The Summer We Lost Her

by Tish Cohen

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  For Peter

  I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

  Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

  – PROLOGUE –

  New Jersey

  2006

  It was one of those things that never should have happened—the kind you turn over, splay open with pins, and examine at intervals for the rest of your life because it will never, ever cease to matter. Any little interruption could have changed the timing: a slice of bread in the toaster too long, a stalled van on the 287, a song on the radio you just had to hear to the end.

  Elise Sorenson stepped outside to a frosty October morning. The frenzied weekday choreography of grave-faced commuters marching to the train and parents stuffing schoolchildren turtled by backpacks into SUVs had finally given way to quiet. The odd yellow leaf spiraled softly earthward. She could see her breath as she climbed into her car.

  No riding in the third trimester had been her husband’s only request. Her obstetrician’s advice was straightforward: any sport you are already proficient at is safe to continue, especially at Elise’s level of experience. Dressage riders competed at the Olympics while pregnant. The doctor had left it up to Elise to determine when to stop, and when she reached twenty-eight weeks—her belly the size of a domed screen that keeps flies off a picnic ham—it felt right to stay on the ground.

  Anyway, her horse was young. It wasn’t a bad idea to have her coach train him for a few months.

  It had been three weeks since she’d stopped riding, and having nowhere to go every morning still felt strange. Blissful, yes. But lonely. You couldn’t spend five days a week debating cloth diapers versus disposables. More often than not, habit drew her back to the stable. The place was more than just a barn for Elise; it had been her home the second half of high school.

  She arrived that day to find Ronnie Goodrich schooling her horse in the arena and slipped behind the low, dust-covered wall of the viewing area to watch. Steam puffed from the animal’s nostrils as he cantered around the far end. The only sound was the powdery thud of hooves and the familiar waxy squeak of good saddle leather.

  It was still pretty outside. The arena doors and windows had been flung open to the quivering riot of scarlet, mulberry, and gold in the woods beyond. Another month or two and the place would be sealed up tight, heaters on the ceiling glowing like embers.

  A somersault in her abdomen and Elise smiled. Her hand instinctively went to her stomach. This little one was an acrobat. Over three pounds now, a recent ultrasound showed. And already sucking its thumb. Her thumb. The baby’s position had finally allowed for a peek.

  Soon Ronnie’s working students filed in—three moon-eyed, flat-bellied girls who floated along the barn aisles like cult followers, armfuls of freshly laundered saddle pads and flakes of sweet hay offered up in exchange for lessons and board from the great man. Elise had done the same at their age. Lara, Amy, and Kirsten. Amy waved excitedly, gestured toward Elise’s stomach, whispered, “So cute!”

  Too soon, the ride was over. I’m not ready to leave this haven yet, she thought as she stepped into the soft give of the arena footing. Indie hadn’t had a thorough brushing in ages. His hooves needed polishing. Besides that, she’d give his silver bit and the fittings on his bridle a good scrub with a toothbrush. Smooth lanolin over the stirrup leathers with a damp sponge, reaching farther under the saddle flaps than usual.

  As Ronnie loosened the girth, he raved about the horse’s winning combination of enthusiasm and absolute calm. The animal was kinder and more tranquil than most humans. As if embarrassed, Indie gently tugged on Elise’s sweater with his lips. It made the girls laugh. Swoon, even—teenage girls are always horsesick. Elise had started to lead the gelding back to the barn when Amy asked if anyone had taken a photo of Elise atop her horse the day she’d stopped riding.

  “Seriously, how darling would that be with your baby bump?”

  Very, was the squealed consensus.

  Still, Elise hesitated. But Indie was so gentle and trustworthy, Ronnie’s preschool-age nieces and nephews had been led around the arena on his back. Ronnie had given a disabled rider from Colorado a lesson on the horse that summer. The animal was, as they say, bomb-proof.

  “Okay,” she said. “But just for a second.”

  Kirsten held the reins while Elise stepped up onto the mounting block and tentatively slid one foot into the stirrup.

  The little gray dog came out of nowhere.

  – CHAPTER 1 –

  Greenville, North Carolina

  June 2015

  Even with the flight’s fifteen-minute delay and the half-hour drive from Newark to Montclair, she’d still make it to the school on time, Elise told herself as she tightened her seat belt and forced herself to slow down and breathe. She checked her watch—1:15 p.m. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room.

  A striking woman with flippy black hair and a breezy linen shirt over white jeans paused in the aisle, her destination clearly the window seat. “Sorry. That’s me over there.”

  Elise shifted to allow her seatmate to pass in a moneyed jingle of bracelets and the faintest whiff of perfume. Once the scent dissipated, Elise realized that, in the confined space of the airplane, in her breeches and sweatshirt, she smelled vaguely organic. Bestial, even, covered as she was in sweat, sunscreen, and show-ring silt.

