He saw their apartment as it had been before they’d left for the hospital, and then how they’d had to come back to the bags of diapers, the bibs, the towels, and bootees folded by the dryer. The bottles drying by the sink. The rocker and the high chair, the boxes of Marjorie’s hand-me-downs. The car seat.
People had tried to help—in delivering food, Murray thought—but Nancy had dumped it all in the trash silently, and then had washed her hands for long intervals at the kitchen sink afterward, or in the bathroom, if she’d needed to close the door and cry beneath the sound of running water.
“Go, go!” Victoria cheered Emily through a series of toe taps and side shuffles for agility and increased lactate threshold.
Anna and Rodney walked toward him. They both refused eye contact, and he heard Rodney make a joke about one of her classes, some double entendre he couldn’t follow, and Anna laughed. Nancy again, walking out of the elevator that last day they’d met outside Beinecke, for one of their last lunches, as perfunctory as ever—not a hint of the old excitement in seeing one another in the middle of the day.
Knee-length blue dress, rose-gold hoop earrings he’d given her one Christmas, red lipstick. He felt her staring back at him, scissoring a cigarette, blowing smoke in a thin, wistful stream. And now he was just supposed to reply to her email? As if nearly two decades didn’t divide them.
When the girls finished, he had them line up by the door. Rodney blinked dramatically at him, like he’d been staring at her. Had he been staring? That was the wrong word. No, he was supervising. This was his job. He collected their charts, reminded them of pool practice tomorrow morning, then their prerace run on Friday before Saturday’s meet. The bus was leaving at 6:30 a.m., so they had to eat breakfast early, at least an hour to let things digest. But the girls weren’t listening; they were packing their bags and talking about which dining hall to go to.
Murray used to join them for these post-workout dinners—especially during his first years of coaching, when he’d had the energy, the interest, to ask about classes and professors.
Murray always assumed Becky managed well enough in her classes, that if she was earning Bs, she was getting the support she needed, though it might have been on the lower end of the team’s 3.7 average. He’d never asked her about the pressure she might have felt, but he saw it in her rush to the library immediately after meals. She spent every long bus ride studying, too, while the other girls chattered on about weekend parties. She usually sat alone, in the front seat opposite his. The last book he’d seen her with was John Donne’s poetry, this pale green book stickered with USED. Sometimes he caught her looking out the window, staring off.
He thought of that March after it happened: how Nancy would stand in the kitchen and look out its only small window, smoking in her bathrobe, the silken green one she’d bought in Paris.
She’d been so quick to regain her shape after pregnancy, he thought. Three months of sleeplessness that kept her in bed until late afternoon most weekends. And then the three after they lost Jean—after they lost her—words that never consciously entered Murray’s mind. There was only the image of his wife, skeletal—after she’d fallen back to her old cigarette diet, but he’d had no room to criticize then.
Not during those days she couldn’t rise from bed, her spine sharp under the bedsheets. He’d smelled smoke in everything. And later, long after she was gone, he relied on Febreze, plugging air fresheners into every room.
That first March into April, he guessed she’d been trying to tell him something, in what she hadn’t said, the impenetrable quiet that had filled their apartment and his car, as he drove to work, fixing the radio to as many different stations as he could to drown out the lack of noise.
He would make her breakfast. All those months, relentlessly—dry toast, the glass of milk she wouldn’t touch. And then one day, she’d looked up from her full plate, about to speak, dents below her eyes, lips chapped. She’d coughed in place of words, and he’d been about to get up and help her, rub her back, ask her what she needed, but there’d been this feeling that if he touched her, she would shatter—and so he’d waited for her cough to settle, for her to find her breath. She had looked up at him, her eyes bright as if in alarm, and then he’d watched that light dim from them, turn milky and faraway. Was it then he’d known she was gone and wasn’t coming back?
