There was death at its beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl's dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.
The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half-hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.
There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.
Grace Maclean had come up from New York City the night before with her father, just the two of them. She always enjoyed the trip, two and a half hours on the Taconic State Parkway, cocooned together in the long Mercedes, listening to tapes and chatting easily about school or some new case he was working on. She liked to hear him talk as he drove, liked having him to herself, seeing him slowly unwind in his studiously weekend clothes. Her mother, as usual, had some dinner or function or something and would be catching the train to Hudson this morning, which she preferred to do anyway. The Friday-night crawl of traffic invariably made her crabby and impatient and she would compensate by taking charge, telling Robert, Grace's father, to slow down or speed up or take some devious route to avoid delays. He never bothered to argue, just did as he was told, though sometimes he would sigh or give Grace, relegated to the backseat, a wry glance in the mirror. Her parents' relationship had long been a mystery to her, a complicated world where dominance and compliance were never quite what they seemed. Rather than get involved, Grace would simply retreat into the sanctuary of her Walkman.
On the train her mother would work for the entire journey, undistracted and undistractable. Accompanying her once recently, Grace had watched her and marveled that she never even looked out of the window except perhaps in a glazed, unseeing scan when some big-shot writer or one of her more eager assistant editors called on the cellular phone.
The light on the landing outside Grace's room was still on. She tiptoed in her socks past the half-open door of her parents' bedroom and paused. She could hear the ticking of the wall clock in the hall below and now the reassuring, soft snoring of her father. She came down the stairs into the hall, its azure walls and ceiling already aglow from the reflection of snow through undraped windows. In the kitchen, she drank a glass of milk in one long tilt and ate a chocolate-chip cookie as she scribbled a note for her father on the pad by the phone. Gone riding. Back around 10. Luv, G.
She took another cookie and ate it on the move as she went through to the passageway by the back door where they left coats and muddy boots. She put on her fleece jacket and hopped elegantly, holding the cookie in her mouth, as she pulled on her riding boots. She zipped her jacket to the neck, put on her gloves and took her riding hat down off the shelf, wondering briefly if she should phone Judith to check if she still wanted to ride now that it had snowed. But there was no need. Judith would be just as excited as she was. As Grace opened the door to step out into the freezing air, she heard the furnace come to life down in the basement.
Wayne P. Tanner looked gloomily over the rim of his coffee cup at the rows of snowcrusted trucks parked outside the diner. He hated the snow but, more than that, he hated being caught out. And in the space of just a few hours it had happened twice.
Those New York state troopers had enjoyed every minute of it, smug Yankee bastards. He had seen them slide up behind him and hang there on his tail for a couple of miles, knowing damn well he'd seen them and enjoying it. Then the lights coming on, telling him to pull over and the smartass, no more than a kid, swaggering up alongside in his stetson like some goddamn movie cop. He'd asked for the daily logbook and Wayne found it, handed it down and watched as the kid read it.
'Atlanta huh?' he said, flipping the pages.
'Yes sir,' Wayne replied. 'And it's one helluva lot warmer down there, I can tell you.' The tone usually worked with cops, respectful but fraternal, implying some working kinship of the road. But the kid didn't look up.
'Uh-huh. You know that radar detector you've got there is illegal, don't you?'
Wayne glanced at the little black box bolted to the dash and wondered for a moment whether to play all innocent. In New York fuzz-busters were only illegal for trucks over eighteen thousand pounds. He was packing about three or four times that. Pleading ignorance, he reckoned, might just make the little bastard meaner still. He turned back with a mock-guilty grin but it was wasted because the kid still didn't look at him. 'Don't you?' he said again.
'Yeah, well. I guess.'
The kid shut the logbook and handed it back up to him, at last meeting his eyes. 'Okay,' he said. 'Now let's see the other one.'
'I'm sorry?'
The other logbook. The real one. This one here's for the fairies.' Something turned over in Wayne's stomach.
For fifteen years, like thousands of other truck drivers, he'd kept two logs, one telling the truth about driving times, mileage, rest-overs and all and the other, fabricated specially for situations like this, showing he'd stuck by all the legal limits. And in all that time, pulled over God knows how many dozens of times, coast to coast, never had any cop done this. Shit, damn near every trucker he knew kept a phony log, they called them comic books, it was a joke. If you were on your own and no partner to take shifts, how the hell were you supposed to meet deadlines? How the hell were you supposed to make a goddamn living? Jesus. The companies all knew about it, they just turned a blind eye.
He had tried spinning it out awhile, playing hurt, even showing a little outrage, but he knew it was no good. The kid's partner, a big bull-necked guy with a smirk on his face, got out of the patrol car, not wanting to miss out on the fun and they told him to get down from the cab while they searched it. Seeing they meant to pull the place apart, he decided to come clean, fished the book out from its hiding place under the bunk and gave it to them. It showed he had driven over nine hundred miles in twenty-four hours with only one stop and even that was for only half the eight hours required by law.
So now he was looking at a thousand-, maybe thirteen-hundred-dollar fine, more if they got him for the goddamn radar detector. He might even lose his commercial driver's license. The troopers gave him a fistful of paper and escorted him to this truck stop, warning him he'd better not even think of setting out again till morning.
He waited for them to go, then walked over to the gas station and bought a stale turkey sandwich and a six-pack. He spent the night in the bunk at the back of the cab. It was spacious and comfortable enough and he felt a little better after a couple of beers, but he still spent most of the night worrying. And then he woke up to see the snow and discovered he'd been caught out again.
In the balm of a Georgia morning two days earlier, Wayne hadn't thought to check that he had his snow chains. And when he'd looked in the locker this morning, the damn things weren't there. He couldn't believe it. Some dumbfuck must have borrowed or stolen them. Wayne knew the interstate would be okay, they'd have had the snowplows and sanders out hours ago. But the two giant turbines he was carrying had to be delivered to a pulp mill in a little place called Chatham and he would have to leave the turnpike and cut across country. The roads would be winding and narrow and probably as yet uncleared. Wayne cursed himself again, finished his coffee and laid down a five-dollar bill.
Outside the door he stopped to light a cigarette and tugged his Braves baseball cap down hard against the cold. He could hear the drone of trucks already moving out on the interstate. His boots scrunched in the snow as he made his way over the lot toward his truck.
There were forty or fifty trucks there, lined up side by side, all eighteen-wheelers like his, mainly Peterbilts, Freightliners and Kenworths. Wayne's was a black and chrome Kenworth Conventional, 'anteaters' they called them, because of the long, sloping nose. And though it looked better hitched to a standard high-sided reefer trailer than it did now with the two turbines mounted on a flatbed, in the snowy half-light of dawn, he thought it was still the prettiest truck on the lot. He stood there for a moment admiring it, finishing his cigarette. Unlike the younger drivers who didn't give a shit nowadays, he always kept his cab gleaming. He had even cleared all the snow off before going in for breakfast. Unlike him though, he suddenly remembered, they probably hadn't forgotten their goddamn chains. Wayne Tanner squashed his cigarette into the snow and hauled himself up into the cab.
Two sets of footprints converged at the mouth of the long driveway that led up to the stables. With immaculate timing, the two girls had arrived there only moments apart and made their way up the hill together, their laughter carrying down into the valley. Even though the sun had yet to show, the white picket fence, confining their tracks on either side, looked dowdy against the snow, as did the jumps in the fields beyond. The girls' tracks curved to the brow of the hill and disappeared into the group of low buildings that huddled, as if for protection, around the vast red barn where the horses were kept.
As Grace and Judith turned into the stable yard, a cat skittered away from them, spoiling the snow. They stopped and stood there a moment, looking over toward the house. There was no sign of life. Mrs Dyer, the woman who owned the place and had taught them both to ride, would normally be up and about by now.
'Do you think we should tell her we're going out?' Grace whispered.
The two girls had grown up together, seeing each other at weekends up here in the country for as long as either could remember. Both lived on the Upper West Side of town, both went to schools on the East Side and both had fathers who were lawyers. But it occurred to neither of them that they should see each other during the week. The friendship belonged here, with their horses. Just turned fourteen, Judith was nearly a year older than Grace and in decisions as weighty as risking the ever-ready wrath of Mrs Dyer, Grace was happy to defer. Judith sniffed and screwed up her face.
'Nah,' she said. 'She'd only bawl us out for waking her up. Come on.'
The air inside the barn was warm and heavy with the sweet smell of hay and dung. As the girls came in with their saddles and closed the door, a dozen horses watched from their stalls, ears pricked forward, sensing something different about the dawn outside just as Grace had. Judith's horse, a soft-eyed chestnut gelding called Gulliver, whinnied as she came up to the stall, putting his face forward for her to rub.
'Hi baby,' she said.'How are you today, huh?' The horse backed off gently from the gate so Judith would have room to come in with the tack.
Grace walked on. Her horse was in the last stall at the far end of the barn. Grace spoke softly to the others as she passed them, greeting them by name. She could see Pilgrim, his head erect and still, watching her all the way. He was a four-year-old
Morgan, a gelding of a bay so dark that in some lights he looked black. Her parents had bought him for her last summer for her birthday, reluctantly. They had worried he was too big and too young for her, altogether too much of a horse. For Grace, it was love at first sight.
They had flown down to Kentucky to see him and when they were taken out to the field, he came right over to the fence to check her out. He didn't let her touch him, just sniffed her hand, brushing it lightly with his whiskers. Then he tossed his head like some haughty prince and ran off, flagging his long tail, his coat glistening in the sun like polished ebony.
The woman who was selling him let Grace ride him and it was only then that her parents gave each other a look and she knew they would let her have him. Her mother hadn't ridden since she was a child but she could be counted on to recognize class when she saw it. And Pilgrim was class alright. There was no doubting he was also a handful and quite different from any other horse she had ridden. But when Grace was on him and could feel all that life pounding away inside him, she knew that in his heart he was good and not mean and that they would be okay together. They would be a team.
