The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  When he got back to the house, Annie was in the den, on the phone to her office. She was giving someone, one of the senior editors he guessed, the usual hard time. From what Robert could gather, as he tidied the kitchen, the poor soul had agreed to run a profile piece on some actor Annie despised.

  “A star?” she said, in disbelief. “A star? He’s the complete opposite of a star. The guy’s a goddamned black hole!”

  Robert might normally have smiled at this but the aggression in her voice was dispelling the seasonal glow he had come home with. He knew she found it frustrating trying to run a chic metropolitan magazine from an upstate farmhouse. But it was more than that. Since the accident, Annie had seemed possessed by an anger so intense it was almost frightening.

  “What! You agreed to pay him that?” she howled. “You must be out of your mind! Is he going to do it nude or something?”

  Robert put the coffee on and laid the table for breakfast. The muffins were the ones Annie liked best.

  “I’m sorry John, I’m not going with it. You’ll have to call and cancel. . . . I don’t care. . .. Yes, you can fax it to me. Okay.”

  He heard her hang up. No good-bye, but then there rarely was with Annie. Her footsteps as she came through the hall sounded more resigned than angry. He looked up and smiled at her as she came into the kitchen.

  “Hungry?”

  “No. I had some cereal.”

  He tried not to look disappointed. She saw the muffins on the table.

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem. All the more for me. Like some coffee?”

  Annie nodded and sat down at the table. She looked, with no apparent interest, through the newspaper he’d bought. It was a while before either of them spoke.

  “Get the tree?” she asked.

  “You bet. Not as good as last year’s, but it’s pretty.”

  There was another silence. He poured coffee for them both and sat down at the table. The muffins tasted good. It was so quiet he could hear himself chewing. Annie sighed.

  “Well, I suppose we ought to get it done tonight,” she said. She took a sip of coffee.

  “What?”

  “The tree. Decorate it.”

  Robert frowned. “Without Grace? Why? She’d hate it if we did it without her.”

  Annie put her coffee down with a clatter.

  “Don’t be stupid. How the hell is she going to decorate the tree on one leg?”

  She stood up, making her chair grate on the floor, and went to the door. Shocked, Robert stared at her for a moment.

  “I think she could manage it,” he said steadily.

  “Of course she couldn’t. What’s she going to do, hop around? Christ, she can hardly manage to stand up with those crutches.”

  Robert winced. “Annie, come on. . ..”

  “No, you come on,” she said and she started to go then turned back to him. “You want it all to be the same, but it can’t be the same. Just try and realize that will you?”

  She stood for a moment, framed by the blue surround of the doorway. Then she said she had work to do and was gone. And with a dull turning, deep in his chest, Robert knew she was right. Things would never be the same.

  It was clever the way they handled her finding out about the leg, Grace thought. Because looking back on it, she couldn’t actually pinpoint the moment that she knew. She supposed they had it down to a fine art, these things, and knew exactly how much dope to pump into you so you didn’t freak out. She was aware something had happened down there even before she could move or speak again. There was this strange feeling and she noticed how the nurses seemed busier there than anywhere else. And it just seemed to slip into her consciousness like many other facts as they hauled her out of that tunnel of glue.

  “Going home?”

  She looked up. Leaning in at the door was the woman who came each day to see what you wanted to eat. She was vast and friendly, with a booming laugh capable of passing through bricks and mortar. Grace smiled and nodded.

  “Alright for some,” the woman said. “Means you don’t get to eat my Christmas dinner, mind.”

  “You can save me some. I’m coming back the day after tomorrow.” Her voice sounded croaky. She still had a Band-Aid over the hole they had made in her neck for the respirator tube. The woman winked.

  “Honey, I’ll do just that.”

  She went and Grace looked at her watch. It was still twenty minutes till her parents were due and she was sitting on her bed, dressed and ready to go. They had moved her into this room a week after she’d come out of the coma, freeing her at last from the respirator so she could speak rather than just mouth. The room was small, with a terrific view of the parking lot and painted that depressing shade of pale green they must make specially for hospitals. But at least there was a TV and with every surface cluttered with flowers, cards and presents, it was cheerful enough.

  She looked down at her leg where the nurse had neatly pinned up the bottom half of her gray sweatpants. She’d once heard someone say that if you had an arm or a leg cut off, you could still feel it. And it was absolutely true. At night it itched so badly it drove her crazy. It itched right now. The weird thing was that even so, even as she looked at it, the funny half-leg they’d left her with didn’t seem to belong to her at all. It was someone else’s.

  Her crutches were propped against the wall by a bedside table and peeping around them was the photograph of Pilgrim. It was one of the first things she’d seen when she came out of the coma. Her father had seen her looking at it and told her the horse was okay and that made her feel better.

  Judith was dead. And Gully. They’d told her that too. And it was just like it was with the leg, the news wouldn’t quite sink in. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe it—why after all would they lie? She had cried when her father broke it to her but, perhaps again because of the drugs she was on, it hadn’t felt like real crying. It was almost like watching herself cry. And since then, whenever she’d thought about it (and it was amazing to her how she managed not to), the fact of Judith’s death seemed somehow to be suspended in her head, protectively encased so that she couldn’t inspect it too closely.

