Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  The barn still had four walls but it, too, had lost its roof — that first peeling panel in the tack room had been the beginning of the end. The metal had been wrenched up, sheet by sheet, until all the roofing was lying scattered in the swampy pit of my dressage arena or across the parking lot. The wind had come in and shoved out all the shutters and one of the garage doors from the inside. The leftover pieces of wood and metal, mangled and cracked, were left to rattle in the stiff gusts of wind.

  I’d lost everything that didn’t whinny.

  We walked closer and beyond, behind the wreck of the house and the barn, the horses were grazing in their flooded paddocks. The fences were nearly all intact. I hadn’t lost my paddocks or my horses. But that was all. I kicked something and looked down — some of the crumpled paper. I picked it up.

  “The hindquarters are engaged and the back lifts, creating impulsion and collection simultaneously. The horse is now ready — ”

  It was a page from one of my books.

  All that scattered paper had been the stripped pages of the books from my shelves.

  I scarcely noticed that it was Peter who put his arm around me, or that it was Peter whom I had collapsed into, biting back suffocating sobs, or that it was Peter rubbing my back and resting his stubbled chin on my head. I scarcely noticed — but I did. I knew it even while I was only really conscious of my loss. My farm, my farm, my farm — I’d fought for this farm, fought my parents for it, fought the naysayers who called me a trust fund baby, fought everyone to get my barn and fill its stalls with clients and land my sponsored horse and now… nothing. Nothing!

  “Nothing,” I murmured through unshed tears, and scraped fiercely at my eyes. “There’s nothing left.” The words made my stomach drop.

  “The horses,” Peter murmured softly, against my hair. “You’ve got the horses. They’re all on four legs, and everything else can be replaced. Come on, honey, you know the rest can be replaced. But you can’t replace the horses.”

  He was right.

  I looked up through my sniffles, seeing through blurred eyes the dark bay and four socks of that silly mare Margot, the sparkling red chestnut of my darling Dynamo, the little brown pony’s body and well-bred head of Passion, the big gray flash of my greatest hope, my Mickey. “The horses,” I whispered.

  “Come on, honey, let’s go down and check out everyone, make sure they’re all okay.”

  And with his arm firmly around my shoulders, Lacey trailing behind, we set off down the hill.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As I had predicted, there wasn’t any cell phone service. The towers were probably in shattered piles of metal all over the hillsides of Marion County. Horses were probably trundling through them, getting caught up in the wires that were never there before.

  Don’t think of it.

  We ended up driving back to Peter’s farm to pick up the trailer and a chainsaw, some lead shanks and spare halters.

  “It’s going to take all the daylight we have left to get the tree cleared and a load of horses back to the farm,” Peter predicted, looking up at the cheerful sun. For once, it was nearly two p.m. and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The day after a hurricane can be disconcertingly dry. On one hand, the clear skies are a blessing for people trying to clean up. On the other, there’s a distressing lack of normalcy. Nothing looks the same, and even the weather is behaving strangely.

  But it was hot — late September, dry and sunny, and the temperature was around ninety degrees. I reflected on the supposed joys of an upstate New York summer. It was probably so cold folks had to blanket their horses at night. What utter bliss, I thought, managing to forget that I started to shiver uncontrollably the second the temperature dropped below 75. Lacey reminded me of this when I voiced my climate envy.

  “You, up north? You’d freeze to death,” she laughed, and it was the first time any of us had laughed all afternoon. I had to laugh with her, which was impressive, considering that I was holding a section of log for Peter while he sawed through it, chopping up the beautiful live oak that previously shaded the entrance to my driveway. Beneath it, once we rolled the log aside, were the shattered remains of my signpost. Peter picked up the antique sign that had swung in the sea breezes for five decades.

  “This is salvageable,” he said. “Just needs a touch-up on the paint.” He set it gently against the paddock rails. “Would hate to lose such a piece of history. That’s the last Green Winter Farm sign on this whole stretch of road.”

  I remembered — he had told me there were once ten signs, one at each driveway. Green Winter Farm must have been hundreds of acres. I had ten of them. And the sign. “I’ll fix it,” I assured him. “It can go on the insurance bill with everything else.”

  “Well, at least you have insurance,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ll bet you a lot of these people don’t, or at least nowhere near enough, and they’re just going to be wiped out. It’s going to be a smaller business from here on out.”

  I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t very good insurance. I was fairly certain that I was wiped out, too. But I had to push that thought from my mind. As long as I had the horses, I still had something. I wasn’t completely out of business — not yet, anyway.

  It was late afternoon before we managed to get the trailer up the driveway and parked in a relatively dry spot where it wouldn’t get bogged down, stranding us all. Lacey and I had already discussed who could travel together: Mickey, Dynamo, and the two warmbloods from Orlando would go in Peter’s rig, set up as box stalls. The other trainees could go in my four-horse trailer, mercifully spared significant damage once we dragged the roofing metal away from it.

  “The lay-ups can come tomorrow,” I announced, trying to sound cheerful. “Nice and easy.”

