It was brilliant. Nancy hurried to change Jean into her pajamas, struggling over Jean’s thrashing legs. Nancy continued Murray’s shh, shh in sets of three, as if the trick was repetition, consistency.
She stayed with Jean in the back seat, one hand by her knee, the other on Goodnight Moon—Jean’s favorite—that she’d snatched from their nightstand just in case. There were several red lights until they merged onto 95. Nancy didn’t know where they would head to. She hoped Murray had an idea; it was nearing ten o’clock, and she needed to be sure. “What about Meriden?” She pictured the hike they’d taken there once, one spring, where there’d been a beautiful park, a ridge they could drive up to, for the view.
“Okay,” Murray said. About ten miles in, they heard the first break in Jean’s cries, and gradually they became more intermittent whimpers. Nancy stroked her warm leg; she whispered, “That’s it, little girl. My sweet girl.”
Jean’s chest rose and fell, ever more quietly, her neck relaxing, head drooping with tiredness, and Nancy brushed her cheek as lightly as possible. They were only halfway to Meriden, but Murray took the next exit. He was peering into the rearview mirror, a partial smile on his lips.
They pulled into the lot of a Kmart in Wallingford. Murray let the engine hum. He opened his door and stepped out carefully in the cold, and she opened hers as softly, and they looked at one another, then at Jean, so still, her mouth quivering slightly, the air seeming more frigid against the warmth of the car. Nancy pulled her jacket closer and squeezed Murray’s hand, after he’d gotten in the back next to her, gently closing the door, to lock in the warmth.
They were a good team, Nancy thought, as they let Jean sleep.
The next night, after Nancy put Jean down, she decided she would do it: she’d surprise him with the lingerie set she’d gotten on sale around Christmas. She’d been planning to wait another month or two, until she’d at least tried to get into better shape, but there was no time like the present. I have to remember this, she told herself, slipping on the first piece, a black silk chemise with lace that furled around her bottom. The second was a garter belt, but she had to hurry and fasten the sheer knee-highs that came with it before he finished brushing his teeth in the bathroom.
She had left only the green reading light on when he entered in his boxer shorts. In the warm glow, she wasn’t sure how well he could distinguish her shape, and even if it was easy enough for him to, did she look alright? He smiled at her and climbed onto their bed. He waited for her on his knees, arms spread out. She sauntered over, shimmying her hips and laughing. Her breasts were still so much larger than they’d ever been, but at least they no longer hurt. Murray lifted the bottom of her top and began kissing between her thighs. He tugged at the loose strings hanging from her belt. She bent over and nuzzled his neck, smelling the ordinary bar soap he used, his fresh scent. His hair was still wet from the shower, and she rubbed her hands through it, this blond that shone silvery gray in certain light. Murray unhooked her belt and began inching down her thong. When they heard Jean crying, Nancy looked up and paused. She remembered again what Dr. Sharp had said about self-soothing. How Jean would learn to sleep longer overall if she let her go more.
“She’ll be fine,” Murray said. He pulled her close to him, her back pressed against his chest as he kissed an earlobe, then reached down with one hand to tenderly squeeze a fleshy cheek. The closer she was, the more force she could feel in his erection. Jean had already quieted, which allowed her to close her eyes again and enjoy each sensation.
Usually Nancy had one ear on the monitor without thinking about it—the white noise of Jean’s breath and the creaking sound of her moving in her crib. But just after she and Murray finished, about ten minutes later, she noticed the intense quiet. She crawled over Murray, out of the bed. His body slackened, and he stretched his arms and legs out. “Really?” He pressed his temples. Nancy had slipped on her robe and was hurrying to the nursery.
She would scream. A wild shrieking through the whole bones of the house. A shrieking that tore through its foundations, lasting the lifetime it took Murray to make it to the crib.
“She’s not breathing!” Nancy was still screaming when he rounded the doorway and found her, holding Jean in her arms as gently as she could manage. Murray took Jean from her and laid her on the floor. Nancy fell beside him, sobbing. “Christ,” he shouted. “Pick up the phone! Call an ambulance!”