She had wanted to change his name to something prouder, like Cochise or Khan, but her mother, ever the tyrant liberal, said it was up to Grace of course, but in her opinion it was bad luck to change a horse's name. So Pilgrim he remained.
'Hey, gorgeous,' she said as she reached the stall. 'Who's my man?' She reached out for him and he let her touch the velvet of his muzzle, but only briefly, tilting his head up and away from her. 'You are such a flirt. Come on, let's get you fixed here.'
Grace let herself into the stall and took off the horse's blanket. When she swung the saddle over him, he shifted away a little as he always did and she told him firmly to keep still. She told him about the surprise he had waiting for him outside as she lightly fastened the girth and put on the bridle. Then she took a hoof pick from her pocket and methodically cleared the dirt from each of his feet. She could hear Judith already leading Gulliver out of his stall so she hurried to tighten the girth and now they too were ready.
They led the horses out into the yard and let them stand there a few moments appraising the snow while Judith went back to shut the barn door. Gulliver lowered his head and sniffed, concluding quickly it was the same stuff he had seen a hundred times before. Pilgrim however was amazed. He pawed it and was startled when it moved. He tried sniffing it, as he had seen the older horse do. But he sniffed too hard and gave a great sneeze that had the girls rocking with laughter.
'Maybe he's never seen it before,' said Judith.
'He must have. Don't they have snow in Kentucky?'
'I don't know. I guess so.' She looked across at Mrs Dyer's house. 'Hey, come on, let's go or we'll wake the dragon.'
They led the horses out of the yard and into the top meadow and there they mounted up and rode in a slow, climbing traverse toward the gate that led into the woods. Their tracks cut a perfect diagonal across the unblemished square of the field. And as they reached the woods, at last the sun came up over the ridge and filled the valley behind them with tilted shadows.
One of the things Grace's mother hated most about weekends was the mountain of newsprint she had to read. It accumulated all week like some malign volcanic mass. Each day, recklessly, she stacked it higher with the weeklies and all those sections of The New York Times she didn't dare trash. By Saturday it had become too menacing to ignore and with several more tons of Sunday's New York Times horribly imminent, she knew that if she didn't act now, she would be swept away and buried. All those words, let loose on the world. All that effort. Just to make you feel guilty. Annie tossed another slab to the floor and wearily picked up the New York Post.
The Macleans' apartment was on the eighth floor of an elegant old building on Central Park West. Annie sat with her feet tucked up on the yellow sofa by the window. She was wearing black leggings and a light gray sweatshirt. Her bobbed auburn hair, tied in a stubby ponytail, was set aflame by the sun that streamed in behind her and made a shadow of her on the matching sofa across the living room.
The room was long and painted a pale yellow. It was lined at one end with books and there were pieces of African art and a grand piano, one gleaming end of which was now caught by the angling sun. If Annie had turned she would have seen seagulls strutting on the ice of the reservoir. Even in the snow, even this early on a Saturday morning, there were joggers out, pounding the circuit that she herself would be pounding as soon as she had finished the papers. She took a sip from her mug of tea and was about to junk the Post when she spotted a small item hidden away in a column she usually skipped.
'I don't believe it,' she said aloud. 'You little rat.'
She clunked the mug down on the table and went briskly to get the phone from the hallway. She came back already punching the number and stood facing the window now, tapping a foot while she waited for an answer. Below the reservoir an old man wearing skis and an absurdly large radio headset was tramping ferociously toward the trees. A woman was scolding a leashed gaggle of tiny dogs, all with matching knitted coats and with legs so short they had to leap and sledge to make progress.
'Anthony? Did you see the Post?' Annie had obviously woken her young assistant but it didn't occur to her to apologize. "They've got a piece about me and Fiske. The little shit's saying I fired him and that I faked the new circulation figures.'
Anthony said something sympathetic but it wasn't sympathy Annie was after. 'Do you have Don Farlow's weekend number?' He went to get it. Out in the park, the dog woman had given up and was now dragging them back toward the street. Anthony returned with the number and Annie jotted it down.
'Good,' she said. 'Go back to sleep.' She hung up and immediately dialed Farlow's number.
Don Farlow was the publishing group's storm-trooper lawyer. In the six months since Annie Graves (professionally she had always used her maiden name) was brought in as editor-in-chief to salvage its sinking flagship magazine, he had become an ally and almost a friend. Together they had set about the ousting of the Old Guard. Blood had flowed - new blood in and old blood out - and the press had relished every drop. Among those to whom she and Farlow had shown the door were several well-connected writers who had promptly taken their revenge in the gossip columns. The place became known as the Graves Yard.
Annie could understand their bitterness. Some had been there so many years, they felt they owned the place. To be uprooted at all was demeaning enough. To be uprooted by an upstart forty-three-year-old woman, and English to boot, was intolerable. The purge was now almost over however and Annie and Farlow had recently become skillful at constructing payoff deals which bought the silence of those departing. She thought they had done just that with Fenimore Fiske, the magazine's aging and insufferable movie critic who was now badmouthing her in the Post. The rat. But as Annie waited for Farlow to answer the phone, she took comfort from the fact that Fiske had made a big mistake in calling her increased circulation figures a sham. They weren't and she could prove it.
Farlow was not only up, he had seen the Post piece too. They agreed to meet in two hours' time in her office. They would sue the old bastard for every penny they'd bought him off with.
Annie called her husband in Chatham and got her own voice on the answering machine. She left a message telling Robert it was time he was up, that she would be catching the later train and not to go to the supermarket before she got there. Then she took the elevator down and went out into the snow to join the joggers. Except, of course, Annie Graves didn't jog. She ran. And although this distinction was not immediately obvious from either her speed or her technique, to Annie it was as clear and vital as the cold morning air into which she now plunged.
The interstate was fine, as Wayne Tanner had expected. There wasn't too much else on the road what with it being a Saturday and he reckoned he'd be better keeping on up 87 till it hit 90, cross the Hudson River there and head on down to Chatham from the north. He'd studied the map and figured that though it wasn't the most direct route, less of it would be on smaller roads that might not have been cleared. With no chains, he only hoped this access road to the mill they'd told him about wasn't just some dirt track or something.
By the time he picked up the signs for 90 and swung east, he was starting to feel better. The countryside looked like a Christmas card and with Garth Brooks on the tape machine and the sun bouncing off the Kenworth's mighty nose, things didn't seem so bad as they had last night. Hell, if it came to the worst and he lost his license, he could always go back and be a mechanic like he was trained to be. It wouldn't be so much money, for sure. It was a goddamn insult how little they paid a guy who'd done years of training and had to buy himself ten thousand dollars' worth of tools. But sometimes lately he'd been getting tired of being on the road so much. Maybe it would be nice to spend more time at home with his wife and kids. Well, maybe. Spend more time fishing, anyway.
With a jolt, Wayne spotted the exit for Chatham coming up and he got to work, pumping the brakes and taking the truck down through its nine gears, making the big four-twenty-five horsepower Cummins engine roar in complaint. As he forked away from the interstate he flipped the four-wheel-drive switch, locking in the cab's front axle. From here, he calculated, it was maybe just five or six miles to the mill.
High in the woods that morning there was a stillness, as if life itself had been suspended. Neither bird nor animal spoke and the only sound was the sporadic soft thud of snow from overladen boughs. Up into this waiting vacuum, through maple and birch, rose the distant laughter of the girls.
They were making their way slowly up the winding trail that led to the ridge, letting the horses choose the pace. Judith was in front and she was twisted around, propped with one hand on the cantle of Gulliver's saddle, looking back at Pilgrim and laughing.
'You should put him in a circus,' she said. 'The guy's a natural clown.'
Grace was laughing too much to reply. Pilgrim was walking with his head down, pushing his nose through the snow like a shovel. Then he would toss a load of it into the air with a sneeze and break into a little trot, pretending to be frightened of it as it scattered.
'Hey, come on now you, that's enough,' said Grace, reining him in, getting control. Pilgrim settled back into a walk and Judith, still grinning, shook her head and turned to face the trail again. Gulliver walked on, thoroughly unconcerned by the antics behind him, his head moving up and down to the rhythm of his feet. Along the trail, every twenty yards or so, bright orange posters were pinned to the trees, threatening prosecution for anyone caught hunting, trapping or trespassing.
At the crest of the ridge that separated the two valleys was a small, circular clearing where normally, if they approached quietly, they might find deer or wild turkey. Today however, when the girls rode out from the trees and into the sun, all they found was the bloody, severed wing of a bird. It lay almost exactly in the middle of the clearing like the mark of some savage compass and the girls stopped there and looked down at it.
'What is it, a pheasant or something?' said Grace.
'I guess. A former pheasant anyway. Part of a former pheasant.'
Grace frowned. 'How did it get here?'
'I don't know. A fox maybe.'
'It couldn't be, where are the tracks?'
There weren't any. Nor was there any sign of a struggle. It was as if the wing had flown there on its own. Judith shrugged.
'Maybe somebody shot it.'
'What, and the rest of it flew on with one wing?'
They both pondered a moment. Then Judith nodded sagely. 'A hawk. Dropped by a passing hawk.'
Grace thought it over. 'A hawk. Uh-huh. I'll buy that.' They nudged the horses into a walk again.
'Or a passing airplane.'
Grace laughed. 'That's it,' she said. 'It looks like the chicken they served on that flight to London last year. Only better.'
Usually when they rode up here to the ridge they would give the horses a canter across the clearing and then loop back down to the stables by another trail. But the snow and the sun and the clear morning sky made both girls want more than that today. They decided to do something they had done only once before, a couple of years ago, when Grace still had Gypsy, her stocky little palomino pony. They would cross over into the next valley, cut down through the woods and come back around the hill the long way, beside Kinderhook Creek. It meant crossing a road or two, but Pilgrim seemed to have settled down and anyway, this early on a snowy Saturday morning, there would be nothing much about.
