The Horse Whisperer Read online

  Robert had always imagined caesareans were peaceful affairs. No panting, shoving and screaming, just a simple cut along a plotted line and the baby lifted effortlessly out. Nothing then had prepared him for the wrestling match that followed. It was already under way when they let him in and stood him wide-eyed in a corner. Annie was under general anesthetic and he watched these men, these total strangers, delving inside her, up to their elbows in gore, hauling it out and sloshing it in dollops into a corner. Then stretching the hole with metal clamps and grunting and heaving and twisting until one of them, the war hero, had it in his hands and the others suddenly went still and watched him lift this little thing, marbled white with womb grease, out of Annie’s gaping belly.

  He fancied himself as a comic too, this man, and said casually over his shoulder to Robert: “Better luck next time. It’s a girl.” Robert could have killed him. But after they had quickly wiped her clean and checked that she had the right number of fingers and toes, they handed her to him, wrapped in a white blanket and he forgot his anger and held her in his arms. Then he laid her on Annie’s pillow so that when she woke up Grace was the first thing she saw.

  Better luck next time. There had never been a next time. Both of them had wanted another child but Annie had miscarried four times, the last time dangerously, well into the pregnancy. They were told it was unwise to go on trying but they didn’t need telling. For with each loss the pain multiplied exponentially and in the end neither felt able to face it again. After the last one, four years ago, Annie said she wanted to be sterilized. He could tell it was because she wanted to punish herself and he had begged her not to. In the end, reluctantly, she’d relented and had a coil fitted instead, making a grim joke that with luck it might have the same effect anyway.

  It was at precisely this time that Annie was offered and, to Robert’s amazement, accepted her first editorship. Then, as he watched her channel her anger and disappointment into her new role, he realized she’d taken it either to distract or, again, to punish herself. Perhaps both. But he wasn’t in the least surprised when she made such a brilliant success of it that almost every major magazine in the country started trying to poach her.

  Their joint failure to produce another child was a sorrow he and Annie never now discussed. But it had seeped silently into every crevice of their relationship.

  It had been there, unspoken, this afternoon when Annie arrived at the hospital and he had so stupidly broken down and wept. He knew Annie felt he blamed her for being unable to give him another child. Maybe she had reacted so harshly to his tears because somehow she could see in them a trace of that blame. Maybe she was right. For this fragile child, lying here maimed by a surgeon’s knife, was all they had. How rash, how mean of Annie to have spawried but one. Did he really think that? Surely not. But how then could he speak the thought so freely to himself?

  Robert had always felt that he loved his wife more than she would ever love him. That she did love him he had no doubt. Their marriage, compared with many he had observed, was good. Both mentally and physically they still seemed able to give each other pleasure. But barely a day had gone by in all these years when Robert hadn’t counted himself lucky to have held on to her. Why someone so vibrant should want to be with a man like him, he never ceased to wonder.

  Not that Robert underestimated himself. Objectively (and objectivity he considered, objectively, to be one of his strengths) he was one of the most gifted lawyers he knew. He was also a good father, a good friend to those few close friends he had and, despite all those lawyer gags you heard nowadays, he was a genuinely moral man. But though he would never have thought himself dull, he knew he lacked Annie’s sparkle. No, not her sparkle, her spark. Which is what had always excited him about her, from that very first night in Africa when he opened his door and saw her standing there with her bags.

  He was six years older than she was but it had often felt much more. And what with all the glamorous, powerful people she met, Robert thought it nothing less than a minor miracle that she should be content with him. More than that, he was sure—or as sure as a thinking man could be about such matters—that she had never been unfaithful to him.

  Since the spring however, when Annie had taken on this new job, things had become strained. The office bloodletting had made her irritable and more than usually critical. Grace too, and even Elsa, had noticed the change and watched themselves when Annie was around. Elsa looked relieved nowadays when it was he rather than Annie who got home first from the office. She would quickly hand over messages, show him what she had cooked for dinner and then hurry off before Annie arrived.

  Robert now felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see his wife standing beside him, as though summoned by his thoughts. There were dark rings under her eyes. He took her hand and pressed it to his cheek.

  “Did you sleep?” he asked.

  “Like a baby. You were going to wake me.”

  “I fell asleep too.”

  She smiled and looked down at Grace. “No change.”

  He shook his head. They had spoken softly as if for fear of waking the girl. For a while they both watched her, Annie’s hand still on his shoulder, the whoosh of the respirator measuring the silence between them all. Then Annie shivered and took her hand away. She wrapped her woolen jacket tightly around her, folding her arms.

  “I thought I’d go home and get some of her things,” she said. “You know, so when she wakes up, they’ll be there.”

  “I’ll go. You don’t want to drive now.”

  “No, I want to. Really. Can I have your keys?”

  He found them and gave them to her.

  “I’ll pack a bag for us too. Is there anything special you need?”

  “Just clothes, a razor maybe.”

  She bent and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “I will. I won’t be long.”

  He watched her go. She stopped at the door and looked back at him and he could tell there was something she wanted to say.

