin to know how to address it.
By late afternoon, the wind had only gotten sharper and the flurries swirling in off the bay began to cling to a few metal rails on the exposed side of the barn. Everyone was zipped deep into parkas and pea coats, swathed with scarves, their hands buried in gloves. Jenny was beginning to long for a sunny Florida day. Her mother and father were sniping at each other, too cold to bother being nice anymore. Mister leaned over his stall guard and made his favorite I’m bored faces, one hit after another: the sideways head tilt with outstretched lips, the bared-teeth rapid head-nod, the twisted jaw/lolling tongue. Between each face, he ran his front teeth down the stall wall, leaving deep grooves in the paint. Jenny sought peace in the tack room, and sat quietly on an upturned bucket, reading the labels on the supplement buckets. That lasted a bare minute. Then she started pacing.
Then she began checking the contents of the paddock bag, leaning over the canvas tote taking inventory of the things they might need while saddling: a hoof pick, extra non-slip pads, a horsehair brush, latex bandages.
Marco walked in like a bolt of lightning, crackling with energy, the door swinging wide and smacking the wall, then slamming shut behind him.
Jenny stood up too quickly. There was a complaining pop in each of her knees, and she winced. When she opened her eyes again, he was looking at her, all wolfish grin and hungry gaze.
“Jenny,” he said, lingering on the short syllables of her name, “you ran away from me.”
She squared her jaw, not willing to give him an inch. Today was the day Jenny Wolfe was not a pushover, was not afraid, was not taking anyone’s shit. In a few minutes they’d be walking over to the paddock for the biggest race in the country. To saddle the horse she had bred, for her family’s farm. In front of the people she had offended and the people she loved. Was she really going to let Marco ruin that for her? When she spoke, she made sure her voice was light and mocking. “Don’t take it personally, Marco. I ran away from everything.”
His brows came together in a tight frown. This wasn’t the Jenny he’d been counting on, she knew. This was City Jenny, not Country Jenny. “You’re coming back though, aren’t you?”
“Never,” she said, not caring if it was true or not. “Never, never, never.”
She saw Marco clench his fists, saw the disbelief in his eyes, saw the decision pass across his face.
“You’ll come back, Jenny,” he said finally. “It’s your home.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she told him wearily. “Don’t you know not everything is a choice?”
When Marco had closed the door behind him, when he’d gone off down the shed-row alone, when he’d left her there in the tack room, she felt a pang of misery. He’d been her friend once. One of her closest, most dear friends.
Would they all drop off, one by one, until there was no one left?
The paddock was buzzing, high-spirited horses bucking and kicking everywhere as the cold wind whipped through the saddling stalls and shook the needles from the stately old pine tree in the center of the walking ring. Women in ill-considered skirts stood shivering in their stilettos, children fussed with their nannies, and men with loud-colored bowties and collars standing up beneath their dark coats did their best to look authoritative and gangsterish, yet ready for a summer beach party at the same time—the only interpretation of racing life most outsiders could conjure up.
Jenny hated paddocks on big race days, when dozens of owners and hangers-on showed up with their extended families and crowded into the racetrackers’ domain, a space already tense with the prospect of the race ahead. Any race was a big deal for the horse’s everyday connections: the trainer, the assistant, the hotwalker, the groom, the exercise rider, and of course the jockey. Not every race could pay your bills for a few months, like this one could, but every race was another chance to move up a rung, fall a rung, or lose everything. Every race could be make or break.
In her mind, she was writing an article about the pre-race mannerisms of the people around her: the groom hovering over the colt in stall eight, pressing her fingers to the colt’s nostrils in some trick for keeping that particular horse cool and collected which likely only she had mastered; the trainer in stall four checking every bridle strap, buckle, and keeper over and over, running his fingers over the leather, pausing to caress his horse’s ears, forelock, and the secret places over the eye sockets where so many horses loved to be scratched by a set of careful fingernails. The looks of fear, of love, of careful disassociation: the faces of horsemen and horsewomen, caught up in the eternal elation and terror of the race.
These were the stories she had wanted to tell, the pictures she had wanted to paint for the non-believers so that they could see: horse racing people were equestrians just like them. And somehow, she thought now, she’d failed.
But Lana had said people had read them, that readership had fallen off once she had gone.
She shrugged. There was no point in worrying about it now.
“What are you shrugging about?” Andrea asked. “Are you having some conversation with yourself?”
“I always talk to myself, I just learned to internalize it better when I moved to the city.”
“Mmhmm. Well, when you come back to Florida, you can talk out loud again and no one will notice. Ever think of that? There are better places to be alone than the city, if that’s still what you want.”
Still on about coming back to Florida. Still convinced she hadn’t found her place here. Still undermining her confidence with carefully chosen words. Still completely unaware of how those words affected her. Did parents ever change?