  A police officer had come to see her last week and had asked her questions and taken notes about what had happened. The poor guy had looked so nervous and Robert and Annie had hovered anxiously in case she got upset. They needn’t have worried. She told him she could only remember things up to the point when they slid down the bank. It wasn’t true. She knew that if she wanted to, she could remember much, much more. But she didn’t want to.

  Robert had already explained that she would have to make some other statement later, a deposition or something, for the insurance people, but only when she was better. Whatever that meant.

  Grace was still staring at the picture of Pilgrim. She had already decided what she was going to do. She knew they’d try and get her to ride him again. But she wasn’t going to, ever. She would tell her parents to give him back to the people in Kentucky. She couldn’t bear the idea of selling him locally where she might come across him one day being ridden by someone else. She would go and see him one more time, to say good-bye. But that was all.

  Pilgrim came home for Christmas too, a week earlier than Grace, and no one at Cornell was sad to see the back of him. He left tokens of his appreciation with several of the students. One now had her arm in plaster and half a dozen others had cuts and bruises. Dorothy Chen, who had devised a kind of matador technique to give him his daily shots, was rewarded by a perfect set of teeth marks on her shoulder.

  “I can only see them in the bathroom mirror,” she told Harry Logan. “They’ve gone through every shade of purple you can imagine.”

  Logan could imagine. Dorothy Chen, examining her naked shoulder in her bathroom mirror. Oh boy.

  Joan Dyer and Liz Hammond came with him to pick the horse up. He and Liz had always got on well, despite having rival practices. She was a big, hearty woman of about his age and Logan was glad t
o have her along because he always found Joan Dyer, on her own, a little heavy going.

  Joan, he guessed, was in her mid-fifties and had that sort of stern, weathered face that always made you feel you were being judged. It was she who drove, apparently content to listen while Logan and Liz chatted about business. When they got to Cornell, she backed the trailer expertly right up to Pilgrim’s stall. Dorothy got a shot of sedatives into him, but it still took them an hour to get him loaded in.

  These past weeks Liz had been helpful and generous. When she got back from her conference she’d come over to Cornell, at the Macleans’ request. It was obvious they wanted her to take over from him—a sacrifice Logan would have been all too happy to make. But Liz reported back that Logan had done a great job and should be left to it. The compromise was that she was to keep a kind of watching brief. Logan didn’t feel threatened. It was a relief to share notes about a difficult case like this.

  Joan Dyer, who hadn’t seen Pilgrim since the accident, was shocked. The scars on his face and chest were bad enough. But this savage, demented hostility was something she’d never before seen in a horse. All the way back, for four long hours, they could hear him crashing his hooves against the sides of his box. They could feel the whole trailer shake. Joan looked worried.

  “Where am I going to put him?”

  “What do you mean?” said Liz.

  “Well, I can’t put him back in the barn like this. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  When they got back to the stables, they kept him in the trailer while Joan and her two sons cleared one of a row of small stalls behind the barn that hadn’t been used in years. The boys, Eric and Tim, were in their late teens and helped their mother run the place. Both, Logan noted as he watched them work, had inherited her long face and economy with words. When the stall was ready, Eric, the older and more sullen of the two, backed the trailer up to it. But the horse wouldn’t come out.

  In the end Joan sent the boys in through the front door of the trailer with sticks and Logan watched them whacking the horse and saw him rear up against them, as terrified as they were. It didn’t seem right and Logan was worried about that chest wound bursting open, but he couldn’t come up with a better idea and at last the horse backed off down into the stall and they slammed the door on him.

  As he was driving home that night to his wife and children, Harry Logan felt depressed. He remembered the hunter, that little guy in the fur hat, grinning down at him from the railroad bridge. The little creep was right, he thought. The horse should have been put down.

  Christmas at the Macleans’ started badly and got worse. They drove home from the hospital with Grace carefully bolstered across the backseat of Robert’s car. They hadn’t got halfway when she asked about the tree.

  “Can we decorate it soon as we get back?”

  Annie looked straight ahead and left it to Robert to say they’d already done it, though not how it was done, in a joyless silence late the night before with the air between them bristling.

  “Baby, I thought you wouldn’t feel up to it,” he said. Annie knew she should feel touched or grateful for this selfless shouldering of blame and it bothered her that she didn’t. She waited, almost irritated, for Robert to leaven things with the inevitable joke.

  “And hey young lady,” he went on. “You’re going to have enough work to do when we get home. There’s firewood to cut, all the cleaning, food to prepare . . .”

  Grace dutifully laughed and Annie ignored Robert’s sidelong look in the silence that followed.

  Once home, they managed to summon some little cheer. Grace said the tree in the hall looked lovely. She spent some time alone in her room, playing Nirvana loudly to reassure them she was alright. She was good on the crutches and could even handle the stairs, falling only once when she tried to bring down a bag of little presents she’d had the nurses go out and buy for her to give her parents.

