Who knew she’d be so clumsy with a diaper? That she’d have a hard time tempering Jean’s thrashing kicks while securing one sticky tab over the front, or how often she’d mistakenly position it backward? There were more physical pains, but these, too, were invisible to Murray, and if they weren’t going to talk about how she felt, then her mind flipped to how Murray hadn’t suggested sex, not once—even though she consoled herself with what Dr. Weiss had said—that it was best to wait at least four weeks after birth. But she wanted to know her husband still wanted her. Sometimes she wondered about others who might caress her, someone who’d desire her in any shape.
When fantasies arose, she learned to fight them. She put all of her energy into Jean, into feeling love for her baby. How much she wanted to look at her intently, to stare fixedly into her eyes, their clearest of blues, and not think, This is it? All the agony, the preparation, And now? What she felt but could never say was that the pleasure she’d once relished, the excitement over meeting Murray in the middle of the day for lunch, or to sit in the art museum, had dissipated. She felt these feelings had vanished.
On the worst days, when she was home alone with the baby, she found calm in music. James Taylor, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. Her taste in music changed as rapidly as her moods. At least Jean didn’t seem to mind the variety, though when Édith Piaf came on, this one held her attention especially.
“I love you, Baby,” Nancy forced herself to say every day. She hoped the more she practiced, the more the feeling would become real.
Even on those mornings when she struggled to rise out of bed, the silence of the bedroom punctured by wails from the nursery, she asked herself: Are you loving? Or those afternoons when she wanted nothing more than to take a walk in the fresh July sun but knew the heat would be too much for Jean: Are you true? And then, the answer: It doesn’t matter about you, Nancy.
After six weeks, she and Murray took Jean for her first standard checkup. Dr. Sharp was a tall, slender woman with gray hair and eyes. She praised Nancy and Murray for Jean’s health. The baby’s heart was beating normally, and her ears and mouth showed no signs of infection. More numbers: Jean was now ten pounds six ounces—in the eighty-fifth percentile for her age, sixtieth percentile in length, twentieth percentile in head size. Nancy watched as Dr. Sharp poked and prodded her baby, placing her hand over Jean’s skull to feel the shape and make sure her brain wasn’t pushing out disproportionately. “Great.” She nodded, then pressed softly on the top, confirming the necessary flat spot. No organs felt enlarged when the doctor squished her tummy. The joints in Jean’s hips and legs moved fluidly.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Sharp said, after she’d asked for some time alone to talk with Nancy. Murray had already left with Jean to sit in the waiting room. Dr. Sharp’s eyes squinted a bit. “I know it’s not my place to ask, but have you spoken with your GP?”
“About what?” Nancy asked, feeling her fists tighten.
“I have to say I’m a bit concerned,” the doctor continued. “You look like you’ve lost any baby weight very quickly. Are you eating enough?”
Nancy said she hadn’t really noticed, not that she wasn’t eating—she was—though she knew she could have been better about it, the way she’d begun to subsist on a slice of toast here or there, maybe a piece of fruit or a yogurt when she felt light-headed. But she supposed she hadn’t been weighing herself regularly, or looking in the mirror, afraid of what she might see—her fatigued eyes, her washed-out cheeks.
“I am eating,” she said finally, defensively, but Dr. Sharp just stared at her, perplexed. Fatigue, soreness, some irregular bleeding, she said, were all normal, but the gauntness of her face, it wasn’t right.
“I don’t have time,” Nancy said, tears rising. The doctor excused herself for a few minutes and returned with Murray. He had Jean’s head nestled over his shoulder.
“Hold her closer by your chest,” Nancy told him. “I only ever hold her like that after a feeding.” Her hand was on her forehead. “Where is her car seat? He doesn’t even have it. Did you leave it in the waiting room?”
“Wait,” Dr. Sharp said. She looked at Nancy, then Murray. “Your wife is depleted,” she said. “Will you make sure she eats?”
