They had been going slowly, she said, but suddenly Coronado had reared up on his hind legs, making an unfamiliar, guttural sound. He threw her off to the side, then fell on her before she had the chance to roll away. She said she felt as if she were drowning. She tried to breathe, but couldn’t, as if she were underwater, not underneath her horse. The last thing she remembered was the day going completely dark.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Grandmother said, barely hiding the fear beneath her anger.
Daniel liked to say that Caroline Atwood wasn’t just any tough old bird, she was the toughest of them all. Not tonight.
“I don’t feel lucky,” Mom said, her words dying in the air a few inches from her mouth.
“Well, you are,” her mother said.
“People talk all the time about being strong in the broken places,” Mom said. She paused, wincing as she took in a breath. “Except I feel like all my places are broken places right now.”
She reached out. I took her hand, gently, afraid of squeezing hard enough to break it.
“Finally found something I can’t fix myself,” she said. “Me.”
She managed a small smile then, though it appeared to take all the energy she had in her. I’d never seen her strength at such a low point.
I’d been lucky in my life, luckier than a lot of other riders I’d visited in the hospital when they had gotten hurt. Even with my share of spills, I’d never broken anything.
I remembered the first time I fell off a horse. Grandmother had been in the practice ring that day. She hadn’t even made a move in my direction. When I’d finally cleaned myself off and walked over to her, she’d seen my red eyes and said, “If you want to cry, go watch a sad movie.”
We’d always been big on tough love in our family, but now the injured rider was Mom.
“How’s my horse?” Mom said now.
Now I felt myself smiling, for the first time since I’d found her.
“Pissed,” I said. “He couldn’t understand why he didn’t get to come to the hospital, too.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” she said, “or they’ll be wheeling me back into surgery.”
“I’ll try,” I said, gently squeezing her hand again. “But you know how hard it is for me to hold back the funny.”
“None of this is funny!” my grandmother said.
She was on the other side of Mom’s bed. In a gallant attempt at affording us privacy, Daniel stood in the corner.
“You’ll ride him for me tomorrow?” Mom said to me.
“Don’t worry about that right now, Maggie,” Grandmother said.
“You worry about me,” Mom said. “I’ll worry about Coronado.”
“I got you,” I said.
“Could we stop worrying about the goddamn horse for one minute?” Grandmother snapped. “Good God, Maggie. He threw you. He fell on you. It wasn’t the other way around.”
“But then he led me right to her,” I said.
Grandmother made a snorting sound, not unlike one of her own horses.
“Great,” she said. “Million-dollar rescue animal. Just what we needed to bet the farm on.”
“Mom,” Maggie said, “that’s a little dramatic.”
“Maybe,” Grandmother said. “But if not now, you tell me when?”
My mom closed her eyes now. For a moment, I thought she’d gone right to sleep with the rest of us still in the room.
“She needs rest,” Grandmother said.
My mom opened her eyes.
“I need to get better,” Mom said. “I asked Dr. Garry about the recovery time.”
“Probably asked before the anesthesia wore off,” Grandmother said.
“I asked how many weeks,” Mom said. “Doc gave me one of those patronizing doctor smiles and said, ‘You mean months.’”
She squeezed my hand now, hard enough to surprise me.
“I told him I don’t have months,” she said.
My whole life, I had been watching Mom in and out of the ring. I’d seen her compete from here to Calgary and back. Seen her take on the most famous riders in the world and beat them, men and women. I knew how much pride she took in not showing her emotions, win or lose, especially after she lost. She was every bit as tough as her mother, even though she didn’t feel the need to broadcast that.
But I thought she might cry now.
“This was the one,” she said.
I didn’t have the words to make her feel better, or hurt less. Maybe no one did right now. I stood there holding her hand and wished it had been me who’d gotten thrown and not her. Wished that for once in my stupid life I’d been on time.