I turned up my radio and wrote as much as I could, mostly equine veterinary medical articles for Equus. On breaks, I took brief walks. I bought new shoes—I’d been lying around in socks for years—and discovered that my feet had shrunk two sizes. I had lived for so long in silence and isolation that the world was a sensory explosion. At the grocery store, I dragged my hands along the shelves, touching boxes and bags, smelling oranges and pears and apples. At the hardware store, I’d plunge my arm into the seed bins to feel the pleasing weight of the grain against my skin. I was a toddler again.

After years of seeing people almost exclusively on television, I found their three-dimensionality startling: the light playing off their faces, the complexity of their hands, the strange electric feel of their nearness. One afternoon, I spent fifteen minutes watching a shirtless man clip a hedge, enthralled by the glide of the muscles under his skin.

On a cool fall day in 1996, I was sifting through some documents on the great racehorse Seabiscuit when I discovered Red Pollard, the horse’s jockey. I saw him first in a photograph, curled over Seabiscuit’s neck. Looking out at me from the summer of 1938, he had wistful eyes and a face as rough as walnut bark.

I began looking into his life and found a story to go with the face. Born in 1909, Red was an exceptionally intelligent, bookish child with a shock of orange hair. At fifteen, he was abandoned by his guardian at a makeshift racetrack cut through a Montana hayfield. He wanted to be a jockey, but he was too tall and too powerfully built. That didn’t stop him, though. He began race riding in the bush leagues and fared so badly that he took to part-time prizefighting in order to survive. He lived in horse stalls for twelve years, studying Emerson and the “Rubáiyát,” piloting neurotic horses at “leaky roof” tracks, getting punched bloody in cow-town clubs, keeping painfully thin with near-starvation diets, and probably pills containing the eggs of tapeworms.

He was appallingly accident prone. Racehorses blinded his right eye, somersaulted onto his chest at forty miles per hour, trampled him, and rammed him into the corner of a barn, virtually severing his lower leg. He shattered his teeth and fractured his back, hip, legs, collarbone, shoulder, ribs. He was once so badly mauled that the newspapers announced his death. But he came back every time, struggling through pain and fear and the limitations of his body to do the only thing he had ever wanted to do. And in the one lucky moment of his unlucky life he found Seabiscuit, a horse as damaged and persistent as he was. I hung Red’s picture above my desk and began to write.

What began as an article for American Heritage became an obsession, and in the next two years the obsession became a book. Borden and I moved to a cheap rental house farther downtown, and I arranged my life around the project. At the local library, I pored over documents and microfilm I requisitioned from the Library of Congress. If I looked down at my work, the room spun, so I perched my laptop on a stack of books in my office, and Borden jerry-rigged a device that held documents vertically. When I was too tired to sit at my desk, I set the laptop up on my bed. When I was too dizzy to read, I lay down and wrote with my eyes closed. Living in my subjects’ bodies, I forgot about my own.

I mailed the manuscript off to Random House in September, 2000, then fell into bed. I was lying there the following day when the room began to gyrate. Reviewing the galleys brought me close to vomiting several times a day. Most of the gains I had made since 1995 were lost. I spent each afternoon sitting with Fangfoss on my back steps, watching the world undulate and sliding into despair.

In March of 2001, Random House released “Seabiscuit: An American Legend.” Five days later, I was lying down, when the phone rang. “You are a best-selling writer,” my editor said. I screamed. Two weeks later, I picked up the phone to hear him and my agent shout in tandem, “You’re No. 1!” Borden threw a window open and yelled it to the neighborhood.

That spring, as I tried to cope with the dreamy unreality of success and the continuing failure of my health, something began to change in Borden. At meals, he sat in silence, his gaze disconnected, his jaw muscles working. His sentences trailed off in the middle. He couldn’t sleep or eat. He was falling away from me, and I didn’t know why.

He came into my office one night in June, sat down, and slid his chair up to me, touching his knees to mine. I looked at his face. He was still young and handsome, his hair black, his skin seamless. But the color was gone from his lips, the quickness from his eyes. He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth wavered. He dropped his chin to his chest.

He began to speak, and fourteen years of unvoiced emotions spilled out: the torment of watching the woman he loved suffer; his feelings of responsibility and helplessness and anger; his longing for children we probably couldn’t have; the endless strain of living in obedience to an extraordinarily volatile disease.

We talked for much of the night. I found myself revealing all the grief that I had hidden from him. When I asked him why he hadn’t said anything before, he said he thought I would shatter. I realized that I had feared the same of him. In protecting each other from the awful repercussions of our misfortune, we had become strangers.

When we were too tired to talk anymore, I went into the bedroom and sat down alone. I slid his ring from my finger and dropped it into a drawer.

We spent a long, painful summer talking, and for both of us there were surprises. I didn’t shatter, and neither did he. I prepared myself for him to leave, but he didn’t. We became, for the first time since our days at Kenyon, alive with each other.

One night that fall, I walked to the back of the yard. As Fangfoss hunted imaginary mice in the grass, I looked out at the hill behind the house. Beyond it, downtown Washington hummed like an idling engine, the city lights radiating over the ridge. I looked west, where a line of row-house chimneys filed down the hill until they became indistinguishable from the trunks of the walnut trees at the road’s end. Borden came out and joined me briefly, draping his arms over my shoulders, then he went inside. I watched the screen door slap behind him.

As I turned back, I saw a slit of light arc over the houses and vanish behind the trees. It was the first meteor I had seen since that night in Linc’s car. I thought, for the first time in a long time, of the deer.

In the depths of illness, I believed that the deer had crashed through the windshield and ushered me into an existence in which the only possibility was suffering. I was haunted by his form in front of the car, his bent knee, the seeming inevitability of catastrophe, and the ruin my life became.

I had forgotten the critical moment. The deer’s knee didn’t straighten. He didn’t step into our path, we didn’t strike him, and I didn’t die. As sure as I was that he had taken everything from me, I was wrong.

The car passed him and moved on. ♦