  “What?” he said. But she just smiled and shook her head. Then she turned and was gone.

  The roads were clear and at this hour, apart from a lonely sand truck or two, quite deserted. Annie drove south on 87 and then east on 90, taking the same exit the truck had taken the morning before.

  There had been no thaw and the car’s headlights lit the low walls of soiled snow along the roadside. Robert had fitted the snow tires and they made a low roar on the gritted blacktop. There was a phone-in on the radio, a woman saying how worried she was about her teenage son. She’d recently bought a new car, a Nissan, and the boy seemed to have fallen in love with it. He spent hours sitting in it, stroking it and today she’d walked into the garage and caught him making love to its tailpipe.

  “Kinda what you’d call a fixation, huh?” said the show’s host, whose name was Melvin. All phone-ins seemed to have these ruthless wise guy hosts nowadays and Annie could never understand why people kept calling, knowing full well they would get humiliated. Perhaps that was the point. This caller sailed on oblivious.

  “Yes, I guess that’s what it is,” she said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Don’t do anything,” cried Melvin. “The kid’ll soon get exhausted. Next caller . . .”

  Annie turned off the highway onto the lane that curled up the shoulder of the hill to their house. The road surface here was glistening hard-pack snow and she drove carefully through the tunnel of trees and pulled into the driveway that Robert must have cleared yesterday morning. Her headlights panned across the white clapboard front of the house above her, its gables lost among towering beech trees. There were no lights on inside and the hall walls and ceiling gave a glimpse of blue as the headlights shafted briefly in. An outside light came on automatically as Annie drove around to the back of the house and waited for the door of the basement garage to raise.

  The kitchen was how Robert had left it. Cupboard doors hung open and on
the table stood the two unpacked grocery bags. Some ice cream in one of them had melted and leaked and was dripping off the table into a small pink lake on the floor. The red light was flashing on the answering machine, showing there were messages. But Annie didn’t feel like listening to them. She saw the note Grace had written to Robert and stared at it, somehow not wanting to touch it. Then she turned abruptly and got to work clearing the ice cream and putting away the food that hadn’t been spoiled.

  Upstairs, packing a bag for Robert and herself, she felt oddly robotic, as if her every action were programmed. She supposed the numbness had something to do with shock or maybe it was some kind of denial.

  It was certainly true that when she first saw Grace after the operation, the sight was so alien, so extreme, that she couldn’t take it in. She had been almost jealous of the pain it wrought so palpably in Robert. She had seen the way his eyes kept roving over Grace’s body, siphoning agony from every intrusion the doctors had made. But Annie just stared. This new version they had made of her daughter was a fact that made no sense at all.

  Annie’s clothes and hair smelled of the hospital so she undressed and showered. She let the water run down over her for a while then adjusted it till it was almost too hot to bear. Then she reached up and switched the shower head to its most vicious setting so that the water pricked her like hot needles. She closed her eyes and held her face up into it and the pain made her cry out loud. But she kept it there, happy that it hurt. Yes, she could feel this. At least she could feel this.

  The bathroom was full of steam when she stepped out of the shower. She wiped the towel across the mirror, only partly clearing it, then dried herself before it, watching the smeared, liquid image of a creature that didn’t seem to be her. She had always liked her body, though it was fuller and bigger-breasted than the sylphs who strutted the style pages of her magazine. But the blurred mirror was giving her back a distorted, pink abstraction of herself, like a Francis Bacon painting, and Annie found it so disturbing that she turned off the light and went quickly back into the bedroom.

  Grace’s room was just as she must have left it the previous morning. The long T-shirt she wore as a nightdress was lying on the end of the unmade bed. There was a pair of jeans on the floor and Annie bent to pick them up. They were the ones that had fraying holes in the knees, patched inside with pieces cut from an old floral-print dress of Annie’s. She remembered how she had offered to do it and how hurt she had been when Grace said nonchalantly that she’d rather Elsa do it. Annie did her usual trick and, with just a little hurt flick of an eyebrow, made Grace feel guilty.

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” she said, putting her arms around her. “But you know you can’t sew.”

  “I can too,” Annie said, turning into a joke what they both knew hadn’t been.

  “Well, maybe you can. But not as good as Elsa.”

  “Not as well as Elsa, you mean.” Annie always picked her up on the way she spoke, adopting her loftiest English accent to do so. It always prompted Grace to come back in flawless Valley Girl.

  “Hey Mom, whatever. Like, you know, really.”

  Annie folded the jeans and put them away. Then she tidied the bed and stood there, scanning the room, wondering what to take to the hospital. In a sort of hammock slung above the bed were dozens of cuddly toys, a whole zoo of them, from bears and buffalo to kites and killer whales. They came from every corner of the globe, borne by family and friends and now, convening here, took turns in sharing Grace’s bed. Each night, with scrupulous fairness, she would select two or three, depending on their size, and prop them on her pillow. Last night, Annie could see, it had been a skunk and some lurid dragon-creature Robert had once brought back from Hong Kong. Annie put them back in the hammock and rummaged to find Grace’s oldest friend, a penguin called Godfrey, sent to the hospital by Robert’s friends at the office on the day Grace was born. One eye was now a button and he was sagging and faded from too many trips to the laundry. Annie hauled him out and stuffed him in the bag.

