The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans

Author:Nicholas Evans [Evans, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-57474-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1995-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

The physical therapist who looked after Grace was a tiny woman with a shock of streaked curls and gray eyes so large they made her seem permanently surprised. Terri Carlson was fifty-one and a Libra; both her parents were dead and she had three sons which her husband had given her in rapid succession some thirty years ago before running off with a Texan rodeo queen. He’d insisted the boys be called John, Paul and George and Terri thanked the Lord he’d gone before there was a fourth. All this Grace had found out on her very first visit here and on each subsequent visit Terri had taken up where she left off so that now, had Grace been asked, she could have filled several notebooks on the woman’s life. Not that Grace minded in the least. She liked it. It meant she could simply lie on the workout bench, as she was doing now, and surrender herself entirely not just to the woman’s hands but to her words as well.

Grace had protested when Annie told her she’d arranged for her to come here three mornings a week. She knew that after all these months it was more than she strictly needed. But the therapist in New York had told Annie that the harder you worked at it, the less likely it was you’d end up with a limp.

“Who cares if I have a limp?” Grace said.

“I do,” Annie said, so that was it.

In fact, Grace enjoyed the sessions here more than in New York. First they did the workout. Terri had her doing everything. On top of all the exercises, she strapped Velcro weights on her stump, got her sweating on the arm bicycle, even had her disco dancing in front of the mirrors that lined the walls. That first day she’d seen Grace’s expression when the tape came on.

“You don’t like Tina Turner?”

Grace said Tina Turner was fine. Just kind of . . .

“Old? Get outa here! She’s my age!”

Grace blushed and they laughed and from then on things were fine. Terri told her to bring in some of her own tapes and these had now become the source oi much joking between them. Whenever Grace brought in a new one Terri would examine it, shake her head and sigh, “More gloom from the tomb.”

After the workout, Grace would relax for a while and then get to work on her own in the pool. Then, for the last hour, it was back in front of the mirrors for some walk practice or “gait training” as Terri called it. Grace had never felt fitter in her whole life.

Today Terri had pressed the pause button on her life story and was telling her about an Indian boy she visited each week up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He was twenty years old and proud and beautiful, she said, like something out of a Charlie Russell picture. That was, until last summer when he’d gone swimming in a pool with some friends and dived headfirst into a concealed shelf of rock.

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