Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  At Jean’s funeral, she had wanted just one person to look at her and understand, eyes to say: You’re alive, breathing. You’re going to live. It had taken Nancy everything to turn her head toward Marjorie, waiting for her to meet her eyes, but when she did, there’d only been distance, this insurmountable absence. Marjorie wouldn’t console her, no one would, and it was then that Nancy knew how utterly alone she was, and would always be, in the depth of her loss, the hollowness of her rib cage, her aching limbs.

  She was nearing a public area. Sounds like the faint echo of radio music, the squeal of children. Nancy often heard Jean crying, calling to her. Those rare nights she was able to sleep, she often awoke to the sound of it. Jean crying to be fed.

  Now, close to the water, she let her feet stick into the wet sand. She watched as a child flopped over on his belly, waiting for a wave’s salty rush. She did not see the child’s parents anywhere. There was no lifeguard.

  “Be careful,” Nancy said, nearly reaching for his arm. She felt a sudden rage, not for the child, but for the mother: her neglect. A mother didn’t understand how precious time was until it was gone.

  “Simon! Simon!”

  The mother helped her little boy up, then out of the water. A Mediterranean tan bathed her body: taut calves, thighs, and hips. A sheer cover danced over her one-piece. She had red oval-shaped sunglasses.

  Nancy tried smiling casually, pretending she’d never said anything to the boy, who was whining as his mother dragged him toward their umbrella. There were so many children here, and Jean stood there, vividly in each of them. Her blue eyes and happy smile up close, her grasping hands.

  All Nancy had was emptiness, this cistern of emptiness pulling her in. She seized her knees, then the sand as it continued to slip through her fingers. Her chest felt crushed in and the heaves wouldn’t quiet and she did not know how to make space for her breath—like the ocean before the moon finally lets go.

  THIRTEEN

  Saturday

  7:08:45 a.m.

  Every year in early September, Murray took his girls for the infamous tri-team meet against Harvard and Princeton, and this time Harvard was hosting at Franklin Park in Boston. It was one of the rare occasions Yale men and women ran simultaneously, and though Murray and the men’s coach, Ross Kennedy, had never really been close friends, Ross had expressed his support these past weeks and his own concerns about training on the golf course.

  “How’s it going?” Ross was using his team’s cooler to refill a dented Poland Spring bottle. He gulped the water, saving just a few sips, never rescrewing the cap.

  “Fine,” said Murray. “Yourself?”

  “Good,” he said, taking another gulp. “Hey, did you get my messages? Burger night Sunday?”

  Murray had gotten them, was about to say he hadn’t had a free moment to answer, but they were interrupted by one of Ross’s athletes, Joe Valdez. Joe had rushed into the tent and dropped down for push-ups, blowing out air forcefully each time he lowered his chest. He was a 1500-meter runner whose best was just short of Murray’s at his age. He ran cross-country just to stay in shape for spring.

  “Joe, you’ll tire yourself out,” Ross said. “Joe!”

  When Joe kept going, Ross crouched down next to him and pulled out an earbud. “Joe, get up!”

  Murray flinched. His own heart had accelerated, but sometimes that happened when the seasons changed. Made his joints ache more too. He thought of his girls already ten minutes into their warm-up, the crisp breeze, crisper in their lungs.

  Franklin Park’s course started in an open field before it led into a series of trails. Not nearly as hilly as Van Cortlandt, but there’d be a steep incline around mile two.

  “Coach.”

  Murray looked up from his pad, where he’d been tinkering with Anna’s target splits. It was the Harvard coach, Jeff Evans. Jeff wore his same crimson cap, the H sallow at its center. The same piece of gum by his lower jaw he talked around. “I’ve been trying to keep up with the latest, but you know—”

  “It’s fine.” Murray had a sheet with seed times folded in his pocket. He pretended to read it as if he hadn’t thirty times already.

  “I wanted to tell you, Lily and I—Becky’s in our thoughts.” Lily Walker was Jeff’s assistant. Just a few years out of college, she was still racing professionally. Other coaches speculated Jeff had been cheating with her for years. He had three kids.

