Her mother always knew how to make her feel better, Jenny thought. “I’m better off without it. Right now, anyway. I’m reading a lot.”
“Great,” Andrea said, making her feelings about Jenny’s reading list all too clear. She’d always been of the opinion that if her daughter had read a little less, she’d have stayed at home where she belonged. “Anyway, your father says it’s a good sign, he’s getting his game face on and doesn’t want anyone messing with him. You should see how fit he is. I’m almost afraid he’s peaking too early.”
“You guys won’t let that happen,” Jenny assured her. “You know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing this a long time.”
“Yeah,” her mother agreed darkly. “A long time. And yet this is our first Breeders’ Cup horse.”
“Well, Mom, we aren’t millionaires. Breeding a big horse takes time.”
“Your parents sound fun,” Becca stage-whispered. “Let’s go to Florida and meet them.”
“Tell your friend we’ll be there in a month,” Andrea said. “No need to come to Florida.”
Jenny winced at the reminder. Why did the Breeders’ Cup have to be in New York this year? Couldn’t they have moved the damn thing back out to Del Mar? She imagined her parents safely out in California, far from her New York life, so far that she could plausibly say she couldn’t get that much time off work to join them, but she’d be rooting for Mister from home.
Instead, they would all come here, crowding into her life, demanding her time at the track, pushing her right back into the thick of the world which had spit her out just a few months ago.
“Good luck this weekend, Mom,” Jenny said weakly. “Give Mister a kiss for me.”
“Not on your life. He’d take off my nose.”
Jenny looked at the wall for a long moment after the call ended, willing her blood pressure to return to optimal levels.
“I found the picture of Mister biting Rico,” Becca declared, waving her phone in front of Jenny’s face.
“Jesus, Becca, did you listen to the entire conversation?”
“Your mother is kind of loud. And I have good hearing. Look at this pic!”
Jenny snatched the phone from Becca’s hand. Mister was leaning over his stall webbing, ears pinned wickedly, his teeth bared as he took hold of Rico’s upper arm. Rico, his back to the horse while he gestured about something to the reporter, had set himself up for disaster. “Oh, Rico. You totally deserved it.”
Becca laughed. “Jenny, I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
“I don’t have any enemies.” She handed back the phone, not before noting that her mother was right about Mister’s fitness: the horse’s face was drum-tight, the skin pulled over his cheek and nasal bones as if it had been stretched over a frame. When a horse was absolutely as fit as he was going to get, without an extra ounce of flesh on his frame, this was the look you were left with. This was the game-face Andrea had mentioned. “Mister looks amazing.”
Becca studied the photo. “This is the colt you bred?”
“Yeah.”
“And started?”
“Yeah.”
“And you just left him to live in New York?”
“Yeah.”
Becca sighed. “Are you sure you’re not in love with this Aidan guy? Because I would never, ever leave this horse’s side.”
Their subway line was disrupted by some unnamed emergency, police tape strewn across the stairs and tourists staring at the closed station disconsolately, so Becca started walking east towards a bus line. Jenny dawdled along Central Park South, considering her best options for a line back to Brooklyn, absently watching the carriage horses who were dozing or nosing through grain buckets along the sidewalk.
“Jenny! Girl, where have you been?”
She looked up, startled. “Janice. Oh my goodness.”
Janice hopped down from the box of her carriage. Cherry, who had been scrounging for oats along the gutter, looked back in surprise, blinking at them from behind his blinkers. He nickered, the sound coming from deep in his chest. “He wants a carrot,” Janice explained, handing one to Jenny. “Give him one or he’ll follow you home.”
Jenny snapped the carrot into small bites so that Cherry could easily chew them around the bit in his mouth. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch. I quit the website… things have been weird. I work here now, though. For the parks department. I’m surprised I haven’t seen you.”
“Well, don’t forget we were off for all of August,” Janice reminded her. “We’ve only been back in the city a couple of weeks. And working a lot of night shifts. Cherry loves the cool evenings. We do a lot of dates. You love romance, right boy?”
Cherry went back to licking up spilled oats.
“Anyway,” Janice went on, “I did mean to email you because I wanted to know what happened with Ames. That whole thing? Did he find the horse you were looking for?”
“I think he did,” Jenny said evasively. “I definitely saw him at the auction. He bought a lot of horses.”
“That’s what he does. He fixes them up, finds them new jobs. He’s a good guy.”
“We need more of those.”
“Yeah.” Their conversation trailed off. Both women looked at Cherry for a few moments. It was easy to lose yourself in the act of gazing at a horse, studying the angles of joints and the swirls of coat and the little twitches of muscle as flies alighted and were dispatched back into the air. Both of them were expert at it.
“So where would the horse be now?” Jenny asked carefully. She had no intentions now; the bay horse would be safe, she assumed, and there was no getting him to Lana, now that she and Lana were no longer speaking.
“Oh, here in New York,” Janice said. “The place in Queens where Cherry came from, actually. That’s where Ames brings all of his horses.”
“Where in Queens?”
“Way out in the east,” Janice said, waving her hand. “Hard to find.”
