But Daniel wasn’t here.
Somehow in that moment it was as if Gus were reading my mind.
“Focus,” he said. “Good’s not good enough today, for either one of you. You both need to be great. And you can’t do that worrying about what’s going down with Daniel tomorrow.”
I knew he was only talking to me in that moment.
Then he went over the course one more time, for both of us. Distances and combinations and opportunities to slash some time and rollbacks and how the water jump, where it was positioned, might be the greatest challenge of all. We could make mistakes, but not there. A bad landing, he said, and good-bye.
“Fourteen jumps,” he said. “Go clean. Get to the jump-off. Go clean there and go fast. Both of you get pretty ribbons. Go home.”
Now I grinned at him.
“You’re going too fast for me,” I joked.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Gus said.
“Anything else?” Maggie Atwood said to him.
“As a matter of fact, there is,” he said. “Think how good I’ll look if the two of you look good.” Then he spun his chair around and headed for the schooling ring. I watched him and wondered what was really going through his head today, training the woman he was involved with and probably in love with, and training me. With the stakes the same for both of us.
Mom went to get her horse, saying she’d decided to walk him up to the ring today. Gus watched her go. Smiling. I saw him do that sometimes when he didn’t know I was watching him, looking at her as if it were the first time he’d ever seen her here, when they were both in their twenties.
Then he turned to me.
“You want to know the truth about all the shit that’s going on?” he said. “That ring behind us will be the best possible place in the world for you to be today. Maybe the easiest.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s the only place where you’re in charge of things,” he said.
I went up to the pedestrian bridge to watch Mom’s round, her first in weeks without Daniel, thinking that maybe what was happening this weekend, and then tomorrow with Daniel’s arraignment, had brought Mom and me even closer together. The Atwood women against the world.
But once she was in the ring, she didn’t need me, or Daniel, or Gus. She rode Coronado like a dream. There was one close call, almost not putting enough air underneath him on the water jump, clearing the water by less than a foot. No hesitation today on the rollback. She took the inside turn, even with that big horse, like a champ. Finished strong. Still early in the class, of course. But for now, she had the best time. More important, she was in the jump-off.
So far, so good.
I walked down from the bridge and got on my horse in the schooling ring. Only rooting for me now, and Sky. And from the time the buzzer sounded, it seemed as if both of us were in charge.
We didn’t need to break any records. Just needed to go clean. When we finished, we were a half second behind Mom’s time of 71.6. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were in the jump-off, too. By the time the round was over, there were five riders who’d gone clean. Tess, Jennifer, Matthew, Mom, and me.
Back in the schooling ring, there was no conversation between Mom and me as we leisurely flatted our horses to keep them warm. Tess McGill pulled up alongside me at one point and said, “You and your mom riding like this in the same event and the same ring? Crazy.”
“You have no idea,” I said.
Tess was beautiful, talented, rich, never big-timed anybody because of who her dad was. Always had great horses. As great as she was, she still hadn’t made the Olympics yet. It meant she wanted it as badly as Mom and I did.
Maybe more, if that was even possible.
Mom went first in the jump-off, went clean, came in at 35.5. Sky and I went next. She was fast, but somehow Coronado had found an extra gear today. We came in at 36.2. Mom was still in second by the time Tess McGill was in the ring. I was fourth.
Then Tess proceeded to blow everybody away. Her ride, Volage du Val Henry, pretty name for a pretty horse, went around the jump-off course at what looked like the speed of light, finishing clean in 34 flat.
Still not a bad Sunday for the women of Atwood Farm, all in all.
Monday wasn’t anything like that at the Palm Beach County Courthouse in West Palm Beach. As soon as the judge in Daniel’s assault case had released him on his own recognizance, ICE was waiting for him outside the courtroom.
ONE HUNDRED NINE
DAD HAD TOLD ALL OF US—me, Mom, Grandmother, Gus—to say our good-byes before Dad walked Daniel out of the courtroom and into federal custody.