The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  The bell on the front door rang; Jenny looked up automatically, expecting nothing but another cold person stumbling in off the dark street.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath when she saw Aidan coming inside, his shoulder bag flipped over his back to keep it from bumping into the tables on either side of him. It only took a moment for his eyes to land on her. Then he was coming towards her, his expression intent.

  Jenny slowly closed her laptop and watched him approach, heart thudding against her chest, mouth dry, mind racing. He couldn’t have expected to see her here—she never would have expected him. Why was he here, at nine o’clock at night, in a Manhattan cafe where they’d only ever worked during the day? This was no typical nighttime hangout for him, surely, unless he’d given up drinking and smoking and partying with pretty artists. Unless, in the months they’d been apart, he had given all that up.

  Then he was standing in front of her table, and then he was sitting down across from her, and then they were staring at one another, neither willing to speak first. Jenny couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. She was too busy trying to keep herself from screaming. He was there, right across from her, and she couldn’t bear a second parting like the one they’d had before.

  Aidan’s face was white, pinched with cold; his light blue scarf was still wound around his throat, the short fringe tickling at his ears. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his brown hair was unkempt, blown around by the wind. The sandy highlights of summer were gone. He took off his thin leather gloves slowly, finger by finger, and she touched them from across the table. They were icy cold.

  “You need a hot drink,” she said.

  She held up a hand when he started to rise, walked over to the counter and ordered him a latte. The nightshift barista didn’t know them, but as she took down the order, her eyes followed Jenny’s gaze back to the table where Aidan sat, toying with this gloves, his scarf still tucked in around his neck. She took time with his drink, slipped a chocolate wafer onto the saucer, and dropped another one in Jenny’s cupped hand. “Good luck,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  Jenny thanked her, smiling back, although she wasn’t quite sure what the luck would be needed for. Why was Aidan here, and how had he known how to find her?

  She put the saucer and cup in front of him with fingers that were trembling ever-so-slightly, hoping he would not notice.

  He looked up at her gratefully. “I think it’s really going to snow now,” he said, his voice still husky with the wintry city air. “I’ve been out all day, wandering around in the wind while it just thought about snowing, but I think it’s committed now.”

  She wondered what it was. The sky, the atmosphere, the city, the gods? Each one seemed equally possible. The city certainly seemed capable of making up its own mind about things, the weather included. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked him, smiling. “I actually kind of like snow.”

  He grinned at her. “Don’t tell anyone, but… I do, too. I always have. I just pretend to hate it because everyone else says they do.”

  “I think everyone likes snow just a little bit,” Jenny mused. “Except maybe building owners who have to get up and shovel the sidewalks out.”

  “That’ll never be our problem.” Aidan took a sip of his coffee, looked back at the barista and waved his thanks to her. “We’ll never be homeowners. Not in this city, anyway.”

  She dropped her gaze back to her fingernails, rough against the polished wood of the table. It didn’t mean anything when he said we, but it felt like it should. “So what brings you out here tonight?” she said after a moment. “Just needed a coffee before you went home?”

  He put down his cup. “I was looking for you, actually.”

  “How would you know to find me here?”

  “I didn’t.” There was a pause. He smiled ruefully. “This was the last place I looked.”

  Jenny’s lips were dry. “How long have you been looking for me?”

  Aidan looked at her steadily. “Since noon. I thought you’d be in the park. When you weren’t anywhere I checked, I just… I just kept looking everywhere I could think you might be.”

  She wanted to scoff at him, call him out on his joke and admit that he’d just stopped in for a coffee and happened to see her, but, just as urgently, she wanted it to be true. Wanted to know Aidan had been wandering the city for the past nine hours, looking in all of her haunts and stopping at all of her posts, trying to find her and make it look like an accident.

  “I was in Queens this afternoon,” she said. “At a weird little horse farm out near Aqueduct.”

  He chuckled. “That explains it. I was never going to find you out there. The one borough I didn’t check.”

  “Hopefully you didn’t check Staten Island.”

  Aidan shrugged. “It’s a nice ferry ride, anyway.”

  “You didn’t think to call me?”

  “I didn’t think you’d answer.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, waiting for him to drop his gaze, but he didn’t. Something was different. “Aidan,” she said. “What did you want so much that you spent all day in the cold looking for me?”

  “Well, I’m on a mission from Lana,” he said, and her heart sank. “But more than that, Jenny, I have just missed you so much. I needed to see you.”

  He told her his mission first, though she squirmed in her chair and wanted him to hustle through the business talk. Lana was making one more offer, he said. She wanted Jenny back, because the website just wasn’t what they’d wanted it to be without her there, and she was willing to let Jenny work on her own time, to go as in-depth as she liked, instead of requiring regular columns. She understood Jenny was doing her own thing with the parks department and didn’t want to be tied down to a desk. She was happy to be flexible. She would do what she could to make this arrangement work. Full Stride wasn’t going to meet its mission if Jenny wasn’t there to lend heart to the amazing photos Aidan was providing.

