Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  We were oiling the chains of the garage doors that theoretically pulled down over the aisle entrances, hoping we could coax them down when the weather turned bad, when I heard a car pulling into the gravel of the parking area. I went to investigate. Becky was getting out of her little car, eying our row of Corona bottles which were perched on the railroad tie like the aftermath of a relatively tame frat bash.

  “Becky,” I said, and she dragged her fascinated gaze away from the remnants of our pity party and looked at me without pleasure.

  “Hi Jules,” she replied thinly.

  “What brings you out?” I asked, not terribly pleased myself. “Long time no see,” I added hurriedly, by way of a greeting of sorts.

  “Pete sent me over, to see if you were okay before the storm. It looks like it’s really happening — I heard it on the radio while I was driving over… seventy-five percent chance the eye will pass right over us here.”

  “Yeah, I heard. The weather radio won’t shut up. We gave up on music after a while. That storm sitting out there isn’t helping.”

  We both surveyed the dark sky. “It’s pretty crazy at Pete’s, too,” she said after a moment or two of silence. “But we got all our things inside and the horses ready… so we thought of you guys, just the two of you… Oh. Whose truck is that?”

  “Manny’s… he’s helping us.”

  “Manny?”

  “Our stall guy.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” I could hear the quiet disbelief — how can they afford someone to muck stalls? and I didn’t bother to disabuse her. We couldn’t afford him, actually.

  “What about you?” she asked, changing the subject. “Where are you going to ride out the storm?”

  “Oh, the tack room,” I said airily. “We’re going to close the doors to keep the wind from going down the barn aisle — and close the shutters on the stall windows. We’ll be fine in there.”

  “Will you? Do you think the doors will hold up against a category three storm? That’s like, a hundred and twenty mile an hour winds, at least… if you lose the doors, you’ll lose the roof.”

  “It’s the best option we’ve got,” I insisted, annoyed. “We can’t leave. What if we couldn’t get back? I have a barn full of horses to think about — and most of them don’t belong to me.”

  “Yeah… true… we have twenty in our barn…” That was unnecessary, I thought. “It’s a pretty new barn so… you know, hurricane codes have changed. That’s all I’m worried about with your barn. It’s at least thirty years old.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s…” I started to argue, but subsided. There was no getting around the fact that my barn was built in the 1970s, before building codes got much tighter to prevent catastrophic damage from hurricanes, and horsemen started coming up with better designs to protect their charges. There was also the fact that we were turning the horses out so that they’d be safe if the barn collapsed, but we ourselves were evacuating to the barn. Safe enough for humans, but not for horses? Well, maybe. We could burrow under a mattress if need be… horses didn’t have that option. “It’s fine.”

  “Okay, well, if you’re okay…”

  “We are, thanks.”

  “Great, well — I’ll head back now. Let Pete know you’re all set. And don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”

  “Yes, thank you very much for coming… Seriously.” I escorted her to her car, hastening her departure.

  She finally left. Lacey came out of the barn as soon as the car disappeared over the hill. She had probably been hiding just inside the end stall, listening to our every word and bristling with jealousy. I couldn’t understand it. Why would I ever want Becky back? Wasn’t spending every waking moment together enough proof that I liked having Lacey around? Really, this jealousy thing was getting old.

  “What did she want?”

  I felt way too tired for this. “Can we not have this rivalry thing, please? Or at least let it go while we’re planning for the end of the world? I don’t have the energy to deal with hurricanes and high school jealousy. Okay?”

  Lacey was taken aback. “Sorry,” she said, clearly hurt. “Manny says the doors are all set,” she added stiffly.

  “Oh, thank God. Let’s go eat. I’m losing my mind with this. I need meat.”

