Every Wild Heart Page 13

  “You probably have a lot to do,” Nic said.

  “Nope,” Denny answered.

  Just when she was beginning to worry that her time at the barn would run out before she had a chance to sneak into Peach’s stall again, the phone in the office rang. Denny straightened. Bear looked up at Denny and thumped his enormous tail against the stone floor. “Keep an eye on Nic,” Denny told the dog. He gave Nic a stern look before setting off at a jog toward the office.

  Nic studied Bear. Bear studied Nic. A long, skinny line of drool ran from his lip to the floor. Nic could not be entirely sure that the dog did not have a way to communicate with his master. Denny had a way with animals that at times seemed to border on mystical.

  She decided to risk it.

  With the leafy stalks of two carrots sticking out of the pocket of her jeans and the soft brush still in one hand, she slid open Peach’s stall just wide enough to step inside. The horse flattened her ears and started to turn away. Nic realized she was about to get kicked.

  “Peach,” she said. “Look.” She held out one of the carrots.

  Peach stopped. Her ears flicked forward, her eyes suddenly less hard than bright. She snatched the carrot from Nic’s hand and began to chew. As she ate, Nic took a step closer. Then she took another step. The horse watched as she approached, but other than her teeth grinding and her ears flicking, she didn’t move. Nic felt sure that deep inside, Peach wanted her there, and had been waiting for her. There was something between them, a connection that Nic had never felt with another horse. She had needed horses before, to comfort her and distract her and sometimes challenge her—but this time, this horse needed her. Nic suspected that on some level Peach knew this.

  She reached up and placed her outstretched hand on Peach’s neck. She spoke gently, reassuringly, confidently all the while, and felt the horse listening. She began to move her hand down the horse’s neck, stroking below her mane, lifting her hand before she reached the scars on Peach’s shoulder. The horse relaxed below her touch, the taut, sensitive skin below her coat gradually softening.

  “There you go,” Nic murmured. She lifted the brush and began to use it instead of her hand, slowly brushing the length of Peach’s body. She kept up a steady stream of murmured praise for the horse.

  After a few moments, Peach sighed. Okay, the horse seemed to be saying.

  “I won’t let you down,” Nic replied. But to do this, she knew, she had to ride her.

  Suddenly, just outside of the stall: the sounds of Bear scrambling to his feet, barking, and setting chase after some unseen barn intruder—a bird or a squirrel or a mouse.

  Peach startled. Then, in a flash, she reached back toward where Nic stood at her side and snatched the second carrot from Nic’s pocket, her teeth striking Nic’s hipbone.

  Nic winced and stumbled away. From the office, she could hear Denny tell Bear to quiet down. She hurried from the stall, hip throbbing. When she stood again in front of Tru’s stall, she turned back to look at Peach. The horse watched her between the bars. Denny was out of the office and in the aisle now. Nic willed away the tears that smarted her eyes.

  I see you, she told the horse with her mind. She pressed her hand against the pain at her hip. You didn’t mean to hurt me.

  Chapter 11

  On Wednesday morning, I tossed my phone into Nic’s lap and started the car. She was supposed to be at school at nine and as usual we were running late. The battlefield that was San Francisco at rush hour waited for no one. I took a strange pleasure in navigating the predictable morning gridlock with Nic at my side; during those thirty to sixty minutes, Monday through Friday, our fates were intertwined.

  “Find something that will appease the traffic gods,” I said to Nic, nodding toward my phone.

  She scrolled through my playlists, and before long, the car’s speakers filled with the sound of Janis Joplin wailing about the pieces of her heart.

  I grinned. “You know, this was playing in the hospital room when you were born.”

  “And when I woke up from the com . . . I mean the concussion,” she answered, just managing to correct herself before she said “coma.” She was working hard to use language that downplayed the seriousness of her accident in the hopes that I could be convinced to disregard Dr. Feldman’s recommendation that she refrain from riding. Despite her bravura, I’d noticed that she winced as she walked down the stairs from her bedroom that morning. No matter what she said, her injuries—brain and otherwise—were not fully healed. She wasn’t riding anytime soon.