  Aidan related all this as if he was repeating a document he’d been instructed to memorize, as if he was a secret agent reciting a mission too delicate to commit to paper.

  “Basically, she wants your writing back on the site in whatever capacity you care to give her,” he summed up once the message had been relayed and he could revert to his normal voice. “The traffic has gone to shit since you left. Then the Breeders’ Cup coverage, the pictures of you… people are asking for you. You should see the comments.”

  “Spare me the comments,” Jenny laughed, holding up her hand before he could slide his phone across the table. “Even if you say they’re flattering, I’ll stick to my rule on never reading them. So Lana says I can freelance and keep riding at the parks department?” She wondered if Lana had considered, even for a moment, making her offer in person. The chances were slim. Once turned down, Lana wasn’t about to make a second overture. If they were going to have a friendship again, even anything beyond an editor/writer relationship, Jenny was going to have to wait for Lana’s pride to recover.

  That was fine, she thought. She was good at waiting.

  “If it’s something you want to do,” Aidan said. “Or if you want to come back to the office, you’re welcome there, too. It’s just the two of us and frankly I’m pretty sure if it stays that way it’s going to be just the one of us.”

  “Which one of you lives?”

  “Whoever snaps first and kills the other person.” He shrugged. “It’s not that bad. It’s just… it’s not the same. It was different when you were there. It was better.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be there all the time,” Jenny said. “But I do want to write. And I have a story here. That’s what I’m working on, actually. Remember the bay horse I followed from Saratoga? The one that started that whole mess? Well, I found him today.”

  “No way.” Aidan’s face lit up, and he was suddenly right next to her, pulling his chair around to her side of the table. The barista frowned at the scraping noise on the uneven floorboards
. “Show me.”

  Jenny smiled, and flipped open her laptop, and showed him what she had written so far. “You see,” she said, highlighting a few lines in the middle about the men and women Handler worked with at the track and the auctions. “There’s a whole system in place to catch horses who need homes. And it works best when they’re right here in the city. Proximity, I guess, and there are fewer places to get rid of horses here, no room for auction houses. So that guy Ames? He agents for Handler and a couple of other buyers in the northeast who need cheap ex-racehorses for their programs. Camps and police horse trainers and carriage drivers, all kinds of horse-people buy them. It’s this whole underground network I didn’t know about. No one knows about it, until they’re in it. He’s got horses in Queens, horses in Brooklyn, horses in the Bronx. Horses all over, basically hidden in plain sight. It’s crazy!”

  Aidan was astonished, leaning in to hungrily read her words. “Right under our nose, this whole time,” he said finally. “Right in the city. That’s amazing.”

  “A good story,” Jenny said. “I thought there weren’t any. I was wrong.”

  “Send this to Lana.”

  “It’s not done.”

  “Just send it, as a draft. Set her mind at ease. Then I don’t have to call her and report back.”

  “Why? What were you going to tell her?” Jenny turned to look at him.

  Aidan met her gaze. “That I found you,” he said softly, his voice suddenly layered with meaning.

  Jenny’s heart was thudding in her chest. This had to be the moment, she thought.

  And yet it wasn’t. They looked at each other, and then, with silent agreement, they slid back their chairs. Jenny closed her laptop, slipped it into her bag, and stood. Aidan walked ahead of her, opened the door, and led her out into the night.

  The street was loud with traffic, car tires sloshing on wet roads, the endless slip-slap of windshield wipers. For a city known for long walks and underground trains, there was an endless cacophony of traffic and its associated racket. But they didn’t hear those things as intrusions anymore. Only as the background, the accompanying soundtrack to their lives. Like a movie with a missing score, the lack of noise would have been a distraction.

  Jenny turned up her head to look at Aidan, and a snowflake drifted past her nose. Then another, and another, and just like that, they were surrounded by a snowfall.

  “You like it,” Aidan reminded her as she wrinkled up her nose, blowing away a bold, cold flake which had landed there. “You love it.”

  “I love it,” she said. “I do.”

  A taxi blew its horn at a jaywalker, and a bicyclist shouted at the cabbie, and a police car whooped its siren at all of them, and Aidan leaned down and kissed Jenny at last.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The sun was rising between two squat sabal palms as Jenny mounted her horse, its bright orange glow illuminating the individual threads of his chestnut mane. Rosey was a reliable old Quarter Horse who had been one of her father’s favorite track ponies for years, and since she wanted to be able to free her hands to take some video of the morning gallops, she’d wheedled permission to ride him out to the training track this morning.

  There was a crunching of wheels on gravel, and Aidan pulled up next to her in one of the farm’s golf carts. “Are you all set for this?” he asked, looking up at her with a smile. “I’m going to be shooting you, too, in case you were wondering.”

  “I figured.” Jenny shrugged. Since November, since the Breeders’ Cup win and the Queens stables and Sergeant and Handler and the article she had given Lana which had gone viral, developed a life of its own, and even inspired several New York-based news outlets to cover the strange life cycle of the retired racehorses in their midst, she had accepted she couldn’t be anonymous anymore. Her hermit days had come to an end. She even had a new headshot, provided by Aidan, to accompany the opinion pieces she was asked to write and the interviews she was asked to give to other publications, equine and non-equine alike.

