The Horse Whisperer Read online

  There were enough X rays to mount a small exhibition. Dorothy pinned them up on the light box and they stood side by side, studying them. As Logan had thought, there were cracked ribs, five of them, and the nasal bone was broken. The ribs would heal themselves, and the nasal bone Dorothy had already operated on. She’d had to lever it out, drill holes and wire it back in place. It had gone well, though they still had to remove the swabs packed into the clotted cavity of Pilgrim’s sinus.

  “I’ll know who to come to when I need a nose job,” said Logan. Dorothy laughed.

  “You wait till you see it. He’s going to have the profile of a prizefighter.”

  Logan had been worried there might be some fracture high on the right foreleg or shoulder, but there wasn’t. The whole area was just terribly bruised from the impact and there was severe damage to the network of nerves that served the leg.

  “How’s the chest?” said Logan.

  “It’s fine. You did a great job there. How many stitches?”

  “Oh, about two hundred.” He felt himself blushing like a schoolboy. “Shall we go see him?”

  Pilgrim was out in one of the recovery stalls and they could hear him long before they got there. He was calling out and his voice was cracked from all the noise he’d been making since the last lot of sedatives had worn off. The walls of the stall were thickly padded but even so they seemed to shake under the constant thumping of his hooves. Some students were in the next stall and the pony they were looking at was clearly bothered by Pilgrim’s din.

  “Come to see the Minotaur?” one of them asked.

  “Yeah,” said Logan. “Hope you guys already fed him.”

  Dorothy slid the bolt to open the top part of the door. As soon as she did so, the noise inside stopped. She opened the door just enough for them to look in. Pilgrim was backed into the far corner with his head low and his ears pinned right back, looking at them like something from a horror comic. Almost every part of him seemed to be wrapped in bloody bandage. He snorted at them then raised his muzzle and bared his teeth.

  “And it’s good to see you too,” said Logan.

  “You ever see a horse this freaked before?” Dorothy asked. He shook his head.

  “Me neither.”

  They stood there for a while, looking at him. What on earth were they going to do with him, he wondered. The Maclean woman had called him yesterday for the first time and had been real nice. Probably a little ashamed, he thought, about the message she’d sent through Mrs. Dyer. Logan wasn’t bitter, in fact he was sorry for the woman after what had happened to her daughter. But when she saw the horse she’d probably want to sue him for letting the wretched thing live.

  “We should give him another shot of sedative,” said Dorothy. “Trouble is there aren’t too many volunteers to do it. It’s kind of hit and run.”

  “Yes. Though he can’t stay on the stuff forever. He’s already had enough to sink a battleship. Let’s see if I can get a look at his chest.”

  Dorothy gave an ominous shrug. “You’ve made a will I hope?”

  She started opening the lower part of the door. Pilgrim saw him coming and shifted uneasily, pawing the floor, snorting. And as soon as Logan stepped into the stall, the horse moved and swung his hindquarters around. Logan stepped to the side wall and tried to position himself so that he could move into the animal’s shoulder, but Pilgrim was having none of it. He surged forward and sideways and lashed out with his hind legs. Logan leapt for safety, stumbled, then beat a rapid, undignified retreat. Dorothy quickly shut the door after him. The students were grinning. Logan gave a little whistle and brushed his coat down.

  “Save a guy’s life and what do you get?”

  It rained for eight days without taking a breath. No dank December drizzle this, but rain with attitude. The rogue progeny of some sweet-named Caribbean hurricane had come north, liked it and stayed. Rivers in the Midwest burst their banks and the TV news was awash with images of people crouched on rooftops and the bloated bodies of cattle twirling like abandoned airbeds in swimming pool fields. In Missouri a family of five drowned in their car while waiting in line at McDonaid’s and the President flew in and declared it a disaster, as some on the rooftops had already guessed.

