The Horse Whisperer

'The child has such a vivid imagination,' her grandmother said.

Reduced to mute contempt and acts of petty vengeance, A

Her father had been a bounding, joyous man. The only one who ever thought she was of value. And since his death, her life had been a ceaseless quest to prove him right. Through school and through her student days and on through her career, she'd been driven by that single purpose: to show the bastards.

For a while, after having Grace, she'd thought the point proven. In that pinched pink face, hungering so blind and needy at her nipple, came calm, as if the journey were complete. It had been a time for definitions. Now, she told herself, now I can be what I am, not what I do. Then came the miscarriage. Then another and another and another, failure compounding failure and soon A

But it wasn't like before. Since her early days at Rolling Stone, those parts of the news media that followed such matters had dubbed her 'brilliant and fiery'. Now, reincarnated as boss of her own magazine - the kind of job she'd vowed never to take - the first of these epithets stuck. But, as if in recognition of the colder fuel that drove her, 'fiery' transmuted to 'ruthless'. In fact, A

Last fall she'd met an old friend from England, a woman who'd been at the same boarding school and when A

'Remember how you stuck your arms in that bucket of fake blood for the "Out, damned spot" speech? You were red right up to the elbows!'

'Yep. Sure was one hell of a spot.'

A

Now, from the fatuous vantage of her office in exile, A

Only when she was with him did she feel part of it. Three times more he had come to her door with the horses and they had ridden out together to other places he wanted to show her.

It had become routine that on Wednesdays Diane collected Grace from the clinic and sometimes on other days she or Frank might take her there too if they had to go to town. These mornings, A

The last time, she'd been in the middle of a conference call and she'd looked down toward the corrals and seen him leading Rimrock and a colt, both saddled, from the barn and she'd quite lost the drift of the conversation. She was suddenly aware that everyone in New York had gone silent.

'A

'Yeah, sorry,' A

When Tom arrived, the conference was still going and she waved him in through the screen door. He took off his hat and came through and A

There were a couple of recent issues of her magazine lying there and he'd picked one up and looked through it. He found her name at the top of the page where it listed everyone who worked there and he made an impressed face. Then she saw him gri

It was ten minutes before the conference call finished and A

'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay, I liked hearing you work. And now I know what to wear next time I go down to Arkansas.' He tossed the magazine onto the couch. 'It's a lot of fun.'

'It's a lot of pain. Mostly in the ass.'

She was already in her riding clothes and they went right out to the horses. She said she'd try the stirrups a little longer and he came and showed her how to do it because the straps were different from those she was used to. She stepped in close to watch how he did it and for the first time she was aware of the smell of him, a warm clean smell of leather and some functional brand of soap. All the while, the tops of their arms touched lightly and neither of them moved away.

That morning they'd crossed over to the southern creek and made their way slowly up beside it to a place he said they might see beavers. But they saw none, only the two intricate new islands they'd built. They dismounted and sat on the gray bleached trunk of a fallen cottonwood while the horses drank their own reflections from the pool.

A fish or a frog broke the surface in front of the colt and he leapt back scared like some character in a cartoon. Rimrock gave him a weary look and went on drinking. Tom laughed. He got up and walked over and when he got there he put one hand on the colt's neck and another on his face. For a while he just stood there holding him. A

'What's the matter?'

'How do you do that?'

'Do what?'

'Make him feel it was okay.'

'Oh, he knew it was okay.' She waited for him to go on. 'He gets a little melodramatic sometimes.'

'And how do you know that?'

He gave her the same amused look he'd given her that day when she'd asked him all those questions about his wife and son.

'You get to learn.' He stopped and something in her face must have told him she felt rebuked because he smiled and went on.

'It's only the difference between looking and seeing. Look long enough and if you're doing it right you get to see. Same with your job. You know what makes a good piece for your magazine because you've spent time making it your business to know.'

A

'Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't guess in a million years that's what people want to read about.'

'They don't.'

'Sure they do. It's fu

'It's dumb.'