  Ross came up and slapped Jeff’s shoulder with his crushed water bottle.

  Murray looked back down at the sheet with Anna’s official seed time: 17:45, just a few seconds behind Georgia Manning, Jeff’s number two.

  When he looked up, Jeff stood poised before him, arms crossed, gum suddenly wedged between his front teeth.

  “All I can say is feel lucky for the clear skies. God bless.” He brought his fingers to his mouth and kissed them. His gum snapped.

  Jeff’s number one was Amy Fossie, Becky’s closest rival last year. Amy was warming up on the field when Jeff interrupted her to talk, gesturing with his stopwatch. Amy nodded as Jeff leaned in. Jeff gripped her narrow shoulders. It was all about pacing, who to look out for along the way, always saving just enough for the last hundred yards.

  Murray looked around for Princeton’s Jana Carlsson, but he didn’t see her anywhere. She’d only been coaching for two, maybe three, years, but she boasted some insane Danish method. Had three young children too. One of them, her nine-year-old daughter (Murray couldn’t remember her name), had already run a 5K in Lawrenceville under twenty minutes.

  A gun went off. Murray jerked his head around to look. Someone shouted, “False alarm!”

  “Jesus, you would think they’ve done this before.” Ross was in a squat, stretching inner thighs. “One of these days someone is going to get hurt.”

  Wind shuddered the top of their tent. Murray only had seventeen minutes to collect the girls before the start. Anna was just coming out of the woods, leading the team. She jogged beside Tanya. They seemed to be going a little too quickly for a warm-up, and when they got to him, they didn’t disperse like usual for that last drink of water, porta-potty runs, more spikes in need of tightening. Anna and Tanya stood talking. At one point, they looked over at him.

  He pretended not to see by glancing at his pad again. Pages fluttered. All the way back to the beginning, where Becky’s numbers were. It would be three weeks ago Monday. He flipped the page and started fresh, furiously drawing out rows, filling in names.

  When he glanced back, the girls were still talking.

  “Drills!” he shouted.

  Anna tilted her head up, mouth fixed in a cold smile. Murray had learned this lesson many times throughout his marriage: people pleasers were slow to boil, but when they did, there was no quelling them. The rage.

  “Who?” Anna’s face was close to him now. When had she run up? “You were talking to yourself but looking at me,” she said. Her eyes glistened as she clasped her hands from behind and stretched back. “And you said ‘them.’”

  “Them?”

  “Yes,” she laughed. Her teeth, perhaps they weren’t as crooked as Nancy’s, just mildly overlapped.

  The wind had calmed to a breeze, blowing a few stray pieces of hair around her face.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Five minutes until the start.”

  Last night after the team dinner, he’d told Anna to keep her distance from Rodney. She was a waste of her time, a bad influence, and she wouldn’t be on the team much longer anyway; she was on academic probation. They’d been by the vending machines in the athletic lounge. She’d gotten a bag of pretzels, crunching and sucking the salt from each piece. When he’d told her the bit about Rodney’s grades, she’d looked up at him sternly. Her eyes had narrowed, and she’d asked to be excused. But he hadn’t excused her officially. She’d just gotten up and kicked in her chair.

  Maybe she was hormonal, he thought, had broken up with her boyfriend, if she had one? Either way, he reminded himself,
anger could be good—the best runners found a little before stepping onto the line. They found it in the middle of a race, too, like Murray had always used suppressed rage, every ounce he could muster, to pass man after man on the track.

  Ross offered to drive them in his Jeep to mile one. Murray said he’d forgotten his stopwatch in his car, that he’d have to meet him there.

  “You mean the one in your hand?”

  “Oh—” In the distance, a gunman was giving instructions. Ross leaned in, his own watch poised.

  Murray cleared his time to zero. “It’s a monitor so we can hear her at night.”

  “What?” Ross squinted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A watch. I meant.”

