The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “She’s a star,” Aidan muttered, losing himself to the photos and the process. It was an ability of his that Jenny envied. She had to stay present at all times, so that she could take away a record of everything she was observing or hearing. And now, unfortunately, to try and talk down Tommy just a little bit further.

  “Thank you,” Jenny said to him softly, keeping her voice low so as not to distract the filly from her modeling duties. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I should have said the moment we walked in that we were here as press. But I was just so happy to see you again… it’s been a while.”

  She pressed her lips together as if she was a hurt child, hating herself all the while for playing the role of little Jenny Wolfe. But that was who Tommy remembered from so many training mornings and racing afternoons back in Florida—who was she to decide what side of her he had to see now? She took a breath and kept going: “One of the things I’ve found really difficult about living in the city is that people don’t understand how much we love horses in this sport. Even in Ocala, my school friends didn’t get it. They had their jumpers and their hunters and they thought that was the only normal way to have horses. I guess I just… I guess I just want to bring the real backside stories to everyone, so they can understand we’re just like they are.”

  Behind her, Aidan whispered sweet nothings to the filly. In front of her, a hot walker led a horse out of the shed-row’s midmorning trench, a channel dug up by dozens of hooves, and walked him onto the packed dirt along the side of the pathway, giving the little party of humans a wide berth so that no one got hurt. Beside her, Tommy Vargas looked at her with that wily old horseman’s eye, considering his options.

  Finally he shook his head. “I don’t know, girl. I don’t know who’s going to tell you their stories. I can tell you that this is a good filly by Maintain, and she’s training well and eating her head off and sound as a dollar and we’re pointing her towards a stakes race in July or August. But I don’t have time to spin you a lot of yarns about her favorite bedtime stories or what have you. I gotta get back to work. Son? You done taking photos?”

  Aidan stepped back from the filly’s stall door and nearly into a hot walker with a blowing horse. “Oh, jeez, I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, bouncing back up to the concrete lip running along the stalls.

  The hot walker muttered in Spanish and kept walking, taking the same trajectory around them as the person before him, stepping over the trench where the horses walked with an exaggerated stretch of his legs.

  Tommy cast Aidan an irritated look, then glanced back at Jenny. “Keep an eye on him,” he warned her. “Or no one will welcome you back for a second visit.”

  “Tommy,” Jenny said, “who should I talk to?”

  He considered her for a moment.

  “Caitlin Robert,” he said finally. “She was an assistant in the Smythe barn for a while, went off on her own this past year. She’s young, like you. She might like your idea.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Jenny told him, suddenly feeling defiant now that they’d been dismissed. “It’s going to change everything.”

  Tommy shrugged and smiled. “Maybe it is, Jenny. Maybe so. I’m an old dog, what can I say? I hope you got some good ones of the filly,” he called to Aidan. “You can use them. Send me the link when they’re finished.”

  Jenny gave Aidan a hopeless look when they were safely away from the Vargas barn. He stopped at a picnic table in a grassy area between barns and fiddled with the lenses on his camera. “What’s wrong?” he asked, fitting a new lens and spinning it home. “That was a good start. I got some great shots, and with any luck she’s going be a rising star later this summer. We’ll have been here first.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jenny threw herself down on the bench, allowing herself to wallow in the feeling of defeat for a few delicious moments. Sometimes, she felt, she just had to drop the facade that everything was going fine, that all events were proceeding according to plan. Her reality was more a sense of impending doom than a confident procession towards fame and accomplishment, but presenting oneself with the air of a magnificent life lived to a magnificent plan had been drilled into her as the only acceptable public face. “What’s wrong? Tommy basically told us not to bother with the backside reporting. I told him exactly what I wanted to accomplish for racing, for us, and he told me it wasn’t going to work.”

  “And then he told you who might work with us,” Aidan said patiently. He put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder and she leaned into it, pressing her head against his arm. She knew she shouldn’t, knew the closeness would just give her feelings she would cry about later (she could imagine Amelia now, knocking on the false wall between their rooms, asking if everything was okay in that simpering tone which always made Jenny want to scream and scream), but at this moment, with her dream shattered around her feet, she didn’t feel like she could resist Aidan, as well.

  “We need to concentrate on the younger people for the backside stories,” Aidan went on, his fingers stroking her shoulder. He was being comforting, Jenny told herself. He wasn’t touching her because he had some deep, erotic need to put his hands all over her. That was her fantasy, not his. “We’ll just modify our approach with the old guard, that’s all. Visuals are important, too. If more people read articles, you wouldn’t even be trying to solve this problem. People would already know racing does lots of good in the horse world.”

  “That’s true,” Jenny mumbled, her voice garbled around both the lump in her throat and the trembling in her nerves that Aidan’s touch was setting off. “Like all veterinary advancements, for example.” Her voice gained a little strength as one of her favorite arguments strode forward and demanded her full attention. “All those hock injections and ulcer meds and ultrasound machines—where do they think those things come from? Racing investment, that’s where.”