As they left the clearing and passed again into the shade of the woods, Grace and Judith fell silent. There were hickories and poplars on this side of the ridge with no obvious trail among them and the girls had frequently to lower their heads to pass beneath the branches so that soon they and the horses were covered with a fine sprinkling of dislodged snow. They negotiated their way slowly down beside a stream. Crusts of ice overhung it, spreading jaggedly from the banks and allowing but a glimpse of the water that rushed darkly beneath. The slope grew ever steeper and the horses now moved with caution, taking care where they placed their feet. Once Gulliver slipped lurchingly on a hidden rock, but he righted himself without panic. The sun slanting down through the trees made crazed patterns on the snow and lit the clouds of breath billowing from the horses' nostrils. But neither girl paid heed, for they were concentrating too hard on the descent and their heads were filled only with the feel of the animals they rode.
It was with relief that at last they saw the glint of Kinderhook Creek below them through the trees. The descent had been more difficult than either girl had expected and only now did they feel able to look at each other and grin.
'Nice one, huh?' Judith said, gently bringing Gulliver to a stop. Grace laughed.
'No problem.' She leaned forward and rubbed Pilgrim's neck. 'Didn't these guys do well?'
They did great.'
'I don't remember it being steep like that.'
'It wasn't. I think we followed a different stream. I figure we're about a mile farther south than we should be.'
They brushed the snow from their clothes and hats and peered down through the trees. Below the woods a meadow of virgin white sloped gently down to the river. Along the near side of the river they could just make out the fence posts of the old road that led to the pulp mill. It was a road no longer used since a wider, more direct access had been built from the highway which lay half a mile away on the other side of the river. The girls would have to follow the old mill road north to pick up the route they had planned to get home.
Just as he'd feared, the road down to Chatham hadn't been cleared. But Wayne Tanner soon realized he needn't have worried. Others had been out before him and the Kenworth's eighteen heavy-duty tires cut into their tracks and grabbed the surface firmly. He hadn't needed the damn chains after all. He passed a snowplow coming the other way and even though that wasn't a whole lot of use to him, such was his relief that he gave the guy a wave and a friendly blast on the horn.
He lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. He was earlier than he'd said he would be. After his run-in with the cops, he'd called Atlanta and told them to fix things with the mill people for him to deliver the turbines in the morning. Nobody liked working on a Saturday and he guessed he wasn't going to be too popular when he got there. Still, that was their problem. He shoved in another Garth Brooks tape and started looking out for the entrance to the mill.
The old mill road was easy going after the woods and the girls and their horses relaxed as they made their way along it, side by side in the sunshine. Away to their left, a pair of blue jays chased each other in the trees fringing the river and through their shrill chatter and the rustle of water on rock, Grace could hear what she assumed was a snowplow out clearing the highway.
'Here we go.' Judith nodded up ahead.
It was the place they had been looking for, where once a railroad had crossed first the mill road and then the river. It was many years since the railroad had closed and though the river bridge remained intact, the top of the bridge across the road had been removed. All that remained were its tall concrete sides, a roofless tunnel through which the road now passed before disappearing in a bend. Just before it was a steep path that led up the embankment to the level of the railroad and it was up here that the girls needed to go to get onto the river bridge.
Judith went first, steering Gulliver up the path. He took a few steps then stopped.
'Come on boy, it's okay.'
The horse gently pawed the snow, as if testing it. Judith urged him on with her heels now.
'Come on lazybones, up we go.'
Gulliver relented and moved on again up the path.
Grace waited down in the road, watching. She was vaguely aware that the sound of the snowplow out on the highway seemed louder. Pilgrim's ears twitched. She reached down and patted his sweaty neck.
'How is it?' she called up to Judith.
'It's okay. Take it gently though.'
It happened just as Gulliver was almost at the top of the embankment. Grace had started up behind him, following his tracks as precisely as she could, letting Pilgrim take his time. She was halfway up when she heard the rasp of Gulliver's shoe on ice and Judith's frightened cry.
Had the girls ridden here more recently, they would have known that the slope they were climbing had, since late summer, run with water from a leaking culvert. The blanket of snow now concealed a sheet of sheer ice.
Gulliver staggered, trying to find purchase with his hind feet, kicking up a spray of snow and ice shards. But as each foot failed to hold, his rear end swung down and across the slope so that he was now squarely on the ice. One of his forelegs skewed ; sideways and he went down on one knee, still sliding. . Judith cried out as she was flung forward and lost a stirrup. But she managed to grab the horse's neck and stayed on, yelling down at Grace now.
'Get out of the way! Grace!'
Grace was transfixed. There was a roar of blood in her head that seemed to freeze and separate her from what she was watching above her. But upon Judith's second cry she reconnected and tried to turn Pilgrim down the slope. The horse yanked his head, frightened, fighting her. He took several small sideways steps, twisting his neck up the slope until his feet too skidded and he nickered in alarm. They were now directly in the path of Gulliver's slide. Grace screamed and wrenched the reins.
'Pilgrim, come on! Move!'
In the odd stillness of the moment before Gulliver hit them, Grace knew there was more to the roar in her head than the rushing of blood. That snowplow wasn't out on the highway. It was too loud for that. It was somewhere nearer. The thought was vaporized by the shuddering impact of Gulliver's hindquarters. He bulldozed into them, hitting Pilgrim's shoulder and spinning him around. Grace felt herself being lifted out of the saddle, whiplashed up the slope. And had one hand not found the rump of the other horse she would have fallen then as Judith fell. But she stayed on, wrapping a fist into Pilgrim's silky mane as he slid'down the slope beneath her.
Gulliver and Judith were past her now and she watched her friend being flung like a discarded doll across the horse's rear, then jerk and twist viciously back as her foot snagged in the stirrup. Judith's body bounced and swung sideways and as she hit the ice hard with the back of her head, her foot took another twist in the stirrup, locking itself there so that now she was being dragged. In one seething, frenzied tangle, the two horses and their riders careered down toward the road.
Wayne Tanner saw them as soon as he came out of the bend. Assuming he would be approaching from the south, the mill people hadn't thought to mention the old access road farther north. So Wayne had seen the turn and taken it and was relieved to find the Kenworth's wheels seemed to hold the untracked snow as well as they had back on the highway. When he came around the bend he saw, maybe a hundred yards ahead, the concrete walls of the bridge and beyond it, framed by it, some animal, a horse, trailing something. Wayne's stomach turned over.
'What the hell?'
He hit the brakes, but not too hard for he knew if he made things too sudden the wheels would lock, so he worked the trolley valve on the steering wheel, trying to get drag from the brakes at the back of the trailer. He couldn't even feel it. The gears would have to bring him down and he smacked the heel of his hand into the shift and double-declutched, making the six cylinders of the Cummins roar. Shit, he'd been going too fast. There were two horses there now, one with a rider on it. What the hell were they doing? Why didn't they get off the goddamn road? His heart was pounding and he could feel a sweat breaking out as he worked the trailer brakes and the shift, finding a rhythm in the mantra going through his head: Hit the binders, grab a gear, hit the binders, grab a gear. But the bridge was looming up too fast. For Christsake, couldn't they hear him coming? Couldn't they see him?
They could. Even Judith, in her agony on the ground, could see him, fleetingly, as she was thrashed around screaming through the snow. Her thighbone had snapped when she fell and in the slide to the road both horses had stepped on her, crushing ribs and splintering a forearm. In that first stumble Gulliver had cracked a knee and torn tendons and the pain and fear that filled his head showed in the whites of his eyes as he reeled and pranced and tried to free himself of this thing that hung hooked to his side.
Grace saw the truck as soon as they reached the road. One look was enough. Somehow she had managed not to fall and now she had to get them all off the road. If she could get hold of Gulliver's reins, she could lead him off to safety, dragging Judith behind. But Pilgrim was as freaked as the older horse and the two of them circled frantically, feeding each other's fear.
With all her strength, Grace tugged on Pilgrim's mouth and for a moment had his attention. She backed him toward the other horse, leaning precariously from her saddle, and reached out for Gulliver's bridle. He moved off, but she shadowed him, stretching out her arm till she thought it would pop from its socket. Her fingers were nearly on it when the truck blasted its horn.
Wayne saw both horses leap at the sound and for the first time realized what it was that hung from the side of the one that had no rider.
'Holy shit.'
He said it out loud and at the same time found he had run out of gears. He was in first and the bridge and the horses were coming up so fast he knew all he could do now was go for the tractor brakes. He murmured a little prayer and stepped harder than he knew he should on the foot valve. For a second it seemed to work. He could feel the wheels at the back of the cab bite home.
'Yeah! That's my girl.'
Then the wheels locked and Wayne felt forty tons of steel take charge of their own destiny.
In a stately, accelerating slither, the Kenworth snaked into the mouth of the bridge, entirely ignoring his efforts at the wheel. Now Wayne was just a spectator and he watched the cab's offside wing below him make contact with the concrete wall in what at first was but a glancing kiss of sparks. Then, as the deadweight of the trailer shouldered in behind, there was a gouging, ripping mayhem of noise that made the very air vibrate.
In front of him now he could see the black horse turn to face him and he saw that its rider was just a young girl and that her eyes were wide with fear beneath the dark peak of her hat.
'No, no, no,' he said.
But the horse reared up defiantly before him and the girl was jerked back and fell to the road. Only briefly did the horse's front feet come down, for in the moment before the truck was upon it, Wayne saw it lift its head and rear again. Only this time it leapt right at him. With all the power of its hind legs, it launched itself over the front of the cab, clearing the sheer face of the radiator grille as if it were a jump. The metal shoes on its front feet came down on the hood, skidding up it in a frenzy of sparks and as a hoof hit the windshield there was a loud crack and Wayne lost all sight in a craze of glass. Where was the girl? God, she must be down there on the road in front of him.