  “Right,” I said. “Your ‘concussion.’ The concussion that left you unconscious and in a coma for four hours and stole at least as many years from my life.”

  “Drama queen.” I didn’t have to look at Nic to know she was smiling.

  “Head case,” I shot back.

  “Mom! I can’t believe you’re joking about my battered head.”

  “Oh, so now it’s battered?”

  Nic laughed. “No. It’s not. I’m fine.”

  I shook my head but could not help laughing along with my daughter. How could I? There she was in the passenger seat of my car, wearing a bright red T-shirt that I hadn’t even known she owned, laughing and healthy. I felt so lucky that she was there beside me, where I could reach out and squeeze her hand.

  “Hands on the wheel, please, Mom.”

  I sighed and returned my hand to the wheel. I began to sing along with Janis. To my delight, Nic joined in.

  After a moment, she stopped. I felt her eyes on the side of my face. “Do you ever miss playing music for people?” she asked.

  I glanced at her. “What do you mean? I play music all the time.”

  “Not on the radio, though. Not the way you used to. You have such a cool music collection but no one ever gets to hear it.”

  “Oh. Well, first of all, thank you. Second, I hear it. You hear it. Simone and Damien and Rachel and Sam hear it when they come over. Roy hears it in the car, as much as he might wish he didn’t.”

  Nic began braiding the dark hair that fell over her shoulder. She could do this practically in her sleep, her fingers nimble from hours spent plaiting Tru’s coarse tail. “Yeah,” she said, “but we’re just a few people.”

  “You’re the only ones who matter to me.”

  I felt Nic looking at me again. I considered telling her about the ZoneTV offer and how excited I was about the prospect of reshaping the career I’d carved out for myself, but something stopped me. She was in a good mood, and I suppose I didn’t want to ruin the moment.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I haven’t played music that I actually like on the radio in a billion years. Not since college.”

  “But you hosted that show when I was little. I remember. Love Songs After Dark.”

  “I didn’t play any of the music I really like on that show. It was all cheesy love songs.”

  “But ‘Piece of My Heart’ is a love song.”

  “Well—”

  “You once told me,” Nic persisted, “that all songs were love songs.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that. Anyway, Hawke Media wouldn’t agree.”

  “Oh.” The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was next on the playlist. Nic turned up the volume. “They don’t know what they’re missing!” she yelled over the music.

  Nic sang along with Mick Jagger. I’d seen him perform the song live, slipping on the persona of the devil for the few minutes that the song lasted and then shedding the persona just as quickly as he moved on to “Brown Sugar” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Satisfaction.”

  I glanced at my daughter. Her eyes were bright, her hair loosening already from the hasty braid. She seemed happy. And a bit wild, too: hopeful and complicated and teenaged. I recognized myself in her. For a few minutes, I ignored the constant throb of my worry. I gave in to the music that filled the car, the drum that had always matched something deep inside of me beat for beat.

  Who could resist being a dev
il for a moment or two? Not me.

  She’s right, I thought. Hawke Media doesn’t know what it’s missing.

  WHEN I WAS young, I thought punk music was about being young. I thought it was about rebelling against everyone always telling you what to do (and how and where and when to do it). To me, being forced to follow other people’s rules was childhood, so I guess it was only natural that I heard the rebellion in punk and rock and thought it was the domain of the young. Now, I knew better. Or, maybe, I continued to be every bit as self-centered as I was when I was young, and therefore I had to expand my interpretation of punk so that I could remain sure that those songs that I loved were still, in the end, about me.

