Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I’m Linnet,” she said. “Like the bird? Patrick paid me to sit up with her and let me help rub her down. She’s fantastic. I think Patrick was tired when he came back around.”

  “I think Patrick was drunk.”

  “That, too,” Linnet said smoothly as Frank stroked Glory Bee’s neck, marveling at the mostly durable change in her, as though she’d had her brain removed and replaced with the temperament center of another horse.

  “So she’s had a good rubdown . . .”

  “And her dinner. A light dinner.”

  “Are you here for juniors?”

  “I was, back when I was a kid.”

  “What do you do now?” Frank meant, What do you do now at Grand Prix events, but the girl had a different answer.

  “I’m in jockey school.”

  “You’re in jockey school?”

  “College.”

  “There’s a college for being a jockey?”

  “Yes, a regular college sports program. There are only a few, but I’m in one.”

  “Where?”

  “Indiana. The big one is Chris McCarron’s school in Kentucky, but this is a good school. Trevor Caven runs it.”

  “That’s something I never would have believed,” Frank said. “Jockey school. I thought you just did that.”

  “Well, I guess you once just did being a doctor. But not very well.”

  “Huh. I’ll go back and call it a night, then. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m twenty. I know I don’t look it. I can take care of myself. And there are big guys out there with guns. Not that I would need their help.”

  “Then you won’t mind my saying you should stay away from Patrick.”

  “I do mind,” Linnet said. “He’s not a bad person. You think the drinking is all there is to it. But my father drinks like that, and he also has no talents.”

  “You don’t know Patrick.”

  “I do. He’s been down to our school.”

  “Patrick? For what?”

  “He did a series of lectures on two weekends a couple of months ago about avoiding common injuries. He knows Trevor.”

  “Patrick did a series of lectures?”

  She might as well have told Frank he’d said Mass.

  “He’s very thoughtful about it.”

  Frank stopped. She was right. Patrick had a good heart and a keen mind; he treated Glory Bee like a duchess and Ian like a little brother. The response to jockeys as lecherous little creatures who drank to avoid eating and tried to skewer every woman past puberty was an easy shot. “I’ll apologize, then.”

  “I might come to see your farm one day.”

  “That would be good. Do better. You let me know if you . . . Do jockey school students need summer jobs?”

  The girl beamed. Her skin was parchment white, with freckles, and she was almost plain until she smiled. The smile recalibrated everything. No wonder Patrick was smitten.

  She said, “This one does. Do you have full-time help?”

  “Well, Professor Patrick lives and works at Tenacity. But early summer is hard. We put up hay and we’re going to have my . . . a friend’s horse there, healing . . .”

  “Prospero. Yes.”

  “If he makes it, and we still board a few. Do you like work?”

  “I’ve been working since I was ten.”

  “So you must like it.”

  “I’d rather have wealthy patrons of racing buy villas and hot cars for me, but yes, for now I do like it.”

  Back at the hotel, Frank fell asleep for a few hours to what seemed like one endless Law & Order episode, but was probably, in fact, four or five, to wake sweating from a dream he didn’t recall until he had finished the cold toast and coffee he’d nearly kicked across the hall—having forgotten he’d ordered them the night before. He brought the tray back in, knocking over Claudia’s suitcase that was just inside the door. Suddenly deciding that he and Patrick would drive home tonight no matter when the event finished, he humped all the luggage down to the bell stand. It was while standing there, folding claim tickets into his wallet, that he realized that he’d dreamed again of elevator doors opening, but that this time first Natalie and then Claudia and then Patrick were stepping in, only to reach up to him from boiling water while he held back from all of them, clutching Ian in his arms. His phone pinged with a message. Claudia had written, Pro is resting on a suspended bed. They pinned a fracture, right hind leg fibula. The doctor says his temperament is on his side because he won’t fight confinement as he heals. Transport will bring him home next week. I’ll wait and drive back. I thought about you all night. C.C.

  CeeCee.