  She’d started a buzzing conversation about racehorses, retirement, and yes, slaughter, but it was a different kind of conversation that those which had come before. This one was about potential, and the remarkably unexpected places you could find a happy home for horses, instead of just the usual wheel of sad stories about dumped horses sent to cruel fates, or the publicity round of racing charities sponsoring retirement opportunities for racing stars with no breeding prospects.

  Jenny knew part of the story’s success was the diversity angle—the inner-city cowboys were such well-kept secrets, their reality reduced to obscure urban legends, while most people regarded owning horses of any sort as a rich white girl’s hobby. But she also knew it wouldn’t have gone this far if she hadn’t been so tightly wrapped up in the fate of the Lawson gelding for so long, and if she hadn’t had her heart ripped out at that auction in upstate New York. And if she hadn’t been raised by the men and women of horse racing, from her parents to the trainers she’d grown up alongside, to believe that horses were important, and deserved respect and care, from day one to their last day on earth. And that racing was mostly peopled with good guys, not bad ones. All of those factors together—that combination was what made the article touch so many people, and drove so much interest.

  Lana had known it too, and that’s why she had gone to the glossy magazine Equestrian Journal and asked them to partner with Full Stride on a full feature piece on the state of the American horse farm. It wasn’t just a racing article for racing people. It was an equestrian story, for all horse-people. It was Jenny’s dream. And it was centered on her, and her family, and their farm.

  She’d written most of the words already, words about the fragility of a family farm and the strain of running a complex, emotionally-fraught business which teetered on the edge of ruin for more than thirty years. She wrote about the steel spine of her mother, the gentle horsemanship of her father. She wrote about her childhood, raised to put horses first. To eat plain toast for breakfast during tight seasons, but never to skimp on the horses’ alfalfa. To live with the pendulum of good years and bad years. To raise horses, to love them, to lose them, and sometimes, with luck and hard work, to find them again.

  She had somehow found the words. Now it was just time for the photos to illustrate them. That was where Aidan came in.

  Her father rode up on a chunky bay gelding who had won the farm enough money in allowance sprints back in the day to pay their hay bill during a lean, dry summer. The horse had more than earned his right to stay on the farm forever. “You ready? We’ve already done two sets out there.”

  Jenny scowled. “We couldn’t exactly do a photoshoot before sunrise. You couldn’t wait a little bit?”

  “There are four more sets,” he said, unapologetic. “You can get what you need in that timeframe.”

  There was a rhythmic series of clicks from beside them. Aidan looked at his camera display, then smiled up at them. “This is a good start.”

  Jenny’s father grimaced, but it was all for show. Both of her parents had been rather tight-lipped about the article, but Jenny had overheard them the night before, while she’d been unpacking from her flight, and the phrases at least she’s writing again and proud of her had been uttered aloud.

  Aidan, sitting on the bed watching while she’d frozen in place, jeans dangling from her stilled hands, had winked at her afterwards. “When you win an Eclipse Award for it, they’ll say those things to your face.”

  “Maybe not,” she’d said, laughing quietly so they wouldn’t be overheard. “But that’s okay. This is enough.”

  Life was a little easier with her parents’ approval. Especially since she’d thought she could never make them happy if she wasn’t here at home, on the farm.

  Now she walked Rosey alongside her father’s gelding, Aidan buzzing off ahead of them to scout some good spots along the training track, and felt a deep sense of contentment.

  “I’m glad you and Aidan have worked things out
,” her father said after they’d ridden in silence for a few strides. “I was sorry when you weren’t getting on with your friends. That’s a big city to be without friends in, Jenny.” He said this with a note of warning, as if Jenny was planning on dumping them all again at the first convenient moment, and she had to smother a smile.

  “I am too,” she said simply. “And I’m glad it worked out with Lana. I’m dropping down to volunteering with the mounted unit again. I’m going to learn more about carriage driving with Janice, too. There are a lot of amazing ways horses live in the city, and I really want to explore them, show them off to people. I loved being on the mounted patrol, but it’s not a career for me.”

  “No,” he agreed. “This is your career.”

  And Jenny knew he didn’t mean training racehorses.

  “When we go home, let’s get back to shooting at Aqueduct a couple of times a week,” Aidan suggested. They were sitting at her parents’ kitchen table, savoring a little alone time. Joseph and Andrea were out overseeing a vet visit in the broodmare barn. Marco had come to pick them up in a golf cart, and he had taken the opportunity to glower at Jenny from the living room window where she had been tapping away at her laptop, as if his sour face could draw her out and inspire a hitherto unrealized declaration of love. But she had simply waved at him and bent back over her keys. In person, he hadn’t bothered her again since that day at Belmont. He watched Aidan, and Aidan watched him, but Jenny knew their few days here would pass in peace. Marco might think he deserved her, but he also knew he had a good job at a thriving farm with a Breeders’ Cup champion under its belt, and he wasn’t going to do anything to risk it.