When I opened my eyes I could see Gus looking down at me. And Daniel.
Where did he come from?
Daniel started to reach down for me when Gus said, “Don’t touch her!”
“Sorry,” Daniel said.
“Becky?” Gus said now.
He almost never called me by my name.
“Here,” I said.
My voice sounded as if it were coming from inside the barn.
“Do me a favor?” Gus said.
“Sure,” I said, in the same weak voice.
“Lift one of your legs for me,” he said.
Sounded like a simple enough task. Lift a leg. Anybody could do that. But when I tried to lift my right one, I felt like it had weights attached to it. Like the heavy ones we occasionally used in the gym.
Finally, I got the leg off the ground.
Gus said something I didn’t hear right away.
“What?” I said.
“Now an arm, please,” he said.
I did that.
“Good girl,” he said.
“Becky,” Daniel said. “Where does it hurt the most?”
“Everywhere,” I said.
Daniel turned to Gus.
“Let’s help her sit up,” he said.
“Carefully,” Gus said.
I reached up to them with both hands. Gus, leaning forward as far as he could in his chair, took one. Daniel took the other. Slowly they got me into a sitting position. I mostly felt the move in my upper back, not the hip area. I saw two rails next to me on the ground.
“We need to get you to the hospital,” Daniel said.
“Where did you come from, by the way?” I said.
“Your mom beat me to Gus’s today,” he said. “There was something wrong with the strap on her helmet. She asked me to come over here and pick up her old one.”
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” I said. “I’m just sore and a little stiff.”
“Daniel will take you,” Gus said, as if that settled that.
Daniel started to take my hand again. I told him I could stand up on my own. And did. Wobbly at first. But upright. Telling myself I wasn’t going down again. Screw that.
I asked where Sky was, and Gus told me Emilio had already taken her back inside the barn. We began to slow-walk out of the ring in that direction. Daniel was on one side of me. Gus rode alongside me on the other.
“It was the sun,” I said, even though neither of them had asked what happened. “Got me and got my horse.”
“Like I said,” Gus said. “Shit happens.”
He gave me a long look and said, “Happened to me that way once.”
By the time Daniel and I got to the gate, after what felt like an hour and a half, I realized Gus wasn’t with us. I turned and saw that he was back in the ring, near the jump where I’d crash-landed.
Staring back up into the sun.
EIGHTY
NO CONCUSSION, I FOUND out at Wellington Regional, first thing. No broken bones. No cracked ribs. Just some bruising, mostly where I’d landed on my hip. I hadn’t been injured nearly as badly as Mom had been, even if I did feel as if Sky hadn’t just tossed me but run me over.
Mom and Grandmother were in the waiting room when Dr. Garry was finished poking and prodding and X-raying and shining lights and asking questions.
“You were lucky, young lady,” Grandmother said.
I grinned.
“I must get that from Dad’s side of the family,” I said.
“Not funny,” she said.
“Kind of funny?” I said.
“You kind of need to take a couple of days off,” Mom said.
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
“What did Dr. Garry say?” she said.
“That my body would tell me when it was okay to ride again,” I said. “But for now I should go home and take a hot bath, then a shot of tequila before bedtime, and call him in the morning.”
“Again with the jokes,” Grandmother said.
“Well,” I said, “I may have made up the part about the hot bath.”
Most of the pain I was still feeling was in my upper back and neck area, almost like whiplash, which I knew happened to riders who’d gotten thrown the way I had.
I did take a hot bath when I got home, got into bed, alternated heat and ice to the back of my neck for the rest of the afternoon. I decided to wait until after dinner to medicate with a glass of the Patrón that Dad had bought me for Christmas. I was about to call him to tell him what had happened, then changed my mind. As cool as he was, he was going to tell me to take some time off, same as Mom had.