Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

Grace looked at her and the hate and hurt in her eyes almost took Annie's breath away.

'Why should I tell you?'

'Grace—'

'No why? Huh? Because you care? Or just because you have to know everything and control everything and not let anybody do anything unless you say so! Is that it?'

'Oh Grace.' Annie suddenly felt she needed light and she reached across to turn on the lamp on the bedside table but Grace lashed out.

'Don't! I don't want it on!'

The blow hit Annie's hand and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. The ceramic base broke into three clean pieces.

'You pretend you care but all you really care about is you and what people think of you. And your job and your big-shot friends.'

She propped herself up on her elbows as if to bolster a rage already made worse by the tears distorting her face.

'Anyway, you said you didn't want me to ride again so why the hell should I tell you? Why should I tell you anything? I hate you!'

Annie tried to take hold of her but Grace pushed her away.

'Get out! Just leave me alone! Get out!'

Annie stood up and felt herself sway so that for a moment she thought she might fall. Almost blindly, she made her way across the pool of light that she knew would take her to the door. She had no clear idea of what she would do when she got there. She merely knew that she was obeying some final separating command. As she reached the door she heard Grace say something and she turned and looked back toward the bed. She could see Grace was facing the wall again and that her shoulders were shaking.

'What?' Annie said.

She waited and whether it was her own grief or Grace's that shrouded the words a second time she didn't know, but there was something about the way they were spoken that made her go back. She walked to the bed and stood close enough to touch but didn't, for fear her hand might be struck away.

'Grace? I didn't hear what you said.'

'I said… I've started.'

It came amid sobs and for a moment Annie didn't understand.

'You've started?'

'My period.'

'What, tonight?'

Grace nodded.

'I felt it happen downstairs and when I came up there was blood in my panties. I washed them in the bathroom but it wouldn't come out.'

'Oh Gracie.'

Annie reached down and put a hand on Grace's shoulder and Grace turned. There was no anger in her face now, only pain and sorrow and Annie sat on the bed and took her daughter in her arms. Grace clung to her and Annie felt the child's sobs convulse them as if they were but one body.

'Who's going to want me?'

'What, honey?'

'Whoever's going to want me? Nobody will.'

'Oh Grade, that's not true…'

'Why should they?'

'Because you're you. You're incredible. You're beautiful and you're strong. And you're the bravest person I ever met in my whole life.'

They held each other and wept. And when they could speak again, Grace told her she hadn't meant the terrible things she'd said and Annie said she knew, but there was truth there too, and how as a mother she had got so many, many things wrong. They sat with their heads on each other's shoulder and let flow from their hearts words they'd barely dared utter to themselves.

'All those years you and Dad were trying for another baby? Every night I used to pray this time let it be okay. And it wasn't for your sake or because I wanted a brother or a sister or anything like that. But just so I wouldn't have to go on being so… oh I don't know.'

'Tell me.'

'So special. Because I was the only one, I felt you both expected me to be so good at everything, so perfect and I wasn't, I was just me. And now I've gone and spoiled it all anyway.'

Annie held her more tightly and stroked her hair and told her this wasn't so. And she thought, but didn't say, what a perilous commodity love was and that the proper calibration of its giving and taking was too precise by far for mere humans.

How long they sat there Annie couldn't tell. But it was long after their crying had ceased and the wetness of their tears had grown cold on her dress. Grace fell asleep in her arms and didn't wake even when Annie laid her down then laid herself beside her.

She listened to her daughter's breathing, even and trusting, and for a while watched the breeze stirring the pale drapes at the window. Then Annie slept too, a deep and dreamless sleep, while outside the earth rolled vast and silent under the sky.

Robert looked out through the rain-streaked window of the black cab at the woman on the billboard who'd been waving the same wave at him for the last ten minutes. It was one of those electronically animated jobs, where the arm actually moved. She was wearing Ray-Bans and a bright pink bathing suit and in her other hand had what was probably meant to be a pina colada. She was doing her best to persuade Robert and several hundred other traffic-snarled, rain-soaked travelers that they'd be better off buying an air ticket to Florida.

It was debatable. And a harder sell than it seemed, Robert knew, because the English newspapers had been going to town on stories about British tourists in Florida being mugged, raped, and shot. As the cab crawled forward, Robert could see some wag had scrawled by the woman's feet, Don't forget your Uzi .

He realized too late that he should have taken the Underground. Every time he'd been to London in the last ten years they'd been digging up some new section of the road out to the airport and he was pretty sure they didn't just save it up for when he came. The flight to Geneva was due to leave in thirty-five minutes and at this rate he'd miss it by about two years. The cabdriver had already informed him, with something suspiciously approaching relish, that out at the airport there was a 'right peasouper'.

There was. And he didn't miss his flight; it was canceled. He sat in the business-class lounge and for a couple of hours enjoyed the camaraderie of a growing band of harassed executives, each pursuing his or her own self-important path to a coronary. He tried calling Annie but got the answering machine and he wondered where they were. He'd forgotten to ask their plans for this first Memorial Day in years they hadn't spent together.

He left a message and sang a few bars of the 'Halls of Montezuma' for Grace, something he did over breakfast on this day as a cue for groans and missiles. Then he took a final look at the notes of today's meeting (which had gone well) and the paperwork for tomorrow's (which might also if he ever got there) and then he put it all away and went for another walk around the departure area.

As he was looking idly and for no good reason at a rack of cashmere golf sweaters that he wouldn't have wished upon his worst enemy, someone said hello and he looked up and saw a man who came as close to that category as anyone he knew.

Freddie Kane was something medium-to-small in publishing, one of those people you never questioned too closely about the exact nature of their business, for fear of embarrassing not them but yourself. He compensated for whatever deficiences might lie in that murky area by making it clear that he had a personal fortune and furthermore knew every piece of gossip there was to know about anyone who was anyone in New York. By forgetting Robert's name on each of the four or five occasions they'd been introduced, Freddie had made it equally clear that he didn't count Annie Graves's husband among this number. Annie, on the other hand, he very much did. 'Hi! I thought it was you! How're you doing!' He thumped one hand on Robert's shoulder and used the other to pump his hand in a way that somehow managed to be simultaneously both violent and flaccid. Robert smiled and noted that the man had on a pair of those glasses movie stars were all now wearing in the hope that it made them look more intellectual. He'd clearly forgotten Robert's name again.