Every Wild Heart Page 11

  “So you’re just going to get rid of her? All because she doesn’t behave the way you want her to?”

  “Listen—”

  “No,” Nic interrupted. Tru snapped his head up from the flake of hay he was working on, and eyed her, worried. Nic reached out to him and murmured quietly that she was sorry. She just didn’t feel like hearing any more about how hard it was to keep a horse that didn’t play well with others. “Are you going to stand there watching me the whole time?” she asked Denny without turning around.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  A few minutes later, the phone rang in the office. Nic could feel Denny’s hesitation. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, without looking away from Tru.

  “Stay out of Tru’s stall. I mean it.”

  Nic turned and snapped her hand off her forehead in salute. She’d never done this before.

  Denny’s eyebrows knit together. The phone kept ringing. He narrowed his eyes at Nic one last time and then strode off, boots echoing as he walked the length of the aisle and stepped into the office.

  There was no one else around. Tru pulled mouthfuls of hay from his flake and chewed peacefully. Nic, as though drawn to her, peered toward Peach’s stall. The horse had not stopped moving since Nic had arrived; she seemed agitated by the girl’s presence.

  Nic took a second apple from her bag and crossed the aisle. She opened Peach’s stall door just wide enough to slip inside. Peach was a few hands taller than Tru, but it was her expression as much as her size that gave Nic the impression that the horse towered over her. Tru had a soft, honest eye, but this horse’s eye was hard, a glint of danger in the shadowy stall. Peach breathed quickly, smelling the apple. Nic’s head thrummed.

  And then a strange thing happened. The sounds of the barn—the horses eating and shifting and breathing all around them—fell away, and it was just the two of them.

  Nic held out the apple. Peach watched her. The horse drew up her head and flared her nostrils, huffing out hot bursts of air. Nic thought Peach was just about to step forward and take the apple when they heard the sound of laughter. She glanced through the bars of the stall to see if someone was coming, and in that instant Peach flattened her ears against her head and came at her, teeth first. Nic stumbled backwards and felt the wind knock out of her as her shoulder slammed into the stall door. Her knees buckled and she fell to the ground, the apple dropping from her hand into the straw bedding.

  Peach swayed above her, breathing hard. Nic’s heart hammered in her chest. She could feel the heat that poured off the horse. She saw the fear in the horse’s eye and tasted it in her own mouth.

  Nic knew fear. She knew that fear became a mask you could not remove. Below the horse’s fear, below Nic’s own fear, there was something else waiting to be discovered.

  Nic slowly stood.

  Peach watched her, chest heaving.

  “I see you,” Nic said. She used her voice in the same way that she held bridle reins: light and sure. Medicine hidden in honey. She heard the softness and the strength in her voice, and the horse heard it, too.

  Peach lowered her head to the ground and found the apple. She bit into it, watching Nic.

  And then there were footsteps outside the stall, two sets of them, and voices. Nic pressed herself against the wall where she would not be seen. Peach moved toward the stall door and looked out into the aisle, her teeth grinding through the last bite of apple.

  “That horse isn’t right in the head,” said one of the voices. It was Javi, the barn hand that Peach had bitten during turnout. Javi was great with the horses, beloved by their owners, and it had always seemed to Nic that he had a special affection for the least favored horses at Corcoran Stables. It was strange to hear him speak so negatively, so decisively, about Peach. She heard him take a step closer to the stall. Peach stretched her neck and snapped her teeth together, making contact with the bars on the stall door. Nic sucked in her breath.

  “Jesus!” Javi cried.

  There was a loud guffaw. It was Pat, another barn worker. “Damn, Javi,” he said. “She’s got your number.”

  “Not for long, she doesn’t,” Javi said. Now he sounded sad. “Someone pushed that horse too far and she’s never coming back.”