Murray made a face, one Nancy knew too well, his brow furrowed, eyes narrowing. Then he looked away, as if distracted by some ambient noise coming through the wall. He was cradling Jean. Jean Bean, he’d started calling her when he took her into his willowy arms. As she watched him, she felt more tears collect. Suddenly he asked her to hold Jean while he got the car seat. Her arms trembled as she brought Jean close to her chest. She wondered if Dr. Sharp noticed. Could anyone actually see how she felt? Could anyone see her?
Jean squirmed in her arms and began to cry, and Nancy scrambled to search for her diaper bag, to make sure she had enough extras if this was the problem, but it was likely Jean was hungry, so she asked Dr. Sharp if they were through, if she could go home and see her again next month. The doctor said that was fine, but offered one final word of advice. “I know you and Murray want to be as attentive as possible, but sometimes Jean will have to self-soothe. If she’s been recently fed and still goes on, it’s okay to let her cry a little bit. It will ease your stress too.” She smiled in a way meant to comfort, but the look of concern in her eyes, clear even behind the thick lenses of her glasses, set some kind of dread in Nancy’s stomach.
As she positioned Jean into the car seat later that day, she considered what Dr. Sharp had said to her right before they’d left. She’d asked what her plans were for returning to work, and Nancy said she hoped to return next month. “We need the money” was Nancy’s explanation. Murray had stood silently beside Nancy, his arms full of Jean. Nancy could feel him next to her, his watchful presence, possibly calibrating how Nancy would handle the question.
Dr. Sharp had looked at them and smiled. “You do whatever you need to do,” she had said. “You’re good parents.”
A few days later, Murray would go to the toy store and surprise Jean with an enormous teddy bear made of a powder-blue terry cloth that matched some of her bath towels. When he brought it home, he’d wave the squishy gargantuan thing at her and then pretend to claw her little belly with it. He’d growl, too, but Jean would only stare at him blankly, a slate sheen over her eyes, which were still learning how to focus. Nancy would feel herself laughing then, perhaps out of pure nerves, perhaps out of the absurdity of Murray’s whim, this simple act of love. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of many things anymore. But, yes, it still felt good to laugh.
SEVEN
Tuesday
7:02:14 a.m.
Murray was waiting for the girls to arrive for pool practice. Once a week they jogged in the water to flush their muscles of the lactic acid accrued from workouts.
Anna arrived early. She wore a one-piece that accentuated her strong arms and thighs. Fuller than Becky’s, but no less lean. She didn’t smile at him, or wave; he kept his gaze half on his pad, pretending he might not have noticed her. He drew little lines under the interval sets he’d plotted out. When he finished, Anna was leaning over by the edge of the pool, struggling to touch her toes. He appreciated her effort to make use of every little pocket of time, to prepare, stretch.
A few more girls entered. Liu and Victoria. Rodney, Tanya, and Ginny arrived next, laughing. There was always someone laughing, he thought, like they were children, and he wasn’t here to babysit. He told them to get in the water and stay in the first two lanes. Twenty minutes of warm-up. But not too easy. They had to focus on keeping their torsos straight, abs tight as they drew their hamstrings back. He yelled out reminders, especially for Victoria, who liked to lean forward and get ahead. In high school, she’d once broken eighteen minutes in the 5K, but he’d yet to see her do it again. He used to have patience with burnouts, but some days, like today, he wanted to tell Victoria her time was better spent studying in the library.
“Two minutes on!” he shouted.
He followed the large round clock to the left of the pool. A long red needle marked seconds for tracking each interval.
Becky would have worked double their pace. Even in the water, she moved as fluidly as air. Like at Nationals, in Terre Haute, how light she’d looked in her midriff tunic and briefs. It had been twenty degrees that day in late November, and when she’d passed him at mile one, there’d been a sheen on her face and arms, Vaseline to prevent chapping, her eyes frozen with determination.
