The Horse Whisperer (8 page)

“I thought I’d go home and get some of her things,” she said. “You know, so when she wakes up, they’ll be there.”

“I’ll go. You don’t want to drive now.”

“No, I want to. Really. Can I have your keys?”

He found them and gave them to her.

“I’ll pack a bag for us too. Is there anything special you need?”

“Just clothes, a razor maybe.”

She bent and kissed him on the forehead.

“Be careful,” he said.

“I will. I won’t be long.”

He watched her go. She stopped at the door and looked back at him and he could tell there was something she wanted to say.

“What?” he said. But she just smiled and shook her head. Then she turned and was gone.

   The roads were clear and at this hour, apart from a lonely sand truck or two, quite deserted. Annie drove south on 87 and then east on 90, taking the same exit the truck had taken the morning before.

There had been no thaw and the car’s headlights lit the low walls of soiled snow along the roadside. Robert had fitted the snow tires and they made a low roar on the gritted blacktop. There was a phone-in on the radio, a woman saying how worried she was about her teenage son. She’d recently bought a new car, a Nissan, and the boy seemed to have fallen in love with it. He spent hours sitting in it, stroking it and today she’d walked into the garage and caught him making love to its tailpipe.

“Kinda what you’d call a fixation, huh?” said the show’s host, whose name was Melvin. All phone-ins seemed to have these ruthless wise guy hosts nowadays and Annie could never understand why people kept calling, knowing full well they would get humiliated. Perhaps that was the point. This caller sailed on oblivious.

“Yes, I guess that’s what it is,” she said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Don’t do anything,” cried Melvin. “The kid’ll soon get exhausted. Next caller . . .”

Annie turned off the highway onto the lane that curled up the shoulder of the hill to their house. The road surface here was glistening hard-pack snow and she drove carefully through the tunnel of trees and pulled into the driveway that Robert must have cleared yesterday morning. Her headlights panned across the white clapboard front of the house above her, its gables lost among towering beech trees. There were no lights on inside and the hall walls and ceiling gave a glimpse of blue as the headlights shafted briefly in. An outside light came on automatically as Annie drove around to the back of the house and waited for the door of the basement garage to raise.

The kitchen was how Robert had left it. Cupboard doors hung open and on the table stood the two unpacked grocery bags. Some ice cream in one of them had melted and leaked and was dripping off the table into a small pink lake on the floor. The red light was flashing on the answering machine, showing there were messages. But Annie didn’t feel like listening to them. She saw the note Grace had written to Robert and stared at it, somehow not wanting to touch it. Then she turned abruptly and got to work clearing the ice cream and putting away the food that hadn’t been spoiled.

Upstairs, packing a bag for Robert and herself, she felt oddly robotic, as if her every action were programmed. She supposed the numbness had something to do with shock or maybe it was some kind of denial.

It was certainly true that when she first saw Grace after the operation, the sight was so alien, so extreme, that she couldn’t take it in. She had been almost jealous of the pain it wrought so palpably in Robert. She had seen the way his eyes kept roving over Grace’s body, siphoning agony from every intrusion the doctors had made. But Annie just stared. This new version they had made of her daughter was a fact that made no sense at all.

Annie’s clothes and hair smelled of the hospital so she undressed and showered. She let the water run down over her for a while then adjusted it till it was almost too hot to bear. Then she reached up and switched the shower head to its most vicious setting so that the water pricked her like hot needles. She closed her eyes and held her face up into it and the pain made her cry out loud. But she kept it there, happy that it hurt. Yes, she could feel this. At least she could feel this.

The bathroom was full of steam when she stepped out of the shower. She wiped the towel across the mirror, only partly clearing it, then dried herself before it, watching the smeared, liquid image of a creature that didn’t seem to be her. She had always liked her body, though it was fuller and bigger-breasted than the sylphs who strutted the style pages of her magazine. But the blurred mirror was giving her back a distorted, pink abstraction of herself, like a Francis Bacon painting, and Annie found it so disturbing that she turned off the light and went quickly back into the bedroom.