  “Anna looks good.” Ross nodded. “She’s built some muscle.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Murray said, but it was hard not to look: her parting calves.

  On the way to Ross’s Jeep, another gust of wind blew some dirt into Murray’s eye. He swore and asked if Ross would hold the door for him; he shuffled all his papers together. Then they got stuck behind a line of cars on the road. More coaches, a few obsessive parents. A black Subaru pulled up next to them and started its blinker.

  “Look at this jackass,” Ross said. The car nudged closer, threatening an accident if they didn’t let him in.

  Ross clenched his fist and pounded the steering wheel. “Fucking move!”

  He was going to miss Anna at mile one. The car in front inched forward, but rather than close the gap, Ross pulled out and drove off the side of the road.

  “What are you doing?”

  Ross put the car in park and kicked his door open, balancing the multiple stopwatches on his lap, his own pad and clipboard.

  “Run!”

  Murray manually unlocked the passenger side to get out. He braced himself, hips too stiff for the slowest jog, but he remembered the shortcut to mile two, deep in the woods. Knees ached for oxygenated blood; birds and squirrels twitched more nimbly among trees. Dry foliage, the start of it hard and thick below his beaten shoes.

  Eventually he saw Jana leaning in with her watch. Then someone . . . Jeff calling to Amy, “Get ready!” Where was Ross?

  Murray heard the rattle of a large plastic hand. A chorus of finger whistles, the distant chanting of names.

  Jana began calling out to her number one, Rita Santiago, leading the pack. Anna less than ten feet behind her.

  “Get up there, get up there!” Murray shouted through cupped hands. One quick sprint and she’d close the gap—but then maybe she should wait, save her energy until the last—“Go now!” he said. “Compete!”

  Behind him, a spectator yelled “Dig deep!” Words that meant nothing outside a coach.

  The course was a loop, the finish line not far from where he stood. Wind pushed more debris around. A man on a bicycle passed him. Some idiot who hadn’t read the writing on the wall.

  “This is a meet!” Murray shouted. “Get off the path!” No one else seemed to care or notice.

  Once, shortly after they married, he’d taken Nancy for a bike ride, but hadn’t had the patience to stay with her; he’d been fixated on his ideal cardio zone. One hundred and eighty beats per minute.

  Then, through yellow goggles, the man looked at him. A balloon, cream colored and dirty, hung from his baseball cap like a tassel. Slowly he pedaled away. Gravel crunched.

  “Who is this guy?” Murray pointed his stopwatch at him. He elbowed Jana.

  “What guy?” she asked. Her eyes must have been so fixed on her next runner that she couldn’t have noticed, but when he looked around at others, other bystanders even, no one affirmed what he’d seen. He’d have to file a report later. Only another forty seconds until Anna came through. Maybe less than that, if she was beating his projected time.

  By the finish, a large clock with red numbers bled forward. Jeff’s Amy Fossie crossed in 17:12. Three seconds later: Jana’s Rita Santiago.

  More coaches and spectators cheered, but Anna was nowhere. He counted four, then eight more seconds, eyes set on the lip of the woods. Only weaker runners emerged, among them Tanya, Victoria, Emily, Ginny; he clocked them all. When he heard his name, he had to squint into the sun.

  “Anna’s down. Happened sometime after mile two.” It was Jeff, cupping the bill of his hat. “I have to stay by the finish. But the trainers know.”

  “What?”

  “Must have tripped over a rock or something. A root. Nothing ice can’t take care of, right?” Jeff repositioned his cap loosely.

  Fifteen minutes later, a half mile from the finish, he saw the bright red jacket, the white cross of a medical aide.

  Anna sat upright, gripping the ground. He said her name, and she cried, head wincing in the opposite direction of her ankle. A knot the size of an egg. The trainer was an older woman, her hair chopped short. “I don’t think she broke anything. But I would get an X-ray.”

  Murray watched white tape crisscross over joints and bones.

  “I don’t know how it happened.” Anna gripped his arm. “I didn’t see a rock or anything.” Several strips of tape were added along her shin, the last piece cut with the trainer’s teeth.

