The Road to Canada

by Kate Christie

  “On a new flight, one stop in Vancouver,” she texted to Emma, glancing at her hastily printed boarding pass for the new flight number to include along with the new arrival time. “See you sooner! Love you.”

  Emma’s reply came quickly: “Love you too! Safe flights!” And she typed a string of emojis, including hearts, an airplane, and more than one pair of crossed fingers.

  A flight attendant gave Jamie the kind of pursed-lips look that only a French woman could pull off, so she turned her phone to airplane mode and slid it into the seat-back pocket in front of her. No need to piss off the flight personnel at the outset of a transatlantic flight. Emma knew her whereabouts, and that was what mattered. As it turned out, Emma wasn’t only afraid to fly herself. She was also afraid for anyone she loved to get on an airplane.

  “Not exactly convenient, given our jobs involve a teeny, tiny bit of travel,” Jamie had murmured into Emma’s ear the morning Emma confessed this fact. It had been their last full day off before the Algarve, and they’d been lying in bed in Emma’s apartment, snuggling before a scheduled workout with her trainer. Jamie’s arms had been around Emma’s waist from behind while Emma had nestled back against her, the little spoon to Jamie’s big spoon.

  “Ugh, I know,” Emma had said, sighing. “I’m sorry, but I can’t exactly help that my uncle got himself killed on an ill-advised ski trip.”

  “Okay, but what are the odds someone else in your family would die in a plane crash?” Jamie had asked.

  Emma had literally slapped her hands. “Don’t say that! Jesus, talk about a sports jinx.”

  Athletes were seriously the most superstitious people in the world.

  Despite Emma’s next level fear of flying, Jamie didn’t worry too much about crashing. The odds of being in a car accident were significantly higher, which was one of the reasons she hadn’t let her parents drive down to see her at her first residency camp in LA a year and a half earlier. That, and she hadn’t wanted to be distracted. But flying, to her mind, was one of the perks of being on the national team. You got to wake up in one part of the world and go to sleep in another. Plus the view of the earth from above couldn’t be beat. She loved looking down on the world below and imagining the people on the ground who might be gazing up at the jet’s contrails. Flying was awesome. Except when there was turbulence. Then she disliked it just as much as the next person, assuming the next person wasn’t Emma.

  This particular flight was smooth, and soon Jamie’s eyelids were drooping, the past couple of months of travel catching up to her as she’d suspected they would. Good thing she’d remembered her travel pillow. A kink in her neck wouldn’t do, not when she was about to commence the last round of try-outs for Canada. In the next few weeks, the coaches would make their final selection. Out of the twenty-five athletes invited to Carson this time, two would have their hearts broken.

  Two out of twenty-five—those were actually higher odds than Jamie would have liked.

  Still: “Congratulations! The six is now officially yours to lose,” Melanie had told her after they’d beaten France two weeks earlier.

  Jamie replayed the statement now, remembering Mel’s proud smile as she’d clapped Jamie on the back. Remembering, too, her and Emma’s private celebration once they got home from Portugal. Not only had Emma regained her starting role (at least temporarily), but Jamie had somehow managed in the space of a single year to ascend from the cut list to a coveted position on the top squad in the world.

  Flying was the least of their worries, really.

  #

  After spending the last couple of months mostly in Northern Europe, it was nice to be warm again, Jamie thought as she and Emma strolled along the boardwalk at Hermosa Beach. The coaches had given them the morning off ahead of an afternoon scrimmage against the under-17 boys’ national team, and when Emma had invited her out to breakfast, Jamie had jumped at the chance to be alone with her. They’d eaten at a restaurant so close to the beach they could hear the rhythmic hum of the surf, and Jamie had savored the chance to be themselves away from team rules and the constant teasing of their friends. Being a couple on the national team really wasn’t for the faint of heart.

  The sun was still rising over the buildings that bordered the beach, and only a few people were out jogging or riding their bikes along the boardwalk on a Wednesday morning in late March. With their identities masked by baseball caps and sunglasses, Jamie felt safe reaching for Emma’s hand as they walked along the sand-dusted pavement.

  Emma, however, glanced at her quickly and pulled her hand away. “What are you doing?”

  Jamie swallowed a sigh. “Sorry. I just thought…”

  Emma maintained a careful bubble of space between them as they walked on. “You know we can’t risk it.”

  “We held hands in Portugal,” Jamie pointed out. “And France, and England, and—”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “It just was, Jamie. Drop it, okay?”

  Emma had been doing that lately—making unilateral decisions about their public presentation and then getting irritated with Jamie when she dared disagree. While Jamie could appreciate that Emma was gobs more recognizable than she was, it still stung to be rejected.

  “You know,” she said, choosing passive aggression because that was a language that Emma spoke fluently, “this is the beach where I threw away the bracelet you gave me.”

  Jamie’s trashing of the bracelet wasn’t news. She’d admitted her rash action shortly after she and Emma had started dating, apologizing profusely even as Emma had assured her the action was well-deserved. But now Emma looked at her, eyes unexpectedly vulnerable.

  “It is?” she asked, her voice slightly stricken.