In his car, on his way to the course, the sun began to drain from the sky, slivers of light lowering closer to his eyes, and he had to squint. It was after seven o’clock, but by the time he reached the course, he’d still have enough light left to monitor any activity, see what new clues might surface. Already a little over two weeks since the accident, and so far he’d averaged four trips per week, varying the time of day and nature of his loops. He had yet to spot anyone suspicious along the first or second holes or in the surrounding trails and neighborhoods. Groaning mowers or the ticking arches of sprinklers might be dulling his senses, but weren’t these the conditions he needed for determining plausibility?
In his office, the light on his answering machine was always red. At least five calls a day from reporters he didn’t return. But there was no use speculating out loud to them, without evidence, without doing the work they weren’t willing to do out here on the links.
Murray determined that somewhere near the tee blocks on the second hole was the most likely point someone would have hit from. Assuming a low, wayward drive shot had caused the accident, this golfer was an amateur. Murray set the ball on a white tee, in line with the slope where Becky had fallen.
He looked through a laser range finder he’d purchased from the clubhouse and confirmed no targets obstructed his path. He went to his bag for his best driver, one with a lightweight titanium head and thin speed face for maximum speed and distance. At the tee, he pointed its shaft at twelve o’clock, then three, since he had to know what was straight to know what wasn’t. He thought about the rough under Becky’s feet, the border of woods to her left.
His stomach constricted. He had to wait, to breathe, to suppress shaking in his forearms, but it was now or never, so he dipped his whole body in, jumping at the whish, the crack. He watched the ball curve toward the fairway, then into the woods.
He’d read about a forty-five-year-old groundskeeper in Sanford, Florida, who’d been hit on his temple by a ball struck one hundred feet away. The hole had been a par five, and the worker had been cleaning debris near a tree. Paramedics had spent ten minutes trying to revive him.
Murray was looking for his own ball in the woods now. His back ached as he crouched down, rummaging beneath leaves, wishing he’d purchased a ball finder online, one he’d researched, with a vibrating camera and blue-lit LCD screen for guiding him to the exact spot. But this advanced technology made it seem more absurd that the simplest precautions hadn’t been taken before the ball was struck—binoculars or yelling fore, anything that might have offered foresight—wasn’t that the point of the word?
In 2009, a sixty-five-year-old woman had been killed by her son-in-law’s wayward shot on a course in Scotland. The ball had struck the woman in the back of her head; the same thing happened to a seventy-year-old man walking ahead of his group at a course in Chino, California. This ball had been hit from a tee only ten yards away, and the man had spent several days in the hospital before he died. Murray had only pinpointed one case involving a coma, a young spectator who’d been hit, and that young person had woken up, because younger people recovered faster, and Becky was recovering.
He found his ball behind a rock, and he held it for a few minutes, examining its dimples and wondering about the power of a synthetic core.
When he came out of the woods, a group of elderly women sped by, white puffs of hair beneath visors. He heard them laughing, as if they used their cart for assisted living instead of efficacy, and he guessed these women might also giggle off a bad shot, never bothering to look for their balls. Because why, because they wanted to drive around and laugh and drink iced tea
? Did they consider what they might have done to an innocent girl, one with such an athletic career ahead of her, such promise? He was still holding his ball, clammy in his hand, and his head felt light, his knees aching.
He drove his cart back to the clubhouse and went inside Widdy’s and asked for a glass of ice water. The bar was empty. He would stay for a drink. A straight shot of bourbon. The US Open played from a wide-screen TV behind the counter, these two players he’d never heard of: a twenty-year-old Serbian woman against a nineteen-year-old from Italy, and they were in the middle of the third set. The announcers went on about rankings, and at one point, the Italian’s height-to-weight ratio got mentioned, because ever since Monica Seles, grunting was supposed to compensate for a lack of strength and speed—that trend in the nineties, before she was stabbed.
Murmurs of conversations behind him matched the shuffling feet of the players between hits. Becky’s rasp through a tube, her threads of breath when he found her.