  Their steps retreated and faded away as they continued down the aisle. Nic knew Javi was wrong about Peach; the horse was not made of anything worse than fear. She wished that she could put her hands on Peach so that she could massage the tension from her powerful neck and pull the straw from her mane, but she knew the horse wouldn’t allow it. Still, she made Peach a silent promise of help, and in return the horse turned a cold eye on her, ears flattened.

  “Hey,” Nic whispered. “That won’t work with me again.”

  It was true; she wasn’t afraid of Peach. At least, not much. Was it because of the accident? Because she’d hit her head? Was there something wrong with her? Nothing felt wrong. She felt like she’d been carrying a weight for years, and now it was gone. She grew tall. “Make room,” she told Peach. “There’s only one way out.” She made a slow shooing motion with her hands and clucked her tongue and Peach tossed her head defiantly but backed away from the door. Nic slid it open and stepped into the aisle.

  She was standing in front of Tru’s stall, rubbing her sore shoulder and entertaining secret plans, when Denny returned from the office. He seemed distracted, maybe even amused; he didn’t say a word when Nic momentarily forgot herself and kicked a clump of straw from the bottom of her sneaker.

  Chapter 9

  The first thing on my agenda when I returned to the studio Monday afternoon was a meeting that I’d arranged with Hawke Media’s head of security, director of Information Technology, and Simone and Martin. There weren’t enough seats in my office for everyone, so Martin stood by the window and Adam, the security guy, crossed his arms and leaned against the back wall. Simone and Rebecca from IT sat in the pair of armchairs that faced my desk.

  The lowering sun reflected off the windows of the building across the street at a blinding angle, so I lowered the shades as I hurried through a couple of answers to questions about Nic’s health. Over and over again, I had to stop my mind from returning to the sight of Nic appearing in the kitchen wearing the yellow dress that I’d bought her for her birthday, looking as bright and shiny as a new penny. I was certain that if I lingered too long on thoughts about my daughter I’d end up running from the building, hailing a cab, and racing down to Corcoran Stables to stop Nic’s fragile, perfectly imperfect brain from getting anywhere near a horse.

  Instead, I leaned my elbows on my desk and said, “I think I have a stalker.”

  Rebecca immediately straightened in her chair. “I scan your in-box daily,” she said. “I’d say you have fifty stalkers, minimum. More during the holidays.”

  “The holidays are particularly hard on stalkers,” chimed in Adam from security. I could see that he was excited to have been included in the meeting; there was a vein in his neck that appeared intent on breaking free of his skin.

  Martin, ever delighted by the effect that crazed fans had on ratings, failed to stifle a grin. When he realized I was watching, he lifted his fist to his mouth and tried to mask his joy with a spectacularly fake sneeze.

  “Allergies,” he murmured. “My apologies.”

  I chucked a box of tissues at him, certain that his reflexes would be dulled by his glee at Rebecca’s stalker news. (Fifty stalkers! Jesus. I knew there was a good reason why I hardly ever checked my fan email account.) The tissue box thudded against Martin’s shoulder and fell to the ground.

  “I know that some of us believe that stalkers make excellent listener bait,” I said, “but I think there might be one in the mix who needs to be taken more seriously.” I reminded them of the call we’d received during the show the previous week, and told them about the heavy-breathing phone call to my home line and the email with the unnervingly similar threat that had been sent to my personal email account. “It’s not much to go o
n, but it could be the same person. If it is, I’d prefer we get a handle on the situation sooner rather than later.”

  Adam was vigorously nodding. “I’m with you one hundred percent, Ms. Gideon. The best defense is a good offense.”

  “That’s not the saying,” Simone said.

  Adam ignored her. “We can beef up security at the building, but I also want to be out there catching this guy.” He knocked Rebecca’s chair with his foot. She turned to look at him, startled. “Any leads from IT? We need to work together on this.”

  “Leads?” she sputtered. “I was sitting right here in this office with you when we learned of this guy’s existence thirty seconds ago.”

  Adam released a disdainful scoff, as though this were no excuse, and began to pace the length of my office.