  Either way, after that conversation with Nic in the morning, I spent the rest of the day thinking that punk rock was actually about freedom. Freedom from expectations, freedom from the past, freedom from convention, freedom, yes, from the rules placed on us by others, but also freedom from ourselves, the freedom to shed the roles that we’ve adopted and that might no longer fit, the freedom and the fire to grow and change and, sometimes, break free.

  The first thing I did after Roy dropped me off at Hawke Media that afternoon was shut the door to my office so I could blare Patti Smith’s Horses album. Moments later, my agent’s number appeared on my office telephone line, which I knew meant that she’d become serious about tracking me down.

  “What in the hell?” she said when I picked up. “What is that god-awful noise?”

  “That, Shayne, is music.”

  “Music, music, music . . .” she repeated slowly. “Ah, yes! I remember music. It used to be a moneymaker, didn’t it? When was that? The nineties?”

  I laughed despite myself; I had always found her very agent-ness endearing. Shayne somehow managed to poke fun at herself while completely embracing her own quirks. I could perfectly imagine her at eighty years old, making the same snarky jokes, having the same greedy impulses. If anyone could remain happily the same over the decades, it was my agent, the one and only Shayne Deacon.

  “Is this,” she asked, “the kind of music you can only listen to at an exceedingly high volume? Perhaps the nuances aren’t discernible until the windows begin to rattle?”

  “Yup,” I said. Still, I pointed the remote at the stereo and turned Patti down a few notches.

  Shayne asked how Nic was doing and I told her the truth: I wasn’t sure.

  “That’s great,” Shayne said. “Have you been thinking about the ZoneTV offer? You got my message that Simone is part of the deal now, right? She’ll be a senior producer.”

  “Thanks for moving on that,” I said. “But I’m not sure how interested Simone is after all. And . . . I don’t know, Shayne. I need to make sure I make the right decision. Not just for me, but for Nic.”

  “How could this not be the right decision? Radio is a steppingstone to television! You’re on an upward trajectory! If you think you make a difference in people’s lives now, wait until you see your reach when you’re on television. It’s a whole other galaxy of influence. Hop on this ride, Geej. You won’t regret it.” I heard Shayne cover the phone and holler for her assistant. “What are your plans this weekend?” she asked me, her voice suddenly loud again in my ear. “Will Nic be with you?”

  “No. It’s her weekend with Tyler.”

  “Fantastic. Lev Curtain is going to be in San Francisco and he wants to meet you in person. Apparently he is really excited—I guess he’s been a fan of yours for years. Your one male fan, Geej! You’ll finally get to meet him!” Shayne barked out a laugh. “But seriously. What do you think? Can I give my assistant the go-ahead to make the arrangements?”

  What else did I have planned that weekend? Nothing.

  “Sure,” I told Shayne. “Send me the details.”

  After we said goodbye, I turned up the music so loud that Martin eventually swung by my office and asked in his particular groveling, fake-apologetic way if I would turn it down.

  DENNY PICKED UP the phone after a few rings.

  “Nic’s fine,” he said.

  I smiled. “Hello.”

  “I knew you’d want to know that before anything else.”

  “I appreciate it. Are you busy?”

  “No.”

  He’d also said this when I called him the day before, and I didn’t believe him then either. I’d been to the barn enough times to know that Denny Corcoran was always busy. No matter what I saw him doing—whether it was throwing down hay bales from the loft, or hosing off a horse in the wash stall, or standing in the center of the ring as a row of children on ponies circled him—I always had the sense that it was just one of hundreds of things that he would do that day. I was sure the enormity of the task of keeping a property like Corcoran Stables running was part of the reason Denny always seemed so brusque—he didn’t have the time to use ten words when two would suffice. So when he told me he wasn’t busy, I knew that he wasn’t telling the truth, but I was glad. The other thing that I’d noticed about Denny was that no matter what he was doing, he seemed to center himself on that one thing, giving it his full attention. And if there’s one thing I’d never shied from, it was attention.