  Ignorant of all this, her battered cells silently regrouping, Grace Maclean lay in the privacy of her coma. After a week, they had removed the air tube down her throat and inserted one instead through a little hole cut neatly in her neck. They fed her plastic bags of brown milky liquid through the tube that went up her nose and down into her stomach. And three times a day a physical therapist came and worked her limbs like a puppeteer to stop her muscles and joints from wasting away.

  After the first week, Annie and Robert took turns at the bedside, one keeping vigil while the other either went back down to the city or tried to work from home in Chatham. Annie’s mother offered to fly in from London but was easily dissuaded. Elsa came up and mothered them instead, cooking meals, fielding calls and running errands to and from the hospital. She watched Grace for them on the only occasion Annie and Robert were absent at the same time, the morning of Judith’s funeral. Upon the sodden turf of the village cemetery they had stood with others under a canopy of black umbrellas, then driven all the way back to the hospital in silence.

  Robert’s partners at the law firm had as always been kind, taking as much off his shoulders as they could. Annie’s boss, Crawford Gates, the group president, had called her as soon as he heard the news.

  “My dear, dear Annie,” he said, in a voice more sincere than both of them knew him to be. “You mustn’t even think of coming back here till that little girl’s one hundred percent better, do you hear me?”

  “Crawford . . .”

  “No, Annie, I mean it. Grace is the only thing that matters. There’s nothing on this earth so important. If anything crops up we can’t handle, we know where you are.”

  Far from reassuring her, this only made Annie feel so paranoid that she had to fight a sudden urge to catch the next train to town. She liked the old fox—it was he after all who had wooed her and given her the job—but she trusted him not a jot. Gates was a recidivist plotter and couldn’t help himself.

  Annie stood at the coffee machine in the corridor outside the intensive care unit and watched the rain gusting in great swathes across the parking lot. An old man was having a fight with a recalcitrant umbrella and two nuns were being swept like sailboats toward their car. The clouds looked low and mean enough to bump their wimpled heads.

  The coffee machine gave a last gurgle and Annie extracted the cup and took a sip. It tasted just as revolting as the other hundred cups she’d had from it. But at least it was hot and wet and had caffeine in it. She walked slowly back into the unit, saying hello to one of the younger nurses coming off shift.

  “She’s looking good today,” the nurse said as they passed.

  “You think?” Annie looked at her. All the nurses knew her well enough by now not to say such things lightly.

  “Yes, I do.” She paused at the door and it seemed for a moment as if she wanted to say something else. But she thought better of it and pushed the door open, going.

  “Just you keep working those muscles!” she said.

  Annie saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”

  Looking good. What did looking good mean, she wondered as she walked back to Grace’s bed, when you were in your eleventh day of coma and your limbs were as slack as dead fish? Another nurse was changing the dressing on Grace’s leg. Annie stood and watched. The nurse looked up and smiled and got on with the job. It was the only job Annie couldn’t bring herself to do. They encouraged parents and relatives to get involved. She and Robert had become quite expert at the physical therapy and all the other things that had to be done, like cleaning Grace’s mouth and eyes and changing the urine bag that hung down beside the bed. But even the thought of Grace’s stump sent Annie into a sort of frozen panic. She could barely look at it, let alone touch it.

  “It’
s healing nicely,” the nurse said. Annie nodded and forced herself to keep watching. They had taken the stitches out two days ago and the long, curved scar was a vivid pink. The nurse saw the look in Annie’s eyes.

  “I think her tape’s run out,” she said, nodding toward Grace’s Walkman on the pillow.

  The nurse was giving her an escape from the scar and Annie gratefully took it. She ejected the spent tape, some Chopin suites, and found a Mozart opera in the locker, The Marriage of Figaro. She slotted it into the Walkman and adjusted the earphones on Grace’s head. She knew this was hardly the choice Grace would have made. She always claimed she hated opera. But Annie was damned if she was going to play the doom-laden tapes Grace listened to in the car. Who knew what Nirvana or Alice In Chains might do to a brain so bruised? Could she even hear in there? And if so, would she wake up loving opera? More likely, just hating her mother for yet another act of tyranny, Annie concluded.

