The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Of course, she didn’t.

  She told herself that every time the thought came back around, revolving with the others in a carousel of visions.

  Aidan took her picture as she patted Mister on his hot, sweaty neck, and as she ducked away before he took a bite out of her shoulder, laughing because his expression told her it was nothing but mischief. He took her picture as she walked with her parents back to the barn, Joseph leading the colt, who was looking at the crowd in the stands with great interest. He took her picture as she helped their groom bring out warm water for a bath, and he took her picture as she flung a blue cooler, the farm name embroidered on the side in white letters, over the colt’s steaming back. He took her picture as she ducked away from the camera crews and reporters waiting to talk with her parents, and as she sat down on an overturned bucket in the tack room, and put her fingers out to the humming space heater.

  He closed the door behind them.

  She looked up. She’d heard him all around her out there, and his presence had filled with her with a sense of well-being she wouldn’t want to try and articulate, a simple realization that he made her feel safe and whole, and she was enjoying this day a hundred times more because he was with her. Even if his interest in capturing her walk back to the barn with her stakes-winning colt was strictly business—and she didn’t think it was, anyway.

  “Are you going to do a full photoblog of me?” she asked, smiling at him.

  “I might. If you’ll let me.” He let his camera swing loose from its neck strap. “I thought you might want these photos some day. A chronicle of the best day of your life.”

  “What makes you think it’s the best day of my life? It was actually a really hard day. I might enjoy a day on the beach in Tahiti more, now that I think about it.”

  “You bred the horse that won the biggest race in the world.”

  “The Emirates might disagree,” she teased, thinking of the Dubai World Cup.

  “If they didn’t want to win this race, they wouldn’t have sent two horses out against Mister. Who demolished them. Anyway, every reporter out there is asking your parents about the Dubai World Cup, so better update your passport.”

  “My passport’s fine,” she said idly. “I went to Canada—last year? Two years ago?”

  “That was three years ago,” Aidan corrected her. He leaned on a sawhorse holding a small mountain of exercise saddles. “The first summer after we met. I was going to come up and see you, remember? And you said your parents were keeping you too busy with horse stuff to even get out and see the city. My feelings were hurt. I thought you just didn’t want me to come.”

  “You went to see Lana instead,” Jenny remembered. “I thought you were going to ask her out and I—” She stopped abruptly, realizing with horror that she’d been about to say I was jealous.

  What a dead giveaway, that she’d always been hoping for more than friendship. Now, more than ever, she wasn’t going to give him an inch on this.

  “What?” He was craning his neck to look down at her face, to try and read the expression on her face.

  “I thought if you two dated, I would be left out,” Jenny improvised, and once she said it, she knew that was the truth, too.

  “Funny,” Aidan said. “I always thought the same thing about you and Lana.”

  “Aidan!”

  “No, it’s true. Not about you dating so much, although it would have had the same result. But even just as a friendship, two girls and a guy… I was always going to be a little bit the odd man out, right? And I think it affected all of us. You and Lana didn’t have a lot of close friends besides us by the end of school. I didn’t have a lot of close friends but I did have a lot of girlfriends. I guess I was just making sure I wasn’t ever going to end up alone.”

  Jenny looked up at him, shocked by his confession. Aidan was looking at the floor, his long lashes downturned. There was a little flush to his cheeks which might have windburn, or the shame of saying aloud that he had been safeguarding his life against abandonment by his best friends, by turning into a player that none of them could respect. “Aidan, I—I had no idea you felt that way. We were never going to abandon you.”

  “But you did,” Aidan said to the floor. “Only you abandoned Lana, too.”

  “Is that what you think? Is that what Lana thinks?” Jenny’s pulse was pounding in her head, and suddenly the space heater was too hot, the space too airless. She pushed it away with the toe of her boot, the casters spinning on the polished concrete. “It was Lana who turned into a dictator, it was Lana who fired me—”

  Aidan looked up. “You sabotaged yourself to make Lana fire you. You wanted out. You wanted away from us. Not just her, either. Both of us.”

  “Well for god’s sake, Aidan, what the fuck did you expect? You fucked me and then you rejected me and then you left me alone! Who abandoned who?”

  Jenny was on her feet, her fists balled at her sides. For a moment, she literally saw red, a rushing in her ears causing her to reel drunkenly, and then Aidan was backing up, his hands up as if to ward off the punch she looked ready to deal out.

  Who knew what he might have said? There wasn’t a damn thing he could say in response, and they both knew it, and then the door opened and Marco came in, his face stormy, and Jenny realized he’d been listening outside the entire time.

  Marco looked ready to punch faces. Jenny wished Aidan was the type of guy who would just run for it. But Aidan, while not the fighting sort, was also not the backing-down sort. He was the sort who got in over his head trying to defend his own honor (and maybe her’s, who knew).

  But Marco didn’t just start throwing punches. Instead, he looked at her. “Jenny, you want rid of this guy?”