  “Woman’s existence,” said Simone.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “That caller last week sounded like a woman,” she said. “But who knows. There are devices you can use to change the sound of your voice. There’s even an app you can buy for a cell phone.” It seemed to me that Simone was the only one in the room who was truly worried.

  “So it could be anyone!” Martin said. He quickly spread a tissue across the lower half of his face—but not quickly enough to mask his grin. “Achoo!” he said. When he lowered the tissue, he looked thoughtful, and a little disappointed. “Or maybe it’s just Jenny Long again?” Martin held Jenny Long in great contempt; a woman too crazy to hide her crazy long enough to make it on air could never be a boost for ratings.

  “Who knows?” I said. “But I don’t think so. This person hates me. Jenny was a ‘stan.’”

  “A ‘stan’?” asked Rebecca.

  “Short for ‘stalker-slash-fan,’” explained Adam, still pacing. “This new asshole isn’t a true stan because he isn’t a fan. He’s just an old-fashioned stalker.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “Do you still have that email?” Rebecca asked me. “I should be able to trace it to an IP address. We can give that information to the police.”

  “And me,” Adam said.

  Rebecca rolled her eyes. “What do you plan to do with an IP address, Adam?”

  Before he could answer, I told Rebecca that I’d already deleted the email and blocked the sender from contacting me again.

  She shrugged. “Send me your log-in information for your personal email account anyway. I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Threats come with the territory—I know that by now. I simply prefer empty threats. Let’s all just go about our business on a slightly elevated level of alert.” I sighed. “Adam, please quit pacing.” He stopped abruptly, military style, and turned on his heel.

  “What about when you’re at home?” he asked. “You should think about having security there, too. For you and your daughter. If this person has your home phone number, he or she probably knows where you live.”

  I considered this. Over the years, many people in my life had suggested I hire a bodyguard, or at minimum a security guard for our home. I had always resisted taking their advice. Even though I was a household name, I wasn’t a household face. I believed this protected me. I wasn’t regularly recognized and stopped by fans on the street. I’d been interviewed on television and in magazines, but I wasn’t a movie star. I was, mostly, a voice on the radio. Of course, all of this would change if I accepted the offer from ZoneTV, but until we crossed that bridge I wanted my daughter to continue to live a normal life. Nic—or at least the old Nic—would be mortified to have a bodyguard shadowing her every move. Did I really want to let one mouth breather scare me so badly that I turned our lives upside down? And the person who had called my home had not actually said a word when I answered the phone—he or she might not have anything to do with the person who had emailed me and called during the show. And even if they were all the same person, she could live across the country for all I knew.

  “Let’s hold off on that,” I told Adam.

  I hoped I wouldn’t regret the decision.

  AFTER THE MEETING, I called Corcoran Stables. The phone rang eleven times before Denny picked up. Eleven times. I could have boiled an egg faster than the time it took that man to answer the phone.

  “Corcoran Sta—”

  “Is Nic there? How does she seem?”

  “Oh, hey, G.G.,” Denny answered. “Sure, she’s here. She seems fine.”

  The knot in my chest loosened.

  “Actually,” Denny said, “I’d say she’s better than that. She seems strong. Surprisingly strong, given how serious that fall was.”

  I leaned back in my desk chair. “She’s desperate to ride.”

  “Yeah, she’s made that pretty clear. But for now she needs to take it easy. She’ll ride again, just not yet.”

  I mumbled some agreement, but the truth was that I could not imagine allowing Nic back on a horse.

  “You’re doing the right thing by letting her visit Tru,” Denny said. “It’s good for her to be around horses. She could be spooked by the accident, but instead she’s itching to ride again. That’s a brave kid.”

  “She’s working every angle to get herself back in the saddle. On the way to school this morning, she announced that she’d spent an hour online yesterday researching the therapeutic benefits of horseback riding for patients with traumatic brain injuries. She wasn’t even supposed to be on the computer.”