  She wiped a trickle of saliva from the corner of Grace’s mouth and tidied a strand of hair. She let her hand rest there and stared down at her. After a while she became aware that the nurse had finished dressing the leg and was watching her. They smiled at each other. But there was a trace of something perilously close to pity in the nurse’s eyes and Annie swiftly broke the moment.

  “Workout time!” she said.

  She pushed up her sleeves and pulled a chair closer to the bed. The nurse gathered up her things and soon Annie was alone again. She always started with Grace’s left hand and she took it now in both of hers and began working the fingers one by one then all of them together. Backward and forward, opening and closing each joint, feeling the knuckles crack as she squeezed them. Now the thumb, revolving it, squashing the muscle and kneading it with her fingers. She could hear the tinny sound of the Mozart spilling from Grace’s earphones and she found a rhythm in the music and worked to it, manipulating the wrist now.

  It was oddly sensual this new intimacy she had with her daughter. Not since Grace was a baby had Annie felt she knew this body so well. It was a revelation, like coming back to a land loved long ago. There were blemishes, moles and scars she had never known were there. The top of Grace’s forearm was a firmament of tiny freckles and covered with a down so soft that Annie wanted to brush her cheek against it. She turned the arm over and studied the translucent skin of Grace’s wrist and the delta of veins that coursed beneath it.

  She moved on to the elbow, opening and closing the joint fifty times, then massaging the muscles. It was hard work and Annie’s hands and arms ached at the end of every session. Soon it was time to move around to the other side. She laid Grace’s arm gently down on the bed and was about to get up, when she noticed something.

  It was so small and so quick that Annie thought she must have imagined it. But after she had put Grace’s hand down, she thought she saw one of the fingers quiver. Annie sat there and watched to see if it happened again. It didn’t. So she picked the hand up again and squeezed it.

  “Grace?” she said, quietly. “Gracie?”

  Nothing. Grace’s face was blank. The only movement was the top of her chest which rose and fell in time with the respirator. Maybe what she had seen was merely the hand settling under its own weight. Annie looked up from her daughter’s face to the stack of machines that monitored her. Annie still hadn’t learned as well as Robert how to read their screens. Perhaps she trusted their inbuilt alarm systems more than he did. But she knew pretty well what the most vital ones should be saying, the ones that watched Grace’s heartbeat and her brain and blood pressure. The heartbeat screen had a little electronic orange heart on it, a motif Annie found quaint, sentimental almost. The rate had stayed a constant seventy for many days. But now, Annie noticed, it was higher. Eighty-five, flicking to eighty-four as she watched. Annie frowned. She looked around. There wasn’t a nurse to be seen. She wasn’t going to panic, it was probably nothing. She looked back at Grace.

  “Grace?”

  This time she squeezed Grace’s hand and, looking up, saw the heartbeat monitor go crazy. Ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten . . .

  “Gracie?”

  Annie stood up, holding the hand tightly in both of hers, and peering down into Grace’s face. She turned to call for someone but didn’t have to because two of them were there already, a nurse and a young intern. The change had been picked up on the screens at the central desk.

  “I saw her move,” Annie said. “Her hand . . .”

  “Keep on squeezing,” said the intern. He took a penlight out of his breast pocket and opened one of Grace’s eyes. He shone the light into it and watched for a reaction. The nurse was checking the monitors. The heartbeat had steadied out at a hundred and twenty. The intern took Grace’s earphones off.

  “Talk to her.”

  Annie swallowed. For a moment, stupidly, she was lost for words. The intern looked up at her.

  “Just talk. It doesn’t matter what you say.”

  “Gracie? It’s me. Darling, it’s time to wake up now. Please wake up now.”

  “Look,” the intern said. He was still holding Grace’s eye open and Annie looked and saw a flicker. The sight of it made her take a sudden, sharp breath.

  “Her blood pressure’s up to one-fifty,” said the nurse.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she’s responding,” said the intern. “May I?”

  He took Grace’s hand from Annie, still holding the eye open with his other hand.