By the end of her freshman season, Becky’s swimsuit had begun to hang from her at pool practice, bagging around her chest and bottom. She’d rubber banded the back straps together. Anna and Victoria had expressed their worries to him at that time, and he assured them it was being taken care of, said he’d have a talk with her, but then the season had gotten busy. She’d cleared the BMI minimum at her first mandatory weigh-in for the season, but now there were rumors she’d tied little weights to the inseams of her shorts. He’d heard Rodney tell Anna this on the course, at their second practice back after summer break, when the team had been in the middle of doing their form drills. If Rodney was gifted at anything, he thought, it was spreading rumors.
After the last interval, he clapped his hands twice. “Everyone out of the water!” Told them to find a spot for core work. Had them hold a plank position for one minute on their elbows, then it was time for push-ups.
“On your knuckles!” he said. After twenty, everyone but Anna could stop. He crouched down and started counting twenty more. The other girls were cheering her on, but after fifteen, she cried out she had to stop; her knuckles were raw.
“For Becky!” he shouted.
The girls fell silent. Anna collapsed onto her chest and whimpered. Rodney grabbed her towel from the bench and jogged for the locker room, slamming her body through the swinging door.
“Hey!” he said. Liu, already wrapped in a towel, used the end to wipe her eyes. He excused them all. Anna’s knees wobbled as she stood up, but she just waited there in front of him, clutching her shoulders for warmth.
“How could you say that?” she said. She was looking right at him, her eyes quivering.
“Where’s your towel?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking around. “But I asked you—” Her voice had softened.
“I heard you,” he said. “Don’t you think she’d want you to work hard?” When she began to speak, he stopped her. “You know, you’re right,” he said. “I was out of line.” It wasn’t a big deal—his eyes twitched—wasn’t his fault if the words came off wrong. But he couldn’t let her leave like this, risk it damaging her times. Complaining to Rick.
“Did you hear from her parents?” Her shoulders had relaxed a little.
“No,” he said, a twitch in his cheek.
“Can we visit her?” she asked. “I could help organize something,” she said, her voice still soft.
“Not yet,” he said. “Her parents aren’t ready.”
When she shivered, he told her she had to find her towel, but she wouldn’t go.
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “It could have happened to any of us.” Her voice cracked.
“You heard me,” he said. “Dry off before you catch a cold.”
Three days later, at the Iona Invitational, Murray thought he heard Rodney say something about holding a vigil in Battell Chapel. The girls were loading their duffels out of the bus’s luggage carrier. Tanya and Victoria had nodded. “It’s not right,” Liu nearly whispered.
He may have been getting older, but his hearing was immaculate. Something he wished he’d reminded Nancy of more often. She used to accuse him of not listening, not truly hearing what she was trying to say, but she had no way of being inside his head to judge what he had taken in.
Battell Chapel stood opposite the campus green, which was wide enough for thousands of students to gather. It didn’t make any sense to Murray, except that Yale was a dramatic place in which students and administration continually sought various pedestals for voicing their fixations. Wasn’t quiet meditation better? Silent prayer?
Anna was drinking from her water bottle under the team tent. He called her over, gripping his clipboard with both hands. “Nestle in with Lisa Gates and Bernadette Morgan. Lisa is U Conn. Blue. Bernadette, Iona. Red. They’re five seconds faster per mile than your best.”
When he went over her mile targets, he alternated between pointing his stopwatch over the numbers and locking eyes with hers, which looked more hazel in the sunlight.
“If you hold on to those two,” he said, “I know you can outkick them.” She didn’t nod like usual, and he wondered if she knew more about Becky than he did.
“Choose a focal point, color, clothing tag, anything. Just don’t lose sight. Hear me?”
For a moment, he felt Nancy’s eyes, sweat on her brow, looking up at him in pain.
He knew she—Anna—wanted him to confirm a hospital visit, but he couldn’t just yet. Even if he could, there was no telling how it would affect her season. Of all Division I courses, Van Cortlandt’s was the toughest, back-loaded with hills, the last half mile always much longer than it looked. Wednesday he’d had Anna do mile repeats on the road, up Prospect Avenue. She’d looked stronger than ever; there would be no disrupting her streak.