  She went over to the desk by the window and packed Grace’s Walkman and the box of tapes she always took on trips. The doctor had said they should try playing music to her. There were two framed photographs on the desk. One was of the three of them on a boat. Grace was in the middle with her arms around both their shoulders and all of them were laughing. It had been taken five years ago in Cape Cod; one of the happiest vacations they’d ever had. Annie put it in the bag and picked up the other picture. It was of Pilgrim, taken in the field above the stables shortly after they got him last summer. He had no saddle or bridle on him, not even a halter, and the sun gleamed on his coat. His body was pointing away but he had turned his head and was looking right at the camera. Annie had never really studied the photograph before but now that she did she found the horse’s steady gaze unsettling.

  She had no idea if Pilgrim was still alive. All she knew was from a message Mrs. Dyer had left yesterday evening at the hospital, that he’d been taken to the vet’s place in Chatham and was to be transferred to Cornell. Now, looking at him in this picture, Annie felt herself reproached. Not for her ignorance of his fate, but for something else, something deeper that she didn’t yet understand. She put the picture in the bag, switched off the light and went downstairs.

  A pale light was already coming in through the tall windows in the hall. Annie put the bag down and went into the kitchen without turning on any lights. Before checking the phone messages, she thought she would make herself a cup of coffee. As she waited for the old copper kettle to boil, she walked over to the window.

  Outside, only a few yards from where she stood, was a group of whitetail deer. They were standing completely still, staring back at her. Was it food they were after? She’d never seen them this close to the house before, even in the harshest of winters. What did it mean? She counted them. There were twelve, no, thirteen. One for each year of her daughter’s life. Annie told herself not to be ridiculous.

  There was a low, burgeoning whistle as-the kettle started to boil. The deer heard it too and they turned as one and fled, their tails bouncing madly as they headed up past the pond to the woods. Christ almighty, thought Annie, she’s dead.

  THREE

  HARRY LOGAN PARKED HIS CAR UNDER A SIGN THAT SAID large animal hospital and thought it odd that a university couldn’t come up with wording to indicate more precisely whether it was the animals who were large or the hospital. He got out and trudged through the furrows of gray sludge which were all that remained of the weekend snow. Three days had passed since the accident and as Logan wove his way through the rows of parked cars and trailers, he thought how astonishing it was that the horse was still alive.

  It had taken him nearly four hours to mend that chest wound. It was full of fragments of glass and flakes of black paint from the truck and he’d had to pick them out and sluice it clean. Then he’d trimmed the ragged edges of flesh with scissors, stapled up the artery and sewn in some drainage tubes. After that, as his assistants supervised the anesthetic, air supply and a long-overdue blood transfusion, Logan got to work with needle and thread.

  He had to do it in three layers: first the muscle, then the fibrous tissue, then the skin, some seventy stitches in each layer, the inner two of them done with soluble thread. And all this for a horse he thought would never wake up. But the damn thing had woken up. It was incredible. And what’s more he had just as much fight in him as he’d had down in the river. As Pilgrim struggled to his feet in the recovery chamber, Logan prayed he wouldn’t tear the stitches out. He couldn’t face the idea of doing it all over again.

  They had kept Pilgrim on sedatives for the next twenty-four hours by which time they thought he had stabilized enough to stand the four-hour trip over here to Cornell.

  Logan knew the university and its veterinary hospital well, though it had changed a lot since he was here as a student in the late sixties. It held a lot of good memories for him, most of them to do with women. Sweet Jesus, did they have some time
s. Especially on summer evenings when you could lie under the trees and look down at Lake Cayuga. It was about the prettiest campus he knew. But not today. It was cold and starting to rain and you couldn’t even see the damn lake. On top of that, he felt lousy. He had been sneezing all morning, the result no doubt of having his balls frozen off in Kinderhook Creek. He hurried into the warmth of the glass-walled reception area and asked the young woman at the desk for Dorothy Chen, the clinician who was looking after Pilgrim.

  They were building a big new clinic across the road and, as he waited, Logan looked out at the pinched faces of the construction workers and felt better. There was even a little ping of excitement at the thought of seeing Dorothy again. Her smile was the reason he wasn’t going to mind driving a couple of hundred miles every day to see Pilgrim. She was like a virgin princess from one of those Chinese art movies his wife liked. A hell of a figure too. And young enough for him to know better. He saw her reflection coming through the door and turned to face her.

  “Hi Dorothy! How’re you doing?”

  “Cold. And not very happy with you,” she wagged a finger at him and frowned, mock-stern. Logan held up his hands.

  “Dorothy, I drive a million miles for one of your smiles, what have I done?”

  “You send me a monster like this and I’m supposed to smile at you?” But she did. “Come on. We got the X rays.”

  She led the way through a maze of corridors and Logan listened to her talking and tried not to watch the delicate way her hips moved inside her white coat.