He paused for dramatic effect.
“Mr. Steve Gorton himself,” he said.
“What!” Grandmother yelled, loud enough I was afraid the artwork was going to fall off the wall behind her.
“There is no way you got that jerk to help you!” Mom said, and even slapped Dad on the arm.
I laughed.
“TMZ,” I said to him.
“What the hell does that mean?” Grandmother said.
“My daughter will explain it later,” Dad said. “Right now, it’s time to really get this party started.”
Mom said, “He means because he’s here.”
The night only got louder after that. Dinner eventually was served, not that anyone had much interest in it by that time. Daniel wanted to know all about the jump-off for the individual, and about the storm, and about how Sky had managed at the last second not to fall down.
It was near midnight by then. There was one last raucous conversation about whether we might need to have a few more bottles of wine when the door to our room opened and someone shouted, “Hey, is this the gold medal party I heard about?”
Steve Gorton.
Dad leaned over and whispered, “I might have told him where we’d be, just for my own twisted amusement.”
“Thanks so much,” I whispered back.
Gorton stood there in the middle of the room as if just by showing up he’d immediately turned into our host.
“Well,” he said, “it wasn’t easy, but we all managed to end up with gold medals in the end.”
“We?” Tyler Cullen said to Gus.
Gus lowered his voice for once and said, “A horse’s ass to the end.”
Mom sighed, breaking a silence that was beyond awkward. Gorton stared at us. We all stared back at him, until the smile had completely disappeared from his face.
Finally, after what felt like an hour had passed, he said, “I get it, okay? I get it,” and turned and walked out.
The noise level shot right back up to where it was before, and maybe beyond, before more bottles of wine appeared, as if by magic. Grandmother then stood up one last time, raised her water glass, and announced that she wanted to make one more toast, which was why nobody noticed Daniel and me as we slipped out.
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE
DANIEL AND I WALKED over the bridge known as Pont des Arts. We held hands. I had already asked if he wanted to talk about the detention center.
“Not tonight,” he said.
He asked if I knew where we were headed.
“Right now,” I asked, “or in general?”
“Either one,” he said.
“Not a clue,” I said.
Then I told him that I knew the damn Louvre was over on this side of the river somewhere. I looked over at him and saw that he was smiling.
“I should have left the party earlier,” he said, smiling, “and walked this particular course myself.”
“You know they call Paris the City of Lights, right?” I said.
“I believe I might have heard that.”
I giggled. I wasn’t drunk. The night air had helped out with that. But I was just light-headed enough. In a good way. Knowing it wasn’t just the wine.
“Well, I didn’t think the lights of Paris were so great when I was coming up on that water jump in a monsoon,” I said.
“You got over it,” Daniel said.
“My horse got over,” I said.
“You two are a good pair,” he said. “You take care of each other.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes, still holding hands. He was as comfortable with it as he’d ever been. Daniel being Daniel.
“You know,” I said finally, “I was thinking that if Dad had gotten you out a few days earlier, you could have been here in time to help train Mom.”
“It is like I told her, she didn’t need me,” he said. “What I really wanted was to make it here in time to watch you.”
“Get a rail,” he said.
“Get another gold medal,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “that old thing.”
“By the way?” Daniel said. “Gus thinks it’s time for you and Maggie to switch trainers again.”
“He might have mentioned that to me, too,” I said. “But I couldn’t tell if it was the whiskey talking.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Now I smiled. “I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “But you definitely show promise.”
He asked if I was getting tired. I told him Sky was the one who ought to be tired after the way she’d carried me, and not just in Paris. Then he asked what I wanted to do when we got back to Florida. I said it was time for me to get back to school.