  “I’m okay,” she said when Robert ran to her. She had banged her head sharply on the wall and Annie, emerging from the kitchen, could see she was in pain.

  “Are you sure?” Robert tried to offer help but she accepted as little as she could.

  “Yes. Dad, really I’m fine.”

  Annie saw Robert’s eyes fill as Grace went over and put the presents under the tree and the sight made her so angry she had to turn and go quickly back into the kitchen.

  They always gave each other Christmas stockings. Annie and Robert did Grace’s together and then one for each other. In the morning, Grace would bring hers into their room and sit on the bed and they would take turns unwrapping presents, making jokes about how clever Santa Claus had been or how he’d forgotten to remove a price tag. Now, as with the tree, the ritual seemed to Annie almost unbearable.

  Grace went to bed early and when they were sure she was asleep, Robert tiptoed to her room with the stocking. Annie undressed and listened to the hall clock ticking away the silence. She was in the bathroom when Robert came back and she heard a rustling and knew he was pushing her stocking under her side of the bed. She had just done the same with his. What a farce it was.

  He came in as she was brushing her teeth. He was wearing his striped English pajamas and smiled at her in the mirror. Annie spat out and rinsed her mouth.

  “You’ve got to stop this crying,” she said without looking at him.

  “What?”

  “I saw you, when she fell. You’ve got to stop feeling sorry for her. Pity won’t help her at all.”

  He stood looking at her and as she turned to go back into the bedroom their eyes met. He was frowning at her, shaking his head.

  “You’re unbelievable, Annie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s happening to you?”

  She didn’t reply, just walked past him back into the bedroom. She got into bed and switched off her light and after he’d finished in the bathroom he did the same. They lay with their backs to each other and Annie stared at the sharp quadrant of yellow light that jutted in from the landing onto the bedroom floor. It wasn’t anger that had stopped her answering him, she simply had no idea what the answer was. How could she have said such a thing to him? Perhaps his tears enraged her because she was jealous of them. She hadn’t wept once since the accident.

  She turned and slipped her arms guiltily around him, putting her body to his back.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured and kissed the side of his neck. For a moment Robert didn’t move. Then slowly he rolled onto his back and put an arm around her and she nestled in with her head on his chest. She felt him give a deep sigh and for a long time they lay still. Then she slid her hand slowly down his belly and gently took hold of him and felt him stir. Then she rose up and knelt above him, pulling her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to the floor. And he reached up, as he always did, and put his hands on her breasts as she worked herself on him. He was hard now and she guided him into her and felt him shudder. Neither of them uttered a sound. And she looked down through the darkness at this good man who had known her for so long and saw in his eyes, unobscured by desire, an awful, irretrievable sadness.

  The weather turned colder on Christmas Day. Metallic clouds whipped over the woods like a film in fast-forward and the wind shifted to the north and brought arctic air spiraling down the valley. Inside, they listened to it howling in the chimney as they sat playing Scrabble by the big log fire.

  That morning, opening presents around the tree, they had all tried hard. Never in her life, not even when very young, had Grace had so many presents. Almost everyone they knew had sent her something and Annie had realized, too late, that they should have kept some back. Grace, she could see, sensed charity and left many gifts unopened.

  Annie and Robert hadn’t known what to buy her. In recent years it had always been something to do with riding. Now everything they could think of carried an implication simply through not being to do with riding. In the end Robert had bought her a tank of tropical fish. They knew she wanted one but Annie feare
d even this had a message tagged to it: sit and watch, it seemed to say. This now is all you can do.

  Robert had rigged it all up in the little back parlor and put Christmas wrapping paper on it. They led Grace to it and watched her face light up as she undid it.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “That is just fabulous.”

  In the evening, when Annie finished tidying away the supper things, she found Grace and Robert in front of it, lying on the sofa in the dark. The tank was illuminated and bubbling and the two of them had been watching it and fallen asleep in each other’s arms. The swaying plants and the gliding shadows of the fish made ghostly patterns on their faces.

  At breakfast the next morning, Grace looked very pale. Robert put his hand on hers.

  “Are you okay, baby?”

  She nodded. Annie came back to the table with a jug of orange juice and Robert took his hand away. Annie could see Grace had something difficult to say.

  “I’ve been thinking about Pilgrim,” she said in a level voice. It was the first time the horse had been mentioned. Annie and Robert sat very still. Annie felt ashamed neither of them had been to see him since the accident or at least since he had come back to Mrs. Dyer’s.

  “Uh-huh,” said Robert. “And?”

  “And I think we should send him back to Kentucky.”

  There was a pause.

  “Gracie,” Robert began. “We don’t need to make decisions right now. It may be that—” Grace cut him off.

  “I know what you’re going to say, that people who’ve had injuries like mine do ride again, but I don’t—” She broke off for a moment, composing herself. “I don’t want to. Please.”

  Annie looked at Robert and she could tell he felt her eyes on him, daring him to show even a hint of tears.

  “I don’t know if they’ll take him back,” Grace went on. “But I don’t want anyone around here to have him.”

  Robert nodded slowly, showing he understood even if he didn’t yet agree. Grace latched on to this.