If conversations around him amplified, maybe he could pick up something, anything about the event, but he didn’t want to hear them talking about him, if they were speculating about his back arched over the counter.
“Can you change the channel?” Murray took a large sip from his drink and kept his glass up, the coolness over his hands, then another sip.
“I’m sorry,” the bartender said. He was a tall, lean man in black suspenders, drying a wineglass.
“What do you mean?” Murray asked. The cloth looked stained, specked in purple, one of the spots blooming deeper the more the bartender dried.
“Club orders,” he said. “We have to play relevant sports—and it’s the Open.”
“What other sports outside tennis and golf? Polo, rugby?”
“I don’t know,” the bartender said. “We can’t play football or anything, if that’s what you want.”
“Does it look like I do?” Murray was wearing a tracksuit, had been in the paper, was a legend here, but he was glad for this, should be glad, not to have yet been identified.
Love–fifteen. A British announcer’s voice echoed through his ears, the arbitrariness of scoring. Love instead of zero, fifteen-point increments instead of one, as if such adjustments softened loss.
Nancy might not have cared for many sports, but she related to those that required a singular vision. This was what she’d understood about his running and coaching, and why he supposed she’d said she liked tennis, too, watching and playing it, despite her horrendous hand-eye coordination. She had been afforded lessons as a child, and once, he’d taken her to the courts by the field house. They had snuck in after hours and played under the lights. Most of Murray’s serves had been like bullets, low and hard into the net, or else he whiffed, and this had made her laugh. He had taught himself to play at a park one summer during college, and he supposed she’d guessed this—that he’d never had lessons—but she’d barely been able to serve herself, so they had not kept score. They had only counted how many balls they could hit in a row.
He did not know if she had remarried, or if she lived alone, or how much to ask, say, or not ask or say in his reply, if he replied at all. When he couldn’t sleep and did research, he kept his email open, her message running in the background. By now, he had read the message twenty-two times.
One of the players grunted too loud, and he wanted the volume turned down.
“I’m sorry,” the bartender said. “Club orders.” He was using the same dirty cloth to dry the counter behind him. Then he leaned back on its ledge and crossed his arms.
“It’s stained,” Murray said. “You could be spreading bacteria. Listeria.” The deli meat he’d watched Nancy abstain from, the lists she’d made from her books, all the things to avoid—the things she had avoided.
“What?” The bartender looked at the cloth. “It’s clean,” he said, and then laughed. “You need to get your eyes checked.”
They were interrupted by a couple taking seats one stool over from Murray. The man looked young enough to be in college; his arm was around the woman, who seemed even younger.
Murray could smell the woman’s heavy perfume; also he could detect the diamond on her ring, scintillating in the amber light. When the man opened a menu and ordered cocktails, Murray noticed his ring too. Titanium.
“Charge it to account 9117,” the man said.
Murray looked up at the screen to see the Italian was winning this last set, four games to three.
“Good stuff,” the husband said, gesturing to the match. He loosened his tie.
“Whaddya get us?” his wife said. “You never tell me!” She sat slouched over a black sequined handbag. Her hair was a vivid blonde that reminded him of Sarah.
“Thanks, Patrick,” the husband said after the drinks were ready.
“How’s the little one?” the bartender asked. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s good, wonderful.” The wife unwedged the orange from her drink and sloppily bit into it, discarding the rind on her napkin.
“She’s starting school,” the husband said. “Can you believe it?” He looked at Murray as if he’d asked to be a part of their conversation.
The woman tipped her head to rest on her husband’s shoulder. “Nice to have a night out,” she said.
“How long has it been?” The husband looked at her. “January?”
“Nooo,” she said. “Liar.” She laughed. “For you maybe, but me, it’s been foreverrr!” Her hands became two fists on the counter.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “I’m the one up at dawn.” He looked hard at Murray and shook his head. Murray was about to say something, but the wife spoke first.