  “Grace,” he said. “I’m going to squeeze your hand now and I want you to try and squeeze back if you can. Try as hard as you can now, okay?”

  He squeezed, looking into the eye all the time.

  “There,” he said. He passed the girl’s hand to Annie. “Now I want you to do it for your mother.”

  Annie took a deep breath and squeezed . . . and felt it. It was like the first, faint, tentative touch of a fish on a line. Deep in those dark, still waters something shimmered and would surface.

  Grace was in a tunnel. It was a little like the subway except that it was darker and flooded with water and she was swimming in it. The water wasn’t cold though. In fact it didn’t really feel like water at all. It was too warm and too thick. In the distance she could see a circle of light and somehow she knew she had the choice of going toward it or turning and going in the other direction where there was also light, but of a dimmer, less welcoming kind. She wasn’t frightened. It was simply a matter of choice. Either way would be fine.

  Then she heard voices. They were coming from the place where the light was dimmer. She couldn’t see who it was but she knew one of the voices was her mother’s. There was a man’s voice too, but not her father’s. It was some other man, someone she didn’t know. She tried to move toward them along the tunnel but the water was too thick. It was like glue, she was swimming in glue and it wouldn’t let her through. The glue won’t let me through, the glue . . . She tried to call out for help but she couldn’t find her voice.

  They didn’t seem to know she was there. Why couldn’t they see her? They sounded such a long way off and she was suddenly worried they might go and leave her all alone. But now, yes, the man was calling her name. They had seen her. And although she still couldn’t see them, she knew they were reaching out for her and if she could only make one final, great effort, maybe the glue would let her through and they could haul her out.

  FOUR

  ROBERT PAID IN THE FARM SHOP AND BY THE TIME HE came out, the two boys had tied the tree up with string and were loading it into the back of the Ford Lariat crew-cab he’d bought last summer to ferry Pilgrim up from Kentucky. It had been a surprise for both Grace and Annie when he drove it, with its matching silver trailer, up to the house early one Saturday morning. They came out onto the porch, Grace thrilled and Annie quite furious. But Robert had just shrugged and smiled and said come on, you couldn’t put a new horse in an old box.

  He thanked the two boys, wished them a Merry Christmas and pulled out of the muddy, pot
holed parking lot onto the road. He had never bought a Christmas tree so late before. Usually he and Grace would go out the weekend before and get one, though they always left it until Christmas Eve to bring it inside and decorate it. At least she would be there to do that, to decorate it. Christmas Eve was tomorrow and Grace was coming home.

  The doctors weren’t totally happy about it. It was only two weeks since she’d come out of the coma but he and Annie had argued forcefully that it would be good for her and finally sentiment had triumphed: Grace could go home, but for two days only. They were to collect her at noon tomorrow.

  He pulled up outside the Chatham Bakery and went in to pick up some bread and muffins. Breakfast at the bakery had become a weekend ritual for them. The young woman behind the counter sometimes babysat Grace.

  “How’s your beautiful girl?” she asked.

  “Coming home tomorrow.”

  “Really? That’s great!”

  Robert saw others were listening too. Everyone seemed to know about the accident and people he had never talked to before asked after Grace. He noticed though how no one ever spoke about the leg.

  “Well, you make sure you give her my love.”

  “I sure will, thanks. Merry Christmas.”

  Robert saw them watching from the window as he got back into the Lariat. He drove past the animal feed plant, slowed to cross the railroad, and headed for home through Chatham Village. The store windows along Main Street were full of Christmas festoonery and the narrow sidewalks, strung above with colored lights, were busy with shoppers. Robert exchanged waves with those he knew as he drove by. The creche on the central square looked pretty—undoubtedly a violation of the First Amendment—but pretty nonetheless and hey, it was Christmas. Only the weather seemed not to know it.

  Since the rain had stopped, on the day Grace mouthed her first words, it had been ludicrously warm. Fresh from pontificating about hurricane floods, media climatologists were having their most lucrative Christmas in years. The world was officially a greenhouse or at least upside down.