She shrugged. “Errands. An appointment. I don’t want to be late.”
His fingers lingered. “I don’t want you to be late.”
“I won’t be.” She stepped away. “Talk soon.”
“Okay, Jenny,” he called after her. “Let’s talk soon.”
That afternoon a heavy, cold rain began to fall, pounding on the sidewalks and the piles of drab leaves coating the pavements on the side streets. Jenny put her nose against a front window and watched the umbrellas go up; a trickle on her street and a whole flood out on the avenue. The sky was heavy and charcoal-colored, and she turned back to the warm light of her apartment. She had bought tiny little lamps to scatter around, some in an empty corner, one on a bookshelf, one on the dresser where she balanced the TV, one on the little table next to her sofa, and tossed golden and red shawls over a few of them. The shawls glowed like little suns, like little braziers, and made the whole room feel comforting and safe and snug. Now she snuggled beneath a fleece throw on the sofa and picked up a book; she was still committed to her social media diet. Edith Wharton, she had found during her college years, was the perfect rainy-day-in-New-York read. She’d decided to leaf through The Age of Innocence again.
But it wasn’t long before she realized her mistake. Romantic manners aside, yearning love stories were simply not what she needed right now. She reached for her bookshelf and pulled out an old favorite instead, a paperback she’d found at a thrift store and brought home for a quarter. The Black Stallion’s Courage. Her first introduction to New York racing, the charms of Belmont Park, and the challenges of backside life. That evening, she read the book cover to cover, and then settled in for bed in the streetlamp-lit darkness of her studio.
She looked at the shadows on the walls, and thought about her parents’ imminent arrival: the next big exciting thing in her life; the last big exciting thing in her life. At least, that she had planned.
There would be the thrill of having Mister back in her life for a few days; there would be the excitement of the racing festival, the press and nonstop nerves of race-day itself, the excruciating waiting during those minutes he was actually out on the track, and, hopefully, the incandescent joy of having a winner. Enough emotions in one day, she thought ruefully, to last a person an entire year.
And maybe, that would be enough.
They’d have their fun with Mister, and then her parents would take their big horse back to Florida, and she’d be left alone with her quiet patrols and her quiet apartment.
That was the right choice, wasn’t it? No more big stories, no more breaking news, no more columns. No more changing the world… that was all just a little too public.
No, she’d put on her uniform and her indifferent face and go out amongst the strangers camouflaged in municipal green. This would be her winter of hibernation. She’d earned it, hadn’t she? She’d put up with enough drama for a lifetime. She could take a few months off to recuperate.
And maybe, during the long cold winter, Aidan would realize how much he missed her.
Chapter Thirty
“Well, of course we want to see your apartment,” Andrea Wolfe said, her eyes shooting daggers at her husband. “Your father is just being difficult.”
This was the reason Jenny’s mother had been giving for little disagreements with Jenny’s father for as long as Jenny could remember, and the familiar words made her simultaneously smile and cringe—on the inside. On the outside, she was being a dutiful daughter who did what she was told. She’d been at Belmont since noon, when the truck hauling Mister had pulled in and her big gray colt had spilled out, dragging his groom and whinnying like he’d been marooned in the desert for six weeks and hadn’t seen grain or hay or carrot in all of that time. She’d stepped up and moved to pacify him with one of the cookies in her pocket, but Mister had changed in the past six months of hard training and harder racing. He was aloof, looking over her head, watching for his next engagement. Mister had gone from silly colt to his own, imperious self.
The change shifted something inside of Jenny, made her realize that things were not ever going to be as she left them. Her horse was not the baby she had bred and trained, and her life was not on the path she had planned, and her parents, and Lana, and Aidan, and everyone else who had ever meant anything to her, were all going to continue changing and spiraling off in their own directions, and there was nothing she could do about it.
But the racetrack backside is no place for an existential crisis, and so she had pulled herself together, helped get Mister and their equipment over to the stable where he’d been assigned a stall, and sat guard outside his box for a few hours while her parents went off to deal with some bureaucracy up in the offices which were burrowed into the grandstand.
The October day was chilly, with bright blue skies occasionally punctuated by an A380 sinking slowly towards JFK, its double-decker rows of windows flashing golden in the sunlight. The big jets paraded over the racetrack most evenings, filled with, Jenny imagined, high-rollers and high-lifers, jetting across the oceans for the simple reason that they could. In the space of time it took a person to get on the train and bus to Belmont, bet on a few races, eat a hot dog, and get back to the city, a possibly wiser person could get on a plane and fly to London. Jenny had never been to London, never been out of the country. So she tilted back on her folding chair and watched the jets through the stable door, and wondered what on earth she was going to do next. If Aidan didn’t come back into her life. If the dark, cold winter spent shuttling between her tiny apartment and the windy paths of Central Park proved too taxing. If she really had lost the thread of her New York life when she’d lost the friends she’d built it all with.
Mister circled his stall, his hooves threshing the deep straw, and pushed his neck out over his stall webbing, whinnying piercingly and waiting, ears pricked and head high, for the response. A few other horses down the shed-row replied, but they weren’t who he was looking for. He turned another circle. Jenny wondered who he had been stabled with in Florida, who he had left behind, how long it would take for him to forget they’d ever been friends, ever met at all.
