“Doctors can be wrong about the speed of athletes’ recovery time,” I said.
That was all I had.
She looked up at me and said, “Told you before. Don’t make me laugh, kiddo.”
Then she closed her eyes again. A few minutes later she was asleep. Grandmother led Daniel and me out of the room.
Once Daniel had gently shut the door behind us, Grandmother said, “I hate this sport.”
I looked at her.
“You know you don’t mean that,” I said.
“Don’t tell me what I mean,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You want to be sorry about something?” Grandmother snapped. “Be sorry you weren’t there.”
Then she walked away.
FIVE
Maggie
HAPPY NEW YEAR to me, Maggie Atwood thought bitterly.
No one in the room had spoken of the multiple Olympic qualifiers over the next several months that would decide which four riders—one an alternate—would represent the United States in jumping in Paris. Nobody had even spoken the word Olympics. But it was the thousand-pound horse in the room. Like her dream horse had tried to crush her whole world.
She’d gone out for a trail ride, an equestrian walk in the park, and ended up here.
Broken.
She’d been bred to her sport the way horses were bred to it. She aced the fractional calculations that made the difference between winning and losing—the split seconds of timing, the measure of an inside turn, the pressure of a horse’s back leg on a rail that stayed in place versus one that fell, the numbers that measured the distance between first place and fifth. When she made mistakes in the ring, she owned them. Somebody else won. You lost.
And sometimes being the better rider was less important than riding the better horse. The more expensive horse. Simple, basic economics.
Then Coronado came along, and she was the one with a top-tier horse, one that really did change everything, for all of them. He was a Belgian warmblood, sired by a famous stallion named Chaco-Blue, who had been an FEI champion—International Federation for Equestrian Sports—in his career. The mare was a Belgian warmblood who had one of those fancy show names that Maggie loved: Hypnose Van Paemel. She had won a half dozen FEI events in her career.
Atwood Farm had a solid enough reputation. Caroline Atwood liked to tell Maggie that she never imagined herself getting rich in the horse business. But now they were just getting by, struggling, even. Her mother once told her that she’d retire the morning a groom or trainer found her facedown in a stall, because she planned to work until she died. In the past they’d travel with the horses to all the best shows—now it was only some of them.
“You know how they call equestrianism the sport of the rich and the poor rich?” Caroline asked Maggie, then answered her own question. “Sometimes I feel like we’re just poor.”
“I can do something else,” Maggie said.
“No,” her mother said, “you can’t. And neither can I.”
They couldn’t afford a horse like Coronado on their own, no matter which way Caroline and the accountants ran the numbers.
A friend of a friend had told Caroline about the horse. A barn owner in Lexington had run out of money and decided to cash out. He was banking on Coronado, his best horse, to bring top dollar. Caroline and Maggie had worked Coronado out, fell in love with him the way they had his bloodline. Found a deep-pockets partner in Steve Gorton, a New York hedge-fund guy with a place in Palm Beach who’d followed his Florida friends into horses.
Caroline Atwood had explained to Gorton that she thought the horse had a chance to be special, and proposed a fifty-fifty split, even knowing that it would be a scramble to come up with her end, going into her savings, still needing help from the bank, feeling no different than a desperate bettor at the racetrack.
“You’re the expert,” Gorton had said, then asked, “And what exactly do I get for my half?”
“Half the profits,” Caroline had said.
Most people, Maggie had observed, were intimidated by her mother. Not this guy.
He had laughed suddenly. The sound reminded Maggie of glass breaking.
“I was born at night, Caroline,” Gorton had said. “But not last night.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” she’d said.
The joke on Wall Street, he’d said, was that nothing was more limited than being a limited partner of Steve Gorton. Take it or leave it: he’d take care of 60 percent of the asking price, and she could take care of the horse, and decide who rode him.