  Lacey nodded and headed for the house, ready to take on her duties as my personal chef, but I hung back for a moment, looking at my shuttered barn and my empty arenas, big patches of irregular sand rectangles, waterlogged and pitted with puddles already. The oak tree between the house and the barn was already groaning in the stiff, sudden blasts of wind which were accompanying the dark clouds rolling in. A few huge drops of rain stained the pebbles at my feet. The first squall had arrived. Manny came scuttling out of the barn, waved good-bye, and climbed into his little truck.

  I knew I was going to be drenched to the skin if I stayed out any longer, but still I stood in the coming storm and stared, until my eyes blurred and I couldn’t see anything at all anymore. My farm, my start. My horses. My Dynamo. My baby. My Mickey. My big chance. They would be turned out in the storm, while we huddled inside, and hoped, and prayed, and listened, left to turn their tails to the wind and put their heads low to the ground.

  “I love you all,” I told the farm, the horses, the barn, the oak tree.

  The rain was marching across the paddocks, a swiftly moving wall of water obscuring the treeline beyond the mares’ pasture, and I ran for the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Our dinner that night was tense.

  We ate in the living room, the TV set to the local news. The networks had all suspended the usual sitcoms and crime dramas for as much on-scene reporting and wild-eyed acts of live meteorology as possible. The weatherman on my favorite channel had rolled up his sleeves and taken off his tie, which was a sure sign of impending doom. His name was Frederick Lewis, but a few hurricane seasons ago, a particularly cataclysmic year seemed to unhinge him, and he was now known by local wags as Freak-Out Freddy.

  Needless to say, Freak-Out Freddy’s outbursts made his channel the highest-rated station in any sort of weather calamity. There were entire Youtube channels dedicated to chronicling his on-air panic attacks. I thought it was nice to see someone on TV who was treating my personal weather worries with such very real regard, and was very loyal to his weather forecasts. On nights like this, it was reassuring to have him on TV, as if we were going into the storm with friends on our side.

  The storms that had been hovering nearby all evening finally began crashing around our ears as we worked our way through our supper, and in the premature darkness Lacey blended up mudslides and we laughed nervously at the interviews with panicked tourists evacuating from Tampa area hotels, shook our heads at the fifty-mile back-ups on Interstate 75. The weather radio continued to squeal its alarm at regular intervals, announcing flooding on the Rainbow River, a tornado near Morriston, nickel-size hail in Reddick.

  My ears pricked at the mention of Reddick and I sat up on the couch, dropping my paper plate from my lap. Marcus slithered down from the cushion next to me, wagging his tail as he went to work on the steak juice on the plate, but I ignored him. I was thinking, involuntarily, of Peter Morrison, hoping he and his horses and yes, even Becky, were safely indoors, away from the bruising, cutting hailstones. I glanced at Lacey, embarrassed to have even thought of him, but she hadn’t noticed my sudden attention to the news. She was intently watching Freak-Out Freddy as he illustrated, with a homemade computer graphic, how the cumulative effect of more than four hours of hundred-mile-an-hour sustained winds can easily tear the roof off of a new house built to the latest hurricane codes.

  Her eyes were like saucers.

  Lightning flashed outside the windows, and the thunder rattled the floor of the trailer, reminding me that Peter wasn’t the one in the precarious situation here. We were, sitting out here on the prairie in a metal shed.

  “The bad stuff won’t come until tomorrow,” I told Lacey. “We c
an relax tonight.”

  Lacey shook her head. “We have to listen for tornadoes tonight, he says.”

  “We have to listen for tornadoes every night,” I said. “That’s just a fact of life.”

  “It’s more likely with a tropical band spiraling onshore,” she parroted.

  I sighed. “Freddy would be proud. You stay up and keep watch if you want. But I’m going to bed.”