“We’ll go see the apartment, Joe, and be back to the hotel in plenty of time,” Andrea was scolding. Jenny could hear them before they even came back into the shed-row. Mister took a bite of hay from his hay-net, then another, and seemed to be pacified by the textures of alfalfa and timothy on his tongue. He settled into a rhythmic chewing, relaxing his tense neck muscles at last. Jenny got up and stretched, finding her own muscles had tensed into tight knots while she’d been sitting in the cold metal chair.
“We can leave the car near the train station,” she said, noticing the rental car keys dangling in her mother’s hand.
“I’m not taking a car to a train and then a train back to a car. We’ll drive to your place.”
Jenny could think of no worse idea. “I don’t even know how to get there.”
“You don’t know how to get to Brooklyn? We’re ten feet from the New York City line.”
“Well… no. I’ve never had any reason to know how to get there. I know how to take a train there.”
Andrea sighed and looked at Joseph for support. Her father just shrugged. “When in Rome, Andrea. This is Jenny’s city now. Let’s see her version of it.”
They had never come to New York for anything except racing and a few key moments of Jenny’s college years. They understood a few simple premises of coming to New York: aging Italian restaurants in Nassau County, the low-rise sprawl of the suburbs around Belmont, the graceful marble arch of Washington Square on a late spring afternoon, a taxi ride from JFK to a Holiday Inn Express in Chelsea, a dark bar in Greenwich Village. Jenny didn’t think they’d ever even been to Central Park. They were not city people. They were country people who came here because racing, or their confusing daughter, compelled them to.
“Maybe we should just take an Uber to the train station,” Jenny said, realizing that she didn’t know how to drive t
here, either. Or if there was any parking nearby.
“Fine,” Joseph said, giving his wife a level glance that passed for a hard look between them. “Go ahead and get us an Uber.”
The restaurant Jenny chose for their family dinner was warmly lit, with tea lights in small glass votives on the wooden tables, and fairy lights strung around the exposed pipes and beams of the ceiling. The little bistro was a few blocks away from her apartment, on the Prospect Heights side of the street. Her parents were accustomed to heavy-handed portions at red-sauce joints on their occasional visits to New York, but the promise of comfort food and quiet music felt very necessary to Jenny after the claustrophobic afternoon of hosting her parents in her little apartment. Their server, reading the situation with one expert look, brought them house red, poured with a generously tip of the carafe, and cast Jenny a sympathetic expression beneath his lifted eyebrows to let her know there was plenty more where that came from.
Hosting your parents and trying to explain your life to them was becoming a universal Brooklyn experience, Jenny thought wearily.
Across the table, Andrea and Joseph exchanged their own looks. They’d been giving each other meaningful glances ever since they’d gotten off the train at Atlantic Terminal and walked through the rain-slicked streets to Jenny’s apartment, climbed the cramped stairwell, and stood in astonished silence on the threshold. Jenny had run around flicking on her little lamps and showing off the studio, but from her parents’ shocked expressions, she knew they didn’t see a cozy little home. They saw a small, shabby room crammed with cheap furniture and shawl-draped lamps that were probably all fire hazards. Now, she steeled herself for the lecture: what was she doing here, living like this, and when was she coming home?
“Jenny,” her father began, his voice slow and gentle, “your mother and I are wondering when you plan on getting another job.”
Jenny cocked her head, confused. This wasn’t the attack she had been bracing for. “I have a job. You know I do. I work for the city.”
He gave her a soothing smile. “Of course you do, but didn’t you tell us it was temporary? And you would have to go through a police academy to be considered for a permanent position? That doesn’t sound like you. You came here to be a writer.”
“You can be a writer anywhere,” Andrea interjected, as always too impatient to wait for Joseph’s slow sweet talking to sway her daughter. How many bad decisions had Jenny made because her mother had rushed to push her in the opposite direction? “You can write about racing at home, if you want. You don’t have to sit up here and try to make something out of nothing. How much is all of this costing you?”
How much is all of this costing you? Jenny wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry? The math did not exist.
“It’s fine for now,” she said instead. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Right now I just want to do what I’m doing. I’m riding horses, I’m helping people, I’m reading a lot.”
The server brought them hot, crunchy bread and a bottle of olive oil. Jenny had never been so happy to see bread in her life, and that was saying something.
But her father wasn’t finished. For once, the quiet one in the family had something to say. “I think you’ve hidden quite enough,” he said. “The things you saw in Saratoga… you were right to out them, although you didn’t go about it the right way. There are channels, there are ways to bring people to justice. What you did made some people mad for about ten minutes, and then they found something else to be mad about and they all moved on. But it also opened a few investigations. You lost your press pass because you pushed Brice Lawson. But you also lost him his racing license in New York, along with a few other fellows. And that means you have no one to be afraid of, Jenny. You could be the one calling the shots. You could be the one with the upper hand out there.” He paused, looked around the little restaurant, with its young clientele and twinkling lights. “You can still do what you came here to do. You can do it better than you even realized. I mean, you found an entire community of horsemen here. Think who you know, now. Racing people, the carriage drivers, the park horses you ride now. How many people barely know there’s a single horse in New York City? Think of who you know and how you can share their stories with the world. It’s amazing, really.”
