The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  That line again. As if Jenny had Mister at the farm on training board but was supposed to be working off some of his expenses. “Mom,” Jenny sighed. “I know I bred Mister, but you can’t call him my colt every single time he does something wrong. You’re the ones racing him. You’re the ones who own him. They’re not going to say, ‘owned by Jenny Wolfe’ when he wins his next race, are they?”

  Andrea sniffed, and a world of offense was packed into that inhalation. “Every horse at this farm will be owned by Jenny Wolfe someday, miss. Maybe sooner than later, if your poor father doesn’t take a break. He’s not as young as he used to be! He could have a heart attack and keel over in the shed-row! Is that what you want?”

  The glass was cool against her cheek. A little girl went skipping down the sidewalk, her hair in a multitude of braids. Her mother was close behind, head covered in a pretty pink scarf. The girl was holding a plush unicorn, with a rainbow mane and tail. She made it jump onto the railings of Jenny’s front stoop, jump off again, canter through the air to the next apartment house. Jenny had done that a million times, in the Paddock Mall as she trailed after her mother on school shopping trips, or along rows of seats when she’d been taken to the races as a small child. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up here, walking to school or the store on cracked concrete, imagining a fairy world for her unicorn out of brick buildings and the crayon-colored awnings of bodegas.

  The girl and her mother turned the corner and disappeared into the seething humanity of Atlantic Avenue.

  “Are you still there?” Andrea demanded.

  “I’m really sorry,” Jenny replied. “But I can’t come. Dad will be fine. He knows when to stop. If you want extra help, bring Marco. He’s good with Mister.”

  “What do you know about Marco?” Andrea’s voice was suddenly suspicious. “Have you been talking to him?”

  “Not since May, when I was at the farm.” Jenny stood up straight, her eyebrows coming together. “Wait, what’s that tone for? Is something going on with Marco? He didn’t leave, did he?”

  “Why, did he tell you he was going to leave?”

  “No—I—why would you ask if I’ve been talking to him?” Jenny was becoming utterly confused. “I just said to take him because I know he can handle Mister, that’s all. I’m sure he would be happy to help.”

  “Oh,” Andrea said. “Well, that’s fine. I’ll ask him, then.” She paused. “Unless you’d like to do it?”

  “What? I just said I haven’t spoken to him in over a month. We’re not—” Jenny couldn’t believe she was about to say these words, but this was clearly where her mother was going “—we’re not involved or something, Mom. I ran into him in the training barn when I was down there and said hello. Nothing’s going on.”

  “That’s good. He’s a good rider, but he’s not the kind of boy I want to see you with. You know he got a groom over at Teddy’s place pregnant last year? Did you know that?”

  Jenny closed her eyes. The groom hadn’t been pregnant. She’d been throwing up every morning so everyone thought she was pregnant, but it turned out she’d developed a peanut allergy and hadn’t realized her morning pack of peanut butter crackers was making her sick. Jenny wasn’t sure how Marco had been implicated in the false alarm, but she was sure he wasn’t the only exercise rider in the neighborhood to be the unwitting father of Carolina’s imaginary child. “That’s not quite what happened. But Mom? I have to get back to work.”

  “How is work?” Andrea asked, suddenly chummy.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I liked the story about the carriage horse. It disappeared, though, when I tried to show your father.”

  “You read that? Thank you.”

  “What happened to it?”

  Jenny sighed, walking around the little room. It was only a few steps from window to kitchen, but there was enough room to pace one small, tense circle. “It caused a lot of trouble with the anti-carriage horse people, and Lana had it taken down. I can email you a copy, though, if you want to show Dad.”

  “If Lana thinks she can avoid pissing off the animal rights wackos and run a racing magazine, she’s in for a big surprise,” Andrea said happily. “You tell her I said that.”

  “I will,” Jenny said, still pacing. The floor creaked beneath her bare feet, sharp edges and bent wood. She’d already forgotten the threat of splinters, having kicked off her socks earlier while she was curled up on the couch with her laptop. “I’ll tell her you said that. I’m sure it will change her mind.”