Grace’s room was just as she must have left it the previous morning. The long T-shirt she wore as a nightdress
was lying on the end of the unmade bed. There was a pair of jeans on the floor and Annie bent to pick them up. They were the ones that had fraying holes in the knees, patched inside with pieces cut from an old floral-print dress of Annie’s. She remembered how she had offered to do it and how hurt she had been when Grace said nonchalantly that she’d rather Elsa do it. Annie did her usual trick and, with just a little hurt flick of an eyebrow, made Grace feel guilty.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” she said, putting her arms around her. “But you know you can’t sew.”

“I can too,” Annie said, turning into a joke what they both knew hadn’t been.

“Well, maybe you can. But not as good as Elsa.”

“Not as well as Elsa, you mean.” Annie always picked her up on the way she spoke, adopting her loftiest English accent to do so. It always prompted Grace to come back in flawless Valley Girl.

“Hey Mom, whatever. Like, you know, really.”

Annie folded the jeans and put them away. Then she tidied the bed and stood there, scanning the room, wondering what to take to the hospital. In a sort of hammock slung above the bed were dozens of cuddly toys, a whole zoo of them, from bears and buffalo to kites and killer whales. They came from every corner of the globe, borne by family and friends and now, convening here, took turns in sharing Grace’s bed. Each night, with scrupulous fairness, she would select two or three, depending on their size, and prop them on her pillow. Last night, Annie could see, it had been a skunk and some lurid dragon-creature Robert had once brought back from Hong Kong. Annie put them back in the hammock and rummaged to find Grace’s oldest friend, a penguin called Godfrey, sent to the hospital by Robert’s friends at the office on the day Grace was born.
One eye was now a button and he was sagging and faded from too many trips to the laundry. Annie hauled him out and stuffed him in the bag.

She went over to the desk by the window and packed Grace’s Walkman and the box of tapes she always took on trips. The doctor had said they should try playing music to her. There were two framed photographs on the desk. One was of the three of them on a boat. Grace was in the middle with her arms around both their shoulders and all of them were laughing. It had been taken five years ago in Cape Cod; one of the happiest vacations they’d ever had. Annie put it in the bag and picked up the other picture. It was of Pilgrim, taken in the field above the stables shortly after they got him last summer. He had no saddle or bridle on him, not even a halter, and the sun gleamed on his coat. His body was pointing away but he had turned his head and was looking right at the camera. Annie had never really studied the photograph before but now that she did she found the horse’s steady gaze unsettling.

She had no idea if Pilgrim was still alive. All she knew was from a message Mrs. Dyer had left yesterday evening at the hospital, that he’d been taken to the vet’s place in Chatham and was to be transferred to Cornell. Now, looking at him in this picture, Annie felt herself reproached. Not for her ignorance of his fate, but for something else, something deeper that she didn’t yet understand. She put the picture in the bag, switched off the light and went downstairs.

A pale light was already coming in through the tall windows in the hall. Annie put the bag down and went into the kitchen without turning on any lights. Before checking the phone messages, she thought she would make herself a cup of coffee. As she waited for the old copper kettle to boil, she walked over to the window.

Outside, only a few yards from where she stood, was a group of whitetail deer. They were standing completely still, staring back at her. Was it food they were after? She’d never seen them this close to the house before, even in the harshest of winters. What did it mean? She counted them. There were twelve, no, thirteen. One for each year of her daughter’s life. Annie told herself not to be ridiculous.

There was a low, burgeoning whistle as-the kettle started to boil. The deer heard it too and they turned as one and fled, their tails bouncing madly as they headed up past the pond to the woods. Christ almighty, thought Annie, she’s dead.

H
ARRY LOGAN PARKED HIS CAR UNDER A SIGN THAT SAID
large animal hospital and thought it odd that a university couldn’t come up with wording to indicate more precisely whether it was the animals who were large or the hospital. He got out and trudged through the furrows of gray sludge which were all that remained of the weekend snow. Three days had passed since the accident and as Logan wove his way through the rows of parked cars and trailers, he thought how astonishing it was that the horse was still alive.