Of all the things her father could have said to her tonight, this was the most shocking. She had expected more cajoling, more mewling that she was needed back at the farm, or in Miami, or even at Tampa. She had expected to be told she was wasting her life and her money. And in a way, she had just been told that… and with words which were very hard to argue with, at that. Jenny took a healthy sip of her wine to buy herself some time.
Andrea sighed, as if she had expected Jenny’s silence and was not impressed, and began tearing into the bread. “She’s going to do whatever she wants, Joseph. She always has.”
This was singularly unfair, as Jenny had always done what her parents, and very specifically her mother, had wanted her to do… up until she chose to go to college in New York. Jenny opened her mouth to argue, then thought better of it and put more wine in her mouth instead. When had she ever won a fight with her mother? When had anyone?
“I think I just need to work through this for a little while longer,” she said finally. “I just don’t want to be in people’s faces for a while. I don’t want to break big stories, or write columns, or try to change the world. I just want some quiet.”
Her mother shrugged and nodded, indicating that this made perfect sense to her.
Joseph looked concerned. “That sounds like giving up,” he said.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Jenny considered her words. “Maybe it is. Maybe sometimes that’s the right thing to do.”
“I don’t see how,” her father said.
“Eat some bread,” Andrea told him, pushing the basket towards him. “Let your daughter be. She’s got some thinking to do.”
Jenny wondered how a person could think all of the time and still feel no closer to an answer.
Chapter Thirty-One
Breeders’ Cup day: cold, flurries dancing on icy winds, nervous horses and annoyed connections, half-empty grandstands and muttering about how much better this festival was when they held it in Southern California. “Never snows at Del Mar, that’s all I’m saying,” a prominent trainer was proclaiming into a microphone, surrounded by chortling journalists and photographers.
Six stalls down, Jenny flicked hay from Mister’s thick forelock and pulled his blanket a little higher on his neck. The Florida-bred horse had experienced chilly winters, but nothing like the bone-chilling cold of an icy day at Belmont, with that damp North Atlantic gale blowing in off the nearby waters. She was concerned about how keyed-up the cold would have him when they walked over to the paddock late this afternoon. Just a few days ago, the temperature had been mild and training had been business as usual. The sudden weather change had every horse on the grounds looking for every gremlin, bug-bear and spook they could find, and the siren had been going off nonstop all morning as horses spilled their riders and went for solo galloping sessions.
Andrea came down the shed-row, already changed for the walk over to the paddock, wearing black trousers and a long, dark red coat. Her hair was tucked under a wool hat. “It’s hard to look fashionable for the photographers when the air smells like snow,” she complained.
“The one thing I like about winter,” Jenny countered, “is that all you need is one great coat and you can look fantastic for an entire season. That’s a great coat. I think you’ll be just fine.”
“Thank you,” her mother said, a little surprised at the compliment. “I like yours, too.”
Jenny glanced down. Her own ensemble was pretty tame: black pants, tweed coat, white turtleneck peeking over the collar. She was wearing the new black paddock boots, insulated for winter, that she’d bought for work. They were surprisingly effective at pulling double duty as a fashion statement. Luckily, the classic equestrian look never went out of style in Ne
w York. You could go anywhere with paddock boots and a tweed blazer.
“Are you going to want me to walk Mister with Dad?” There would be two people on either side of the colt for his walk over to the paddock, the better to quell youthful, nervous energy that would be bubbling over at the sight of all the humanity buzzing along the rails.
“I think Marco will do it, if you don’t mind. You walk with me off to the side, and let the men get dragged around. You don’t know how monstrous that colt has gotten.”
Jenny nodded as if nothing had changed, but inside, her thoughts were spinning and she felt a rush of blood pressing up, up, pushing at her cheeks and forehead and the top of her skull. She put her head down, both to hide her red blush and to try to dispel the dizziness. Why was Marco here? When had he arrived? She had been out here every morning all week, helping out, smiling politely at the other racetrackers, earning back her place in their world just in case, just in case, she wanted it again someday. The response from her old friends and sources had been enthusiastic. The greetings from the old guard were more tepid. But, still: everyone had been kind. Everyone knew what she was capable of. Everyone knew why she had done it. Everyone suspected she’d do it again, if she had to.
But Marco had never figured into it. She’d left him in Ocala without saying goodbye, dragging her suitcase to the car, letting her father drop her at the airport on his way back to Miami. For all Marco had known before that day, she was going to Miami, too. For all Marco had known, she’d be back again after the Breeders’ Cup. She had no doubt he had planned on waiting for her. Now she had to worry that behind every closed door, Marco would be lurking, ready to trot out his dazzling smile and long-lashed dark eyes, ready to charm the disillusioned Jenny back into his arms now that she was coming home for good.
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