Wayne smashed his fist and forearm against the windshield and when it shattered he saw the horse was still there on the hood. Its right foreleg was stuck in the V-shaped struts of the wing mirror and the animal was screaming at him, covered in fragments of glass, its mouth foaming and bloody. Beyond it, Wayne could see the other horse at the side of the road, trying to limp away, its rider still hanging by her leg from the stirrup.
And still the truck kept going. The trailer was coming clear of the bridge wall and with nothing now to restrain its sideways drift, it began a slow, relentless jackknife, effortlessly scything down the fence and sending up a cresting bow-wave of snow like an ocean liner.
As the trailer's momentum overtook that of the cab and slowed it, the horse on the hood made one last great effort. The struts of the wing mirror broke and the animal rolled free and disappeared from Wayne's view. There was a moment of brooding calm, as in the eye of a hurricane, in which Wayne watched the trailer finish its sweep of the fence and the edge of the field beyond and start slowly arcing back toward him. Corralled in the quietly closing angle of the jackknife stood the other horse, uncertain now where escape might lie. Wayne thought he saw its dangling rider lift her head from the ground to look at him, unaware of the wave that was breaking behind her. Then she was lost. For the trailer surged over her, scooping the horse toward the cab like a butterfly in a book and crushing it there in a final thunderous slam of metal.
'Hello? Gracie?'
Robert Maclean paused in the passageway by the back door, holding two large bags of groceries. There was no reply and he went through into the kitchen and dumped the bags on the table.
He always liked to get the weekend food in before Annie arrived. If he didn't, they would have to go to the supermarket together and would end up spending an hour there while Annie pondered the fine distinctions between various brands. It never failed to astound him how someone who every moment of her working life made snap decisions, committing thousands, even millions of dollars, could at weekends spend ten minutes wondering which kind of pesto sauce to buy. It also cost a lot more than if he shopped alone, because Annie usually failed to reach any final decision over which brand was best and they'd end up buying all three.
The downside of doing it alone was of course the inevitable criticism he would face for buying the wrong things. But in the lawyerly manner which he applied to all areas of his life, Robert had weighed both sides of this issue and shopping without his wife emerged the clear winner.
Grace's note lay by the phone, where she had left it. Robert looked at his watch. It was only a little after ten and he could understand the two girls wanting to spend longer out on a morning like this. He pushed the playback button on the answering machine, took off his parka and started to put away the groceries. There were two messages. The first, from Annie, made him smile. She must have called right after he'd left for the supermarket. Time he was up, indeed. The second was from Mrs Dyer up at the stables. All she said was would they please call her. But something in her voice made Robert go cold.
The helicopter hung there for a while above the river, taking in the scene, then dipped its nose and lifted up over the woods, filling the valley with the deep, reverberating thud of its blades. The pilot looked down to one side as he circled again. There were ambulances, police cars and rescue squad vehicles down there, red lights flashing, all parked in fan formation in the field beside the massive jackknifed truck. They had marked out where they wanted the helicopter to land and a cop was making big, unnecessary arm signals.
It had taken just ten minutes for them to fly down from Albany and the paramedics had worked all the way, going through routine checks of the equipment. Now they were ready and watched silently over the pilot's shoulder as he circled and made his approach. The sun flashed briefly on the river as the helicopter followed its own shadow in over the police roadblock and over a red four-wheel-drive car also making its way toward the scene of the wreck.
Through the window of the police car, Wayne Tanner watched the helicopter hover above the landing spot and gently lower itself, whipping up a blizzard around the head of the cop who was directing it in.
Wayne was in the front passenger seat with a blanket over his shoulders, holding a cup of something hot he hadn't yet tasted. He could make no more sense of all the activity going on outside than he could of the harsh, intermittent babble of the police radio beside him. His shoulder ached and there was a small cut on his hand that the ambulance woman had insisted on bandaging extravagantly. It hadn't needed it. It was as if she didn't want him, surrounded by such carnage, to feel left out.
Wayne could see Koopman, the young deputy sheriff whose car he was sitting in, over by the truck talking to the rescue-squad people. Nearby, leaning on the hood of a rusted pale blue pickup and listening in, was the little hunter guy in the fur hat who had raised the alarm. He'd been up in the woods, heard the crash and gone straight down to the mill where they called the sheriff's office. When Koopman arrived, Wayne was sitting in the snow out in the field. The deputy was just a kid and had clearly never seen a wreck this bad before, but he'd handled things well and even looked disappointed when Wayne told him he'd already put out a call on channel nine of his CB. That was the channel monitored by the state police and minutes later they started to arrive. Now the place was swarming with them and Koopman looked a little put out that it wasn't his show anymore.
On the snow beneath the truck, Wayne could see the reflected glare of the oxyacetylene blowtorches that the rescue-squad guys were using to cut through the tangled wreck of the trailer and the turbines. He looked away, fighting the memory of those long minutes after the jackknife finished.
He hadn't heard it right away. Garth Brooks was singing on regardless on the tape machine and Wayne had been so stunned at his own survival that he was unsure if it was he or his ghost climbing down from the cab. There were blue jays squawking in the trees and at first he thought this other noise came from them too. But it was too desperate, too insistent, a kind of sustained, tortured shrieking and Wayne realized it was the horse dying in the closed jackknife and he'd clamped his hands to his ears and run away into the field.
They'd already told him one of the girls was still alive and he could see the paramedics at work around her stretcher, getting her ready for the helicopter. One of them was pressing a mask over her face and another had his arms up high, holding two plastic bags of fluid that were connected by tubes to her arms. The body of the other girl had already been flown out.
A red four-wheeler had just pulled up and Wayne watched a big bearded man get out and take a black bag out of the back. He slung it over a shoulder and made his way toward Koopman who turned to greet him. They talked for a few minutes then Koopman led him out of sight behind the truck where the blowtorchers were at work. When they reappeared, the bearded guy looked grim. They went over to talk to the little hunter guy who listened, nodded and got what looked like a rifle bag out of the cab of his pickup. Now all three of them were heading over toward Wayne. Koopman opened the car door.
'You okay?'
'Yeah, I'm okay.'
Koopman nodded toward the bearded guy.
'Mr Logan here is a veterinarian. We need to find that other horse.'
Now that the door was open Wayne could hear the roar of the blowtorches. It made him feel sick.
'Any idea which way it went?'
'No sir. Sure don't think he could've gotten far.'
'Okay.' Koopman put a hand on Wayne's shoulder. 'We'll be getting you out of here soon, okay?'
Wayne nodded. Koopman shut the door. They stood there talking outside the car but Wayne couldn't hear what they said. Beyond them, the helicopter was lifting off, taking the girl away. Someone's hat blew off in the blizzard. But Wayne saw none of this. All he saw was the bloodfoam mouth of the horse and its eyes staring at him over a jagged edge of windshield as they would stare at him in his dreams for a long time to come.
'We've got him, haven't we?'
Annie was standing by her desk, looking over Don Farlow's shoulder as he sat reading the contract. He didn't answer, just lifted a sandy eyebrow, finishing the page.
'We have,' Annie said. 'I know we have.'
Farlow put the contract down on his lap.
'Yes, I think we have.'
'Ha!' Annie raised a fist and walked across the office to pour herself another cup of coffee.
They had been there half an hour. She'd caught a cab down to Forty-third and Seventh, got stuck in the traffic and walked the last two blocks. New York drivers were coping with the snow in the way they knew best, blaring their horns and yelling at, each other. Farlow was already there in her office! and had the coffee on. She liked the way he made himself at home.
'Of course, he'll deny he ever spoke to them,' he said.
'It's a direct quote, Don. And look how much detail there is. He can't deny he said it.'
Annie brought her coffee back and sat down at her desk, a vast asymmetrical affair in elm and walnut that a friend in England had made for her four years ago when, to everyone's surprise, she had given up writing to become an executive. It had followed her from that magazine to this much grander one, where it had won the instant loathing of the interior designer hired at great expense to restyle the deposed editor's office to Annie's taste. He had taken clever revenge by insisting that, as the desk clashed so badly, everything else should clash too. The result was a cacophony of shape and color that the designer, with no detectable sign of irony, called Eclectic Deconstructionism.
All that really worked were some abstract splatter paintings done by Grace at the age of three that Annie (to her daughter's initial pride and subsequent embarrassment) had proudly framed. They hung on the walls among all the awards and photographs of Annie smiling cheek by jowl with assorted glitterati. More discreetly positioned, on the desk where only she could see them, were the photographs of those she cared about: Grace, Robert and her father.
Over the tops of these Annie now surveyed Don Farlow. It was funny to see him not wearing a suit. The old denim jacket and hiking boots had surprised her. She'd had him down as a Brooks Brothers type - slacks, loafers and yellow cashmere. He smiled.
'So. You want to sue him?'
Annie laughed. 'Of course I want to sue him. He signed an agreement saying he wouldn't talk to the press and he's libeled me by saying I've faked the figures.'
'A libel that'll be repeated a hundred times over if we sue. And blown up into a much bigger story.'
Annie frowned.
'Don, you're not going soft on me are you? Fenimore Fiske is a bitter, twisted, talentless, spiteful old toad.'
Farlow put up his hands, grinning.
'Don't hold back Annie, tell me what you really think.'
'While he was here he did all he could to stir up trouble and now he's gone he's trying to do the same. I want to burn his wrinkled ass.'
'Is that an English expression?'
'No, we'd say apply heat to his aging fundament.'
'Well, you're the boss. Fundamentally.'
'You better believe it.'
One of the phones on Annie's desk clicked and she picked it up. It was Robert. He told her in a level voice that Grace had been in an accident. She'd been flown up to a hospital in Albany where she was in intensive care, still unconscious. Annie should stay on the train all the way to Albany. He would meet her there.
