The Horsewoman (14 page)

MY TIME, THE
previous best in the jump-off, was in the top right-hand corner: 38.4

His was 38.7.

Choke on it, Cullen
.

Coronado and I had won the Grand Prix.

Only now Tyler Cullen whipped Galahad around, like he was making one more sharp turn, and the horse was galloping back toward the in-gate, Cullen only pulling him up at the last second, not waiting for his trainer, Mackey, to help him off, jumping down himself, nearly stumbling as he landed, as he handed Mackey the reins.

Then he was running for the judge’s booth.

“No way!” he yelled at the judge. “No way. They skipped a second.”

“What’s he doing?” I said to Daniel.

“Challenging the time.”

“Can you do that?”

“He thinks you can,” Daniel said.

“What do
we
do?”

“We stay right here,” he said.

We weren’t close enough to hear what Cullen was saying once he was inside the booth and managed to lower his voice. We could see him leaning close to the judge, pointing a finger at him. Then he stepped outside, turned around, and yelled that he wanted to see a steward from the FEI.
Right now.
International Federation of Equestrian Sports. Our sport’s ruling body. On a night like this, an event this big, the steward was as close as you could be to God.

“I’ll tell him what I just told you,” Tyler Cullen said now. “The clock was wrong. I saw exactly where I was when I landed.”

I was off Coronado by now. Emilio had him. Daniel and I walked over and leaned against the first jump, waited for the steward to make his way from his perch at the other end.

“He’s just a sore loser, right?” I said.

“The sorest I have ever seen,” Daniel said.

“Can he get away with this?”

In a quiet voice Daniel said, “No.”

“Why?”

“Because he is wrong,” Daniel said.

The steward was Charles Kaiser, a tall, white-haired man in a royal-blue sport jacket and white pants. He walked slowly through the middle of the course. It only seemed to piss off Tyler Cullen more. He was standing in front of the judge’s booth, hands on hips.

“Now what?” I said.

“I have only seen this happen a couple of other times,” Daniel said. “They will connect to FarmTek, which supplies the timing device. Then they will sync up their system with the replay of his round. And then they will see that the clock did not skip anything.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I do,” Daniel said.

Then we both watched the three of them, the judge and Mr. Kaiser and Tyler Cullen, all crouched over a laptop in the judge’s booth. They were in there about five minutes, Daniel and I watching them as closely as we’d watched Cullen’s round on Galahad.

Then Mr. Kaiser was outside the booth, walking slowly toward Daniel and me.

Shaking his head.

I REACHED OVER
and squeezed Daniel’s hand. I was afraid I might end up in the dirt again if I didn’t have something to hold on to.

Or somebody.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Kaiser said in an amazingly deep voice.

He even sounds a little bit like God.

Now I squeezed Daniel’s hand even harder.

Daniel spoke first, because I couldn’t.

“Sorry for what?” he said.

“For the delay,” Mr. Kaiser said. “Mr. Cullen’s time was correct. He slowed up at the end when he raised his arm in the air. He didn’t ride the last few strides through the timer.”

Now Daniel squeezed my hand. I saw him smile. I smiled, too, and in a quiet voice said to Daniel, “Somebody spiked the ball too soon.”

Mr. Kaiser extended his hand to me then.

“You’re a champion, Miss McCabe,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I’D WATCHED CHAMPIONS
honored on plenty of other Saturday nights. I’d watched Mom step up onto the medal stand and be handed the winner’s check and have a special sash placed around her neck, before they handed her and the two runners-up bottles of champagne.

First time for me.

The check for $250,000, oversized for the photographers, was made out to me. When we got the real one, Grandmother and Steve Gorton would divide the money. I wasn’t great at math. But I was good enough to know that our share was just over $100,000. Might have been pocket change to Gorton. Not to Atwood Farm. It didn’t mean that we were in the clear. Just that we could keep on keeping on for the time being.

My place on the medal stand was slightly higher than Matthew Killeen’s and Tyler Cullen’s. Matthew had congratulated me. Tyler Cullen took his place and stared straight ahead, still caught up in his tantrum. After past ceremonies, the riders who’d finished second and third would pop the champagne and spray the champion with it.

Matthew looked over at Tyler’s sullen face and told me, “Save it and drink it. You want mine, too?”