  “There you go!” Aidan stepped back and shouldered his bag, ready to carry on. Jenny felt the ghost of his touch on her shoulder, a warmth accompanied by a shiver of goosebumps, but it was already fading, it was already gone. She sighed and shrugged the memory away. “Let’s go find this Kathleen person.”

  “Caitlin,” Jenny corrected him.

  “Right.”

  The morning was slipping away, and by the time they’d figured out where Caitlin’s barn was, the track conditioning break had arrived and the paths leading to the track were nearly empty. Outside barns, grooms and riders were gathering to eat bagels and drink—water, coffee, Coke, Budweiser. A woman on a folding chair outside a barn waved a can of Bud at them as they walked by. A red cooler next to her was filled with ice and beer.

  “Three dollar,” she said.

  “Too early,” Aidan demurred, smiling. “Thank you.”

  The woman, who had the lined face of an ancient village crone, let her gaze slide past them, searching the for next potential customer.

  Caitlin’s barn was as far from the track as one could get, with the sounds of Long Island traffic rattling through the cloth-covered chain-link fence out back. There was no one outside the barn, and Aidan paused outside the shed-row door, looking nervous. “Should we just go in? You don’t know her, right?”

  “No,” Jenny sighed, feeling her own nerves jittering in her stomach. This was the worst part of journalism, the part which had often made her wonder if she’d chosen the wrong major in college, the wrong career, the wrong path in life. Walking up to someone, introducing herself, and asking if the stranger minded answering a few questions? It was the worst possible request Jenny thought she could make of herself.

  While they were looking at each other, neither willing to make the call, the P.A. system squealed and hummed, and a loudspeaker mounted on a nearby telephone pole announced, “The main track is now open for training.”

  The barns all around exploded with activity. Grooms and riders dropped their napkins and their cans and ran back into the barns. Trainers appeared on horseback, riding down the horse paths towards the track. Then the horses who had
been tacked and ready began streaming out of the barns, riders adjusting their stirrups and straightening their helmets as they strode down the paths. “This is when they’ll get in some fast works,” Jenny said. “Think you want to get some photos of that, instead?”

  Aidan looked tempted. Then they heard the slap of a rubber stall webbing hitting a concrete wall, and looked back into the barn. A rider was coming down the shed-row path on a high-headed horse with a crooked blaze, and as the rider leaned down to tighten the girth, they realized it was a woman in the saddle.

  Jenny recognized her immediately. “Caitlin?” she called, astonished. “What are you doing here?”

  The woman was on her way out of the barn; she circled the horse, who wasn’t the sort you could just stop whenever you wanted. “Jenny Wolfe? I didn’t know you were in New York!” She looked around. “And not on a horse!”

  Jenny flushed, although she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed to be on the ground, and wearing a pair of slim jeans and a floral blouse, with so many people around her mounted and wearing hard-worn riding clothes. Or, she hadn’t been until this moment, face to face with a friend from high school days. Four years older than her, Caitlin O’Connor had been a senior when Jenny had arrived at the school bus loop on her first day, dusty in paddock boots and jeans, having run straight from the training barn to the school bus. She’d climbed out of the bus, ready to vomit with nerves, then made eye contact with Caitlin, who was leaning against a pole in the same boots and jeans. They’d instantly recognized a kinship in each other.

  Now Caitlin was here, at one of America’s top racetracks, a trainer with her own barn. And Jenny was… she looked down at her clean clothes and felt a strange sense of shame. “I didn’t know you were here. Your name changed, huh?”

  “Yeah, I got married… briefly.” Caitlin laughed, but there was something brittle about her smile. “I kept the last name. It was too much of a pain to change, and I already had horses running under Robert.” Her horse flung his head and threatened to rear, and she pushed him forward with two strong nudges from her heels. “I gotta take this beast out before the track is torn up too much. Come back and see me, anytime!”

  Caitlin rode away, her horse’s hooves tearing up clods of wet gravel as he danced and spooked down the path. Jenny watched Caitlin’s long pony-tail swish from side to side, brushing the whip stuck through the back belt loop of her breeches. She had a sudden, desperate longing to be Caitlin, an insane desire that wasn’t grounded in any reality—she knew that Caitlin had been up since four a.m., and was at it at least six days a week, she knew everything about the bone-tiring grind Caitlin was working and the crushing defeats and the icy winter mornings and the sweltering summer afternoons and the empty bank account and the mounting feed bills and the career-ending vet visits… but against all reason, the feeling was there: that she’d given up something precious for this new life, and the trade had not been even.

  “Want to head towards the track and catch those breezes, then?” Aidan asked. His voice shook her from her sad mental wanderings, as it always did, and she turned to look at him, really take him in. Aidan, with his tall-guy slouch and his loose cotton shirts and his penchant for silly linen scarves, his color palette of gray and beige and soft ocean blue, his weakness for a scruffy beard and his sand-streaked dark hair that was always just a little too long, always falling over his eyes. Aidan connected her to the city, to the new identity she’d made for herself there, where she didn’t have to be little Jenny Wolfe, where she could be whoever she said she was, and no one would have any choice or any interest in believing anything but what she told them.

  Maybe, she thought suddenly, working in racing is the mistake, not giving it up.