Annie and Robert had met when she was only eighteen. It was the summer of 1968 and rather than go straight from school to Oxford University where she had been offered a place, Annie decided to take a year off. She signed up with an organization called Voluntary Service Overseas and was given a two-week crash course on how to teach English, avoid malaria and repel the advances of amorous locals (say no, loudly, and mean it).
Thus prepared, she flew to Senegal in West Africa and after a brief stay in the capital, Dakar, set off on the dusty five-hundred-mile ride south in an open-sided bus crammed with people, chickens and goats, to the small town that was to be her home for the next twelve months. On the second day, as night fell, they arrived at the banks of a great river.
The night air was hot and damp and clamorous with insects and Annie could see the lights of the town twinkling far across the water. But the ferry had shut down till morning and the driver and other passengers, now her friends, were concerned about where she would spend the night. There was no hotel and though they themselves would have no trouble finding a place to lay their heads, they clearly felt the young Englishwoman needed somewhere salubrious.
They told her there was a tubab living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a tubab might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The tubab who answered the door - she later found out it meant white man - was Robert.
He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person Annie had ever met. That night he cooked her a wonderful meal of spiced fish and rice, washed down with bottles of cold local beer, and they talked by candlelight till three in the morning. Robert was from Connecticut and was going to be a lawyer. It was congenital, he apologized, eyes wryly aglint behind his gold-rim specs. Everyone in the family had been lawyers for as long as any of them could remember. It was the Curse of the Macleans.
And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined Annie about her life, forcing her to describe and analyze it in a way that made it seem as fresh to her as it did to him. She told him how her father had been a diplomat and how, for the first ten years of her life, they had moved from country to country whenever he was given a new post. She and her younger brother had been born in Egypt, then lived in Malaya, then Jamaica. And then her father had died, quite suddenly, from a massive heart attack. Annie had only recently found a way of saying this that didn't stop the conversation and make people study their shoes. Her mother had resettled in England, rapidly remarried and packed her and her brother off to boarding schools. Although Annie skimmed over this part of the story, she could see Robert sensed the depth of unresolved pain beneath it.
The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.
Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola - the local language - fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.
Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar and the evening before he went, Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.
Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers, did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he'd been high for a year.
She saw Robert once more when she went back up to Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.
They didn't see each other again for seven years. Annie sailed triumphantly through Oxford, launching a radical and scurrilous magazine and sickening her friends by getting a brilliant First in English without ever appearing to do a stroke of work. Because it was the thing she least didn't want to do, she became a journalist, working on an evening newspaper in the far north-east of England. Her mother came to visit her just once and was so depressed by the landscape and the sooty hovel her daughter was living in that she cried all the way back to London. She had a point. Annie stuck it for a year then packed her bags, flew to New York and amazed even herself by bluffing her way into a job on Rolling Stone.
She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors - and there were many - said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn't work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be'done' or 'buried' (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.
Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. 'The tubab who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?' he prompted.
They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he'd been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she'd written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she'd dated in five years.
While Annie's wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.
In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he'd always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.
They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.
Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of what she hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist. One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn't taken in a word.
Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.
'In a coma, you mean,' Annie said, her tone challenging him to talk straight with her.
'That's not what they're calling it, but yes, I guess that's what it is.'
'What else?' There was a pause. 'Come on Robert, for God's sake.'
'Her leg's pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.' Annie took a wincing little breath.
'They're looking at it now. Listen Annie, I better get back there. I'll meet you at the train.'
'No, don't. Stay with her. I'll get a cab.'
'Okay. I'll call you again if there's news.' He paused. 'She's going to be alright.'
'Yes, I know.' She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. Annie rummaged in her bag for her sunglasses, put them on and laid her head back against the seat.
The guilt had started immediately upon Robert's first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.
'It would have made no difference Annie. You couldn't have done anything.'
'Yes I could. I could have stopped her going. What was Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?'
'It's a beautiful day. You wouldn't have stopped her.'
Farlow was right of course, but the guilt remained because it wasn't, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.
Annie had taken six weeks off work when Grace was born and had loved every minute. True, a lot of the less lovable minutes had been delegated to Elsa, their Jamaican nanny, who remained to this day the linchpin of their domestic life.
Like many ambitious women of her generation, Annie had been determined to prove the compatibility of motherhood and career. But while other media mothers used their work to promote this ethic, Annie, had never flaunted it, shunning so many requests for photo spreads of her with Grace that women's magazines soon stopped asking. Not so long ago she had found Grace flipping through such a piece about a TV anchor-woman, proudly pictured with her new baby.
'Why didn't we ever do this?' Grace said, not looking up. Annie answered, rather too tartly, that she thought it was immoral, like product placement. And Grace had nodded thoughtfully, still not looking at her. 'Uh-huh,' she said, matter-of-fact, flipping on to something else. 'I guess people think you're younger if you make out you haven't got kids.'
This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given Annie such a shock that for several weeks she thought of little else than her relationship with Grace or, as she now saw it, her lack of one.
It hadn't always been so. In fact until four years ago when she'd taken her first editorship, Annie had prided herself that she and Grace were closer than almost any mother and daughter she could think of. As a celebrated journalist, more famous than many of those she wrote about, her time until then had been her own. If she so chose, she could work from home or take days off whenever she wanted. When she traveled, she would often take Grace with her. Once they'd spent the best part of a week, just the two of them, at a famously fancy hotel in Paris, waiting for some prima donna fashion designer to grant Annie a promised audience. Every day they walked miles shopping and sightseeing and spent the evenings guzzling delicious room service in front of the TV, snuggled in a gilded, emperor-size bed like a pair of naughty sisters.
Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, Annie had at first refused to acknowledge the toll it was taking at home. She and Grace now had what she proudly referred to as 'quality time'. From her present perspective, its main quality seemed to Annie to be oppression.
They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.
At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. Annie herself no longer rode but, unlike Robert, had from her own childhood an understanding of the peculiar tribal world of riding and showjumping. She enjoyed driving Grace and her horse to events. But even at its best, their time together never matched the easy trust that Grace shared with Robert.
In a myriad minor ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And Annie was by now resigned to the notion that here history was inexorably repeating. She herself had been her father's child, her mother unwilling or unable to see beyond the pool of golden light encircling Annie's brother. Now Annie, with no such excuse, felt herself propelled by pitiless genes to replicate the pattern with Grace.
The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored veranda of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. Annie watched him hug each of them in turn, then shepherd them toward the parking lot. The boy insisted on trying to carry the heaviest bag and the man laughed and let him. Annie looked away and was glad when the train started to move out again. In twenty-five minutes she would be in Albany.
They picked up Pilgrim's tracks farther back along the road. There were spots of blood still red in the snow among the hoofprints. It was the hunter who saw them first and he followed them, leading Logan and Koopman down through the trees toward the river.
Harry Logan knew the horse they were looking for, though not as well as the one whose mangled carcass he had just watched them cut from the wreckage of the jackknifed trailer. Gulliver was one of a number of horses he looked after up at Mrs Dyer's place but the Macleans used another local vet instead. Logan had noticed the flashy new Morgan a couple of times in the stable. From the blood it was trailing, he knew it must be badly hurt. He still felt shaken by what he had seen and wished he could have got here earlier to put Gulliver out of his misery. But then he might have had to watch them taking Judith's body away and that would have been tough. She was such a nice kid. It was bad enough seeing the Maclean girl whom he hardly knew.
The rushing noise of the river was getting loud and now he caught sight of it down there through the trees. The hunter had stopped and was waiting for them. Logan stumbled on a dead branch and nearly fell and the hunter looked at him with scarcely veiled contempt. Macho little shit, thought Logan. He had taken an instant dislike to the guy as he did to all hunters. He wished he'd told him to put his goddamn rifle back in the car.
The water was running fast, breaking over rocks and surging around a silver birch that had toppled from the bank. The three men stood looking down at where the tracks disappeared by the water.
'Must have tried crossing over or something,' said Koopman, trying to be helpful. But the hunter shook his head. The opposite bank was steep and there were no tracks going up it.
They walked along the bank, nobody speaking. Then the hunter stopped and put his hand out for them to do the same.
'There,' he said, in a low voice, nodding up ahead.
They were about twenty yards from the old railroad bridge. Logan peered, shielding his eyes against the sun. He couldn't see a thing. Then there was a movement under the bridge and at last Logan saw him. The horse was on the far side, in the shadows, looking right at them. His face was wet and there was a steady dark dripping from his chest into the water. There seemed to be something stuck to his front, just below the base of the neck, though from here Logan couldn't make out what it was. Every so often the horse jerked his head down and to the side and blew out a strand of pink froth that floated quickly away downstream and dissolved. The hunter swung the gun bag off his shoulder and started unzipping it.
'Sorry pal, they're out of season,' Logan said, casual as he could, pushing past. The hunter didn't even look up, just pulled the rifle out, a sleek Winchester .308 with a telescopic sight as fat as a bottle. Koopman looked on admiringly. The hunter took some bullets from a pocket and calmly started loading the rifle.
'Thing's bleedin' to death,' he said.
'Oh yeah?' said Logan. 'You're a vet too, huh?'
The guy gave a scornful little laugh. He went on slotting bullets into the magazine with the infuriating air of someone who knew he would be proven right. Logan wanted to strangle him. He turned back toward the bridge and took a careful step forward. Immediately the horse backed away and now he was in the sunlight on the far side of the bridge and Logan could see there wasn't anything stuck to the animal's chest. It was a flap of pink skin hanging loose from a terrible L-shaped gash, about two feet long. Blood was pulsing out of the exposed flesh and streaming down his breast into the water. Logan could now see that the wetness on the horse's face was blood too. Even from here he could tell the nasal bone had been smashed in.