  Denny’s laugh was a low rumble of a sound, truck tires over gravel. “She’s always been stubborn, in her own way. I remember a few years ago, back before she got Tru, when she was riding one of our lesson horses, George, who absolutely refused to do a flying lead change.” He paused. “A flying lead change is when a horse does a midair change of the leg that’s leading his canter gait, switching from left to right, or vice versa.”

  “Oh. Right,” I said. I was glad for the reminder. The afternoons when I’d ridden horses at Corcoran Stables felt like a lifetime ago.

  “Well, George just refused. Some horses never learn how to do it under saddle. If you wanted him to change leads you had to bring him back down to the trot and then back up into the canter again on the correct lead. But Nic got it into her head that he was perfectly athletic and smart enough to master the flying change. She kept asking to ride him, and I’d see her out there in the ring day after day after day working that horse through his gaits. She’d even ride him bareback, thinking he might come to understand what she was asking if he could feel more of her legs and seat. She must have been, what? Ten, eleven years old.”

  The name George rang a distant bell, but I couldn’t remember Nic telling me this story. Still, I could picture the scene as clearly as though I’d seen it with my own eyes: stone-faced Nic, long hair whipping the air behind her, skinny legs wrapped around the barrel of a horse, a blur of sky behind them. My heart thudded with pride.

  “Did she get him to do it?” I asked.

  “Of course. It took some time, but your girl was bound and determined and she taught old George a new trick. He’s been one of our most popular lesson horses ever since. ‘Point-and-Shoot,’ the kids call him now, which basically means that he’s very easy to ride. All thanks to Nic. So I’d say that stubborn streak you’re talking about? It’s not so new.”

  It had never really occurred to me that after all these years, Denny knew my daughter well. But of course he did. He’d watched her grow up.

  “I guess she’s just been stealthily stubborn until now,” I said.

  “Are you really surprised? The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, does it?” I could hear the smile in his voice. “You used to butt heads with my mom every single week about which horse she put you on for your lesson.”

  “For good reason! She always put me on the ponies.”

  “You were so tiny, G.G. Those ponies were the right fit for you.”

  “But I wanted to go fast, really fast, and those ponies . . .” I trailed off, hearing myself. “Oh God. Your mom was totally right.�
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  “You felt the need for speed . . . and my mom felt the need to see you live another day.”

  I shook my head, laughing. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

  “I also remember that you used to groom your horse with your Walkman on your hip, Patti Smith blaring through your headphones. You never realized how loudly you sang along with her. Or maybe you didn’t care.”

  “Oh, your mom must have loved that,” I said. A memory flashed through my mind of Denny’s salty, no-nonsense mother asking my mom if I was ever quiet, and my mom answering with a rueful no. My mother liked to say that someone must have been looking out for her when she wasn’t able to have another child—as it turned out, one was plenty.

  “I think she knew she wasn’t going to have to put up with you for long,” Denny said. “A thirteen-year-old who belts out something about how the night belongs to lovers while she’s brushing a pony’s forelock doesn’t really scream ‘lifelong rider.’”

  I laughed. Thirteen. I’d dropped out of riding lessons entirely soon after that, devoting my afternoons to hanging out with boys, talking with friends about boys, thinking about boys. Boys, boys, boys. And music, of course. Always music. My life had a sound track back then, each important moment punctuated, molded, celebrated by song. It felt good to be reminded of the girl I’d once been. For the first time since I’d learned that Nic had been in an accident, I felt relaxed.

  I wasn’t sure that Denny and I had ever had such a long conversation before. He’d always struck me as sort of gruff, but on the phone he was straightforward and funny. And he remembered a lot about me. That was another surprise. A lot of my listeners believed that they knew me, really knew me, just from hearing me talk on my show, but this was different. Denny had known me when we were young. I’d known him, too, of course, but I suddenly realized how little I’d known him. I’d hardly noticed him back then—he was only a year or two younger than me, but those years mean something when you’re a kid.