“I’m good,” I said.

I saw Dad and Mom and Grandmother standing together off to the side. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them together like that. Maybe when I’d graduated high school.
One big happy family,
I thought.
One night only.

I couldn’t see Steve Gorton anywhere.

Dad waved. I smiled back at him. Tyler Cullen turned and apparently decided I was smiling at him. Or mocking him.

“Something you want to say to me?” he said.

First words he’d spoken to me since the jump-off ended.

“Nah,” I said.

I walked over to my family.

“Everybody behaving here?” I said.

“Your grandmother is practically begging me to come back,” Dad said.

Grandmother blew out some air. “Full of it to the end,” she said.

“I think we need to go give that bottle of champagne the attention it deserves,” Mom said.

Now I smiled at her. “What are the rest of you going to drink?”

Mom and Grandmother led the way out of the ring. Dad put an arm around my shoulders.

“I’m glad I didn’t miss this one,” he said.

As always, he’d cast himself as the cool dad and was playing his part before he took off again for New York or California and missed even more of my life.

“Can you stick around for a couple of days?” I said, pretty sure I already knew the answer to that one.

“Back to Gotham in the morning,” he said.

I whispered, “How are you and Mom getting along?”

He grinned. “I’m fine as long as I don’t make any sudden moves.”

“Should have been with her tonight,” I said.

“You know what?” he whispered in my ear, “I’m not so sure about that.”

I looked around for Daniel now, but couldn’t spot him. Knowing him the way I did, I figured he might already be back at the barn with Coronado.

Dad and I walked back through the in-gate and took a left, on our way to the tent.

“Ask you something?” I said to Dad.

“Your grandmother still hates me, if that’s what you’re wondering about,” he said.

I poked him with an elbow.

“What did you say to Mr. Gorton at the tent?”

He grinned again.

“Well,” he said, “I might have mentioned that if I saw him down there talking to you before you went into the ring, I was going to knock him on his ass.”

“Still not a horse show guy,” I said, then asked him to wait while I checked the schooling ring for Daniel. He wasn’t waiting for me there, but Tyler Cullen was leaning against the fence and swigging from his champagne bottle.

Then he saw me.

“Looking for your boyfriend?” he said. “He left.”

THE CEREMONY WAS
over. Becky had invited Daniel over to the house for a family celebration.

“I did everything you told me to do,” she said.

He smiled at her and said, “For once. I’ll see you a little later.”

The tent stayed open like a bar on championship nights and Becky had gone inside with her parents and grandmother. Daniel had passed the schooling ring on his walk to the barn when he heard a loud and familiar voice behind him.

Do not stop.

Just keep walking.

“Hey! Hey, Ortega!”

He stopped, turned, and saw Tyler Cullen, waving his champagne bottle in a mock toast. Directly above Cullen, on the pedestrian bridge, Daniel could see people streaming toward the parking lots. He wished he were with them.

Anywhere but here.

Cullen took a long swallow of champagne now, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then continued yelling.

“You know she was lucky to beat me.”

Daniel was moving toward him and before he realized it, he was climbing over the fence and into the ring.

“She had the better horse,” he said to Cullen. “And she was the better rider, whether you want to admit that to yourself or not.”

Cullen’s hair was shaved close on the side, with longer hair on top. Daniel always wondered about men who worried that much about their appearance. It was well known around the sport how hard the married Cullen chased after younger women.

“Yeah, go with that,” Cullen said.

He walked slowly toward Daniel.

Now it is the playground.

“You are just angry because you made an amateur mistake at the finish,” Daniel said. “You didn’t ride through the timer. That’s not Becky’s fault, or mine. It is yours. It is on you.”

“You’re going to explain riding to me,
señor
?” Cullen said, and took another drink. “Why don’t you look up my record when you get home. You own a laptop, right?”

He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.

“You got a little something going with her on the side?” Cullen said. “Everybody sees the way you look at her.”

“Is it finishing second the way you did that is eating at you?” Daniel said. “Or something else?”

They were about ten feet from each other. The people were still walking across the bridge behind them. Daniel could not believe that Cullen would do something as stupid as starting a real fight with him. He had already embarrassed himself enough tonight. If he wasn’t drunk, he was getting there.

