Usually that would have been the rider’s job.
Mom’s job.
But Coronado’s saddle was empty.
TWO
“HE KNEW ENOUGH to come home,” Daniel said to me.
Home meant the barn.
One firm barn rule was that nobody went out on a trail ride alone. Mom had just done it—her idea of being a maverick. Now I had to break that same rule if I had any chance of saving her.
In my heart I knew that if the situation were reversed, Mom would jump on Sky and ride all the way to the Florida turnpike and back if that’s what it took to find me.
Now I jumped off Sky, handed her reins to George, one of the other grooms, and moved closer to Daniel and Emilio, keeping my distance, not wanting Coronado to spook more than he already had.
Then Daniel slowly reached for the horse’s bridle, talking softly to him in Spanish now. As he did, I came in behind them and put a foot in the stirrup closest to me.
“Let me go find her,” Daniel said.
“No,” I said.
He put his hand on my arm. I looked down, glaring his hand away.
“My mom,” I said. “Her horse.”
We had a brief stare-down, until he nodded and let go of the bridle.
Emilio gave me a leg up into the saddle. Mom’s saddle. Her horse. They were connected in the same way I was connected to Sky.
When I was on Sky and trying to get the distance between jumps exactly right, I was never really sure how much of it was me and how much of it was a combination of her breeding and training and instinct and even muscle memory. In those moments of trust between horse and rider, it was as if we were sharing one brain.
There was always a mystery, even some magic, to what horses knew. And didn’t.
Now I wanted Coronado to know where Mom was, and take me to her.
THREE
I’D RIDDEN CORONADO plenty, worked him out when Mom and Caroline traveled to look at horses for the barn, even jumped him one time when Mom was down with the flu.
This time I was just along for the ride, headed back out the trail along the Palm Beach Point canal, past the Nason barn next to the huge new barn being built by Wellington newcomers, a Kentucky family with money to burn.
Usually I loved being out here, loved the solitude of it and the quiet and the open space. Mom said she did, too, though sometimes I got more enjoyment when Mom wasn’t with me.
Not now. All I could think of was the question she’d once asked me about people who don’t ride. “How can they really feel alive?”
Please let her ask me again.
If her horse came back to the barn alone and she was somewhere out here, it had to be bad.
Coronado and I weren’t going fast. It’s one of the myths of our sport that a horse has to be going fast to throw its rider.
We were out into one of the last undeveloped parts of Wellington. Someday there would be barns out here, too.
Where was she? Was she badly injured? I could feel the panic building inside me. If somebody hadn’t found her by now, put her in a golf cart, or an ambulance, I was going to be the one. There had to be a damn good reason why she had ended up off her horse.
My eyes kept searching the narrow canal as we moved north, not wanting to see her down a glorified ditch.
If I hadn’t been late this morning, none of this would have happened.
I saw her then.
Saw her and felt the air coming out of me all at once, as if I’d been the one who’d gotten thrown. She was maybe fifty yards ahead, between the trail and the canal, on her side.
Motionless.
Except that her body seemed to be going in two different directions at once. The boots I’d ordered special from New York City, for her birthday a few weeks ago, were pointing toward the water, and her upper body was pointing toward the trail.
I was afraid my mother might have broken her neck. I’d seen it happen once before, in person, a Grand Prix event. A horse had refused a jump and threw his rider, who’d gone down and had stayed down until the ambulance was in the ring. He recovered from the injury to walk again, eventually. But he never rode again.
I walked Coronado to her, knelt down. Her eyes were closed, but I could see that she was breathing. She was still wearing her helmet, caked with dirt, like the rest of her.
I knew enough not to move her. I just leaned close.
“Mom,” I said. “I got you.”
Then I took the phone out of my back pocket and dialed 911 thinking, Yeah, Becky, you got her.
A half hour too late.
FOUR
AWAKE, IF NOT ALERT, Mom was telling us about the fox that had appeared out of nowhere.
She had come through the surgery to repair the small fracture in her pelvis and the torn medial collateral ligament in her left knee. She had narrowly missed puncturing a lung, but there was no treatment but the passage of time to heal the two broken ribs.