  Andrea laughed. “Well, just don’t let her call all the shots. Stand up for yourself. You guys are supposed to be friends at the end of the day, but if she steamrolls you, you’ll end up hating each other.”

  Jenny paused, realizing her mother had just said something extremely valuable. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”

  She made it to the office an hour later, stopping for a tray of iced coffees from the Starbucks a block away. With its full allotment of furniture, the office now seemed much smaller than the day they’d signed the lease. The space was just about filled, thanks to two long, blonde work tables in the center, and a small, high table with a few stools pulled around it between the tall windows. The small, glass-walled private room off to the right had been meant for private meetings, but Lana had set up her massive double monitors on the plain desk and started calling it her office. Jenny and Aidan had let it go without comment, but Jenny was pretty sure she didn’t like what it meant. Yes, Lana was the managing editor, but weren’t they supposed to be a team of three, not two and a boss?

  When Jenny walked in, she found Aidan installed at a work table with his laptop, his camera, and his headphones, while Lana chattered away on her phone, an exhibit behind glass. The heavy door clicked behind her and Aidan looked up from his work, a smile lighting up his face. He slid his headphones back. “Hey! What are you doing here?”

  “I just finished my article, and then I realized I really wanted to work with my friends,” Jenny said, smiling rather sheepishly. Now that she really thought about it, showing up at four o’clock was just plain weird. She put down the coffees. “Even that one.”

  Aidan followed her gaze to Lana, who had evidently finished her call and was now tapping a pen with fierce rhythm on her desk while looking murderously at her computer monitor. “You know, I think she took the office out of respect for us, not out of some feeling of superiority. I’ve been watching her, and she hasn’t stopped moving or talking all afternoon. If she were out here tapping that pen, I’d have had to physically restrain her by now.”

  “You might be right,” Jenny agreed. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.” She took the coffee over to Lana’s door and tapped gently. Lana’s head came up like a horse who heard a candy wrapper, and she hopped up from her desk chair, hustling to open the door for her.

  “Jenny! Aidan said you weren’t coming in. Coffee! You shouldn’t have! No I mean really, you shouldn’t have, I haven’t had anything else in my system today but caffeine—no, I want it, believe me I want it!” Lana snatched the coffee Jenny was holding playfully above the trash can and wrapped her lips around the straw. Jenny noticed she wasn’t wearing lipstick, an oddity. Lana was always perfectly made-up. “Mmm. Thank you, Jen. You’re a lifesaver. I’ll probably order up some food later, I’m thinking Thai? If you want to stick around late? What do you think? Feels like a drunken noodles kinda night. Or maybe green curry. I can never decide.” She drank the rest of the coffee down and tossed the empty cup in the trash can.

  Jenny eyed the discarded cup with concern. That had been twelve ounces of black cold brew coffee thrown back in less than a minute. That kind of caffeine ingestion would give anyone the shakes, let alone a size four who hadn’t eaten any solid food in eighteen hours.

  “Lana, is… is everything okay?”

  “It’s great! So many leads! So much going on! Look at these advertisers I have going live next week.” She picked up a sheet o
f paper and flourished it at Jenny, who skimmed the scribbled notes and nodded encouragingly. “I just have a lot to do getting all of these set up with the agency, and I’m still working on our Saratoga game-plan, and there’s a pile of analytics to go through already, and—” Lana paused and looked up at the ceiling tiles. “I don’t know what else. I have a list, so it’s fine.”

  “I think you might need an assistant.” Jenny had seen Lana lose it on big school assignments. The breakdown went a little bit like this: she stopped eating, then she stopped sleeping, then she stopped washing her hair, and then… well, by then she’d usually finished the assignment, gotten top marks, and celebrated with sushi and a weekend nap marathon. This assignment wasn’t going to end in a few days, though. She had to find a different way to deal with deadlines. “Are all of those things really top priorities? You just listed three things which could all easily be their own job.”