  After three weeks in North Carolina and—ten weeks prior to that—three months in Florida, Elise Sorenson was finally on her way home. She’d been at the Tryon horse show in Mill Spring that morning with a very late test time—9:45—for a woman who needed to be in another state by afternoon. After her ride, without taking the time to change, she had raced back to the house she’d shared with six other international-level riders, most of whom she didn’t know; one of whom (the one who did jump squats after midnight and, she was nearly certain, helped himself to her protein powder) she wished she’d never met; and all of whom were fighting for the same thing: better scores than they’d earned in Florida so they could be long-listed for the U.S. equestrian team in Rio next year.

  She’d thrown her bags into the back of her coach’s rented Land Rover, left Ronnie to accompany the horses back to Newark, cleared security in record time considering it was the first real weekend of the summer, and made it, breathless and glowing with anticipation, to seat 21C.

  She checked her watch again. 1:25. I’ll be there, she’d promised her daughter last night on the phone.

  Thumps came from beneath the floor as luggage was heaved into the belly of the plane. Then the breathless pong of the flight attendant call button. She reached up to blast the overhead vent in case her seatmate noticed the eau de cheval, then glanced around. Some of them must be horse people. Anyway, she was probably being paranoid.

  With a mother who worked here and there as a doctor’s receptionist and a father whose John Deere salesman-of-the-year dreams had never materialized, Elise Bleeker had grown up in a depressed neighborhood. It lay along the western border of Lower Vailsburg in Newark, New Jersey, and was not-so-lovingly dubbed “the Coop” because it wasn’t uncommon for people to keep a backyard chicken or two.
The Kirks, who lived directly behind the Bleekers, kept hens in a converted shed along the property line. On a hot day, the caustic smell of excrement would drift through Elise’s window, permeating every soft surface. You couldn’t get it out of your nose. She was certain it attached itself to the clothes her mother hung out to dry, maybe even to her hair. Her suspicions were confirmed on the bus one day when a young boy made a face and told his father something stunk. Elise slipped off at the next stop. That shame never fully leaves a person.

  Now, movement beside her caught Elise’s attention. With every click of an overhead bin being pushed shut and every thump of a passenger rushing past, Elise’s seatmate braced for impact. The woman pulled the safety card from the pouch at her knees and stared at it, hands shaking.

  Elise leaned close. “If it helps at all, I’m on my way to a very important event back in Montclair, something I—one hundred percent—must attend. And if I arrive safely, you arrive safely.”

  The woman’s fingers went to her necklace; she was clearly embarrassed. “Ridiculous to be such a baby. I’m nearly forty-five years old.”

  “Nothing ridiculous about being afraid of something and going ahead and doing it.” Elise realized her paddock boots were smeared with barn dirt and tucked them beneath her seat. “Maybe more ridiculous to board a plane covered in mud.”

  “You’re Elise Sorenson. You can be forgiven.”

  Elise searched her memory. Was this someone she was supposed to know?

  “I’m not a stalker.” The woman held out a manicured hand for Elise to shake. “Laurel Sabados. Getting my girls to and from barns and horse shows and tack shops has been my full-time job since they were old enough to talk. My eldest, Jessa, had a photo of you pinned to her corkboard. From Dressage Today magazine, I think?” When Elise didn’t correct her, Laurel continued. “You were her idol.”

  Were.

  Admittedly, Elise had taken a risk that morning. Dressage is all white gloves and tails, top hat and hair contained in a netted bun. The one event set to music, the Grand Prix Kur, is typically done to Bach, Gershwin, “A New Argentina” from Evita, perhaps. But Tamara Berlo-Chang had just scored 73.39. Elise needed to make a statement and switched her music to something decidedly more edgy at the last minute: Lil’ Kim covering an expletive-spackled song called “Lighters Up.” The judges were in such a fluster, they’d held off scoring. “Sounds like you saw my test.”

  “I loved it,” Laurel paused, then added, “I don’t care what anyone said.”

  Wait. “What did they say?”

  “Oh, you know how people are.” Laurel raised the window shade with the tip of a finger, peered at the ground traffic, then snapped it all the way down. “Doesn’t bear repeating.”

  “Don’t tell me . . . Tamara Berlo-Chang is your daughter’s new idol?” Elise sighed nervously. “Deservedly, without a doubt.”

  “No. You remained her heroine to the end. Jessa died last year.”

  Elise’s stomach dropped. For all the guilt she lived with, things could have turned out far, far worse. “Oh . . . god. I’m so sorry.”

  “Drunk driver—another teenager, actually. Home from Pepperdine for the summer. Out there on a baseball scholarship.” Laurel held a deep, bolstering breath. “He lived. Jessa didn’t.”

  “God.” Elise sat with the weight of this woman’s tragedy. “That’s . . . I don’t know what to say. How on earth do you go forward?”

  Laurel pulled a folded tissue from her sleeve cuff and refolded it. “Minute by minute.”

  “And the driver?”

  “He’s in prison. Two young lives destroyed.”

  A passenger leaned over Elise to stuff his bag into the overhead bin with enough force that it rocked her seat. His tie swung into Elise’s space and she leaned away.

  “I’ve wondered many times since whether I am supposed to forgive him,” Laurel said.

  “And do you?”