  Jenny could have cried from happiness. He was going for the manly savior route instead of just trying to protect his territory? What a stroke of luck. “No, Marco. Aidan was just leaving.”

  Aidan threw her a look that said really?

  She nodded at him. “You have all the pictures you’re going to get.”

  Aidan put the lens cover back onto his camera, placing it just so, taking his time. Marco stepped aside as he approached the door, giving him room to pass. He paused in the doorway and looked back at her.

  “I did what I thought you wanted,” he said softly.

  She shook her head. “How could you think that?”

  “Everything you said—come on, Jenny. You wanted to put the website first. So I put the website first. And it sucked, and I miss you every single day, and I just… I hope you figure out what you want. I really do.”

  He disappeared into the gloom of the shed-row.

  Marco looked at Jenny disapprovingly. “So you did have sex with Aidan, huh? You lied to me.”

  “Oh, Marco.” Jenny sat back down on the bucket, feeling as if all the blood had been drained from her body. “I did no such thing.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Jenny went into work the next morning hungover in more ways than one. She hadn’t been able to get this day off when she’d taken the other ones, and hadn’t worried about it much until one a.m, when she realized she was still in a Manhattan restaurant smashed on champagne and the party was not in any hurry to stop. Her father gave her cab money, since there was no telling when the next late-night train would be passing by on its leisurely way to Brooklyn, and since they were now, however temporarily, people who could afford cabs. She’d watched the city go by from the window and considered how very drunk she was, and considered telling the cabbie to just take her to the corner of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue, since she had to head back over the river in just a few hours, but instead she went to sleep on her couch without pulling the bed portion out and slept in a puddle of drool until her second alarm went off.

  Sergeant O’Dowd was hunched over her computer when Jenny walked in, just barely on time, and punched the time clock with seconds to spare before she was marked late. The older woman turned around in her folding chair and fixed Jenny
with a curious stare. “Your horse won the Breeders’ Cup race yesterday, is that right?”

  “The Classic,” Jenny said cautiously. Had she told her commanding officer that she had a horse in the race? Like Sergeant Wilkes, O’Dowd didn’t care for horse racing. She also didn’t care for personal information, which had made it easy for Jenny to say she needed all that vacation time because her family needed her help, and not have to go into detail at all. “Yes, my horse won. Mr. November. We just call him Mister, though.” She was babbling. She closed her mouth, then wished she hadn’t. Her mouth was hot and dry and her tongue didn’t want to live in it anymore. What would fix her mouth? Coffee. She put down her tote and fumbled with the Keurig.

  “And you got a little celebratory last night, huh?” O’Dowd chuckled. “You guys can go out a little late today. Becca is feeding the boys.”

  “Thanks,” Jenny sighed. She poured an obscene quantity of sugar into a mug and watched the coffee swallow it up. “A bunch of racing types took my parents out to celebrate last night. For all I know, they’re still there.” She paused. “No. They’re at the track. But they probably went straight there and haven’t gone to bed yet.”

  O’Dowd went back to her spreadsheets. “Having your parents in town is always exciting. Especially when they win a million dollars.”

  They’d won three million dollars, actually, but Jenny didn’t feel the need to bring that up. It wasn’t going to stick around long, anyway. A million dollars around horses was like a thousand dollars in real life. Jenny gave their bank account less than a year before it was gasping for life again, but at least the barns would be improved, the training track would be resurfaced, and there would be some sparkly new broodmares in the maiden mare pasture, ready for mom-life.

  “It was exciting,” Jenny agreed. “But I’m ready for them to go home.”

  The door slammed and Becca came in. She took one look at Jenny and screamed. Jenny put her hands over her ears and groaned. O’Dowd slammed her mouse down on the desk and cursed. Becca took no mind of either of them. Instead, she rushed Jenny and embraced her, squealing. Jenny felt her brain rocking back and forth in her skull and decided champagne was henceforth banned from her presence. “Hi, Becca,” she croaked weakly.

  “You didn’t tell me it was the Classic,” Becca roared. “And then I see your face all over the place and I’m like ‘oh my god that’s Jenny!!!’ and my boyfriend was like ‘who is that?’ And I’m like ‘you know Jenny, my partner?’ and then we fought about how he never listens to me but oh my god, Jenny! That colt! Take me to meet him.”

  “There’s no time,” Jenny said without regret. Going back to Belmont would be seeing Marco again, and she just couldn’t face him. Not after that scene with Aidan. “He leaves for home tomorrow, as long as he walks sound this morning. Which, I guess he has done already, since it’s past eight o’clock.”

  “Oh my god, racetrack people get up so early. I do not know how they do it. I hate getting here at eight.”

  “You’re lazy,” O’Dowd intoned.

  “Excuse me, I’m normal. Anyway, I can see you are hungover so I apologize for screaming. But oh my god. What a thing to keep secret.”

  “I just didn’t really want to talk about it, in case I jinxed it,” Jenny lied. She took a long, deep gulp of sugary coffee and felt better almost immediately. A suspicion hit her, as if her brain had just switched on the moment the caffeine hit her tongue. “Where did you guys see my picture?”