  As we had for the last couple of days, Denny and I spoke first of Nic, how she appeared stronger and more determined by the hour. She had a buzz of vitality about her now that made the memory of her lying in a hospital bed just one week earlier seem impossible, more like a scene that I’d pulled from a nightmare than something that had actually happened.

  “I don’t know if I ever really thanked you for finding Nic and making sure she got to the hospital quickly,” I said to Denny. “When Tru came back to the barn without her, she might have been anywhere, but somehow you knew where to look.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” he said. Then he added, “In fact, maybe I’d rather you don’t. I think my chest is still bruised from the gratitude you pummeled me with in the hospital waiting room.”

  My laughter was sudden and surprised. “Sorry about that. Scared and angry are a dangerous combination for me.” I was quiet for a moment. “But, really, how did you know to look for Nic out there? You told her not to ride on the trails. Doesn’t she usually listen to you?”

  “She does. She’s a good kid . . .”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know. There was something about the way she looked at me when I told her that the woods were a mess and I wanted her to stick to the ring. It wasn’t as though I knew in that moment that she was going to ignore what I’d said . . . but when Tru came back without her, I started running right down into the woods.”

  I’d been returning, more and more lately, to my memory of the night before the accident, when I’d tucked Nic into bed and the look in her eyes had made me wonder what she was thinking about, and if she were planning something. The memory pained me now. “Did she seem upset when she got to the barn?” I asked Denny. “The way she looked at you when you told her to stay in the ring . . .”

  “If you’re asking if I think she had something on her mind when she went out into the woods, the answer is yes. But if you’re asking if I think she meant to hurt herself . . . no, G.G. I can’t possibly know that for sure, but my gut tells me that wasn’t her intention.”

  I released a long breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Then I groaned. “If she wasn’t trying to hurt herself, then trying to jump that tree was just being stupid for the fun of it. I’m so angry with her, but it’s hard to be mad at someone for something she doesn’t even remember doing. She still doesn’t remember riding that day.”

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” Denny said. “Sometimes anger gets you somewhere, and other times it just gets between you and where you need to go.”

  I opened my mouth to respond and then shut it, realizing I had nothing to say. I’d always attributed so much of my drive to the anger that I felt, but now I found myself wondering where I might end up if I truly let go of that anger once and for all. What if I stopped chasing some notion of pro
ving my worth and instead simply followed my heart? What would come next? Where would I go? Who would I be?

  AFTER THE SHOW that night, I pushed through the building’s front doors and Roy immediately fell into step beside me on the sidewalk.

  “I ordered a limo to take you home,” he said, gesturing toward the black car idling by the curb.

  I slowed and looked at him. “A limo? Why?”

  He hesitated. “Someone smashed my headlights. But don’t worry, I’ll have them replaced by tomorrow. Jasper from Bay Limo is going to get you home tonight. He’s a good guy. I’ve known him since—”

  “Wait,” I said, cutting him off. “Someone smashed your headlights while I was in the studio?”

  “Yeah. I was waiting in Pinecrest Diner, having dinner like I always do while you’re on air—great show tonight, by the way. When I got back to my car, the headlights were broken.”

  “Was anything stolen from the car?”

  Roy shook his head.

  There was no one else on the street with us. I looked up at the high-rise buildings that lined the sidewalk, the office lights that glowed in the gray night sky. Any number of people might have been looking down at us. I usually loved San Francisco at night, but suddenly I felt vulnerable.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ms. Gail,” Roy said, reading my mood. “It’s San Francisco. Stuff like this happens all the time. I’ll have the car back to tip-top shape tomorrow.”

  “Do you think whoever did it knows that you’re my driver?”

  His brow furrowed. “I wouldn’t worry, Ms. Gail. This was just some jerk. How could he know the car had any connection to you?”

  I swallowed. “Remember Jenny Long? She saw us together. She’d know which car was yours.”

  “Jenny Long?” Roy asked. “She’s back?” We simultaneously scanned the street around us.