Logan had a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was one hell of a beautiful horse and he hated the idea of putting him down. But even if he could get near enough to control the bleeding, the damage looked so severe, it was odds on the animal would die. He took another step toward him and Pilgrim backed off again, turning to check out the escape upstream. There was a sharp sound behind him, the hunter racking the bolt of his rifle. Logan turned on him.
'Will you shut the fuck up?'
The hunter didn't respond, just gave Koopman a knowing look. There was a rapport developing here that Logan was keen to break. He put his bag down and squatted to get some things out of it, talking to Koopman now.
'I want to see if I can get to him. Could you loop over to the far side of the bridge there and block him off?'
'Yes sir.'
'Maybe get yourself a branch or something and wave it at him if he looks like heading your way. You might have to get your feet wet.'
'Yes sir.' He was already going back up into the trees. Logan called after him.
'Holler when you're ready. And don't get too close!'
Logan loaded a syringe with sedative and stuffed some other things he thought he might need into the pockets of his parka. He was aware of the hunter's eyes on him but ignored him and stood up. Pilgrim's head was low but he was watching every move they made. They waited, the rush of water loud about them. Then Koopman called and as the horse turned to see, Logan stepped carefully down into the river, concealing the syringe in his hand as best he could.
Here and there among the torrent were slabs of exposed rock, washed clean of snow, and he tried to use them as stepping-stones. Pilgrim turned back and saw him. He was getting agitated now, not knowing which way to run and he pawed the water and snorted out another slick of bloody froth. Logan had run out of stepping-stones and knew the moment had come to get wet. He lowered one foot into the current and felt the icy surge over the top of his boot. It was so cold, it made him gasp.
Koopman appeared in the bend of the river beyond the bridge. He too was up to his knees in the water and he had a big birch branch in his hand. The horse was looking from one of them to the other. Logan could see the fear in the animal's eye and there was something else there too which scared him a little. But he spoke to him in a soft, soothing lilt.
'It's okay fella. It's okay now.'
He was within twenty feet of the horse now and was trying to figure out how he was going to do this. If he could get hold of the bridle, he might have a chance of giving the shot in the neck. In case something went wrong, he had loaded more sedative into the syringe than he would need. If he could get it into a vein in the neck, he would have to inject less than if he shot into a muscle. In either case, he would have to take care not to give too much. A horse in as bad a state as this couldn't be allowed to fall unconscious. He would have to try and inject just enough to calm him so they could lead him out of the river and get him somewhere safer.
Now that he was this close, Logan could see the chest wound. It was as bad as anything he'd ever seen and he knew they didn't have long. From the way the blood was pumping, he figured that the horse had already lost maybe up to a gallon of it.
'It's okay young fella. No one's going to hurt you.'
Pilgrim snorted and wheeled away from him, taking a few steps toward Koopman, stumbling and sending up a flash of water that rainbowed in the sun.
'Shake your branch!' Logan yelled.
Koopman did and Pilgrim stopped. Logan used the flurry to lunge nearer, stepping into a hole as he did and wetting himself up to the crotch. Sweet Jesus, it was cold. The horse's white-rimmed eyes saw him come and he started off again toward Koopman.
'And again!'
The shake of the branch stopped him and Logan dived forward and made a grab. He got the reins, taking a turn in them and felt the horse brace and twist against him. He tried to step into the shoulder, keeping as clear as he could from the hind feet that were coming around to get him and he reached up quickly and managed to get the needle into the horse's neck. At the touch of the needle, Pilgrim exploded. He reared up, screaming in alarm and Logan had a fraction of a moment to push the plunger. But as he did so, the horse knocked him sideways, driving into him so that Logan lost all balance and control. Without meaning to, he injected the entire contents of the syringe into Pilgrim's neck.
The horse knew now who was the more dangerous of these men and he leapt away toward Koopman. Logan still had the reins twisted over his left hand, so he was whipped off his feet and pulled headfirst into the water. He felt the icy water streaming through his clothes as he was dragged along like a tangled waterskier. All he could see was surf. The reins bit into the flesh of his hand and his shoulder hit a rock and he cried out in pain. Then the reins came free and he was able to lift his head and take a lungful of air. He could see Koopman now, diving out of the way and the horse splashing past him and scrambling up the bank. The syringe was still hanging from his neck. Logan stood up and watched the horse disappearing up through the trees.
'Shit,' he said.
'You alright?' Koopman asked.
Logan just nodded and started to wring the water from his parka. Something caught his eye up on the bridge and he looked up to see the hunter, leaning on the parapet. He'd been watching and was grinning from ear to ear.
'Why don't you get the fuck out of here,' said Logan.
She saw Robert as soon as she came through the swing doors. At the end of the corridor there was a waiting area with pale gray sofas and a low table with flowers on it and he was standing there looking out of a tall window, the sun streaming in about him. He turned at the sound of her footsteps and had to screw his eyes up to see into the relative dark of the corridor. Annie was touched by how vulnerable he looked in this moment before he saw her, with half his face lit by the sun and his skin so pale it was all but translucent. Then he found her and came walking toward her, with a grim little smile. They put their arms around each other and stayed like that for a while, saying nothing.
'Where is she?' Annie asked at last.
He took hold of her arms and held her away from him a little so he could look at her.
'They've taken her downstairs. They're operating on her now.' He saw her frown and went on quickly before she could say anything. 'They said she's going to be okay. She's still unconscious but they've done all these checks and scans and it doesn't look like there's any brain damage.'
He stopped and swallowed and Annie waited, watching his face. She knew from the way he was trying so hard to keep his voice steady that of course there was something else.
'Go on.'
But he couldn't. He started to cry. Just hung his head and stood there with his shoulders shaking. He was still holding Annie's arms and she gently disengaged herself and held him the same way.
'Go on. Tell me.'
He took a long breath and tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling before he could look at her again. He made one false start then managed to say it.
'They're taking her leg off.'
Annie would later come to feel both wonder and shame at her reaction that afternoon. She had never thought herself particularly stalwart in moments of crisis, except at work where she positively relished them. Nor did she normally find it difficult to show her emotions. Perhaps it was simply that Robert made the decision for her by breaking down. He cried, so she didn't. Someone had to hold on or they would all be swept away.
But Annie had no doubt that it could easily have gone the other way. As it was, the news of what they were doing to her daughter in that building at that very moment entered her like a shaft of ice. Apart from a quickly suppressed urge to scream, all that came into her head was a string of questions, so objective and practical that they seemed callous. 'How much of it?' He frowned, lost. 'What?' 'Her leg. How much of it are they taking off?' 'From above the—' He broke off, having to summon control. The detail seemed so shocking. 'Above the knee.'
'Which leg?'
'The right.'
'How far above the knee?'
'Jesus Christ Annie! What the hell does it matter?' He pulled away from her, freeing himself, wiping his wet face with the back of a hand.
'Well, it matters quite a lot I think.' She was astonishing even herself. He was right, of course it didn't matter. It was academic, ghoulish even, to pursue it but she wasn't going to stop now. 'Is it just above the knee or is she losing the top of her leg as well?'
'Just above the knee. I haven't got the exact measurements but why don't you just go on down and I'm sure they'll let you have a look.'
He turned away to the window and Annie stood watching as he took out a handkerchief and did a proper job on the mucus and tears, angry at himself now for having wept. There were footsteps in the corridor behind her.
'Mrs Maclean?'
Annie turned. A young nurse, all in white, darted a look at Robert and decided Annie was the one to talk to.
'There's a call for you.'
The nurse led the way, walking in small rapid steps, her white shoes making no sound on the shining tiled floor of the corridor so that she seemed to Annie to be gliding. She showed Annie to a phone near the reception desk and put the call through from the office.
It was Joan Dyer from the stables. She apologized for calling and asked nervously after Grace. Annie said she was still in a coma. She didn't mention the leg. Mrs Dyer didn't linger. The reason she had called was Pilgrim. They'd found him and Harry Logan had been on the phone asking what they should do.
'What do you mean?' Annie asked.
'The horse is in a very bad way. There are broken bones, deep flesh wounds and he's lost a lot of blood. Even if they do all they can to save him and he survives, he's never going to be the same.'
'Where's Liz? Can't we get her down there?'
Liz Hammond was the vet who looked after Pilgrim and was also a family friend. It was she who had gone down to Kentucky for them last summer to check Pilgrim out before they bought him. She'd been equally smitten.
'She's away on some conference,' Mrs Dyer said. 'She's not back until next weekend.'
'Logan wants to put him down?'
'Yes. I'm sorry Annie. Pilgrim's under sedation now and Harry says he may not even come around. He'd like your authority to put him down.'
'You mean shoot him?' She heard herself doing it again, hammering away at irrelevant detail as she had just now with Robert. What the hell did it matter how they were going to kill the horse?
'By injection, I imagine.'
'And what if I say no?'
There was a pause at the other end.
'Well, I suppose they'd have to try and get him somewhere they could operate on him. Cornell maybe.' She paused again. 'Apart from anything else Annie, it would end up costing you a lot more than he's insured for.'
It was the mention of money that clinched it for Annie, for the thought had yet to coalesce that there might be some connection between the life of this horse and the life of her daughter.
'I don't care what the hell it costs,' she snapped and she could feel the older woman flinch. 'You tell Logan if he kills that horse, I'll sue him.'
She hung up.
'Come on. You're okay, come on.'
Koopman was walking backward down the slope, waving the truck on with both arms. It reversed slowly down after him into the trees and the chains hanging from the hoist on its rear end swung and clinked as it came. It was the truck that the mill people had standing by to unload their new turbines and Koopman had commandeered it, and them, for this new purpose. Following close behind it was a big Ford pickup hitched to an open-top trailer. Koopman looked over his shoulder to where Logan and a small crowd of helpers were kneeling around the horse.