  Her initials formed a natural nickname. Someone would have called her that in high school. He wondered what, and who, Claudia had done in high school. It was unseemly even for him to wonder about it. She was not his. He had thought of her, too, last night, nearly torturously replaying their sex to a groaning schoolboy conclusion while Sam Waterston snappishly reminded a mopey ADA of the moral fiats behind his oaths. And then he had slept, and dreamed her into his particular hell.

  He texted back, Me, too. Good for Pro. Patrick will baby him. Try not to worry.

  Frank got into the car. As he pulled out carefully onto the frontage road, he heard someone say plainly, I want Ian. Can you bring me? It was a voice, but not a voice, the same crazy head-talk he’d heard just a few days earlier. Ian couldn’t do what Frank could only think of as mental telegraphing—although Frank could not be sure of anything anymore, since he’d been sure that Ian could not speak. Perhaps it was Ian, saying in his small child’s way that he wanted Frank.

  On the way to the coliseum, he called his mother three times, and once he could have sworn that Ian picked up, and then, whether from anger or silliness, left the landline off the hook, hidden someplace Hope wouldn’t find it. Frank had to call his mother’s cell phone to attempt to reach her and was peeved when her message said, Hope Mercy here. Please leave us a message and we really will get right back to you. Who had a name like Hope Mercy? She sounded like a health conglomerate. Frank thought of wireless minutes as costly as uranium rolling up, because his mother, not quite altogether keen on the idea of cell phones, often left hers behind when she was out in the garden or driving around in her pony cart. He thought of Glory Bee possibly—well, impossibly—taking away honors and points from an event that she had no business being in at all. And he thought of Claudia, and what he might now mean to a woman he didn’t even know, and what she might now mean to him, and what any of that meant to Ian, and Ian’s presumed assumed identity, and of Patrick’s comic appraisal of all he could see of Claudia from beneath Frank’s shirt, which had been plenty, and why was Patrick to blame; he was a man, even if he had an inseam twenty-six inches long.

  Then he heard the voice again. Do you hear me? I’m not dead. Goddamn dub!

  Could Ian do this, too? Was he being haunted? Did he have a brain tumor?

  Frank had to pull over to rummage in the glove box for his trusty painkiller (he would end up a junkie, drifting pleadingly from doctor to doctor wearing a false lumbar belt and a quivering smile) when lightning flashes from the corners of his eyes threatened a four-eleven alarm headache. The walk to the open stadium was at least a mile once he parked: Patrick had parked the trailer and van by the stables and cabbed it in luxury. When Frank got out of the air-conditioned truck, he nearly swooned. It was easily a hundred in the shade. That wouldn’t bother his cantankerous Aussie girl, but it might kill other horses. And it could easily kill spectators who were elderly, hatless, or simply sane, because, with the earlier and junior classes, these events were longer than bad marriages.

  Why was he here?

  Frank turned around and wandered back to the stables. His head was pounding through a full Vicodin . . . without it, he’d probably have needed to be hospitalized. His head hurt as though somebody had kicked him while he was unconscious. He’d never had a headache like this.

  Hiya, said th
e phantom voice. Hiya! Fireman!

  And though he got injured, he never got sick . . . or sick enough. In twenty years on the job, he had never once called in sick. He had been sick, dog sick, with bronchitis, a sprained ankle, cuts, bruises, concussions, sinus infections, scratched corneas, broken ribs, pinched nerves, even food poisoning, and a cracked kneecap when Tarmac, sage horse that he was, prudently stopped at a dumpster but let Frank continue his trajectory through space. He’d probably transmitted upper respiratory distress to whole neighborhoods, not to mention tiers of the Cook County Jail and ranks of the court system. But he had never called in sick, and after fifteen years, he had decided that even if he went thirty, he never would; it had become a dare, a challenge, like never being divorced or married, like never having eaten a hotdog or gotten a parking ticket. But he would have called in sick to his very life, not only his job, today, if only to take four painkillers and stop the tennis in his head.

  He should not have slept with Claudia.

  He wanted to see Claudia.

  Ian would hate him.

  A boy needed a mother.