Jenny knew when she was being given the brush-off. Wherever the farm was, it wasn’t for her to know about.
“You might see it sometime,” Janice said. “If you’re working for the parks department. It’s on park land. But you don’t want to make a special trip. It’s not like what you’re used to.”
“I see.” She didn’t have to ask what Janice meant by that. The carriage driver knew she was from a big farm in Ocala. They’d covered that already, that day in the park, sitting behind Cherry. “There are horses in so many places around this city,” she said instead. “I’m always surprised by it.”
“You’re right,” Janice nodded. “And we all have to stick together, if we want to keep it that way. Remember that.”
A couple walked up, their faces full of that buoyant energy that followed a first kiss or an engagement, and Janice cast Jenny an apologetic wave before she turned to them and started her sales pitch. She was handing the woman a carrot to feed Cherry, pushing the woman’s fingers flat to show her how to present it to the horse, as Jenny waved and walked away, wondering just what the woman’s final words had meant.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The leaves were blowing through Madison Square Park, offsetting the passing traffic with their own harsh rattling, but Jenny wasn’t paying attention to the park’s haggard autumn looks. She was too busy trying to look nonchalant as Lana approached her table.
She was drinking a coffee and picking at a cardboard boat of lukewarm fries, the latter a concession to the Shake Shack servers, who were eyeing anyone trying to take up their restaurant’s outdoor seating without buying something. Just yesterday, when Lana had suggested Shake Shack and a chat in the park, the weather had still been warm, bright Indian summer; overnight, the temperatures had dropped and the sky had clouded over, making everything seem a hundred years older and more tired than it really was… Jenny included, she thought.
Lana looked tired, too. She was wearing a khaki trench coat over black trousers, and low-heeled black boots. A green scarf around
her neck was the only splash of color Jenny could see within the drab park. Outside the thinning hedges, even the yellow taxis were being replaced by more and more black cars.
“I took an Uber here,” Lana said, settling down across from her. The wooden chair squeaked in protest, and she frowned down at its outburst. “There were no trains at Fifty-ninth Street for a solid fifteen minutes. It keeps happening. I feel like the city is falling apart.”
“That’s why there are so many black cars now,” Jenny said. “There are more Ubers than taxis.”
“What?” Lana peered at her. “No, there aren’t. You’re imagining that.”
“You have to get a drink or something,” Jenny said, giving up the argument before it could get started. Lana had lived a town-car life before cheap rides were a thing. “Or they’ll chase us out of here.” She pushed the empty cardboard boat aside, to keep the grease and ketchup away from her jacket sleeves. “I did my part while I was waiting for you.”
“Let them try me,” Lana growled. “Are you sure you don’t want to just go across the street and find a Starbucks?”
“I’m fine here.” Jenny didn’t want to be inside a quiet, confined space with Lana. The other woman still possessed the more confident, more consuming personality of the two of them, even if Lana was looking a little bedraggled today. Maybe work was dragging her down, or maybe it was just the weather. Spending a blustery day out in the city, constantly fighting the elements, could do that to a person. “What did you want to talk about?”
Lana leaned back in her chair. It groaned again. “Jesus,” she muttered. “This place will give me a complex. I’ve been skipping the gym,” she added. “And haven’t been up to the farm in a month. Everything I own is tight. I never should have suggested Shake Shack, honestly. I guess I was just craving salt. Things have been stressful, Jenny. It’s been tough since you said that stuff, but it’s been even tougher since you left.”
Getting right to the point, Jenny thought. That was impressive. “I’m sorry I caused you stress,” she said. “I’m not sorry about the things I tweeted. I just wish it had made a difference.”
“Oh, it made a fucking difference.” Lana grimaced, then laughed. “Our site traffic is so far down now. It’s a nightmare. But we have some opportunities to get it back with the Breeders’ Cup in town. And some close personal connections with contenders.”
“Oh, no.” Jenny shook her head, realizing where the conversation would go next.
“Hear me out, Jen. You came all this way. Where do you work now, Central Park? We both could have stayed uptown, but we came down here. Let’s make it worth our time.”
It was actually Jenny’s day off, and she didn’t usually cross the river to Manhattan without a very good reason on her days off. But she had missed Lana and just sitting across from her felt good, like a return to normalcy, something she hadn’t realized she’d missed. She’d been so busy living life as a hermit, commuting and working and holing up in her little studio, she hadn’t even noticed that she had given up some of the things she loved most about New York: just enjoying the city’s sights and streets and flavors with her friends. Sitting here at a table outside one of the city’s most popular outdoor eateries, she could pretend that it was last autumn, when they were seniors working out their final project, the ambitious website that would become Full Stride.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“So, your backside reporting was the real deal. So were the retired racehorse stories. We’ve had a significant drop in traffic since they went away. And that means two things: first, that the business could use you. And second, that racing could really use you. You were telling those stories, Jen! The ones you wanted to tell. And they were reaching an audience.”
