Maggie Atwood and Becky McCabe - mother and daughter, both champion riders - vowed to never, ever, compete against one another. But a dramatic turn of events ahead of the Paris Olympics changes everything. Mother and daughter share a dream: to be the best in the world. Only one rider can fulfil that dream and make history. Only one rider can make history.
“Little (Horse) Woman”
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Originally posted: January 15, 2012
THE VIDEO SHOWS a little girl alone in her bedroom. Maybe
she is ten years old, maybe a bit older than that. As we watch
her, she carefully places a small stool in front of her full-length
mirror. The camera pans to shelves filled with trophies and walls
papered with brightly colored ribbons, almost all imprinted with
the image of a horse.
As she turns slightly, we see that one of the ribbons is hanging
from a string around her neck. She squares herself in front of the
plastic stool, as if about to step onto a medal stand, then pauses
to reach down and press a button on her phone.
We hear our national anthem begin to play. Now the girl, her
long hair in a ponytail, beautiful face solemn, places a hand over
her heart, and stands at attention.
That girl was me once.
Then I grew up.
It’s like one of my trainers would tell me, much later:
Shit happens.
ONE
EVEN IN A HORSE FAMILY, I was the black sheep.
I was late getting to the barn the morning everything changed,
for me and for all of us. Even the horses.
It was said at Atwood Farm that I was operating on Becky
Standard Time. BST. Whenever I made excuses for being late,
my trainer, Daniel, shortened it to BS.
New Year’s Eve was still a few days away, but today my reason
was simple enough: I’d been out way too late the night before
and ended up crashing at a friend’s house, where I’d blown
through two alarms on my phone.
Sunday night was party night for the horse people in Wellington,
a Florida town built around the horse business — the
Winter Equestrian Festival, the dressage show across Southshore
Boulevard, and the Masters Series for jumpers at Deeridge
Farm.
There were no events at the WEF on Monday or Tuesday, so
I headed out with riders and trainers and grooms and owners,
even the polo players who’d spent the weekend competing at
the International Polo Club. I was one of those college kids who
liked to party.
I hadn’t learned anything about riding last night. But I had
woken up with the Monday-morning lesson that drinking tequila
with polo players makes me feel as if one of them had taken a
mallet and hit me in the head.
My name is Becky McCabe. Short for Rebecca. Just Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm — one of the stories my mom used to read to
me when I was little — but Rebecca of Atwood Farm, owned by
my grandmother, Caroline Atwood.
She’d never been a Granny or Gran or some other nickname.
That wasn’t her. She was just “Grandmother.” Or “Caroline.”
Nothing more cuddly than that. “The grandmother,” like it was
her official position, was another way I thought of her, maybe
the way that described her best.
“Your mother’s on her way to the Olympics,” Grandmother had
said the night before. “And you’re on your way to the bar.”
I’d grown up watching her stop horses in the ring with just
the snap of her voice, like she was cracking a whip. I once told
her during an argument that she was a lot like those horses —
only they were nicer.
“I’m not Mom,” I said.
“Not exactly breaking news at this point,” Grandmother said.
“You keep forgetting I’m twenty-one, Grandmother,” I said.
“And proud of it,” she said.
She was seventy-two, proud that she still owned the barn
that she and her late husband, Clint, a legendary horseman, my
grandfather, had built together. She was still a great beauty, even
in an Atwood Farm navy windbreaker, jeans, and boots, her
steel-gray hair pulled into a ponytail. I could see Mom in her.
And myself.
Now I was pulling into the driveway at nine thirty — no
one at Atwood Farm’s definition of an early start time — having
just blown through a couple of lights on Southshore Boulevard,
hoping this might be the one morning of the whole year — or of
her whole life — when my mom, Maggie, had gotten a late start
on her trail ride.
No chance.
Noticing again how run-down our barn looked from the outside,
I ran for the tack room, where I kept spare riding clothes
in a locker. One of our grooms, Emilio, was leaning against the
wall where the bridles were hung, arms crossed in front of him
and sadly shaking his head.
“You got left behind, chiquita,” Emilio said.
“How long ago did she leave?”