Ambulance, ambulance, yes. Nancy’s hands were shaking as she dialed frantically, fingers finding buttons, shouting at the first responder. Murray was on his knees on the floor now, pressing his head over Jean’s chest, listening for a heartbeat.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” he was yelling. “I don’t want to hurt her lungs or press too hard.” Nancy was begging him to hurry and try. “CPR!” she screamed. “Something!” Anything, is what she meant. She felt an assumption rise in her: He should know these things, shouldn’t he? Who was supposed to know these things? She was outside of her body again, shaking above him now, hovering, a dark bodilessness.
Murray tried chest compressions with three fingers. He was doing one hundred half-inch presses within the minute, he yelled. “Her chest isn’t rising,” he yelled louder, crying this time. He bent over her mouth, those tiny petal lips—lips Nancy had made—covering them with his own, and gave one full breath, waiting a second, then another. Mucus had begun to drip down Jean’s rigid nose and neck.
Nancy was arching over the table now, convulsing and wheezing for Murray to try again.
“I don’t want to hurt her.” He began to weep in earnest. “I don’t want to hurt her.” But he would repeat these compressions fifteen more times. Finally, he pulled back from her still body, heaving, shoulders collapsed.
They waited, sirens crushing the darkness, and Nancy did the only thing she could: recite her name every few seconds. “Jean,” she said. “Please, Jeanie,” and then she heard herself begging for God to take her too. Murray held her, her arms thrashing in the late December darkness.
PART II
ELEVEN
Wednesday
4:30:18 p.m.
Murray waited in the gym for the girls to finish a regular training run. He paced rows of treadmills and stationary bikes and step machines: the predictable thrum of varying speeds and pulses, the clank of barbells.
Pop music, had it leaked from headphones? A girl on the StairMaster had large muffs over her ears. Her eyes were closed as if in meditation, her feet forcing rapid, resistanceless steps. Impossible to read the calorie count, how long she’d been going for, but she wasn’t building muscle; she wasn’t gaining anything.
“What’s your problem?” the girl said. She craned her neck to look at him. Her mascara was running, and the biking shorts she had on were way too small. “Creepy,” she muttered. She stopped her machine, grabbed her towel, stepped off, still looking at him that way, like she really thought he’d done something wrong.
Then Murray spotted Liu on a stationary bike. How had he missed her? Up close her frail wrists looked blanched from gripping the side handles too hard. She’d suffered two stress fractures last year, and Dr. Owens, the team physician, had recommended twice weekly cross-training to cut down on mileage. But sometimes she went for two hours like this, pedaling slowly, at real resistance, between 16 and 20.
Becky had been injured once. Only once, she’d suffered a minor gluteal strain, but Owens had said she could bike, so Murray had custom designed a series of workouts, alternating hill grades and speeds to target Becky’s heart rate at 180 beats per minute. Even injured, she’d work out for as long as he wanted, three hours sometimes, and she always came back the next day hungry for more.
“That’s enough, Liu.” Murray set his hand on the monitor. Liu looked up at him, slowly, even more slowly than her legs were working. Her face as white as her wrists.
“But I’ve only done forty-five minutes,” she said. Liu had lost ten pounds over the summer, cheeks hollowed out, limbs reduced t
o muscle and bone. Right now her BMI was at 17, a half point less than Becky’s, but Becky’s situation was different in that Becky’s physical exam and blood work had come back healthy. Anything abnormal would have been mentioned in his monthly meeting with Owens, wouldn’t it?
The female athlete triad—Nancy had brought it up with Murray once, sometime before or after that picnic in East Rock the year Jean died—when he’d been in the middle of recruiting Sarah. Nancy had done her research on the syndrome, had outlined its components for him. Disordered eating, amenorrhea, osteoporosis.
That was before the year of the stress fractures—one year after Nancy left—Liesel Kennedy’s and Jo Delancey’s fractures were the first he’d encountered before Sarah’s set in by her senior year, and then anemia had brought all their times down, too, but nothing that a prescription iron supplement hadn’t been able to fix. Lingering bruises, low self-esteem, depression, these were all symptoms Nancy had pointed out.