  Double fault! A mother? On the basis of one night and two lush couplings? With someone who was a psychiatrist and suspect for that fact alone? A boy who needed a mother was a boy of your own who didn’t already have a mother and not, instead, your own unknowing victim of a felony. Frank wanted to see Ian. Hope would approve of Claudia. Fault! Approve of Claudia for what? Eventually, Frank found the Steel Pier, where Patrick (and Claudia) had imbibed the previous night—a small, crisp, pubby little place nestled against the outside perimeter of the coliseum complex. He ordered a grilled Swiss and tomato to go and two cold Cokes in go-cups. He ate the sandwich on an ornate iron bench in the street, a bench surrounded by a nine-by-five rectangle of brutalized turf studded with a few plump rusty evergreens, one nearly obscuring a sign identifying the little space as Kerri Waldo Creativity Park.

  A “toasted cheese” sandwich was his mother’s remedy for anything, and so it proved. The headache still crouched in the shadows of his brain, but sheathed its claws. His phone pinged. It wasn’t a call, but a picture of Ian, sent by Hope. Even before he saw the picture of Ian, wearing swim trunks, goggles, and Frank’s muck boots, he saw that somehow, it was three in the afternoon. The final was at four.

  Goddamn wally.

  What?

  Hop-skipping in his parody of a run, he went to find Glory Bee.

  Either Patrick was very unforthcoming with his skills or he’d met a woman in Linnet who hadn’t minded sharing hers, for Glory Bee’s mane was plaited in flat braids and her black coat shined glossy. With what was, for her, uncharacteristic calm, she was idly dragging Linnet around in a way that made the small girl look like a big doll. Frank took the halter rope from Linnet, so assaulted by heat she looked as though she’d been swimming, soaked through with Glory Bee’s sweat and her own. Glory Bee stood relatively quietly for Frank, the sweat in thick suds on her own neck. Patrick appeared from wherever it was he appeared from. He looked to have stepped out of a magazine ad, his white trousers and polo shirt blindingly clean, his boots mirror-polished, and his black gloves fitted like his own skin. To Patrick’s immense credit, he only nodded, sliding not a single glance at Frank that would have betrayed any hint of mirth or lewdness connected with his encounter with Claudia last night in the hotel. In fact, Patrick said fewer words even than his customary four or five. Clearly, he, too, for different reasons, was a fist of nerve endings all firing at will.

  They walked to the arena in silence.

  The order of jumps was posted. To Frank, it looked like the kind of chopstick drawings Ian made on table napkins and called his “algebra.” But he walked the course with Patrick, and noticed that everything that made him want to throw up his hands—a triple combination with a six-foot spread in the middle and what looked like a single canter stride for the horse between the three jumps, far short of the three given to test their mettle, and wildly short of the six strides a horse usually loped gathering up for a jump; and a simple single pole decorated with flowers that hid a three-foot-thick wall papered over with what was meant to look like cottage stone, sheer death on a cracker—seemed to calm Patrick. They then walked the jump-off course, which would determine the winner, four jumps in the fastest time. Frank left the arena with no idea where any of the jumps were at all. Patrick went back to claim Glory Bee from two stout stable hands who were holding her down with all their might; he gave Frank a nod and set about wiping down Glory Bee’s flanks and neck before fitting her with the tiny close-contact saddle.

  “There are still people she doesn’t like,” Patrick said. “She doesn’t like a rough hand. She likes that little girl, though.”

  “The student jockey.”

  “Yeah. She’s a solid girl.”

  “Good,” said Frank. He gave Patrick a thumbs-up and left him to it.

  There was, Frank noticed, an owners’ box. But he’d left his credentials in the truck. He doubted if he could make it to the parking lot and back in time, and was scanning the bleachers for something he could climb to without murdering his leg, when someone said, “Frank Mercy?” Frank nearly jumped the five-foot height of one of the jumps obstacles himself, without benefit of a run-up.

  The old man approaching him with his hand extended seemed familiar, in the way high school photos of movie stars suggest the current edition of the person.

  Frank said, “Hello. I’m Frank, yes.”

  “I’m Stuart McCartney,” the man said. He might as well have been Paul McCartney. “You’re exactly like your dad. You don’t remember, but your father trained my horse and coached me. Fiorello and I were on the United States team in 1980.”