He pulled out his phone and squinted at it.
“Thirty-one minutes,” he said. “And counting.”
“How pissed was she?” I said.
“Not any more than usual,” he said.
“You think I should try to catch up with her?”
“Sky and I had won our share of jumping events over the years. At our best, we were a perfect, fearless match.”
“Was me, chiquita?” Emilio said, grinning at me now. “I would
saddle up on Sky and start riding south and maybe not be
stopping until I got to the Florida Keys.”
Sky was my horse. My baby. Technically she was a gray,
even dark gray as a colt. But more white now. A Dutch
warmblood. Riding horse bred to be a jumper. Smaller than
Mom’s horse, Coronado, by a lot. We’d found out about her
from a trainer moving back to Ireland. When I saw her, I’d
fallen in love with her after riding her just one time. All
it took.
Mom and Dad were divorced by then, and we couldn’t afford
to buy another horse. But when I told Dad about Sky, he bought
her for me. Called it an early birthday present. Now the little
horse was my best friend in the world.
Sky seemed to love me just the way I was. I loved her even
more fiercely back. She didn’t want me to work harder, or win
more, or party less. Or wake up earlier. It didn’t matter to her
that Maggie Atwood had been a champion from the time she’d
been the age I was now.
She was Atwood, by the way, and I was McCabe because she’d
given up my dad’s name after the divorce. I’d kept it. People
sometimes wondered if we were even related.
Oh, Sky and I had won our share of jumping events over the
years. At our best, we were a perfect, fearless match. Even after
Sky had knocked down a rail or two and taken us out of the
running for a ribbon, I’d come out of the ring and see that our
time was five seconds faster than anybody else’s. And as hard as
I tried, I couldn’t feel sad about that.
It was why my trainer, Daniel, had taken to calling me
Maverick, after the character Tom Cruise played in Top Gun.
“You have the need,” he’d said, “for speed.”
“I’m not still in pony camp,” I’d said. “I just don’t know what
I want to be when I grow up.”
“When?” he’d said. “Or if?”
Where I pushed boundaries, Mom was precise. We were all
sure she’d be riding Coronado in the Olympics in Paris late next
summer. She was one of the best riders in the country. Trying to
prove she was one of the best in the world.
Mom only went as fast as she needed to when she was in the
ring. Even when one of her horses refused a jump at the last
second, I had never seen her fall off. Other riders, sure. It had
happened to me plenty of times. Her? Never.
In every area of life, she stayed in her lane, and excelled there.
She wasn’t reckless. Didn’t take chances. Even when she and Coronado
got a bad start in the ring, I’d watch her figure things out in the
next half minute. Sometimes sooner. Like she’d hit a reset button.
We didn’t need a handyman at Atwood Farm as long as Mom
was around. If something broke, she put it back together. A
saddle. A bridle. A spur.
Wonder Woman, the horsewoman.
Don’t get me wrong: We loved each other. A lot. We were just
different.
A lot.
It’s why Mom and Grandmother — and Daniel — believed that
Sky and I weren’t at our best often enough, that I wasn’t the
champion they needed me to be.
One of the beauties of our sport is that men and women
compete against each other, from the time they’re teenagers until
some of them are past sixty.
Maggie Atwood didn’t only aspire to being an Olympic equestrian,
she was a serious gym rat. She was on the clock with an
exercise class, followed by a session at the gym, and a massage
booked for after that. She couldn’t afford to waste precious
minutes waiting for me.
Another time fault for Becky McCabe.
Emilio said he’d throw a saddle on Sky. In the bathroom next to
the tack room, I got into my riding pants and boots and helmet,
came out and took the reins from Emilio and started walking
Sky toward the schooling ring. It was then that I heard shouting,
saw Daniel and Emilio running toward the main road.
Then I saw why.
Mom’s horse, Coronado, her ride to the Olympics, was coming
straight for them, at full gallop, as if he were the one feeling the
need for speed.
Daniel took charge, motioning for Emilio to fan out from the
out-of-control horse, protect themselves from being trampled.
No shouting from them now. They had their arms out in front
of them, trying to calm Coronado, slow him down.