Becky had a few bruises along her quads, but that was normal. Almost every athlete had them from working out knotted muscle tissue. Murray had relied on a rolling pin in his racing days, but now there were all kinds of technology his girls used to relieve tightness. Foam rollers and knobbed sticks. A few times he’d caught Becky using her knuckles to knead her quads in the car, and once he’d even said, Easy there. He’d tried to make a joke, just some light humor, even though it had never been his strength. Still, Becky hadn’t smiled, her brown eyes penetrating, her smile faint.
“Coach?” Anna was standing there, beside him, as if it were still Sunday and they were on York Street, a few blocks from the hospital.
But three days had passed, he thought. It was Wednesday. September. Anna’s face healthy and flushed from running outside.
He was still gripping the monitor above Liu’s bike—he peeled his hand away, but now Rodney was here; she had come up behind Anna. How long had they both been standing by him?
Liu was still on the bike—as if this silence, his pause—had condoned her reluctance to stop. As if she could hide her slow, sustained calorie burn from him. He told her again, “That’s enough.”
He himself had skipped dinner last night and hadn’t really slept, the red pixilated numbers on his alarm clock blinking out minutes between 2:00 and 4:30 a.m. But it was 4:55 in the evening, and there were matters to take care of.
“Why did you run together?” he asked.
Anna turned to Rodney. She made a face, or was it Rodney? Anna wouldn’t disrespect him—it was Rodney, of course it was—looking at him this way.
Liu finally stopped her legs and used a towel to wipe her neck, then her wrists and forearms, her machine. She stepped off, still barely moving. She picked up her organic chemistry book on the floor and opened the pages. He could see sweaty fingerprints on the paper, wet rippling along the binding.
“Hydrate yourself,” he said.
Anna had her arms crossed now, but Rodney spoke first: “I’m too slow for Anna?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, eyes firm on Rodney. The way his own father had shunned him, silently, the first time he took a second banana from the fruit bowl, when it was just one banana each. Unlike Murray, Rodney’s eyes were wet, weak with tears in her shame, in resisting his authority.
“We saw her,” Rodney said. She wiped her eyes. “Because you wouldn’t take us.”
“What?” he said, hearing his voice suddenly rise.
“I offered to take them,” Anna said. “Since I know how to—I know her parents.”
“What do you mean you took them?” he said, louder still.
Liu remained in eye range, paused over the nearest water fountain. It took time for her to lift her head up. The girls claimed she barely ate, only fruit. The orange Becky had peeled in his car, that single wind of skin. He turned back to Anna and Rodney, their faces blurred, the sweat on them. His sweat or theirs, cold at his palms? He looked down at the floor, anything but the thought of his own sweat. The orange.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he managed to say calmly. He looked right at Rodney as he spoke, her eyes piercing his, but eventually she turned and walked away, joining the other girls waiting for him to unlock the varsity training room.
Did Lisa Sanders have no problem with a whole crowd in Becky’s room? he thought. Threatening her state? He imagined Becky’s labored breath, her ventilator more forceful, with all of them there. Why hadn’t Lisa called to check with him first? Or at the very least called him after? And Anna, she had gone behind his back?
He sorted out their charts, called each one up to take hers, focusing on names, calling them out, calmly as possible.
Ginny. Victoria. Patricia.
Anna was working the hardest, and so she’d deserved to see Becky first.
Emily. Tanya. Rodney.
The others needed results before they earned their privileges. He would never have dared expect his father to give him the ten cents he and Patrick got for weekly chores; they’d had to wait for their father to bequeath his generosity unexpectedly. The point had been not to expect anything—it was the same for an athlete—you worked and worked, harder and harder, until fate smiled upon you. That word, fate, suddenly in his brain, and the thought made him shudder.
Anna, he wanted to say, as he called her name, handing her chart over last—he wanted to say, What is wrong with you?