  “You competed in the Olympics?”

  “There weren’t any. The United States boycotted the Olympics in 1980. Russians invaded Afghanistan . . .” And on the old man went, finally asking, “Did you come to just look on?”

  “I have a horse in this.”

  “Which?”

  “Her name is Glory Bee.”

  “Ah!” said Stuart McCartney. “That would be the tall black. The mare. She was going for a clear round until some half-wit kid in the stands popped a balloon. She kicked a pole down on the last jump.”

  No wonder Patrick got hammered, having tasted one bright bite of a miracle. Frank’s phone pinged, twice, and then twice again. Finally, although he hated it when other people did this, he took the phone out, and, with an apologetic gesture, glanced at the screen. It read, Pro doing well. Me, too. GB? XO C. The next message said, Dad, Dad, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Ian. He wanted to type this, love, Mom.

  Frank’s throat tightened.

  “Does your mother still own Tenacity?”

  “Yes, she does.” Surprising himself, he said, “With me.”

  “Are you going to sit here with the owners?”

  Frank stood. Someone handed him a pale ale and a bottle of water. He drank both in three swallows. He wouldn’t need his credential cards, at least. He could go through this torture without portfolio.

  At her draw, Glory Bee entered the ring grapevining sideways like a dressage horse. Patrick patiently walked her once around in a tiny circle. She stood, twitching in every muscle. Patrick sat her with a magnificent stillness. Frank thought of people who considered jumping, even stadium events, a cruel torture, when horses would act much the same way if they were wild, fighting to outrun and best each other, in the nature of all herd animals. Frank put on his sunglasses and pulled his hat down low. If it wouldn’t have drawn attention, he would have pulled his shirt over his head, too.

  In two minutes and fourteen seconds, it was over. A pure round, clean as the sole of a bride’s shoe. Glory Bee’s hoof never came within six inches of a pole. He watched as Patrick thoughtfully stroked her neck. Most of the others who did a clear round slapped their horses in companionable exultation. Horses hated being slapped. They wanted the feeling along their necks they had as colts, when their mothers licked th
eir necks.

  His holy admiration for Patrick soothed Frank’s own nerves finally and brought him straight down from all the places he’d been—with Claudia, and with Ian—to the feel of the rounded metal chair back under his hands, still hot enough to sear a scallop even though the owners’ box was now in shadow.

  Discreet lights came up.

  The crew arranged the jumps, adding height to the critical few for the jump-off.

  Five horses formed up.

  Glory Bee went first. She went angelically, as though she were insubstantial instead of a creature that could kick down a garage with thirty minutes of concentrated hysteria. With each loft, Patrick lay on her neck, unmoving, as though he were painted on her. Other riders of ordinary size plumped into their seats as the horse plunged on landing. Patrick’s muscles were apparently much like split oak, because you could see sunlight between his ass and the saddle even when Glory Bee cantered. With a start, Frank realized Glory Bee wore no martingale on her bridle, no strap to hold her head loosely, but down. If she threw her head up, she would break Patrick’s nose or worse. The sweltering crowd roused itself, waving programs and straw hats to cheer her. Patrick touched the brim of his cap, so quickly it was almost unnoticeable. Frank thought, Classy, Patrick. The other riders, all men, favored each other with stoic, military nods.

  The second horse knocked a pole off its sockets. The third did a beautiful clear round, but so slowly it looked as though the big gray Warmblood was running in surf, finishing an unimaginable six seconds behind Glory Bee’s time.

  The fourth horse was willful and fast, completing a clean round.

  Glory Bee won by only half a second.

  In tradition, Patrick would have ridden Glory Bee twice around, pumping the air. But he was off, on the ground, quietly, with his arms around her neck.

  Frank wanted to cry. He wanted to clamber over the stadium wall and run to both of them. If she could repeat what she had done here, she was a century horse. Maybe even an Olympian. He cursed himself for a coward for not using his phone to video the jump-off. His mother would be amazed. Cedric would . . . Cedric.