And there wasn’t much I could do to stabilize her. I lifted my hands up, squeezed her harder with my legs. But it was all up to Sky now, and the instinct she shared with all horses: not to go down.
She didn’t.
One of those Olympic miracles.
Somehow she got her hind legs underneath her, and kept moving. Somehow I managed to keep her in line. Got her a good distance into the last jump. The skinny. They were known as verticals, too. Made them look higher than they actually were. Right now this one looked as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
Sky didn’t care. She’d come this far, too. One more time she flew, and we’d gone clear. She skidded when she landed. It didn’t matter now.
Then I heard the loudest cheers I’d ever heard, at least cheers for me. I turned and with my left glove did my best to rub water out of my eyes and squinted through the rain one last time.
I still couldn’t see much in the ring, but I could see our number: 38.4.
I’d won the gold medal.
Mom had gotten silver. I yelled my head off then, knowing only Sky could hear me, the sound of the crowd combined with the sound of the storm. I walked Sky over to where Mom and Gus were.
“You were great!” Mom shouted up at me.
“So were you!”
“You’re better!” she said.
“How did you keep that horse from going down?” Mom said.
I leaned down and shouted back at her.
“Way I was brought up.”
I wasn’t sure where to go then, what to do. Neither Gus nor Mom nor I had allowed ourselves to discuss what would happen if one of us won. So I didn’t know when the medal ceremony would start, or even where. All I knew was that I needed a moment alone with my horse.
So I walked her back to the schooling ring, the footing in there nearly underwater by now. Emilio helped me down, then hugged me. I felt like a stupidly wet swamp thing and didn’t care. I was stupidly happy. I walked over and leaned against the fence, put my head back as far as it would go and let the rain hit me in the face, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Then I walked back over to Sky and got close to her ear and told her, Bad Becky style, that holy shit, we just beat them all.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN
Four days later
I WALKED ACROSS the schooling ring toward Tyler Cullen, about to do something I could never have imagined. But knowing I had to do it.
Tyler was roughly fifteen minutes away from being part of the jump-off that would decide who won the team gold medal. Five riders had qualified for the jump-off, and Tyler was one of them.
I wasn’t.
Sky had finally gotten her first Olympic rail, on the last day of the team competition. But that was all it took to keep us from continuing. After everything my horse had done, she finally got tired. It was a cheap rail, at the third fence. It had shocked the hell out of me, just because of the way she’d performed every time we’d been in that ring, even in the rain. Didn’t matter. She still had enough in her, and enough heart, to finish strong. We had come that close to going clean for the Olympics, giving ourselves a chance to throw what Gus called a perfect game. And had put more pressure on Mom and Tyler.
They were our team now. We’d all still win gold if their combined score took first in the jump-off. But all I could do now was watch, which wasn’t how this part of the story was supposed to end: Mom needed Tyler to get a gold medal.
And Tyler needed her to get one of his own.
I needed both of them.
The team competition had started out with twenty countries, cut to ten after the first round on Sunday afternoon. And after the final qualifying round tonight, only the five riders who’d gone clear remained. All of them would start even in the jump-off.
Teddy Milestone, from England, took the ring first. His horse knocked down two rails, one early, one late. Matthew was next in. He got one. But Eric had just gone clear. Now for the US—us—to win the gold medal, both Tyler and Mom had to go clean. Or, if one of them did get a rail, the other one had to beat Eric’s time of 38.8.
That was the margin for error.
By now they were extending the time between horses entering the ring, maximizing the drama on the last night of the show-jumping competition. Tyler had complained after his first round that his back was seizing up, and he was worried about spasms. The slowdown allowed him a few extra minutes after Eric’s round to get down and do some stretching.
It was right before he was ready to get back up on Galahad that I went over and gave him a hug, thinking it might be the craziest thing to happen in this whole crazy year.
“Not too hard!” he said.