Usually that would have been the rider’s job.
Mom’s job.
But Coronado’s saddle was empty.
“There was always a mystery, even some magic, to what horses knew. And didn’t.”
TWO
“HE KNEW ENOUGH to come home,” Daniel said to me.
Home meant the barn.
One firm barn rule was that nobody went out on a trail ride
alone. Mom had just done it — her idea of being a maverick.
Now I had to break that same rule if I had any chance of
saving her.
In my heart I knew that if the situation were reversed, Mom
would jump on Sky and ride all the way to the Florida turnpike
and back if that’s what it took to find me.
Now I jumped off Sky, handed her reins to George, one of the
other grooms, and moved closer to Daniel and Emilio, keeping
my distance, not wanting Coronado to spook more than he
already had.
Then Daniel slowly reached for the horse’s bridle, talking
softly to him in Spanish now. As he did, I came in behind them
and put a foot in the stirrup closest to me.
“Let me go find her,” Daniel said.
“No,” I said.
He put his hand on my arm. I looked down, glaring his
hand away.
“My mom,” I said. “Her horse.”
We had a brief stare-down, until he nodded and let go of
the bridle.
Emilio gave me a leg up into the saddle. Mom’s saddle. Her
horse. They were connected in the same way I was connected
to Sky.
When I was on Sky and trying to get the distance between
jumps exactly right, I was never really sure how much of it
was me and how much of it was a combination of her breeding
and training and instinct and even muscle memory. In those
moments of trust between horse and rider, it was as if we were
sharing one brain.
There was always a mystery, even some magic, to what horses
knew. And didn’t.
Now I wanted Coronado to know where Mom was, and take
me to her.
THREE
I’D RIDDEN CORONADO plenty, worked him out when Mom
and Caroline traveled to look at horses for the barn, even jumped
him one time when Mom was down with the flu.
This time I was just along for the ride, headed back out the
trail along the Palm Beach Point canal, past the Nason barn next
to the huge new barn being built by Wellington newcomers, a
Kentucky family with money to burn.
Usually I loved being out here, loved the solitude of it and
the quiet and the open space. Mom said she did, too, though
sometimes I got more enjoyment when Mom wasn’t with me.
Not now. All I could think of was the question she’d once
asked me about people who don’t ride. “How can they really
feel alive?”
Please let her ask me again.
If her horse came back to the barn alone and she was somewhere
out here, it had to be bad.
Coronado and I weren’t going fast. It’s one of the myths of our
sport that a horse has to be going fast to throw its rider.
We were out into one of the last undeveloped parts of Wellington.
Someday there would be barns out here, too.
Where was she? Was she badly injured? I could feel the panic
building inside me. If somebody hadn’t found her by now, put
her in a golf cart, or an ambulance, I was going to be the one.
There had to be a damn good reason why she had ended up off
her horse.
My eyes kept searching the narrow canal as we moved north,
not wanting to see her down a glorified ditch.
If I hadn’t been late this morning, none of this would have
happened.
I saw her then.
Saw her and felt the air coming out of me all at once, as if I’d
been the one who’d gotten thrown. She was maybe fifty yards
ahead, between the trail and the canal, on her side.
Motionless.
Except that her body seemed to be going in two different
directions at once. The boots I’d ordered special from New York
City, for her birthday a few weeks ago, were pointing toward the
water, and her upper body was pointing toward the trail.
I was afraid my mother might have broken her neck. I’d
seen it happen once before, in person, a Grand Prix event. A
horse had refused a jump and threw his rider, who’d gone down
and had stayed down until the ambulance was in the ring. He
recovered from the injury to walk again, eventually. But he never
rode again.
I walked Coronado to her, knelt down. Her eyes were closed,
but I could see that she was breathing. She was still wearing her
helmet, caked with dirt, like the rest of her.
I knew enough not to move her. I just leaned close.
“Mom,” I said. “I got you.”
Then I took the phone out of my back pocket and dialed 911
thinking, Yeah, Becky, you got her.
A half hour too late.”
Extracted from The Horse Woman by James Patterson & Mike Lupica, out now.