It had taken him nearly four hours to mend that chest wound. It was full of fragments of glass and flakes of black paint from the truck and he’d had to pick them out and sluice it clean. Then he’d trimmed the ragged edges of flesh with scissors, stapled up the artery and sewn in some drainage tubes. After that, as his assistants supervised the anesthetic, air supply and a long-overdue blood transfusion, Logan got to work with needle and thread.

He had to do it in three layers: first the muscle, then the fibrous tissue, then the skin, some seventy stitches in
each layer, the inner two of them done with soluble thread. And all this for a horse he thought would never wake up. But the damn thing had woken up. It was incredible. And what’s more he had just as much fight in him as he’d had down in the river. As Pilgrim struggled to his feet in the recovery chamber, Logan prayed he wouldn’t tear the stitches out. He couldn’t face the idea of doing it all over again.

They had kept Pilgrim on sedatives for the next twenty-four hours by which time they thought he had stabilized enough to stand the four-hour trip over here to Cornell.

Logan knew the university and its veterinary hospital well, though it had changed a lot since he was here as a student in the late sixties. It held a lot of good memories for him, most of them to do with women. Sweet Jesus, did they have some times. Especially on summer evenings when you could lie under the trees and look down at Lake Cayuga. It was about the prettiest campus he knew. But not today. It was cold and starting to rain and you couldn’t even see the damn lake. On top of that, he felt lousy. He had been sneezing all morning, the result no doubt of having his balls frozen off in Kinderhook Creek. He hurried into the warmth of the glass-walled reception area and asked the young woman at the desk for Dorothy Chen, the clinician who was looking after Pilgrim.

They were building a big new clinic across the road and, as he waited, Logan looked out at the pinched faces of the construction workers and felt better. There was even a little ping of excitement at the thought of seeing Dorothy again. Her smile was the reason he wasn’t going to mind driving a couple of hundred miles every day to see Pilgrim. She was like a virgin princess from one of those Chinese art movies his wife liked. A
hell of a figure too. And young enough for him to know better. He saw her reflection coming through the door and turned to face her.

“Hi Dorothy! How’re you doing?”

“Cold. And not very happy with you,” she wagged a finger at him and frowned, mock-stern. Logan held up his hands.

“Dorothy, I drive a million miles for one of your smiles, what have I done?”

“You send me a monster like this and I’m supposed to smile at you?” But she did. “Come on. We got the X rays.”

She led the way through a maze of corridors and Logan listened to her talking and tried not to watch the delicate way her hips moved inside her white coat.

There were enough X rays to mount a small exhibition. Dorothy pinned them up on the light box and they stood side by side, studying them. As Logan had thought, there were cracked ribs, five of them, and the nasal bone was broken. The ribs would heal themselves, and the nasal bone Dorothy had already operated on. She’d had to lever it out, drill holes and wire it back in place. It had gone well, though they still had to remove the swabs packed into the clotted cavity of Pilgrim’s sinus.

“I’ll know who to come to when I need a nose job,” said Logan. Dorothy laughed.

“You wait till you see it. He’s going to have the profile of a prizefighter.”

Logan had been worried there might be some fracture high on the right foreleg or shoulder, but there wasn’t. The whole area was just terribly bruised from the impact and there was severe damage to the network of nerves that served the leg.

“How’s the chest?” said Logan.

“It’s fine. You did a great job there. How many stitches?”

“Oh, about two hundred.” He felt himself blushing like a schoolboy. “Shall we go see him?”

Pilgrim was out in one of the recovery stalls and they could hear him long before they got there. He was calling out and his voice was cracked from all the noise he’d been making since the last lot of sedatives had worn off. The walls of the stall were thickly padded but even so they seemed to shake under the constant thumping of his hooves. Some students were in the next stall and the pony they were looking at was clearly bothered by Pilgrim’s din.

“Come to see the Minotaur?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” said Logan. “Hope you guys already fed him.”

Dorothy slid the bolt to open the top part of the door. As soon as she did so, the noise inside stopped. She opened the door just enough for them to look in. Pilgrim was backed into the far corner with his head low and his ears pinned right back, looking at them like something from a horror comic. Almost every part of him seemed to be wrapped in bloody bandage. He snorted at them then raised his muzzle and bared his teeth.