“Yurr life is so hard,” she said. “So hard!” Her shoulders collapsed as she laughed. “They call it golfer’s widow, right?” she said. “Isn’t that what it’s called?”
Murray wanted to say something again. He wasn’t drunk, but had trouble holding his second bourbon steady, nearly dropping it, when the Serbian double-faulted and screamed. He wanted to cover his ears, wanted to reach across the counter for the television’s power button.
But the wife and his own trembling kept distracting him. She was reaching for the burnt orange of a prescription bottle from her purse, but before she could open the lid, her husband grabbed her wrist.
“Stop that!” she giggled.
“Put it away,” the husband mouthed, guiding the bottle back to her bag.
“Where do you play?” Murray asked. He looked straight at the man.
“Greenwich, Norfolk, Stanton. We live in Greenwich.”
“Why are you here?” Murray asked.
“We went to Yale,” the husband said. He slid the cherry off the little sword in his drink.
“Yay,” the woman laughed. “Yeah,” she corrected herself. She gripped the edges of her purse like it would solve her mind’s disarray; if she pinched her purse hard enough, the chaos wouldn’t escalate.
“What’s it to you?” the husband asked. Murray was still looking at them, imagining the golfer’s early habit, the lies he told himself after hearing about a young girl in the news. It couldn’t have been my ball, that golfer must tell himself every morning he had to wake up and live with himself, look into the bathroom mirror.
“This guy’s nuts,” the man said to Murray’s silence, his sustained stare.
“Yeah, we’re alumni, or is it alumna?” The woman’s mouth stretched.
“Alumni.” The man shook his head. Nancy had done the same to Murray, any time he failed to use the term properly about his graduates. Alumnae, she’d said one evening, brushing away pink flecks of pencil eraser from a document.
“Give me that.” The husband took his wife’s drink from her and finished it. Then he ate the orange slice off his own glass’s rim.
“Do you always go early?” Murray persisted, focusing his gaze to better detect the lie, like in a show he’d watched about facial expressions, lies emerging out of the slightest twitch.
“I know you.” The woman leaned in, her eyes coming into focus. “Weren’t you in the paper?” She was still gripping her purse, and he couldn’t understand why her husband didn’t just snap it shut for her. Didn’t he see all of its contents about to scatter?
“That girl, is she going to live?” Her husband braced her back after she nearly tipped from her stool. “I thought so maybe before.” Her voice trailed off. “But now I really see it. The resemblance,” she said. “Do you read the paper?” She looked right at him.
The husband had his phone out like he was making a call—to the hospital—because maybe those pills weren’t antidepressants but for a neurological condition, a degenerative disease that affected speech.
“I looked you up,” the man said. He showed Murray the screen of his smartphone. The article had his photo pinned next to Becky’s, a photo of her midstride in Van Cortlandt Park. But Murray’s photo was much older, this close-up of him in profile, wind blowing his light hair as he leaned in with his stopwatch, waiting for Sarah Lloyd to cross the finish line in 2000—to cross and place in the top five at cross-country Nationals.
He could not hear other noises in the restaurant, only the screams of the crowd as they’d all waited for Sarah, could not hear Patrick asking him if he needed water or help out of his chair, or if he needed someone to call a car. He was still trembling. He felt the wind on his face, the dry November air, the watch cool in his hand, the numbers locked into the screen that no one could ever take away from him: 15:45.36.
“It’s him—” He heard the husband say this through the noise. And then, “You look so much younger.” Murray thought he heard “What happened?” but then Patrick leaned across the bar and asked him if he wanted his bill.
“What’s my time?” Murray asked.
“Your time?”
“I can’t remember my time.” He noticed the husband helping the wife down from her stool, then mouthing something to Patrick or to him, but he couldn’t tell if they were still talking about the news, the pictures on the husband’s phone.
Late Air Page 13