  “That should do it,” the woman said. “Lots of ice. Fifteen minutes on, fifteen off. Keep that up every couple of hours. Take it easy.”

  By the finish, the big clock said 40:55.19. There’d been one in the ICU, in waiting rooms as staff updated records. He’d done the math: Becky had been unconscious for 456 hours, ten minutes, and seconds he could not measure.

  In the car, Murray made Anna keep her leg propped, elevated above her heart to reduce swelling faster. The car stunk of sweat and muscle cream. It was normal for him to drive his athletes when their injuries were minor. It was faster—more efficient—any coach in his shoes would do the same.

  “Sure nobody pushed you?” he asked.

  “Honestly,” she said, “my ankle has been feeling sore for the past few weeks.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know. Started bothering me after a long run.” Anna’s head was turned from him. She was focused on the window. It had started to rain.

  In the car, Nancy used to sit with her arms draped limply over her lap, wrists curled. He still had not replied to her email. Tonight, maybe, depending on how things looked.

  “You better get an MRI,” he said. “You could have fractured it.” They’d been driving for seventy-four minutes. In just another hour and fifteen, they could be in New Haven, if he hurried to make up for any unexpected traffic delays: Murray increased his speed by seven miles per hour.

  At the peak of her senior year cross-country season, Sarah Lloyd had suffered two hairline fractures. One along each femur. The films had shown calcium deposits, two halos of white.

  “You have to keep your hand on the bag. It’ll slide.”

  “It’s already leaking.”

  At a stoplight, Anna removed the sweatshirt she was wearing and wrapped it around the soggy ice. Goose bumps on her forearms.

  They were just one mile before the exit, so he accelerated, but after a few minutes, he heard sirens.

  “Awesome,” Anna said.

  He pulled over, then dug around for his wallet. He rolled down a window for the officer.

  “Are you aware you were going fifteen over the limit?” The sound of rain on his cap, droplets lining the brim.

  “We were on our way to the hospital,” Murray said. “She fell.” But when he turned to Anna, she was sorting through some papers that had fallen out of the glove compartment: a mixture of maps, legal pad sheets, some photos.

  “You’re in pain?” The officer squinted.

  Anna didn’t answer, so Murray did. “She turned her ankle,” he said. Anna shrugged her shoulders, still refusing to acknowledge him.

  The officer just continued scribbling over his pad. He took Murray’s information, told them to wait.

  “Keep it propped,” he said.

&n
bsp; “I didn’t know you were married.” Anna held up a wrinkled photo he didn’t remember saving. “She’s really lovely.” Anna looked up at him.

  “Put that back,” he said. “Now.”

  When the officer returned with the ticket, he reminded Murray to read the fine print about paying the ticket. If he wanted to dispute it, here was the date.

  Murray and Anna didn’t speak the rest of the drive. Before stopping at the hospital, he parked the car by her dorm, in Silliman, and offered to help her to her room so she could change into dry clothes first.

  “No,” she said, face contorted, as though he’d offended her. “I’m fine alone.” But as he unlocked the car door, his cell phone rang.

  Anna was watching him, her hand on the door. When he hung up, he told her the news. “Becky’s awake,” he said.

  “What?” Anna’s eyes widened. He felt his own face, light, his toes numb. “Can we see her?” Her bag was really dripping.

  “Not now. You need the MRI. X-rays at least.” He thought of the pictures Nancy had printed and posted on their refrigerator. Every ultrasound, all of them filed neatly in her desk drawer. Nancy thought she saw her nose and his chin in one of the images, tracing the tiny outlines, and then she had kissed him, had said they were right on track.

  Anna turned to face the window again. “We will already be at the hospital. I don’t understand why we can’t just see her.”

  “Lisa said she isn’t ready yet. In a few days. I’m sure she’ll be even better then.” He felt his voice trail off.

  “Of what?” she asked.

  He turned for a moment, looking confused, then back at the parking lot.