“I’m the one who should be on that horse,” Cullen said. “I know it. You know it. She’s the amateur, whether she did get lucky or not tonight.”

“What really bothers you,” Daniel said, trying as hard as he could to keep his voice even, “is that she is half your age and her best days are ahead of her.”

“Veta a la mierda,”
Cullen said.

Telling Daniel in Spanish he must have picked up at his barn what he could do to himself.

“Look at me,” Cullen said, “using your language.” He shrugged. “Who knows, maybe before too long you’ll be somewhere speaking your real language full time.”

Daniel felt himself clenching and unclenching his fists. Telling himself that though Cullen may treat life as a video game, he was still one of the top riders in the world. The last thing he needed was for the police to show up and break up a fight. And have reason to believe that Daniel had started it.

“Before I went into the ring, you looked like you had something to say to me,” Cullen said. “Nothing stopping you now. Just you and me.”

Now turn and walk away.

“You know nothing about me,” Daniel said.

“Maybe more than you think,” he said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’d hate to see anything happen to you or any of your friends, is all,” Cullen said. “Doesn’t seem all that safe for you people these days. Seems like every time I turn on the news, one of you is going away. Like, for good.”

You people.

There it was.

“The only place I am going right now is to a victory celebration,” Daniel said.

“Hope you have proper ID in case you get pulled over,” Cullen called after him. “You do have proper ID, right? I mean, I know you and your girl are thinking about Paris. But it’d be a shame if you ended up back in Guadalajara or someplace instead.”

MOM AND GRANDMOTHER
and I had just finished a big breakfast of pancakes and turkey bacon and even Mom’s homemade hash browns. Grandmother had gone off on her power walk. Mom said she was going to work out. Coronado was getting the week off. I was getting ready to ride Sky, let her know I hadn’t forgotten her.

I was at the sink, handwashing Grandmother’s china and silver. For a tough old horsewoman, she loved fine things, and decreed that none of those fine things would ever see the inside of a dishwasher. So the duty of washing and drying and storing the plates and cutlery usually fell to me.

But I nearly dropped one of the plates, one I knew had been a wedding gift, when I heard the familiar explosion of tires and gravel on the driveway, looked out the kitchen window, and saw Steve Gorton pulling up in an unfamiliar sleek blue car.

The window was open. I briefly imagined what had been such a nice morning flying out of it, down over the barn and away.

I snorted as loudly as one of the horses. Of course Gorton was talking on his phone as he walked across the driveway wearing a crimson cap printed
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
. As he got closer, I heard him say, loudly, “I’m telling you, I don’t care what he says, he’s lying out his ass.”

Then he nodded and said, “How do I
know
? Because I do it all the time myself.”

His disappearing act after the Grand Prix had stretched into a full week. The last person I knew who’d talked to him was Dad, when he’d whispered that heartfelt message in his ear.

Gorton put his phone away when he got to the ring.

I dried my hands and went out the kitchen door to meet him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Gorton,” I said sweetly, all fake sincerity.

“Listen, I haven’t had the chance to congratulate you since you won the thing,” he said.

One way to do it without actually doing it,
I thought.

“You saw the best part of the night,” I said. “No need to stick around for the after-party.”

“Including Tyler Cullen’s little shit show,” he said. “Heard about it, though.”

“That
was
a little different,” I said.

“I like Tyler,” Gorton said. “Guy’s a great rider. But he didn’t do himself any favors with bullshit like that.” He smirked. “You want a different result? Ride faster, am I right?”

“He still nearly beat me on a day our horse was perfect,” I said.

Our horse.
Smiling. Now I was Rebecca of Atwood Farm with him.

“Listen,” he said, “I might not be the best loser in the world myself. But you won the thing, fair and square. Didn’t just beat Cullen. Even beat my friend Mike Bloomberg’s kid, too. Don’t think I didn’t call the former mayor of New York first thing the next morning.” He paused. “Anyway, a deal is a deal.”

He put out his hand to me. I hesitated at first, but then shook it.

“You stay on the horse,” he said.

That was it. Meeting over. He walked away from me, got into his car, drove away, not pulling out like a lunatic for once. I watched the sleek blue car make the turn onto Stable Way, heading for Palm Beach Point.

I stood on the front lawn and watched him go.

“He
is
lying out his ass,” I said to myself, and then went to ride Sky.