Page 26 of The Reckless Rookie

Vicente finds me at the tack room a little wild around the eyes, which from Vicente means run. “The mare. She’s down and she’s up and she’s down again, and she’s kicking at her own belly.”

That’s not labor. It’s too early for labor, she’s a few months out. But a mare kicking at her own belly is colic, or it’s a twist or it’s the foal in trouble, and any of those can kill her and the foal both before the vet’s truck clears the cattle guard.

I’m moving before I’ve finished the thought. And O’Sullivan’s already moving too, because he was near the paddock the way he’s always near the paddock now, and he falls in beside me without being asked and without slowing me down, which is its own kind of rare.

“Tell me what to do,” he says. The words come easier now. He has learned enough to know that asking is part of the work.

“Halter, slow. We keep her up and walking if we can. If she goes down and rolls, she can twist a gut and that’s the end of her.” I’m ducking the rail as I say it. “Do not let her roll. I don’t care how big she is.”

We work her for an hour.

It’s the worst kind of work, the kind with a clock in it, keeping a thousand pounds of frightened animal on her feet and moving when everything in her wants to throw herself down and thrash. He’s on one side and I’m on the other and we pass her back and forth between us with a rhythm neither of us discussed, and somewhere in the middle of it I stop managing him and start working with him, and there’s a difference, and my body knows it before I let my head admit it.

“Despacio,” I tell the mare, and him, without deciding to, and O’Sullivan eases the halter back slow, right on the word. He’s got it. Somewhere in three weeks he started catching the Spanish that runs this place and banking it quiet, and I file that with the rest of what I’m not supposed to be noticing about him.

The vet’s an hour out. We buy the hour with our four hands and our two voices, and Bonita comes through it, a gas colic, wrung out but alive, the foal’s heartbeat still strong when the vet finally gets a hand on her. She stands in the aisle after, head low, sides heaving, done fighting for the first time all day.

“She’s exhausted,” Finn says, watching her. “She fought that the whole way. Even the parts that were killing her.”

“That’s the only way she knows.”

“Yeah.” He says it soft, and he’s not entirely talking about the horse, and we both know it, and neither of us says so.

The vet’s gone and the men have drifted off and it’s just us and a wrung-out mare and the long gold light that comes after a bad day survives itself.

“You should sleep,” I tell him. “You’ve got the drive.”

“So should you.”

“I don’t sleep much.”

“I know.” He says it simply. Not a guess. An observation, the kind I make about other people all day long, turned around and pointed at me.

“You’ve got the look my grandmother had. Woman who ran everything and trusted it to nobody, so she never got to set any of it down. You’ve got that. All day. Even when you’re standing still you’re running the whole place behind your eyes.”

And I could deflect it. I’ve deflected a thousand truer-than-comfortable things from smarter men than a hockey player. I open my mouth for the level redirect, the gate latch you already know is closed.

I don’t do it.

“That’s the job,” I say instead, which is the closest I’ve come in years to letting someone all the way in. “I read people. That’s what I’m good at. I can walk into any room and tell you what everyone in it is about to do.” I look at the mare instead of him, because this is easier said to a horse. “The part nobody warns you about is that you can’t turn it off. I’m reading you right now. I’ve been reading you since your truck came up the road the first day. I read my own mother across a dinner table like she’s a hand of cards. And you cannot be close to a person you’re always reading. You can’t. The reading is a wall you can’t get around, and I built it out of the one thing I can’t stop doing.”

He’s quiet a second.

“So what happens,” he says, “if you stop reading me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done it.” And this is the true thing, the one I’ve never handed anybody. “That’s what scares me. Not you. Not the deal or the contract or any of it. The idea of setting the instrument down for one second and being in a room with somebody. I don’t know who I am if I’m not the one who sees everything first.”

He doesn’t reach for me, and the restraint lands harder than touch would have.

A lesser man, a man who wanted the piece of me everyone wants, would have taken that opening and closed the distance. He stands there in the gold light holding what I gave him careful, like it could break, like being handed the truth of someone is a responsibility and not an advantage.

“For what it’s worth,” he says finally, “I’ve spent my whole life being wanted by people who needed something off me. The autograph, the goal, the clean six months.” A crooked almost-smile. “You’re the first person in a long time who looked at me and didn’t seem to want a single thing I had. And it turns out that’s the only thing I can’t defend against.” We’re two people who got lonely from opposite directions. Me from seeing everyone. Him from being seen by no one who meant it. And we’re standing in a barn that smells like a survived emergency, and the wall I built out of always-reading is just down, I let it down, I set the instrument on the ground between us and left it there.

I’m not managing this. For the first time in my adult life I am in a room with a man and I am not three moves ahead of him. I’m here. It’s terrifying. It’s the best I’ve felt in years. Those turn out to be the same thing.

Bonita shifts in her stall, wrung out and finally still, done carrying the fight for one evening.

I know exactly what happens now. Not tonight, maybe. But it’s going to happen, the thing I’ve spent three weeks and my whole life governing against, and I’ve stopped pretending the line holds because the line does not hold, I took it down myself, board by board, and I know precisely what it’s going to cost me.