Jenny shook her head. “Those stories were a lie. I was trying to show that the backside was full of wonderful people who loved their horses, and instead I got a mob who hated me and cheerfully sent their horses to a backwoods livestock auction. I was fooling myself. I thought my family was real racing, but real racing is exactly the way the media has always portrayed it. Small-minded and money-grubbing. I didn’t accomplish anything by lying to the people reading my stories. Sure, five nice people like their horses. But the rest? They shouldn’t be allowed near animals. And I can’t pretend they don’t exist.”
Lana closed her eyes briefly towards the end of this speech, as if hoping the lord would grant her the patience or the inspiration she needed to bring Jenny back around to her way of thinking. “You had a bad experience. In your first few months. People were so used to being portrayed as villains, they didn’t trust you yet.”
“And now they never will.”
“What about the ones who have nothing to fear?”
“Who are they? I saw horses who belonged to trainers I’d known all my life. Going for meat prices. Who is innocent? How do I believe anyone, after that?”
“Jenny, there are good stories. You know there are. Your horse isn’t the only one. Go and write them. You’re going to be on the backside anyway. Use this for a comeback.”
“How do you know I’m going to be on the backside?”
“I know Mister is coming up for the Classic, and I know you’re not going to be sitting on a draft horse in Central Park when he’s running. You’re obviously going to be out there every free minute.”
Jenny did not acknowledge that she’d been saving up overtime to use as vacation days for the two weeks her parents would be spending in New York, so that she could work with them at Belmont. She was too busy processing the way Lana had framed her request. Lana hadn’t said that she wanted her back in her life. Or that Aidan wanted her back. Only that the website needed her connections on the backside. What happened to them, the three musketeers, who used to hop the train out to Aqueduct after morning classes?
“What’s Aidan doing these days?”
Lana looked frustrated. “This is still about Aidan?”
“It was never about Aidan.”
Lana shook her head. “It was probably always about Aidan, but you somehow made it about everything else.”
“Are we still friends?” Jenny asked suddenly.
Lana just stared at her, perplexed.
Jenny stood up, gathered her trash, pulled her bag over her arm. “I’m not interested in coming back,” she said. “Good luck.”
She walked across the park without looking back.
Maybe there were no trains at Fifty-ninth Street, but there were at Twenty-eighth. She went down the stairs and hopped onto a sparsely-populated R train, and rode it up to the Fifth Avenue stop at the southeast corner of the park, the stop she used for work. When she got out, though, she went briskly across Central Park South instead of walking into the park.
At Columbus Circle, she stopped and looked around, not sure what she had been hoping for. The subway was evidently still not running, because there was caution tape fluttering at the station entrance across the street from the park, and aggravated people marching up to the tape and stopping at the last moment, incredulous, unable to believe that Manhattan would not unflex for them and them alone. The people of the city were capable of great hubris, of believing they could will things into occurring for them just because they were them, because they were the gods of the city, the people who lived and survived and thrived here in a chaos which flattened lesser souls.
So Jenny looked around and willed her desire to come true.
But when she saw him, when she realized she had truly conjured him into existence with that city magic, she wished she hadn’t. Because she didn’t know what to say to him.
“Jenny,” Aidan said, shifting the camera bag hanging from his shoulder. “Where have you been?”
He was wearing skinny jeans and oxblood oxfords, the laces undone; a slouchy beige sweater and a thin black pea coat against the cold wind. She didn’t have to look down to know she was wearing almost the same thing, her sweater tighter than his and her oxfords a pale chestnut, but the ef
fect was there and it made her burst into giggles, nervous and high-pitched. Aidan looked astonished to hear such a sound come from her lips.
“Right here,” she said finally, getting control of herself again. The whimsy of bringing him here, of saying to the universe I want to see Aidan right now and the wish coming true, was still lacing her voice with laughter. “I’m always here, Aidan. I work at the park.”
His face changed. “That is you on the horse.”
She nodded. He’d seen her. She’d waited for him here, then hid from him here, relying on the anonymity lent by her uniform, but he’d still seen her.
“Lana said she was going to talk to you today,” he said suddenly. “Did she?”
“Yes. I just came from talking to her.”
“Well, what did you say? Are you coming back?”
Jenny shook her head, and Aidan’s lips turned down.
“I thought for sure… I told her… shit, Jenny, come back! I miss you.”
And Jenny realized that was why she had conjured up Aidan from the pavement, why she’d squandered her city magic on a boy who had failed to love her when she’d put herself directly into his path again and again. She just wanted to know that he missed her. She wanted, more than anything, more than she wanted him to swoop down and kiss her on the lips, for him to keep missing her. So that he knew what it was like, to love and love and love and not be able to do anything about it. Not because she wanted to hurt him, not because she hated him, not because she was over him—she definitely wasn’t over him!
She just wanted him to understand.
“I miss you, Aidan,” she said, smiling lightly. “Don’t be such a stranger.”
She touched his arm and moved to go, to walk past him, into the heaving mass of disgruntled commuters clogging the crosswalks around Columbus Circle. She thought she might go into Whole Foods Market, buy some expensive fair trade chocolate, savor the grainy bitterness on her tongue, before she went back to the warmth of her apartment.
He reached for her, put his hand on her shoulder. “Where are you going?”
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 28