A half hour before the start, Anna rounded up the girls for a twenty-minute warm-up through the woods. Tanya would be closest after Anna, though her last two workouts had been mediocre.
He blamed Rodney. She was a bad influence all around, especially given her grades. She struggled to maintain a B-minus average, and he was sure that the combination of two required courses, one in ecology and another in neurology, alongside those required for her major in women’s studies, would keep her on the same downward spiral this semester. Rodney brought down the team GPA, lessened morale. He had all the notes, lists of Rodney’s infractions to date, between coming late to practices, putting in zero effort, and talking out of turn. Her grades were just the icing on the cake. Murray still had to get the final approval from Rick to let her go.
He migrated closer to some of the other coaches gathered by the start. Casually he knew Coach David Marcus from Fordham, and Allan Mosley from Iona, but the U Conn coach, Dena Winters, was new. None of the other Ivies were present, but it was important to establish a precedent here, show Harvard and Princeton what to expect at the Heptagonal meet in a few weeks.
His girls were warmed up. They went to the tent to shed layers and apply more Vaseline between their thighs. He heard Ginny ask Anna for the bag with extra spikes, then for the wrench, but Murray hollered at them. It was too late. They should have taken care of these things sooner. Ginny threw her jacket in the corner and made a sullen face before her run to the start, where a few other girls had already started doing form drills or practicing striders. He yelled at Tanya to keep her back straight, for Victoria and Liu to shift their weight forward, plant their feet midstrike.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Allan Mosley.
“Coach,” he said. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. I was devastated to hear about Becky.” He swept his arm to where his own girls huddled in a nearby mass. “We’re so moved you’re all out here in her spirit. Actually we did a group meditation for her this morning.”
Murray nodded without making eye contact. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it. We’re hopeful she’ll be back soon.”
“My God, really?” Allan’s eyes went wide.
Years ago, Murray had run into Allan at the supermarket, and Allan had given him the same spiel about how sorry he was to hear about Murray’s divorce. His heartfelt consolation had felt just as disingenuous then. Allan had invited Murray to join his family for church once. He and his wife, Mary, and their two kids, a little boy and girl. This must have been some time before Murray’s knees gave out, because he’d jogged with his cart to an aisle on the other end of the store, claiming he needed Dixie cups, then had secured an express checkout lane and paid with
a credit card.
“Well, she’s making progress,” Murray said. His curtness seemed to rattle Allan—and he was glad—the guy needed to back off a little. Iona was a religious school, Catholic, and Murray guessed Allan was praying for him “to find a way back.”
Murray had stopped shaving and doing his laundry on a regular basis, and he assumed most of the other coaches considered him a hermit, a recluse. Sometimes he felt they looked at him like he was a homeless person, like the man he sometimes saw on a park bench by the city green: the man with his long gray beard and high cheekbones, his blue eyes. Once he’d watched the man peel a piece of beef jerky from its wrapper, and Murray had wondered how he—with his dirty face and toenails poking from taped-up shoes, his garbage bags stuffed with blankets—had gotten the jerky. How did he manage at all?
There’d been a time when Murray had looked after himself—in the first years after Nancy left, even—when he’d spent seventy dollars a week at the health food store on vitamins to improve his energy levels. Chaga tea and liquid iron, and other supplements like cordyceps, cardiovascular boosts, brain boosts—“highs” that would only augment his running. Coaching was the same, like a drug: as long as he had his mind on his athletes and their races, he could forget himself.
“I’ve got to set my clock,” Murray said suddenly, unsure if it had been to himself or to Allan, who he was surprised to find still standing there, looking at him, confused. How long had it been, the silence?
“Of course,” Allan said, as if maybe seconds, not minutes, had passed. “Good luck,” he said.
Late Air Page 8