  I left the others to load the horses while I went scouting around in the wreckage for things that could be salvaged. I had put a lot of things, like photos and my computer, into waterproof containers bought for just this situation. I managed to fill up the tack room of my horse trailer with the detritus of my life. Well — I didn’t quite fill it up. Then I stood back and looked at the rubber bins. A tack room in a horse trailer. That’s what I had to show for my life.

  Oh, and the horses.

  Lacey was poking around the barn’s sodden tack room when I finished rummaging through the trash on the lawn, stepping through soggy piles of sheetrock that were drifting across everything like newly fallen snow. “The stuff in the tack trunks is fine,” she reported. “And the saddles… we can probably save the saddles and bridles. I mean, we just need to oil the crap out of them.” She brushed her hand over a velvet hunt cap, soaked through with rain and coated in sheetrock. “This, though…”

  “Another night won’t hurt it all, then.” There was some stamping from the loaded trailer behind us. “Let’s go. The kids are getting impatient.”

  The horses left behind whinnied frantically to the chosen ones in the trailers, and I sent Peter on down the lane with his load while Lacey hurriedly threw grain and hay into the paddocks and I went down the row with Betadine and nitrofurazone, playing triage nurse. No one was seriously injured, but everyone had at least one mark from airborne branches, or bits and pieces of people’s houses and barns. I lingered over Jim Dear, an older gelding, who had a long, clean laceration along one shoulder blade. It probably could have used stitches, but there was no one to sew them in. I had to be content to disinfect the wound and then anoint it with a heaping helping of yellow goop from the nitrofurazone jar. “You’ll be okay,” I told him when I was through, offering him a cookie for his trouble. “I’ll come back for you tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can’t find a vet.”

  Jim Dear snarfed down the cookie and looked for more. “You’ll be fine,” I reminded him, and threw him another cookie before I went to the next paddock.

  At last, everyone had food and water, and their few cuts and scrapes were treated. I could leave.

  But I hated to.

  I stood lookin
g at my house for a few long minutes. It wasn’t exciting living in a double-wide, nothing to write home about, except when it was your first place, your first place of your very own. I went from my parent’s house to this place without any of the usual in-betweens, no college dorms or shared apartments, and now I could look right inside without the benefit of, you know, windows.

  Lacey stood next to me and we regarded the wreck of our home with dry eyes. We were both all cried out.

  “We can get the other things out in the morning,” she offered. “It won’t rain tonight, anyway, and things can’t get any wetter than they already have.”

  The roof was scattered across the grass and sand behind us. It didn’t seem likely that much survived besides the things that I put into storage containers. Luckily, I didn’t own much.

  “Yeah,” I agreed finally. “Tomorrow morning.” And I turned my back on my house. The house. I would have to stop thinking of it as “my house.” It wasn’t anyone’s house anymore, just rubble to be cleared away with a bulldozer and a dump truck.

  Lacey climbed into her car, running her fingers over the deep gouges in the metal left by flying branches and bits of my — the — house. The back windshield had an impressive crack running from side to side. “Don’t hit any bumps,” I suggested, as if that was an option on the tree-strewn roads.

  The horses in the trailer were whinnying and stamping and generally making a ruckus, but the horses left behind were content with their sweet feed and hay. And that was just it, I thought. They had somewhere safe to spend the night, they had food and water, they had each other. And I would have to learn to be just as content.

  At least for a little while.

  I hopped into my truck.

  I swallowed hard as I pulled out, driving carefully between the two deep drainage ditches that lined the farm driveway. They were twelve feet deep in floodwater, and paper — so much paper. I was still astonished by the volume of wood pulp that I had amassed in my short lifetime. I loved books — books were my comfort on long lonely nights when clouds blocked the satellite dish and the horses were tucked into bed or turned out for the night. I hadn’t read so much lately, with Lacey around to amuse me. But it didn’t change my affection for them, and it didn’t make it easier to see my old friends shredded by storm winds. A page stared up at me just before I drove over it, a black and white photo of a horse leaping over a ditch and wall. Another one of my training manuals.

  And behind me, the farm, in shambles.

  I wished I had Marcus with me, or Lacey, anyone to talk to, anyone to stop me from feeling so alone. Just me in my truck, the horses in tow behind… well at least I had them back there.

  And that, I thought, pulling slowly onto the county highway, was what I had to remember. Always, every day. I didn’t know where I was going to live, or where I would keep the horses, or where I would train from, in the coming weeks and months. I didn’t know how long it would take to fix the place up, get a new trailer on the property, put a new roof on the barn. I didn’t have any answers, and it was killing me. But I had the horses. And for now, that was going to have to be enough.

  I sighed and shifted in the truck seat, sitting up a bit straighter, and flipped on the radio. A press conference with the governor: he was speaking about protecting life and property, about sending in the National Guard. Someone asked about a lack of drinking water caused by black-outs. The governor said he would be sending out task forces to assist with the recovery. Water tankers, MREs, the Red Cross. Lines for gas, price gougers would be prosecuted, limited supplies, stay off the roads.