  Aidan’s green eyes were bright; he was looking longingly towards the track. The white rail could just be spotted between two barns across the road, the high bank of the clubhouse turn lifting the horses on it up above them, out of sight. He had no misgivings about being here; for Aidan, making it onto the backside at last was the sign he’d been waiting for, that he was on the right track.

  Jenny touched his arm, more because she wanted to than because she needed to, because she wanted a real, living connection to the choices she’d made.

  “Let’s go see them,” she said. “I know just the place.”

  Chapter Nine

  By the time the morning works were wrapping up, the clock was spinning close to nine thirty and both Jenny and Aidan were thinking of the work ahead of them. Stuck to working out of cafes while the office wasn’t ready yet, they needed to get back to the city, find a place with a table and power outlets available, and settle into a day of website prep. For Jenny, that was working on the content plan she’d written with Lana back when they were preparing their final project: all of the background pages and intro pieces their website would need. Plus, the first column of Notes from the Backside would be written from today’s visit.

  For Aidan, his duties were photo editing and creating albums Lana could draw from to illustrate their articles. Mr. Farnsworth, reasoning that they’d done all the planning work while still in school, wanted the website live in seven days’ time, so they had to build an editorial calendar and hit the ground running right away—there was no waiting around for their internet to get switched on or their office furniture to arrive.

  A few horses were still out jogging around the track, but the energy was falling off quickly. Jenny sat down on one of the benches in front of the clubhouse and flicked through her email while Aidan snapped a few photos of the quiet grandstand. She understood the appeal. Belmont’s grandstand was almost incomprehensibly massive when it was empty, curving up from the sandy yellow track like a vast seashell abandoned on the beach. Instead of a smooth interior, though, it was lined with thousands and thousands of hard, unyielding seats. It was a grandstand built for the glory days of racing, when top Thoroughbreds were household names, and Hollywood stars showed up to see, not just to be seen. It was a grandstand that filled only once per year, and spent the other seasons dreaming of better times.

  “That was magical,” Aidan sighed, sitting heavily next to her. The bench creaked a protest. “Can we do this every week?”

  “That’s the idea.” Jenny put down her phone and looked out over the broad track. “I guess next week we’ll come back to Caitlin’s barn. I’ll find her phone number and set up something formal, instead of just dropping in. I should have done that today, but…” her voice trailed off. But she hadn’t known what to expect. But she hadn’t known how they’d get in. But she hadn’t known how they’d be received. Now she had her answers, and she didn’t love them.

  “This was just a scouting mission,” Aidan agreed. “A recon. We’ll be better prepared next time.”

  They took a Lyft to the train station, then slogged through Broadway Junction to get the A train back to Manhattan. It was a long combination of transportation styles that had Jenny’s eyes closing almost as soon as she hit the plastic seat of the subway car. She tried to look at her phone to stay awake, but there was just no fighting the sway of the train and that early start time they’d gotten this morning.

  Jenny woke up with a startle in Brooklyn, her head on Aidan’s shoulder, and it took her a moment to realize that the heaviness weighing her down was his own sleeping head, resting on hers. Her eyes darted around the subway car, and landed on a woman sitting across from them, watching them with an amused look. The woman smiled at her, her expression knowing. Jenny bit her lip, embarrassed at first—then gave herself up to the moment. She flashed a small smile back at the woman, closed her eyes, and let Aidan’s nap continue without interruption.

  They rattled under the East River, the lights flickering on and off, passengers coming and going with backpacks and briefcases and bicycles and once, embarking at Lafayette and riding uncomfortably all the way to West Fourth, a man pushing a cello in a tall black case. As he shoved his way out of the car, Jenny slowly woke Aidan, slipping h
er head out from beneath his and letting her shoulder catch him until he opened his eyes and looked around. She curved her neck to look down at him and he blinked at her.

  “Next stop,” she said, as the doors closed.

  “Let’s stay on the train,” he sighed, making no move to straighten up. “It’s comfy and cool here.” He closed his eyes. His head was still resting on her shoulder.

  Jenny bit her lip again.

  But when the train slowed and the announcement for Fourteenth Street - Eighth Avenue came garbling over the P.A., Aidan roused himself, and by the time the doors opened he was on his feet and pushing a way clear for her to follow him out.

  The Bumblebee Cafe off Eighth Avenue was their go-to working spot, with plenty of dark wood and globe lights and an espresso machine that sounded like a steam train shortly before its imminent boiler explosion. It was the kind of place where wobbly-legged tables were balanced with wads of napkins and the wooden floors creaked beneath every footstep, but there was also quiet indie music playing on the barista’s iPhone, dropped into a dock on a shelf behind the bar, and enough outlets for everyone to plug in their silver MacBooks when the juice started running low. The espresso was fair trade; the coffee gave strong men the shakes; the sandwiches were pressed under an iron which had to be hidden in case the health department came in. The cafe had a B rating, which an artistic member of management had placed in a gilt-edged frame from the antique shop down the block, its edges decorated with delicate golden bees sipping nectar from flowers. There was a rumor that the baristas were just messy enough to keep an A rating from ruining the aesthetic.