  “Pic-tures,” Becca corrected her. “That website you used to work for! Shaker Heights took a million photos of you and put them all together in a photo essay or whatever they call it. Before, during, and after the race. It’s linked on all the new sites this morning. I even saw a tweet from the New York Times about it.”

  Jenny stared at her. She knew about the after photos, and in that happy haze after the race she had been more than willing to give him every possible angle of her. But now, remembering the way they’d left things last night in the tack room, to think that he’d gone off and worked on an entire series of photos of her, that he had sat up all night and edited the light on her face again and again last night, was deeply troubling.

  O’Dowd pushed back her chair. “Come over here and see it,” she suggested. “Don’t use that stupid little phone to look at it.”

  Becca put her phone back in her pocket. “She’s right. Let’s get a full HD experience.”

  Jenny watched, speechless, as Aidan’s depiction of her day rolled past her. Walking over with the horses, her eyes on Mister, her expression unmistakably adoring. Leaning against the tree in the paddock, so clearly trying to disappear. Looking right at the camera, her eyebrows arched in happy surprise. That photo made her pause. Had she looked like that when she’d seen Aidan? Was her face truly so unguarded? And how had she not realized he was looking at her?

  Then the pictures that surprised her most of all: the race itself. She’d had no idea Aidan had been on the inside rail. She’d never even seen him. But he’d seen her, and in the moments while the horses were still running their race, not yet to the finish line, he’d taken photos of her watching the screen, her fingers to her lips, her eyes lit up with hope. She knew, because she’d seen him edit before, that he’d subtly highlighted her from the crowd, manipulating the colors of her coat and scarf and hair to make her stand out from the masses all around her, the man who had ceded his place to her reduced to a dull shadow figure with a forgettable blur of a face.

  “I didn’t know about these,” she said softly.

  “He really caught you,” Becca said. “I can’t even imagine having photos like this of myself. These are going to win awards.”

  They flicked through the post-race pictures: washing down Mister, giving him carrots, walking him dry. A portrait of Jenny leaning against a shed-row rail, looking out at the shadowy backside, a cat twining around her legs, closed out the collection.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “So, Shaker Heights is definitely in love with you,” Becca said.

  O’Dowd barked a laugh.

  “What?” Becca said. “You don’t think so?”

  “It’s just so obvious,” O’Dowd explained. “I was just laughing because you felt the need to say it out loud.”

  “Aidan is not in love with me,” Jenny sighed, feeling the full force of her hangover once more. “Last night, he said—”

  What had he said?

  He had said he’d done what she’d said she wanted.

  He had said he was afraid of being abandoned by her.

  He had said she had left him behind.

  Jenny felt dizzy. She fumbled her way to a chair and leaned her head back against the wall. From across the room, she heard Becca and Sergeant O’Dowd exchange stage-whispers.

  “Guess she didn’t know.”

  “Now she’s probably going to leave and I’m going to have to patrol with you.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Well, thank you, Becca.”

  “I just meant—I want to patrol with—never mind.”

  “Hmmph!”

  “Are you going to leave, Jenny?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jenny said.

  Instead of leaving, Jenny poured her frustrations (and her headache) into work. She mucked both stalls while Becca was still inside arguing with the sergeant about taking the patrol car to get breakfast. Once Becca finally came back with bacon-egg-and-cheeses, Jenny ate her sandwich standing up in the feed room, tacked up the horses, and went inside to put on her patrol uniform before Becca had finished her second latte of the morning.

  “You’re in a hurry today,” Becca grumbled, pushing Jenny aside so she could open her locker. “A girl can’t even enjoy her coffee?”

  “Get another one while we’re riding,” Jenny said heartlessly. “I don’t know about you, but I need some saddle-time or I’m going to spend way too much time thinking.”

  “I don’t know what there is to think about,” Be
cca snorted.

  But there was everything to think about, and Jenny didn’t want to consider any of it. There was the question of who was right, and who was wrong, on that night in Saratoga. There was the question, never answered, because she’d never asked, of why Aidan had rushed back to the city the next morning. There was the question of the website, and whether by leaving, she was the person who had abandoned Aidan, and not the other way around. She didn’t know the answers to these things, and she couldn’t sort them out without talking to Aidan, and she didn’t want to talk to Aidan without knowing the answers ahead of time, in case she was right and he was wrong but he somehow managed to trip her up again, turn it around on her as he had in the tack room last night. She wasn’t ready to consider all of these things or the futility of the act of consideration, so instead, she was going to go riding and hope that helped clear everything up.

  Sometimes, it did.

  “You girls be back by two,” O’Dowd called. “We have to run out to Queens to check some horses on city property. I called in Wilkes to feed the horses dinner tonight and I’ll drop you both in your neighborhoods after.”

  Becca glanced at Jenny. “This sounds interesting. Have you done a property check yet?”