  In the night I woke up to the sound of wind; the trailer was creaking and groaning as gusts hit the southern frontage. A few small branches from a nearby bottle-brush tree pinged against my window. I went to the window and looked out at the paddocks. In the orange glow from the streetlight, Dynamo stood with his tail to the wind, grazing as if nothing was going on. It wasn’t raining, although the wind was howling. A plastic bag from heaven knew where went scudding through the grass between the house and the barn, and Dynamo started, trotting a few paces, until the barn blocked my view of him. I leaned against the window a few more minutes, feeling it vibrate with the wind, but he didn’t come back into view. I sighed and climbed back into bed, wiggling close to Marcus.

  The next morning was cloudy and windy, with intermittent rain slapping against the windows. The outer walls of the hurricane, officially still out in the Gulf, were coming ashore and rolling up the coastal plain towards our farms and homes. It was knocking on our door.

  Lacey was standing at the living room window, holding back the window blinds with a shaking hand. “What do we do now?” she quavered.

  “Bring the horses in and feed them breakfast, then throw ‘em back out,” I said pragmatically, pulling on Wellington boots. “No work today.”

  As if doing any sort of riding would have been possible in the squalls, beneath those black rushing clouds with their stinging pellets of rain.

  But when faced with the horses’ kicking, bucking, galloping, sliding antics, even my determination to keep a stiff upper lip took a little blow. “This isn’t good,” I had to mutter, as a wild-eyed Dynamo came lurching up to the fenceline, sliding up to the gate and ripping up a six foot section of sod in the process. Everyone else was in the same sort of hysteria. The farm was in an uproar.

  “Can’t we just leave them out?” Lacey suggested. “I don’t think skipping breakfast would hurt them today.”

  I shook my head regretfully. “I wish. But we have to tag them.”

  Eventually we got the whole crew into the barn without anyone getting loose or kicked or bitten or trampled upon. Mud-spattered, red nostrils flaring, the horses ate their breakfast in huge, fast bites, turning in anxious circles to look out their windows, oats trailing out of their mouths and leaving sweet molasses trails in the stalls for the ants to delight in later. Even Passion, who never found anything more interesting than food in front of his face, managed to make a mess of both his stall and his handful of feed during the brief time he was in the barn.

  Getting manes and tails tagged while the horses were leaping about like startled gazelles wasn’t the easiest of tasks. It took Lacey with a chain shank over Mickey’s nose, warning him to stand still or else, to keep him still enough to have a luggage tag braided into his flowing locks. The tags had the farm address and phone number written in marker, then wrapped over and over again with clear packing tape, to give the paper inside some degree of waterproofing.

  We gave their halters similar treatment, wrapping the cheekpieces with duct tape and writing our contact information on the tape, and then everyone got kicked back out to the paddocks, skipping and shying down the barn aisle as they passed the jumping equipment piled alongside the stalls, and out through the empty rectangles of wet sand which used to be our arenas.

  Horses never appreciate a change in routine, anymore than they did the scent of storm in the air and the blasts of hot humid wind. So there was a lot of running and squealing and bucking and farting. After Mickey’s particularly crazed gallop ended in a sliding stop that nearly threw him back on his haunches to avoid crashing into the fence, we filled a wheelbarrow with hay and tossed piles into every paddock, impressing everyone with an unaccustomed treat in their paddocks, and they settled down for a good nosh.

  “What now?” Lacey asked. She had been asking “what” constantly since the first news of the storm yesterday morning and it was starting to make me a little crazy. I didn’t know what now. I had never done this before. Sure, I’d been through hurricanes before… but then, I had always been the working student. Being the boss during a natural disaster wasn’t exactly easy.

  But Lacey was too freaked out to notice how long my every decision seemed to take.

  “We cook a good breakfast while the power is on,” I announced after a few moments’ thought. “Then we move the bedroom TV into the tack room. If we have to evacuate to the barn, we can watch TV as long as have power. That’s valuable during a hurricane. They last a really long time.”

  “Are they going to be okay?”

