Part 5
After he set the phone down, Julian thought of Silver Ridge’s next open afternoon. The clips showed Thunder’s two public kneels and the walk beside his chair, but none of the sessions that had ended early. People could come expecting another moment like those, even though Julian had said he would not ask Thunder to kneel again.
Julian could answer the trainer’s questions about Hank and the gates; he could not make the clips carry those answers. The charge that Silver Ridge was using the horse and Julian for attention was harder to dismiss. Another open afternoon would draw a crowd with its own idea of what Thunder owed it. Giving that up would cost Julian the public ring where he had begun to trust himself again.
He stopped checking his phone. Then he stopped going down to the arena. For three days he took the long way past the barn, close enough to see the upper rail of Thunder’s paddock and far enough away that he could tell himself he was merely crossing the property. Thunder was often on the far side. Once the horse looked up from his hay and Julian kept rolling. He went home angry at a stranger’s certainty and more angry that he had begun to borrow it.
Sarah found him in the kitchen with his old show gloves spread beside his chair. The leather had gone stiff at the seams. He had taken them out years ago when he was learning the reach and balance of the chair; they had been easier on his hands than the thin gloves the hospital gave him. He was rubbing a thumb over a worn patch when she set down a mug of tea.
“I thought you were going to see him,” she said.
“I was.” Julian folded the gloves. “I got as far as the road.”
Sarah pulled out a chair. She had taken him to the showcase hoping he might want to look at horses again. Julian remembered how frightened she had looked when he approached Thunder and how quiet she had grown during the applause. He could see her sorting what to say, and for once he wanted her to say it plainly.
“Do you think I put him at risk?”
“I think I was frightened,” she said. “I should have said more at the time. Some of those people are being cruel, but the question about safety is fair.”
Julian nodded. She hadn’t made him defend himself or offered comfort she couldn’t believe. He told her he wanted to stop doing the public afternoons and promotional interviews. “I still want to work with him,” he said. “I just don’t want to sell the next visit before it happens.”
Julian had not said it to Hank yet. He asked Sarah for a ride to Silver Ridge and decided to tell Hank himself.
At the barn the next morning, Hank was tightening a hinge on a gate. He set down his tools when Julian came through, and Julian was grateful he didn’t pretend not to have heard the interviews. They stood within sight of Thunder’s stall. The horse shifted his weight at the sound of Hank’s bucket and returned to his hay.
“I haven’t been here because of what they said,” Julian told him. “Some of it made me mad. Some of it sounded right. I don’t want more open afternoons or interviews built around us. I still want to work with Thunder.”
Hank looked at the gate he had just repaired. “Then we stop the public demonstrations. I’ll tell Silver Ridge Thunder is off that schedule. You can tell them what you want done with your name.”
Julian felt a small, unmistakable ache at closing the public ring where he had first worked beside Thunder. In Hank’s office he wrote the organizers that he would not appear at more open afternoons or give promotional interviews, and asked them to take his name off future announcements. Hank withdrew Thunder from those demonstrations. By afternoon the organizers had confirmed it; Julian saved their reply.
The work resumed the next morning and continued through the following weeks. One morning Julian rolled away from the arena toward the barn with the entire planned route still clean of hoofprints. His palms ached from the climb to the arena, and the trip home felt longer for a practice in which neither of them had moved. He had gone without asking Hank for one more try. Sarah came to watch the next day. Afterward she asked what Julian had noticed, rather than how the performance had gone. He found he had an answer for her.
The invitation arrived after Thunder had spent months learning Silver Ridge’s ordinary noises and Julian’s wheelchair. The state equestrian championships offered them an entry in its companion freestyle class. He would be the first competitor in a chair; their routine could be done on the ground, without riding. Julian read the letter at Silver Ridge’s tack-room table, already hearing an announcer turn his small, precarious piece of work into a spectacle. He remembered competing before the accident: the familiar saddle, the way a noisy grandstand had once made him sit taller. This time judges would watch a different kind of partnership.
Hank read the invitation without congratulating him. “We’d need to see the arena before we agree,” he said. “A clear route for your chair, a secure ring. I’ll stand close enough to step in.”
Sarah asked, “Do you want to go?”
Julian had spent several days hearing other people’s opinions about their work; none answered Sarah’s question. He looked through the tack-room window toward Thunder, who was standing across the yard with one hind leg resting, apparently indifferent to the invitation on the table. A judged class was public too, but it offered one routine on terms he could check before agreeing, rather than another advertised open afternoon. Julian wanted to know whether their work could hold up in a different place if he and Thunder could leave before the music ended. He was frightened of asking too much of the horse and of being watched when the answer was no. Both fears could come with him.
He wrote back to confirm that the class allowed a ground routine without a lead, that Hank could stand by, and that he could withdraw if Thunder would not settle. The reply confirmed each condition. Julian stared at the word “competitor” longer than he cared to admit, then sent his acceptance. In the morning he would begin preparing Thunder for the place where everyone would be watching.
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