  The woman’s eyes searched the chair back in front of her for answers that weren’t there. “Jessa deserved more.” Then Laurel made a deliberate shift in body language: pushed her fists into her lap, fixed her gaze on Elise, and smiled through eyes now tinged with pink. The moment had passed. “Enough about my life. What takes you to New Jersey on such an important mission that you’re going to keep the plane up in the air for it?”

  It was like coming out of a darkened movie theater, surprised anything exists beyond the story that engrossed you. Elise blinked hard. “Oh, home. My eight-year-old daughter is in her first play tonight.”

  “How lovely. What’s her name?”

  “Gracie. I’ve only been home about ten weeks total this year. This will be my longest stretch back with her and my husband. So it’s a bit of a reunion.”

  For a Grand Prix dressage rider with Olympic dreams who lived in the snow-covered tundra that was the northeastern United States, it simply was what it was. Elise shipped down to Florida in December with her Hanoverian gelding, which meant the family spent many Christmases under palm trees. She flew home for family time as her competition and training schedule allowed, and Matt and Gracie drove down for long weekends. This season, however, Elise’s scores had been all over the place—not ideal with Rio only one year away. The 2016 games were the reason they’d bought Indie all those years ago. And for Tokyo in 2020, Indie would be nineteen. There was no way to know if the horse would be up to it. Maybe with the sale of Matt’s family cabin there would be money to buy a youngster, but to have another horse ready? Possible, but only if everything went smoothly.

  Once the shows in Palm Beach ended, after a couple of well-earned months at home, she and Ronnie trekked down to North Carolina. Trouble was, her scores there were up and down as well. It had gotten to the point where, Elise could tell, Matt was afraid to ask during their bedtime phone calls. He asked about the weather. Her workout schedule. How she slept.

  All the money Elise had spent this past season, all the time away, may have been for nothing.

  “Tough on a family, this lifestyle, I suppose,” said Laurel. “Lots of Skyping, FaceTiming.”

  “Every day, if we can. And Matt is a rock. But, believe me, I face a whole lot of judgment from the moms in the schoolyard.”

  “And if your husband were the gifted athlete; if Gracie’s father were vying for the Olympics . . . those very same people would stand around admiring him. Not a single person would judge him harshly.” Laurel tsked. “Society is still so archaic in some ways. The choices women make as mothers are forever under the microscope. Everyone has an opinion.”

  Perhaps myself most of all, Elise thought. After the accident, Elise hadn’t allowed herself to ride again for nearly three years. It took Matt and Ronnie sitting her down for a two-hour intervention at the Tiny Rhino Café in town to get her back on a horse. “Sometimes deservedly.”

  “And sometimes not.”

  Flight attendants and stray passengers busied themselves with last-minute securing of overhead compartments and seat belts. “It’s not the traditional way to parent, the mother on the road, but you have to believe your child will learn by example, right? How to really go for it.”

  As for her own drive, she certainly hadn’t learned from example. While her father, Warren, with his twinkling green eyes and his politician’s smile, had always taught her she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to, his own methods were sorely lacking. “All you have to do is believe, princess,” he used to say. “Because if you don’t believe, they don’t believe.” And there her large-framed mother, Rosamunde, would sit beside him—always fully made up with hair coiffed—ever hopeful that the big-talking man who’d swept into her life in his used Cadillac to woo her away from finishing her college degree had been the right choice.

  Elise had had many a long, lonely flight to think about what drove her to fight this hard. It hadn’t come from Warren’s encouragement at all. Her fire came much later, from the shock of his betrayal—an act that cost her mother her life. But Elise couldn’t think
of that now. Sorrow was an indulgence she didn’t have time for.

  Laurel was staring at her. “You’re one of the most talented riders in the country, Elise. Being traditional is never really going to be an option. Nor should it be.”

  Elise looked down at the Summerhill Prep program in her lap. The Blossom King was the end-of-school-year play, and Gracie had been selected to draw the cover illustration: a frowning cherry tree next to a vain monarch. He had in his possession three things: the desire for a robe made of petals, a newly sharpened ax, and a henchman willing to use it. What he didn’t see was the morality lesson charging at him like an invisible freight train.

  The curtain would go up at five. Hopefully, Matt would score two front-row center seats so their daughter could feel her parents’ adoration from the stage, where she was to play a baby koala waiting for a breakfast of ripe cherries. That the freckle-faced joey had been born in Branch Brook Park, New Jersey, didn’t seem to have struck the drama teacher as remotely improbable. Nor had it worried her that said marsupial insisted upon wearing a tiara. It was, after all, as Gracie explained to her mother the evening prior on the phone, in the froggy voice that had earned her the nickname “Little Green,” her stage debut.

  Awkward for Elise’s reunion with her husband to happen in front of every parent and teacher in the school, but after a self-conscious embrace, Matt would pull her hand onto his lap, fold her fingers into a ball, and cover it with his own. It was the hot little stone of their love. From this pip sprung their life together.

  Two hours and five minutes, then this plane would land. Another fifty minutes or so, if traffic was kind to her, and she’d be with her family. It was always a bit of a strained dance when the three of them reunited. With Gracie because she’d have forgotten that Elise had any authority, and with Matt . . . well, with Matt because he’d been running the show for an extended period and his wife’s return always tilted the parenting balance.