  I looked out at the horses, nose-deep in hay while the wind fluttered their manes and tails. They had to be okay. These horses, and this farm, were all I had. “Just fine,” I said with a bravado I didn’t feel. “Hurricanes are always a major let-down. Big thunderstorms. The annoying part is losing power. But we’re set for it. We’ll be fine in the tack room, it will blow through by tomorrow morning, and then we’ll go bring the horses in and feed them a late breakfast.”

  I wish it had happened the way that I had said it would happen. Then, afterwards, I wouldn’t have felt like a mom who lied to her kids, and was forever fighting to regain their trust.

  For a while, though, it did. It went exactly as I had said. The storm blew in, first with squall line after squall line, every twenty minutes or so a new microburst whipping across the farm, blasts of wind-driven rain like a hailstorm of pellets beating furiously against the windows, only to subside nearly immediately back into half-hearted drizzle, or even just dry, dark skies, with only that warm, humid wind to belie that there was something different in the air. And the clouds — the low, racing clouds scudding past the higher ones, which moved grandly and with grim purpose above us, spinning to the southeast as the distant eye of the storm slowly slid northeast.

  Of course, it was that contrast in direction, the northeast march of the storm and the southeastern crawl of its lower decks of clouds, which would cause all the problems.

  We sat in the house at suppertime, the horses in the wet fields sedated with more hay, and ate hamburgers and French fries and watched as Freak-Out Freddy loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves on his dress shirt. I took off my shirt; it was wet from being caught in a squall while we threw the evening hay. There were little white spinning graphics on the radar images — they indicated possible tornadoes. And they grew more and more common. There was one near Cedar Key. Then one down near Inverness, to our south. Then one in Orange Lake, to our northeast. We were surrounded by vortices within the vortex.

  A branch from the bottle-brush tree hit the living room’s picture window — a big branch, a sizable portion of the tree, in fact. We turned and watched the pink tendrils of the shattered bottle-brush flowers ooze down the glass with the streaming rain.

  “It’s about time to go,” I told Lacey.

  She put down her soda and looked at me. “Go?”

  “To the tack room,” I said. “Look.” I put my finger to the glass of the television, right on top of one of the spinning circles. It was just to the west of us, near Rainbow Lakes. “This is all around now. Any one of these could be a tornado. This is just a trailer — it doesn’t have to be a big tornado to wreck the house. That’s why we have all that food and gear and the TV in the tack room, Lace. Let’s just go out there, bolt the door, and be safe. Look — ” I pointed to the big glass windows of the living room, shaking as a violent gust of wind hit them. “We don’t even have boards on the windows — a branch could fly right through one of them. The tack room has a storm shutter on its window and the door is steel. Let’s just go out now, okay? It’s goi
ng to happen sooner or later anyway.”

  She looked nervous — as if she’d thought that since we hadn’t gone out to the barn right away, we weren’t going to at all. Who knew what she’d thought, or if she’d thought anything at all. She wasn’t reacting well to the storm. Hurricanes gave me a certain level of excitement and adrenaline — although I’d do better if I wasn’t constantly worried about my horses, out in the fields being buffeted by rain and in danger of being hit by flying debris — but Lacey clearly wasn’t going to cut it as a Florida horsewoman. She’d definitely be summering up north after this.

  I pulled open the front door and gazed out through the watery glass of the storm door, looking south towards the road. It was about seven o’clock, and the sun was still out on the horizon somewhere, maybe in South Florida where it wasn’t even cloudy, but it was gone from here without ever having showed its face. The world was draped in a dark, haunted-mansion kind of dusk. The fields on either side of the driveway shimmered with floodwater, green grass covered with black reflections of the darkened sky. Water below and water above. Only the driveway looked familiar, glinting through the gloom like a white ribbon, its gravel track raised above eight-foot-deep ditches on either side, dug out by the original owners, who had surely been in some doozy storms of their own.

  Marcus came to my side, tail wagging, and I snapped a stray lead-rope to his collar. “No wandering,” I told him, wagging a finger. “We have to stick together.”