Pilgrim was lying on his side in a giant bloodstain that was spreading out through the snow under the knees of those trying to save him. This was as far as he'd got when the flood of sedative hit. His forelegs buckled and he went down on his knees. For a few moments he'd tried to fight it but by the time Logan arrived he was out for the count.
Logan had got Koopman to call Joan Dyer on his mobile and was glad the hunter wasn't around to hear him asking her to get the owner's permission to put the animal down. Then he'd sent Koopman running for help, knelt by the horse and got to work trying to stem the bleeding. He reached deep into the steaming chest wound, his hand groping through layers of torn soft-tissue till he was up to his elbow in gore. He felt around for the source of the bleeding and found it, a punctured artery, thank God a small one. He could feel it pumping hot blood into his hand and he remembered the little clamps he had put in his pocket and scrabbled with his other hand to find one. He clipped it on and immediately felt the pumping stop. But there was still blood flowing from a hundred ruptured veins so he struggled out of his sodden parka, emptied its pockets and squeezed as much water and blood as he could from it. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it as gently as he could into the wound. He cursed out loud. What he really needed now was fluids. The bag of Plasmalyte he had brought was in his bag down by the river. He got to his feet and half ran, half fell back down there to get it.
By the time he returned, the rescue-squad paramedics were there and were covering Pilgrim with blankets. One of them was holding out a phone to him.
'Mrs Dyer for you,' he said.
'I can't talk to her now, for Christsakes,' Logan said. He knelt down and hitched the five-liter bag of Plasmalyte to Pilgrim's neck, then gave him a shot of steroids to fight the shock. The horse's breathing was shallow and irregular and his limbs rapidly losing temperature and Logan yelled for more blankets to wrap around the animal's legs after they had bandaged them to lessen the blood flow.
One of the rescue-squad people had some green drapes from an ambulance and Logan carefully extracted his blood-soaked parka from the chest wound and packed the drapes in instead. He leaned back on his heels, out of breath, and started loading a syringe with penicillin. His shirt was dark red and sodden and blood dripped from his elbows as he held the syringe up to flick the bubbles out.
'This is fucking crazy,' he said.
He injected the penicillin into Pilgrim's neck. The horse was as good as dead. The chest wound alone was enough to justify putting him down but that wasn't the half of it. His nasal bone was hideously crunched in, there were clearly some broken ribs, an ugly gash over the left cannon bone and God knows how many other smaller cuts and bruises. He could also tell from the way the horse had run up the slope that there was lameness high up in the right foreleg. He should just put the poor beast out of its agony. But now he'd got this far, he was damned if he was going to give that trigger-happy little fucker of a hunter the satisfaction of knowing he was right. If the horse died of his own accord, so be it.
Koopman had the mill truck and the trailer down beside them now and Logan saw they had managed to find a canvas sling from somewhere. The rescue-squad guy still had Mrs Dyer standing by on the phone and Logan took it from him.
'Okay, I'm yours,' he said and as he listened, he indicated to them where to put the sling. When he heard the poor woman's tactful rendering of Annie's message, he just smiled and shook his head.
'Terrific,' he said.'Nice to be appreciated.'
He handed the phone back and helped drag the two canvas sling straps under Pilgrim's barrel, through what was now a sea of red slush. Everyone was standing and Logan thought they all looked funny with their matching red knees. Someone handed him a dry jacket and for the first time since he was in the river he realized how cold he was.
Koopman and the driver hitched the ends of the sling to the hoist chains and then stood back with the others as Pilgrim was slowly lifted into the air and swung like a carcass onto the trailer. Logan climbed up there with two paramedics and they manhandled the horse's limbs so that eventually he lay as before on his side. Koopman passed the vet's things up to him while others spread blankets over the horse.
Logan gave another shot of steroids and took out a new bag of Plasmalyte. He suddenly felt very tired. He figured the chances of the horse being alive by the time they got to his clinic were odds on against.
'We'll call ahead,' Koopman said. 'So they'll know when to expect you.'
'Thanks.'
'All set now?'
'I guess so.'
Koopman slapped the rear end of the pickup that was hitched to the trailer and yelled for the driver to move out. It started slowly up the slope.
'Good luck,' Koopman called after them but Logan didn't seem to hear. The young deputy looked vaguely disappointed. It was all over and everyone was going home. There was a zipping sound behind him and he turned to look. The hunter was putting his rifle back in its bag.
'Thanks for your help,' Koopman said. The hunter nodded, swung the bag over his shoulder and walked away.
Robert woke with a jolt and for a moment thought he was in his office. The screen of his computer had gone berserk, quivering green lines racing each other across ranges of jagged peaks. Oh no, he thought, a virus. Rampaging through his files on the Dunford Securities case. Then he saw the bed with its covers neatly tented over what remained of his daughter's leg and he remembered where he was.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. The room was dark except for where the angle-lamp behind the bed cast a cocoon of soft light over Grace's head and her naked shoulders. Her eyes were closed and her face serene as if she didn't mind at all the snaking coils of plastic tube that had invaded her body. There was a tube into her mouth from the respirator and another up her nose and down into her stomach through which she could be fed. More tubes looped down from the bottles and bags that hung above the bed and they met in a tangled fury at her neck, as if fighting to be first into the valve slotted into her jugular. The valve was masked by flesh-colored tape, as were the electrodes on her temples and chest and the hole they had cut above one of her young breasts to insert a fiber-optic tube into her heart.
Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.
He leaned forward and gently pressed down a piece of tape that had come unstuck from one of the catheters in her arm. He looked up at the battery of machines each of whose precise purpose Robert had insisted on having them explain. Now, without having to move, he carried out a systematic check, scanned each screen, valve and fluid level to make sure nothing had happened while he slept. He knew it was all computerized and alarms would sound at the central monitoring desk around the corner if anything went wrong, but he had to see for himself. Satisfied now, still holding Grace's hand, he settled back in his seat. Annie was sleeping in a little room they had provided down the corridor. She had wanted him to wake her at midnight so that she could take over the vigil but as he himself had dozed Robert thought he would let her go on sleeping.
He stared at Grace's face and thought that amid all this brutish technology she looked like a child half her age. She had always been so healthy. Apart from having a knee stitched once when she fell off a bicycle, she hadn't been in a hospital since she was born. Though there had been drama enough then to last a good few years.
It was an emergency caesarean section. After twelve hours of labor they had given Annie an epidural and because nothing seemed likely to happen for a while, Robert had wandered off to the cafeteria to get himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich. When he came back up to her room half an hour later all hell had broken loose. It was like the deck of a warship, people in green running all over the place, wheeling equipment around, yelling orders. While he was away, someone told him, the internal monitoring had shown the baby was in distress. Like some hero from a forties war movie, the obstetrician had swept in and declared to his troops that he was 'going in'.
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 spawned 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 wiseguy 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 this 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.
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 had to pick them out and sluice it clean. Then he trimmed the ragged edges of flesh with scissors, stapled up the artery and sewed 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 times. 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.
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 McDonald'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.
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, potholed 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. 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 goodbye, 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 goodbye. 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 to 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 back seat 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 Glaus 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 feared 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.
'I want to say goodbye to him, Daddy. Could we go see him this morning? Before I go back to the hospital?'
Annie had spoken just once to Harry Logan. It had been an awkward call and though neither mentioned her threat to sue him, it had hung heavily over their every word. Logan had been charming and, in her tone at least, Annie got as near to an apology as she ever got. But since then, her news of Pilgrim had come only through Liz Hammond. Not wanting to add unduly to their worries over Grace, Liz had given Annie a picture of the horse's recovery that was as reassuring as it was false.
The wounds were healing well, she said. The skin grafts over the cannon bone had taken. The nasal bone repair looked better than they had ever dared hope. None of these was a lie. And none of them prepared Annie, Robert and Grace for what they were about to see as they came up the long drive and parked in front of Joan Dyer's house.
Mrs Dyer came out of the stable and crossed the yard toward them, wiping her hands on the sides of the old blue quilt jacket she always wore. The wind whipped strands of gray hair across her face and she smiled as she tidied them away. The smile was so odd and out of character that Annie was puzzled. It was probably just awkwardness at the sight of Grace being helped out onto her crutches by Robert.
'Hello Grace,' Mrs Dyer said. 'How are you dear?'
'She's doing just great, aren't you baby?' Robert said. Why can't he let her answer for herself? thought Annie. Grace smiled bravely.
'Yes, I'm fine.'
'Did you have a good Christmas? Lots of presents?'
'Zillions,' said Grace. 'We had a fabulous time, didn't we?' She looked at Annie.
'Fabulous,' Annie endorsed.
No one seemed to know what to say next and for a moment they all stood there in the cold wind, embarrassed. Clouds barreled furiously overhead and the red walls of the barn were suddenly set ablaze by a burst of sun.
'Grace wants to see Pilgrim,' said Robert. 'Is he in the barn?'
Mrs Dyer's face flickered.
'No. He's out back.'
Annie sensed something was wrong and could see Grace did too.
'Great,' said Robert. 'Can we go see him?'
Mrs Dyer hesitated but only for an instant.
'Of course.'
She turned and walked off. They followed her out of the yard and around to the old row of stalls at the back of the barn.
'Mind how you go. It's pretty muddy back here.'
She looked over her shoulder at Grace on her crutches then darted a look at Annie. It felt like a warning.
'She's pretty darn good on these things, don't you think Joan?' Robert said. 'I can't keep up.'
'Yes, I can see.' Mrs Dyer smiled, briefly.
'Why isn't he in the barn?' Grace asked. Mrs Dyer didn't answer. They were at the stalls now and she stopped by the only door that was closed and turned to face them. She swallowed hard and looked at Annie.
'I don't know how much Harry and Liz have told you.' Annie shrugged.
'Well, we know he's lucky to be alive,' Robert said. There was a pause. They were all waiting for Mrs Dyer to go on. She seemed to be searching for the right words.
