The Horse Whisperer

She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors - and there were many - said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn't work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be'done' or 'buried' (that quip had started even at Oxford) by A

Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. 'The tubab who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?' he prompted.

They met for a drink and he was much better looking than A

While A

In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he'd always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.

They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.

A

Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.

'In a coma, you mean,' A

'That's not what they're calling it, but yes, I guess that's what it is.'

'What else?' There was a pause. 'Come on Robert, for God's sake.'

'Her leg's pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.' A

'They're looking at it now. Listen A

'No, don't. Stay with her. I'll get a cab.'

'Okay. I'll call you again if there's news.' He paused. 'She's going to be alright.'

'Yes, I know.' She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. A

The guilt had started immediately upon Robert's first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.

'It would have made no difference A

'Yes I could. I could have stopped her going. What was Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?'

'It's a beautiful day. You wouldn't have stopped her.'

Farlow was right of course, but the guilt remained because it wasn't, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.

A

Like many ambitious women of her generation, A

'Why didn't we ever do this?' Grace said, not looking up. A

This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given A

It hadn't always been so. In fact until four years ago when she'd taken her first editorship, A

Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, A

They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.

At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. A

In a myriad minor ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And A

The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored veranda of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. A