  A disaster, I thought, looking at the stripped trees along the road, naked of leaves, dark trunks scarred bright white where branches had been ripped away by the wind. It was a war zone, really and truly. I slowed the truck to avoid a long roll of unfurled insulation, neon pink and gathering pine needles and oak leaves, that had come from some trailer much like mine. I should figure out a way to build a barn apartment, I thought. Stop living in a tin can that could blow apart in the next big gale. Put on a better roof with hurricane clips, and climb up under the eaves every night to sleep above the horses.

  It would be nice to be closer to the horses, too. In the winter, when they were inside at night, I would hear them snorting and whinnying, I’d hear if anyone kicked the wall or grew restless. I could peek down at them from windows above the barn aisle. It would be like living with my best friends all the time.

  But there wouldn’t be room for Lacey to live with me up there. I frowned and shook my head. I was going to have to find a different way to redo my living space, I supposed.

  Because one thing I knew: I wouldn’t be able to bear living alone anymore. And after this incident, I didn’t even think it would be safe to try.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The annex barn was tucked away in a hollow between two of Marion County’s beautiful rolling hills. Its shed-rows were walled in with cinder-block, an old-fashioned design, with high glassless windows cut into the walls for light. But from the central entrance, which ran straight through the barn and cut it in two halves, you could look out and see the green pasture sloping down to the ivy-covered walls that hid the farm from the county road. It was high enough to make a Florida-bred like me feel a bit dizzy.

  The last remnants of the Appalachians swayed drunkenly here, slipping south towards their eventual end above Lake Okeechobee. Down the backbone of Marion County, the ridge humped up and captured the seabreezes, creating our beautiful and violent storms, and the floodwaters seeped down through the nooks and crannies of the unsteady native bedrock, our coveted Ocala Lime.

  On its shaky foundation the horsemen of Ocala had built it all. The lime supported the rich green grass of the hills, the gorgeous centurion live oaks, and the growing bones of young horses. The limestone’s influence on the flora and fauna that thrived upon it was obvious: everything was more vibrant and verdant where its shelf lay beneath the sand. The water tasted fresh and pure, filtered naturally through an ancient rocky sponge. And real estate prices, naturally, soared wherever the limestone fed the land.

  Even with the broken trees, even scathed by the hurricane, this rich, priceless land was breathtakingly beautiful. For the first three mornings at the annex, it was all I could do to get to work and not stand staring, open-mouthed, at the yellow sun rising above the curling morning mist, bathing the lowlands before me in shimmering veils of cloud.

  But I did get to work, because that was the only thing keeping me sane these days.

  While we had been picking up the horses from my farm, Becky had been busy preparing stalls in the annex, displaying her usual ruthless efficiency. She was there when I pulled into the barn with my last few horses, the lay-ups we had abandoned to one more night at the ruined farm, and I ground my teeth as she directed my truck to the loading dock at the end of the barn.

  But I soon found that if I set my jaw and worked my molars together every time Becky did something wonderfully efficient and productive for Peter, or Lacey, or myself, I would have to set up an appointment for dentures.

  The barn was dark and cobwebby, her efforts not extending beyond the bare bones of bedding and buckets, but the horses didn’t notice poor housekeeping the way that their humans did and went into their stalls cheerfully enough, snorting with pleasure at their new bedding and one by one going down to roll rapturously in the fresh shavings. Lacey stood before the open stall-fronts, which had only stall guards instead of doors, and laughed at them, while I decided to go ahead and start pulling my earthly possessions out of the trailer tack room and carrying them into the barn’s concrete cubicle of a storage room.

  A few giant spiders hovered in the uppermost corners of the room, which normally would have sent me racing from the barn and down the hill. But today spiders didn’t seem to matter so much. I ignored them, and they ignored me. I figured if I was in and out of the tack room enough, they’d eventually move away, up into the dark rafters. It didn’t seem worth all the scre
aming and swatting with brooms that I usually put myself through. There really wasn’t any more cause for drama in life, after a hurricane had blown away my past, present, and future.

  I was just going to move in and get ready to stay awhile, spiders or no spiders.

  Becky and Peter or no Becky and Peter.

  “You can stay as long as you need to,” Peter assured me over dinner that night. We were working our way through an impressive platter of barbecued chicken he’d made on the big gas grill on the back patio. The back patio that lined a sparkling in-ground pool, of course. Well, it was probably sparkling, on better days. Today it was filled with leaves and a few branches from a nearby oak tree that hadn’t fared very well in the storm. The pool, and the patio, and the commercial-class grill all went firmly into the “con” column in my mind, where I was still trying to work out whether or not I despised Peter. I was pretty certain that I did. But there was still the feeling I had whenever he walked into the room, the shiver that went up my spine, the flip-flop of my stomach, the slight dizziness. None of these things sound nice at all, I know, but they weren’t as bad as they sound.

  I kind of liked them.

  Kind of wanted more of them.

  I was watching him now, as he rubbed a piece of bread around his plate, sopping up the leftover puddles of barbecue sauce. He had a smudge of stubble on his face after the long day, and the overall effect against his tanned skin was a very alluring rugged mountain-man look. His reddish-brown hair fell in a fringe over his brow, and he pushed it behind his ears reflexively with his clean hand.