Joseph and Marco walked Mister, now fully saddled and bridled, out of the paddock stall and into the walking ring. His hooves slipped into the sandy gravel footing, leaving perfectly even crescents in the ground. Mister had always had gorgeous feet, Jenny thought fondly. He was perfect, from head to tail. An athletic, beautiful racing machine. His brain could be better, admittedly—now he was prancing, his tail high like a flag and his head as high as he could get it without actively wrestling away from the men hold
ing his lead shanks—but he was a three-year-old in perfect, peak condition. No one could ever expect him to have sense, too.
Jenny retreated to the tree at the center of the paddock and let the horses parade around her, trying to stay away from cameras. Aidan was out there, snapping away; she saw him and her heart lifted, then she looked away before he could see her standing there, watching them.
She felt comfortably camouflaged there in her dark jacket, pressed to the old tree. The photographers were happy to stick to the horses; the television reporters were glad to stick to the rich families in brightly-colored dresses and jackets, and that left a lone young woman in dark pants and coat, keeping to herself, easy to ignore. She watched Mister toss his mane, then eyed the other horses, half of whom he had already run against earlier in the year, half of whom he had already beat to the wire, and decided she liked his chances. She remembered the tack room in Tampa Bay Downs, and Foster Donahue offering Mister a spot in his Kentucky stallion station if he won his race today. She thought of broken fences and weeds in the training track and the sagging barn roofs back home.
This race truly was make or break.
“He looks amazing,” a familiar voice murmured into her ear, and Jenny jumped.
“Aidan!” she choked. “You scared me!”
“I’m sorry. I thought you’d know it was me—well, I’m sorry. But Mister looks fantastic. I think today’s his day.”
Jenny, knowing he was here on website business, kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t going to give him a quote for whoever was going to write up the race tonight. Not because Full Stride didn’t deserve her love anymore, but because she wanted to keep her face, and her words, far from anything that reminded her of her old mission.
“Off the record, come on, Jenny,” Aidan wheedled. He knew. Of course he knew. He’d always been able to read her thoughts. He just hadn’t read the important ones, the ones she’d willed him, again and again, to read. Or he had, and he hadn’t liked what he’d found out.
“Off the record, Mister looks fantastic,” Jenny said finally. “I’m proud of my boy.”
“Are you still in hibernation?” Aidan asked abruptly, as if he hadn’t listened to her answer at all. “Or can I take your picture when you’re running out to catch him after the race?”
“I’m not supposed to be the one catching him,” she said thoughtlessly. “My father and Marco will.”
“Marco’s here?”
She looked at Aidan. Had she imagined the catch in his voice? “He came up to help my father. I guess Mister’s been so strong, they thought he would be too much for me. They might be right.” She nodded towards the walking ring, where Mister was twisting, trying to get the space to rear, pulling hard against the men who told him they were in charge. Marco had abandoned his coat and his muscles were bulging against the arms of his tight sweater.
“I wouldn’t love to see you over there,” Aidan admitted. “But I know you could handle him if you had to.”
“I could,” Jenny said. “I could handle Mister any day of the week… but I’m glad Marco is the one doing it.” She laughed, but Aidan didn’t join in. A suspicion blossomed in Jenny’s mind and she turned back to him, her eyes narrowing in speculation. “Marco thinks I came back to New York because of him,” she said lightly. “Men think everything is about them, don’t they?”
Her theory seemed to prove correct; Aidan’s jaw was clenching in a way that was unmistakable, and he looked over at Marco with what could only be described as a glare. “He said that to you?” he asked, his voice tight.
“He was probably only joking.”
“You wouldn’t go anywhere for just a man,” Aidan said. “You’re too driven.”
Am I? Jenny wondered. Aidan didn’t know about her life of hibernation; didn’t know about the cozy palace of books she had made for herself back in Brooklyn, or the way she craved the anonymity of her uniform, her last name on a small brass plate her only identifier, her personnel number that served in place of her name in official communications and over the radio. At home she was lost in other peoples’ stories, at work she was just a unit filling a scheduled post or patrol. Would Aidan admire that?
She didn’t like to think of the answer.
A celebrity she had never heard of stood up and the photographers turned their lenses on him while he said a few nonsense words and then announced the only thing that mattered: “Riders up!”
Her pulse quickened. She watched as Joseph unclipped his shank from Mister’s halter, throwing it over his shoulder, and joined the jockey walking up with Andrea. Marco went on walking the colt. Her mother was still talking to the jockey as the tough little man put his knee in Joseph’s cupped hand and leaped up into the saddle. He was knotting his reins, his legs dangling free of the stirrups, and Jenny knew now everything would swing into high gear. The walking was finished. The racing was about to begin.
She turned back to Aidan. “I have to go,” she said, and there was an apology in her voice.
