'He wants to be alright,' Tom said. 'He just doesn't know what alright is.'
And if he ever gets to be alright, Grace thought, what then? Tom had said nothing about where all this was leading. He was taking each day as it came, not forcing things, just letting Pilgrim take his time and make his choices. But what then? If Pilgrim got better, was it she who was expected to ride him?
Grace knew quite well that people rode with worse disabilities than hers. Some even started from scratch that way. She'd seen them at events and once she'd even taken part in a sponsored show-jump where all the money went to the local Riding for the Disabled group. She'd thought how brave these people were and felt sorry for them. Now she couldn't bear the idea that people might feel the same about her. She wouldn't give them the chance. She'd said she would never ride again and that was that.
Some two hours later, after Joe and the twins had come back from school, Tom opened the arena gate and let Pilgrim run back into his stall. Grace had already cleaned the place out and put new shavings down and Tom stood guard and watched her bring in the bucket of feed and hang up a fresh net of hay.
As he drove her back up the valley to the creek house, the sun was low and the rocks and limber pine on the slopes above them cast long shadows on the pale grass. They didn't speak and Grace wondered why silence with this man she'd known so short a time never seemed uncomfortable. She could tell that he now had something on his mind. He circled the Chevy to the back of the house and pulled up by the back porch. Then he cut the engine off, sat back and turned to look her right in the eye.
'Grace, I've got a problem.'
He paused and she didn't know whether she was supposed to say something, but he went on.
'You see, when I'm working with a horse, I like to know the history. Now most times the horse can tell you pretty much the whole deal just by himself. In fact a sight better than his owner might tell it. But sometimes he can be so messed up in his head that you need more to go on. You need to know what went wrong. And often it's not the obvious thing but something that went wrong just before that, maybe even some little thing.'
Grace didn't understand and he saw her frown.
'It's like if I was driving this old Chevy and I hit a tree and someone asks me what happened, well, I wouldn't say, "Well, you know, I hit a tree." I'd say maybe I'd had too many beers or there was oil on the road or maybe the sun was in my eyes or something. See what I mean?'
She nodded.
'Well, I don't know how you feel about talking about it and I can sure understand you might not want to. But if I'm going to figure out what's going on in Pilgrim's head, it'd help me a whole lot if I knew something about the accident and what exactly happened that day.'
Grace heard herself take a breath. She looked away from him to the house and noticed you could see right through the kitchen to the living room. She could see the blue-gray glow of the computer screen and her mother sitting there, on the phone, framed in the fading light of the big front window.
She hadn't told anyone what she really remembered about that day. To the police, lawyers, doctors, even to her parents, she'd gone on pretending that much of what had happened was a blank. The problem was Judith. She still didn't know if she could handle talking about Judith. Or even about Gulliver. She looked back at Tom Booker and he smiled. In his eyes there was not a trace of pity and she knew in that instant that she was accepted, not judged. Perhaps it was because he only knew the person she now was, the disfigured, partial one, not the whole she once had been.
'I don't mean now,' he said gently. 'When you're ready. And only if you want to.' Something beyond her caught his eye and she followed his glance and saw her mother coming out onto the porch. Grace turned back to him and nodded.
'I'll think about it,' she said.
Robert propped his glasses up on the top of his forehead, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a long time. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie lay crumpled among the layers of papers and law books that covered his desk. Along the corridor he could hear the cleaners moving systematically through the other offices, talking to each other now and then in Spanish. Everyone else had gone home four or five hours ago. Bill Sachs, one of the younger partners, had tried to persuade him to come with him and his wife to see some new Gerard Depardieu movie everyone was talking about. Robert said thanks but he had too much work to get through and anyway he always found something faintly disturbing about Depardieu's nose.
'It looks, you know, kind of penile,' he said.
Bill, who could have passed as a psychiatrist anyway, had peered at him over his hornrims and asked in a comic Freudian accent, why Robert should find such an association disturbing. Then he got Robert laughing about two women he'd heard talking the other day on the subway.
'One of them had been reading this book that tells you what your dreams mean and she was telling the other girl how it had said if you dreamed about snakes it meant you were really obsessed by penises and the other one said, phew, that was a relief, 'cause all she ever dreamed about was penises.'
Bill wasn't the only one who seemed to be making a special effort to cheer him up at the moment. Robert was touched but on the whole he wished they wouldn't. Being on your own for a few weeks didn't justify this level of sympathy and so he suspected his colleagues sensed in him some deeper loss. One had even offered to take over the Dunford Securities case. God, that was about the only thing that kept him going.
Every night for nearly three weeks now he'd been up till way past midnight working on it. The hard disk on his laptop was almost bursting with it. It was one of the most complicated cases he'd ever worked on, involving bonds worth billions of dollars being shuffled endlessly through a maze of companies across three continents. Today he'd had a two-hour conference call with lawyers and clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, London and Sydney. The time differences were a nightmare. But curiously it kept him sane and, more important, too busy to dwell too much on how he missed Grace and Annie.
He opened his sore eyes and leaned across to press the redial button on one of his phones. Then he settled back, staring out of the window at the illuminated coronets on the spire of the Chrysler Building. The number Annie had given him, for this new place they'd moved into, was still busy.
He'd walked to the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth before he flagged a cab. The cold night air felt good and he'd toyed with the idea of walking all the way home across the park. He'd done it before at night though only once did he make the mistake of telling Annie. She'd yelled at him for a full ten minutes and told him he was insane going in there at night, did he want to get himself disemboweled? He wondered if he'd missed something in the newspapers about this particular hazard, but it didn't seem the right time to ask.