  “Well, that’s how start-ups work, Jen! You wear a lot of hats until you start making money! Then you can take them off one by one, hand them off to new people. Speaking of which—” Lana tapped her chin and then walked behind her desk again, leaning over her wide second monitor. “Can you start answering tweets in a more timely manner? Like, within fifteen minutes?”

  Jenny considered her blocks of time for writing. Her walks in the park. Reading on the subway. She didn’t like the idea of breaking her concentration four times an hour to answer tweets from strangers on the internet. “I check our notifications once an hour during the work-day, and again in the evening,” she said carefully. “I think that’s plenty for our volume of traffic right now.”

  “Yes, well that’s just it. I want our volume of traffic to double. Triple! And we’ll do that through interaction. Quick answers, better conversation! And I’d like you to create some keyword filters and then jump into conversations as they happen.”

  “Just start tweeting at random Twitter people?” Jenny knew how this would end. There’d be tears and they’d probably be hers, thanks to all the abuse hurled at their account. Did Lana not know how psycho people were on that platform? The key was to tiptoe around the crazies, not actively seek them out.

  “Yes! You can do it easy—just keep Twitter open on your screen all day and answer everything that comes in right away, okay? Start there. But think about the keywords. And auto-replies, with links to our site. Those are great, too. I watched a webinar on it.”

  When on earth did Lana have time to watch webinars on social media? And a better question: why? Social media wasn’t her job. It was Jenny’s job. She felt a familiar bubble of frustration. Lana was not great at staying in her lane. She was kind of a steamroller, actually, with the ability to effortlessly take a group project and turn it into the Lana Farnsworth Superstar Hour.

  This wasn’t school anymore, Jenny thought again. They had to do things differently now.

  “I don’t think so, Lana,” Jenny said with a deliberately casual shrug of the shoulders. “The website content is the most important piece right now. I’m going to build that up. If I overdo it with the engagement bit, we’ll end up with crap writing and crap social media.”

  Lana narrowed her eyes. “So you’re saying we’ll just have crap social media, is that it?”

  Jenny’s face grew hot. Whatever else happened between them, she was proud of her work, and she wasn’t about to have Lana put it down. “We have good social, Lana. But you have to have priorities. The articles are what count.”

  “So now you’re telling me what counts? Now you’re the managing editor?”

  “I’m telling you what I’m going to do with the department I have run since we came up with this site for our graduation project,” Jenny said firmly. “You’re the organizer, you find the money, you lead the direction of the site, you finalize publication. That’s your job. The actual content is my job. Let me do it.”

  Lana frowned at her, something she didn’t usually do for fear of wrinkles. Jenny left her to it. She turned on her heel and walked out of the office, pulling the door closed behind her as she went. All the way back to Aidan, she could feel Lana’s eyes on her back. It made her move even more carefully, more deliberately. She slowly picked up the remaining coffee cup and lifted the straw to her mouth.

  Aidan spoke out of the corner of his mouth, not daring to look at her. “That was impressive.”

  “That’s not everything,” Jenny whispered. “I’m going to make her buy us dinner, too. She’s been a little too big for her britches this week. She needs to remember we’re a team.”

  Behind her, she heard a trilling phone ring, and Lana’s professional voice, bright and chipper, answering. The window muffled her just enough to keep them from making out her words. “But she can keep the office,” Jenny decided. “I’m not going to listen to her on the phone all day.”

  Aidan slid his laptop back on the work table and reclined in his chair. “So what are you working on now?”

  Jenny sat down next to him and took out her own laptop. “I wrote the backside article for the week, so I just need to format and schedule it. But I don’t feel like doing that right now. I think I’d better find the next subject of my retirement column.”

  “A nice, safe lesson horse?”

  She sighed. “So pointless. Any blogger can profile a lesson horse. This isn’t a blog. It’s a professional website. We need to be better.”

  “There’s this,” Aidan said, typing quickly on his phone. He slid it across the table to her.