Don’t you ever disrespect my house, Murray’s father had said, the second time Murray had stolen more than one banana from the bowl, the peel limp in his hands, as he looked down at his shoes.
Anna had taken her chart, nonchalantly as ever, it seemed, and joined Rodney by the free weights. He watched them find their weights, ready for their lunges.
He’d drive the course again tonight, Murray decided, then he’d leave a message with Lisa, reminding her it wasn’t safe for the girls to visit on their own, not without supervision around Howard Avenue, where crime was high. And seeing Becky would lead to more questions about her injury that couldn’t be answered yet, would—though he couldn’t tell Lisa this—distract them from racing well against Princeton and Harvard on Saturday.
He looked over at Anna and Rodney gripping two dumbbells each by their sides as they lowered into walking lunges. Anna’s ponytail had loosened again, splaying the same red, sweat-soaked strands, and she seemed to be whispering something to Rodney.
Murray was sure Rodney had pressured Anna to organize that trip to the hospital. Anna wasn’t so calculating or rebellious on her own, he thought as she pumped her arms through the mirror now. Ten-pound weights, same as the ones he’d given Nancy when she’d been just four months in.
Before Nancy was angry at him, she was quiet, Murray thought. His wife flashed before him again, this time in their bathroom, wrapped in a towel. He thought of those mornings, when she’d rushed for a towel to cover herself—how she’d stood like that, all covered, before the mirror, combing the knots from her hair slowly, blank eyes not meeting his once through the mirror. He’d thought of coming up from behind and kissing her neck, the soft place she’d once liked, that they’d once shared on her body, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to. The touch might have broken them both.
Victoria cheered for Patricia through a round of push-ups. Patricia was in a sorority and still had summer weight to shed. But Owens liked to remind him not to be so hard on the girls after the summer. The doctor claimed each season of training demanded at least two months of recovery. Plus, he said, they were college kids like everyone else. Didn’t they deserve to have some fun? Once Owens had called Murray’s office after a bad season of injuries, warning that if he didn’t relax the reins, their physical and mental health would suffer for the long term. Just like Nancy believed, but Owens, like Nancy, didn’t understand the rigor that had to be sustained over months for times to drop, and it wasn’t his fault if some weren’t as well equipped as others for that challenge.
Four years of college running, Murray had reminded Owens, wouldn’t be th
e thing that barred them from living normal lives one day. If anything, they should blame the pressures of an Ivy League education. Every program was brutally competitive, across the board. It was what you signed up for, and you got your investment back. No matter how well you fared academically or athletically, Yale was a brand you wore for life. Need he list the countless successes of each one of his alumni over the past twenty-two years? Many of them were on Wall Street, or in the best corporate law firms, medical practices, and hospitals in the nation.
He would have killed for an opportunity like the one his girls had—he and Nancy both, he thought, watching Anna and Rodney at the bench press now. They were still whispering about something, and he saw Anna smile. But maybe that was just her habit, to smile as she spoke.
Nancy had always been full of such small kindnesses. All the times she’d helped out their neighbors, Walt and Lauren Peters, after Lauren had to have surgery for a small tumor in her breast. It had proved benign, but Nancy had brought over mounds of leftovers and offered to watch their two children several evenings.
The Peterses had wanted to return Nancy’s support. One weekend when Murray had been away at a meet, Walt had called him to let Murray know Nancy was okay. He hadn’t known what he meant until he’d gotten home and found Nancy locked in the bathroom, refusing to let him in. She’d locked herself inside and wasn’t eating, and later when Walt called again to check on her, he’d told Murray that Nancy had called him and Lauren, weeping over Jean’s empty room, the boxes Murray had packed, and the daisy border, and the crib he had taken down and delivered to the Salvation Army as soon as possible—to make it all more bearable for Nancy. He’d assumed she’d see that, not that he was heartless. Emotionally dead was what she had called him from inside their bathroom the day he’d returned.
Anna lowered into a squat. Rodney must have said something new to make her laugh, because she smiled again, reflected in the mirror.
Late Air Page 12