He heard the note of sadness, and he touched her shoulder. She felt his fingers through her coat and her sweater, and a thrilling shiver shot through her. Dammit, she thought desperately. “I know,” he was saying. “Meet me afterward?”
“There’s no way,” Jenny said. “We’ll be heading back to the barns.” Security was tight on Breeders’ Cup weekend; Aidan couldn’t just go wherever he wanted today.
“In the winner’s circle,” Aidan clarified. “I’ll see you there.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The race went by so quickly, so quickly.
Two minutes and a handful of seconds, a period of time that was utterly inconsequential in almost every single aspect of life. Whole populations of humanity would go through their lives without a specific two-minute memory to speak of by the end of it all. When horses galloped, though, the eyes and hearts and souls of the humans who loved them captured every single agonizing, glorious, breathless half-second, and remembered them forever. A whole lifetime, lived in a tiny brilliant capsule of love and hope and terror. Watching a beloved horse run his race was the emotional equivalent of a diamond’s creation.
Mister ran from the back of the pack, his signature style which had grown more and more pronounced with each race. Every rider who had won on him passed on the knowledge to every future rider, via interview and backside chats: Mister liked to hang back, get the view, find his stride, and didn’t want to engage in the race until three-quarters of a mile had gone by. Then he could be encouraged to get into the fray, and then he was his happiest self, when he was weaving through traffic. His argumentative nature and alpha status meant that he loved to intimidate the horses around him.
Jenny watched him on the infield screen as he came around the backstretch turn and she could tell, even from the distant camera angle, that his ears were pinned, nearly disappearing into his tossing black mane. He was a horse who lived to fight, and his menacing aura was enough to cause the strides of other horses to falter, to make them wobble in their galloping path, and give him the room he demanded to run.
At the top of the stretch he was trapped in an impossible clutch of horses, the announcer screaming that Mr. November had nowhere to go. Bettors were howling. An airplane flew over, but the crowd drowned out the engines of the massive jumbo jet. Not even a 747 could fight against the noise created when the favorite in the Breeders’ Cup Classic was trapped in a pack of lesser horses.
Jenny stayed quiet. She wasn’t in the tumultuous stands, or in the box where her parents, as owners and trainers of a Big Horse in the Big Race on the Biggest of Big Days, had retreated once the outrider had looped her leather strap through Mister’s bit and Marco had slipped the discarded halter over his shoulder. She was leaning against the fence which separated the crowd from the track rail, pressed hard against the side of the winner’s circle, her favorite place to watch a race and easily snagged when the tall man who had been holding the spot for himself realized she was the Wolfe daughter. He was behind
her now, raving about the Wolfe horse not making his run, but Jenny focused all of her concentration on her colt and pushed the man’s presence out of her consciousness. She’d deal with him after the race.
There was a gasp from the crowd as a horse towards the outside spooked at the grandstands and then, with impeccable horse logic, veered towards it. In reality, he was eyeballing the unexpected glut of people and as he tipped his head to look at them, his balance carried him in their direction, but the cause wasn’t important. What mattered was that he made space directly in front of Mister, and suddenly the favorite was locked in the pack no longer. He was running.
“That’s my boy,” Jenny whispered, and the roaring crowds sucked up her little voice and tossed it into the sky. On the screen, she saw Mister’s ear flick towards the stand, then flatten again. The louder they screamed, the harder he would run. Jenny opened her mouth and screeched.
Mister bulled past the three horses running across the track in front of him, the colts scattering to right and left as they felt his menacing presence roaring up behind them like a demon on hooves. There was one horse left to pass, and less than a quarter-mile to do it in, and Belmont’s long, long homestretch was probably surprising him right about now—why wasn’t the race over yet?—and if he didn’t see that horse, a good five lanes in, galloping hard on the rail but suddenly flagging, his stride flattening out, shortening—and then Mister saw him, his ears flicking forward and then back, and he switched leads and pounded down the track in one-two-three-four huge leaps, and he was in front, and Jenny watched him flash past her, her gray colt in the center of the track, just a few dozen feet away, his ears sweeping forward as he surveyed the empty course before him.
The only way he liked it.
Aidan took her picture.
Again and again, crouched before her, towering above her. As she stood in the winner’s circle with her parents and Mister and their grooms and friends, Marco’s presence behind her an annoyance and nothing more, because what could touch her now that she had seen her colt win the biggest race in the land, the greatest race in all of sports? So many things were assured now—Mister would have a glorious career as a stallion, the farm was safe from a for-sale sign, perhaps her parents would even be so distracted by their newfound popularity as trainers and breeders that they would forget about her completely and let her go on living her little quiet life in New York City. The Wolfe name would be a calling-card to every backside again, should she want it; there would be no more fuss about the little Wolfe girl showing up in the barn asking questions trainers didn’t feel like answering. Should she want to ask those questions.
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 30