  “What?” She picked it up, and when she saw what was on the screen, her heart beat faster. “This is weird. Where did you find out about this?”

  “I was just messing around online,” Aidan said cagily. She raised her eyebrows at him. “Fine. I was looking for someplace you could ride in the city, and this came up.”

  Jenny’s heart fluttered unexpectedly. “Why would you be doing that?”

  Aidan shook his head at her. “Jenny, you were crying on the train this morning because you turned down riding for Caitlin.”

  “Oh.” That felt like a million years ago. How had today been so incredibly long? She looked back at the phone. Help your parks stay safe! Volunteer with the Parks Department Mounted Patrol. It was clearly the program the mounted police officer had told her about. “So, you think they have an off-track Thoroughbred? But so might the NYPD, right?”

  “Maybe, but since they’re taking volunteers, I thought it might be easier to get hold of someone. Plus, the parks department sounds warmer and squishier than the police department. It would be hard to make people mad talking about a park ranger’s horse.”

  “True.” She flicked through the site’s handful of pictures. They showed gleaming draft horses like the ones she’d seen in the park a few weeks ago, proudly stepping through the landmarks of Central Park. “Man, this would be crazy.I can’t believe they let volunteers do this.” Not that being a volunteer park ranger was even the story she was considering right now, but, still. The idea was insane.

  “Call them,” Aidan urged her. “Right now. I won’t even listen.” And he put his headphones back on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jenny sat hunched over on the 1 train, hurtling north beneath the Upper West Side. She felt like she’d be spending her entire day underground, rattling along in subway cars. At least she could get some reading in. She’d been devouring a massive history on the champion racehorse Battleship for the past two commutes, and today’s extra travel up to the Bronx pretty much guaranteed she’d be ready for a new book by tomorrow. She decided quite happily that she was going to have to get a Kings County Library card, and start wandering the stacks of that gorgeous edifice of the Brooklyn Public Library just a few blocks away from her apartment… before she ran out of spending money in the city’s delectable bookstores.

  When she’d phoned up the mounted unit’s volunteer number in the office the day before, she’d expected to get connected to the Central Park officers she’d seen riding through the park on that sunny d
ay a few weeks ago, when she’d been sitting alone up by the Sheep Meadow. They’d been so glamorous and gorgeous, so elegant and stern, all at once, mounted on those shining black Percherons. They almost seemed too cool for her, really. She’d curled up her toes in her shoes while she’d waited for someone to pick up, half-worrying one of them would pick, listen to her, then laugh and say a racehorse girl from the sticks wouldn’t be good enough for their cosmopolitan Central Park team.

  Instead, she’d found herself talking to an eccentric-sounding man with a British accent which seemed more suited to an off-Broadway comic musical than assigning volunteer riders to the task of patrolling New York City’s parks. He’d been lovely to speak with, kind and jolly if a little heavy on the puns, and when he realized she was looking for an off-track Thoroughbred to write a story about, he seemed to know just who she should talk to.

  “Sergeant Bevin Wilkes, that’s your one,” he announced cheerfully. “She has the Bronx command, y’see. In Van Cortlandt Park. One of her horses is a Thoroughbred. I’ve ridden him, he’s lovely.”

  In due course she got through to Sergeant Wilkes, whose brisk demeanor and thick New York accent was a little on the other extreme from what Jenny had been expecting. She was like a female version of the NYPD officer with the pony—at least, that was the impression she gave over the phone. Jenny was hoping, as she tried and failed to concentrate on the swaying letters of Battleship, that the sergeant was somehow also kind and outgoing and wasn’t going to make this day complicated for her. These did not seem like police officer qualities, but she was actually dealing with parks department patrol officers, as the British man had explained to her several times over. They were called peace officers. They didn’t carry guns, although they had the power to arrest. The whole set-up seemed to Jenny to be a kinder, gentler version of the police; an agency which spent more time directing tourists to bathrooms than chasing down bad guys.