Joan Dyer, who hadn't seen Pilgrim since the accident, was shocked. The scars on his face and chest were bad enough. But this savage, demented hostility was something she'd never before seen in a horse. All the way back, for four long hours, they could hear him crashing his hooves against the sides of his box. They could feel the whole trailer shake. Joan looked worried.
'Where am I going to put him?'
'What do you mean?' said Liz.
'Well, I can't put him back in the barn like this. It wouldn't be safe.'
When they got back to the stables, they kept him in the trailer while Joan and her two sons cleared one of a row of small stalls behind the barn that hadn't been used in years. The boys, Eric and Tim, were in their late teens and helped their mother run the place. Both, Logan noted as he watched them work, had inherited her long face and economy with words. When the stall was ready Eric, the older and more sullen of the two, backed the trailer up to it. But the horse wouldn't come out.
In the end Joan sent the boys in through the front door of the trailer with sticks and Logan watched them whacking the horse and saw him rear up against them, as terrified as they were. It didn't seem right and Logan was worried about that chest wound bursting open, but he couldn't come up with a better idea and at last the horse backed off down into the stall and they slammed the door on him.
As he was driving home that night to his wife and children, Harry Logan felt depressed. He remembered the hunter, that little guy in the fur hat, grinning down at him from the railroad bridge. The little creep was right, he thought. The horse should have been put down.
Christmas at the Macleans' started badly and got worse. They drove home from the hospital with Grace carefully bolstered across the back seat of Robert's car. They hadn't got halfway when she asked about the tree.
'Can we decorate it soon as we get back?' Annie looked straight ahead and left it to Robert to say they'd already done it, though not how it was done, in a joyless silence late the night before with the air between them bristling.
'Baby, I thought you wouldn't feel up to it,' he said. Annie knew she should feel touched or grateful for this selfless shouldering of blame and it bothered her that she didn't. She waited, almost irritated, for Robert to leaven things with the inevitable joke.
'And hey young lady,' he went on, 'you're going to have enough work to do when we get home. There's firewood to cut, all the cleaning, food to prepare…'
Grace dutifully laughed and Annie ignored Robert's sidelong look in the silence that followed.
Once home, they managed to summon some little cheer. Grace said the tree in the hall looked lovely. She spent some time alone in her room, playing Nirvana loudly to reassure them she was alright. She was good on the crutches and could even handle the stairs, falling only once when she tried to bring down a bag of little presents she'd had the nurses go out and buy for her to give her parents.
'I'm okay,' she said when Robert ran to her. She had banged her head sharply on the wall and Annie, emerging from the kitchen, could see she was in pain.
'Are you sure?' Robert tried to offer help but she accepted as little as she could. 'Yes. Dad, really I'm fine.' Annie saw Robert's eyes fill as Grace went over and put the presents under the tree and the sight made her so angry she had to turn and go quickly back into the kitchen.
They always gave each other Christmas stockings. Annie and Robert did Grace's together and then one for each other. In the morning, Grace would bring hers into their room and sit on the bed and they would take turns unwrapping presents, making jokes about how clever Santa Glaus had been or how he'd forgotten to remove a price tag. Now, as with the tree, the ritual seemed to Annie almost unbearable.
Grace went to bed early and when they were sure she was asleep, Robert tiptoed to her room with the stocking. Annie undressed and listened to the hall clock ticking away the silence. She was in the bathroom when Robert came back and she heard a rustling and knew he was pushing her stocking under her side of the bed. She had just done the same with his. What a farce it was.
He came in as she was brushing her teeth. He was wearing his striped English pajamas and smiled at her in the mirror. Annie spat out and rinsed her mouth.
'You've got to stop this crying,' she said without looking at him.
'What?'
'I saw you, when she fell. You've got to stop feeling sorry for her. Pity won't help her at all.'
He stood looking at her and as she turned to go back into the bedroom their eyes met. He was frowning at her, shaking his head.
'You're unbelievable, Annie.'
'Thanks.'
'What's happening to you?'
She didn't reply, just walked past him back into the bedroom. She got into bed and switched off her light and after he'd finished in the bathroom he did the same. They lay with their backs to each other and Annie stared at the sharp quadrant of yellow light that jutted in from the landing onto the bedroom floor. It wasn't anger that had stopped her answering him, she simply had no idea what the answer was. How could she have said such a thing to him? Perhaps his tears enraged her because she was jealous of them. She hadn't wept once since the accident.
She turned and slipped her arms guiltily around him, putting her body to his back.
'I'm sorry,' she murmured and kissed the side of his neck. For a moment Robert didn't move. Then slowly he rolled onto his back and put an arm around her and she nestled in with her head on his chest. She felt him give a deep sigh and for a long time they lay still. Then she slid her hand slowly down his belly and gently took hold of him and felt him stir. Then she rose up and knelt above him, pulling her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to the floor. And he reached up, as he always did, and put his hands on her breasts as she worked herself on him. He was hard now and she guided him into her and felt him shudder. Neither of them uttered a sound. And she looked down through the darkness at this good man who had known her for so long and saw in his eyes, unobscured by desire, an awful, irretrievable sadness.
The weather turned colder on Christmas Day. Metallic clouds whipped over the woods like a film in fast-forward and the wind shifted to the north and brought arctic air spiraling down the valley. Inside, they listened to it howling in the chimney as they sat playing Scrabble by the big log fire.
That morning, opening presents around the tree, they had all tried hard. Never in her life, not even when very young, had Grace had so many presents. Almost everyone they knew had sent her something and Annie had realized, too late, that they should have kept some back. Grace, she could see, sensed charity and left many gifts unopened.
Annie and Robert hadn't known what to buy her. In recent years it had always been something to do with riding. Now everything they could think of carried an implication simply through not being to do with riding. In the end Robert had bought her a tank of tropical fish. They knew she wanted one but Annie feared even this had a message tagged to it: Sit and watch, it seemed to say. This now is all you can do.
Robert had rigged it all up in the little back parlor and put Christmas wrapping paper on it. They led Grace to it and watched her face light up as she undid it.
'Oh my God!' she said. 'That is just fabulous.'
In the evening, when Annie finished tidying away the supper things, she found Grace and Robert in front of it, lying on the sofa in the dark. The tank was illuminated and bubbling and the two of them had been watching it and fallen asleep in each other's arms. The swaying plants and the gliding shadows of the fish made ghostly patterns on their faces.