'Grace,' she said. 'Pilgrim isn't how he used to be. He's been very disturbed by what happened.' Grace looked very worried suddenly and Mrs Dyer looked at Annie and Robert for help. 'To be honest, I'm not sure it's a good idea for her to see him.'
'Why? What—?' Robert started to say, but Grace cut him off.
'I want to see him. Open the door.'
Mrs Dyer looked at Annie for a decision. It seemed to Annie that they had already gone too far to turn back. She nodded. Reluctantly Mrs Dyer drew back the bolt on the top half of the door. There was an immediate explosion of sound inside the stall which startled them all. Then there was silence. Mrs Dyer slowly opened the top door and Grace peered in with Annie and Robert standing behind her.
It took a while for the girl's eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Then she saw him. Her voice when she spoke was so small and frail that the others could barely hear it.
'Pilgrim? Pilgrim?'
Then she gave a cry and turned away and Robert had to reach out quickly to stop her from falling.
'No! Daddy, no!'
He put his arms around her and led her back to the yard. The sound of her sobbing faded and was lost on the wind.
'Annie,' Mrs Dyer said. 'I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have let her.'
Annie looked at her blankly then stepped closer to the door of the stall. The smell of urine hit her in a sudden, pungent wave and she could see the floor was filthy with dung. Pilgrim was backed into the shadow of the far corner, watching her. His feet were splayed and his neck stretched so low that his head was little more than a foot above the ground.
His grotesquely scarred muzzle was tilted up at her, as if daring her to move and he was panting in short, nervy snorts. Annie felt a shiver at the nape of her neck and the horse seemed to sense it too for now he pinned back his ears and leered at her in a toothy, gothic parody of threat.
Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.
The meeting had been dragging on for almost an hour and Annie was bored. There were people perched all around her office, locked in a fierce and esoteric debate about which particular shade of pink would look best on an upcoming cover. The competing mock-ups were laid out before them. Annie thought they all looked vile.
'I just don't think our readers are Day-Glo kind of people,' somebody was saying. The art director, who clearly did think so, was getting more and more defensive.
'It isn't Day-Glo,' he said. 'It's electric candy.'
'Well I don't think they're electric candy people either. It's too eighties.'
'Eighties? That's absurd!'
Annie would normally have cut it short long before it got to this. She would simply have told them what she thought and that would have been that. The problem was, she was finding it almost impossible to concentrate and, more worryingly, to care.
It had been the same all morning. First there had been a breakfast meeting to make peace with the Hollywood agent whose 'black hole' client had gone berserk at having his profile canceled. Then she'd had the production people in her office for two hours spreading doom about the soaring cost of paper. One of them had been wearing a cologne of such dizzying awfulness that Annie had needed to open all the windows afterward. She could still smell it now.
In recent weeks she had come to rely more than ever on her friend and deputy, Lucy Friedman, the magazine's resident style guru. The cover they were now discussing was tied to a piece Lucy had commissioned on lounge lizards and featured a grinning photograph of a perennial rock star whose wrinkles had already been contractually removed by computer.
Sensing, no doubt, that Annie's mind was elsewhere, Lucy was effectively chairing the meeting. She was a big, pugnacious woman with a wicked sense of humor and a voice like a rusty car muffler. She enjoyed turning things upside down and did it now by changing her mind and saying the background shouldn't be pink at all but fluorescent lime-green.
As the argument raged, Annie drifted off again. In an office across the street, a man wearing spectacles and a business suit was standing by the window, doing some kind of t'ai chi routine. Annie watched the precise, dramatic swooping of his arms and how still he kept his head and she wondered what it did for him.
Something caught her eye and she saw through the glass panel by the door that Anthony, her assistant, was mouthing and pointing at his watch. It was nearly noon and she was supposed to be meeting Robert and Grace at the orthopedic clinic.
'What do you think Annie?' Lucy said.
'Sorry Luce, what was that?'
'Lime-green. With pink cover lines.'
'Sounds great.' The art director muttered something that Annie chose to ignore. She sat forward and laid her hands flat on the desk. 'Listen, can we wind this up now? I have to be somewhere.'
There was a car waiting for her and she gave the driver the address and sat in the back, hunched inside her coat, as they wove across to the East Side and headed uptown. The streets and those who walked them looked gray and dreary. It was that season of gloom, when the new year had been in long enough for all to see it was just as bad as the old one. Waiting at some lights, Annie watched two derelicts huddled in a doorway, one sleeping while the other declaimed grandly to the sky. Her hands felt cold and she shoved them deeper into her coat pockets.
They passed Lester's, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school. They hadn't talked about school yet but soon she would have to go back and face the stares of the other girls. It wasn't going to be easy but the longer they left it, the tougher it would be. If the new leg fit alright, the one they were going to try today at the clinic, Grace would soon be walking. When she'd got the hang of it, she should go back to school.
Annie got there twenty minutes late and Robert and Grace were already in with Wendy Auerbach, the prosthetist. Annie declined the receptionist's offer to take her coat and was led down a narrow white corridor to the fitting room. She could hear their voices.
The door was open and none of them saw her come in. Grace was sitting in her panties on a bed. She was looking down at her legs but Annie couldn't see them because the prosthetist was kneeling there, adjusting something. Robert stood to one side, watching.
'How's that?' said the prosthetist. 'Is that better?' Grace nodded. 'Alrighty. Now see how it feels standing.'
She stood clear and Annie watched Grace frown in concentration and ease herself slowly off the bed, wincing as the false leg took her weight. Then she looked up and saw Annie.
'Hi,' she said and did her best to smile. Robert and the prosthetist turned.
'Hi,' Annie said. 'How's it going?' Grace shrugged. How pale she looked, thought Annie. How frail.
'The kid's a natural,' said Wendy Auerbach. 'Sorry, we had to start without you, Mom.'
Annie put up a hand to show she didn't mind. The woman's relentless jollity irritated her. 'Alrighty' was bad enough. Calling her 'Mom' was dicing with death. She was finding it difficult to take her eyes off the leg and was aware that Grace was studying her reaction. The leg was flesh-colored and, apart from the hinge and valve hole at the knee, a reasonable match for her left leg. Annie thought it looked hideous, outrageous. She didn't know what to say. Robert came to the rescue. 'The new socket fits a treat.' After the first fitting, they had taken another plaster mold of Grace's stump and fashioned this new and better socket. Robert's fascination with the technology had made the whole process easier. He had taken Grace into the workshop and asked so many questions he probably now knew enough to be a prosthetist himself. Annie knew the purpose was to distract not just Grace but also himself from the horror of it all. But it worked and Annie was grateful.
Someone brought in a walking-frame and Robert and Annie watched Wendy Auerbach show Grace how to use it. This would only be needed for a day or two, she said, until Grace got the feel of the leg. Then she could just use a cane and pretty soon she'd find she didn't even need that. Grace sat down again and the prosthetist bounced through a list of maintenance and hygiene tips. She talked mainly to Grace, but tried to involve the parents too. Soon, this narrowed down to Robert for it was he who asked the questions and anyway she seemed to sense Annie's dislike.
'Alrighty,' she said eventually, clapping her hands. 'I think we're done.'
She escorted them to the door. Grace kept the leg on but walked with crutches. Robert carried the walking-frame and a bag of things Wendy Auerbach had given them to look after the leg. He thanked her and they all waited as she opened the door and offered Grace one last piece of advice.
'Remember. There's hardly a thing you did before that you can't do now. So, young lady, you just get up on that darn horse of yours as soon as you can.'
Grace lowered her eyes. Robert put his hand on her shoulder. Annie shepherded them before her out of the door.
'She doesn't want to,' she said through her teeth as she went past. 'And neither does the darn horse. Alrighty?'
Pilgrim was wasting away. The broken bones and the scars on his body and legs had healed, but the damage done to the nerves in his shoulder had rendered him lame. Only a combination of confinement and physical therapy could help him. But such was the violence with which he exploded at anyone's approach that the latter was impossible without risk of serious injury. Confinement alone was thus his lot. In the dark stench of his stall, behind the barn where he had known days far happier, Pilgrim grew thin.
Harry Logan had neither the courage nor the skill of Dorothy Chen in administering shots. And so Mrs Dyer's boys devised a sly technique to help him. They cut a small, sliding hatch in the bottom section of the door through which they pushed in Pilgrim's food and water. When a shot was due they would starve him. With Logan standing ready with his syringe, they would put down pails of feed and water outside then open the hatch. The boys would often get a fit of giggles as they hid to one side and waited for Pilgrim's hunger and thirst to get the better of his fear. When he reached tentatively out to sniff the pails, the boys would ram down the hatch and trap his head long enough for Logan to get the shot into his neck. Logan hated it. He especially hated the way the boys laughed.
In early February he called Liz Hammond and they arranged to meet at the stables. They took a look at Pilgrim through the stall door and then went to sit in Liz's car. They sat in silence for a while watching Tim and Eric hosing down the yard, fooling around.
'I've had enough Liz,' Logan said. 'It's all yours now.'
'Have you spoken with Annie?'
'I called her ten times. I told her a month ago the horse ought to be put down. She won't listen. But I tell you, I can't handle this anymore. Those two fucking kids drive me nuts. I'm a vet, Lizzie. I'm supposed to stop animals suffering, not make them suffer. I've had it.'
Neither of them spoke for a moment, just sat there, gravely assessing the boys. Eric was trying to light a cigarette but Tim kept aiming the hose at him.
'She was asking me if there were horse psychiatrists,' said Liz. Logan laughed.
'That horse doesn't need a shrink, he needs a lobotomy.' He thought for a while. 'There's this horse chiropractor guy over in Pittsfield but he doesn't do cases like this. Can't think of anybody who does. Can you?'
Liz shook her head.
There was no one. Logan sighed. The whole thing, he concluded, had been one goddamn miserable fuckup from the start. And there was no sign he could see of it getting any better.