  And, great, another regret to add to Hermosa Beach. Maybe Jamie would be better off steering clear of this area in the future. “Yeah. Sorry,” she said for the second time in as many minutes.

  “It’s fine.” Emma looked away, fixing her gaze on the ocean where seagulls swooped and a handful of surfers in full wet suits chased the early springtime waves.

  Jamie wished she were out there in the wide, steady ocean instead of walking on the boardwalk with her silent girlfriend. Emma was probably just tired. Jamie was, that was for sure. Crisscrossing the globe was bad enough, but residency camp had been even worse, starting out as it had with the final fitness testing of the year. The last beep test until 2016 was something to celebrate, but first you had to get through it. Jamie had done okay, but her legs were still tired from playing PSG and then traveling halfway around the world all in the same 24-hour period. She could have done better. But then again, she could have done worse, too.

  The six is officially yours to lose. Melanie’s words had become something of a mantra to Jamie, motivating her through the two full days of fitness testing and the two-a-day training sessions that had followed. This was their first morning off all week, and she’d been looking forward to spending quality time with her girlfriend. Why then did it feel like Emma was intent on pushing her away?

  “Is there something we need to talk about?” she asked, and then immediately regretted the question. This beach did not have good history when it came to her relationship with Emma.

  “No,” Emma said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  What the hell? Maybe Emma had changed her mind. Maybe she’d decided that Jamie was too much of a distraction and had nearly cost her a starting role on the national team. Maybe she was trying to find the right way to let her down easily—

  Jamie’s phone rang, interrupting her panicky spiral. She pulled it from the back pocket of her skinny jeans and checked the screen. Why was the national team manager calling her on their morning off?

  “Hello,” she said cautiously, looking away from Emma’s curious gaze.

  “Hi, Jamie,” Fitzy said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” Jamie tried to sound upbeat. Fitzy could call her without there being anything wrong, couldn’t
she? The last time she’d called had been to let Jamie know the airline had found her missing luggage from Paris. Apparently it had traveled to Asia and back before finally arriving in LA. Good thing the National Training Center had extra equipment for athletes in exactly her position—and good thing, too, that she had packed her cleats in her carry-on. That was a habit she’d developed during her youth national team days, back before she was on the senior side with access to the “boot room” and as many pairs of her favorite cleats as she could ever wish for.

  “I received a call a little while ago from a Michael Hollis at Nike,” Fitzy continued. “He was asking for your agent’s name and number.”

  Nike? Holy shit. Holy effing shit! But—“I don’t have an agent.”

  “I am aware of that fact. And now so is Mr. Hollis. Would you like me to email you his contact information?”

  “Sure. Thanks,” Jamie said, pacing away from Emma.

  “Done. But a word of advice, Ms. Maxwell: Find an agent before you return Mr. Hollis’s call.”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding quickly even though Fitzy couldn’t see her. “I will. Thanks!”

  She ended the call and waited until her email alert went off before turning off the display. Then she pocketed her phone and all but skipped a few paces down the boardwalk. Nike! Wanted to talk to her!

  “What was that about?” Emma asked, her tone neutral as Jamie caught up to her.

  Too excited to hold a grudge about their earlier disagreement, Jamie relayed the national team manager’s message. “Can you believe it? Nike actually called for me!”

  “Of course I can believe it.” Emma seemed willing to let bygones be bygones, too, judging by the next words out of her mouth: “Do you want me to call Joel and see if he would be interested in repping you?”

  Joel Rubin was Emma’s agent—and Ellie’s and Maddie’s, too. Jamie had met him briefly the year before when he’d “popped by” her contract negotiations with the Thorns as a personal favor to Ellie.

  “Are you serious?” Jamie asked. “Do you think he would actually be interested?”

  “Doesn’t hurt to try. If his client roster is full, he should be able to point you to someone else at his agency.”

  That was a nice way of saying that Jamie might not be high enough profile for Joel, but that a more junior agent at Sparks Sports Management could probably be convinced to take her on. Given that Rubin’s firm was legendary in professional sports circles, even a junior agent would be a sign that Jamie had officially arrived.

  As Jamie hesitated, Emma added, “You don’t get what you don’t ask for.”

  Or, as the soccer saying went, ‘You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.’”

  “Okay, then,” Jamie said. “That would be cool. Thanks, Emma.”

  “You’re welcome.” She checked her own phone. “We should probably start heading back soon, especially if you want to check out the pier.”

  To be honest, Jamie didn’t particularly want to go back to team time. Not yet, not when they hadn’t been alone like this for what felt like forever. But as she paused, a hand slipped into hers.

  “What are you doing?” she asked quickly, glancing up at Emma.

  “I’m holding my girlfriend’s hand,” Emma said, her chin tilted at a stubborn angle that Jamie recognized more from the soccer field than from their personal interactions. “If that’s okay with you?”

  “You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable, Emma. I won’t be offended.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Well, no, she wasn’t. But she didn’t want to be offended, so. “Yes,” she said, bracing herself for Emma to release her hand.

  Instead, Emma leaned in closer, her shoulder brushing Jamie’s, and said, “You really are too good to me, you know that?”

  She smiled, breathing in Emma’s familiar scent: cucumber shampoo mixed with dark roast coffee. “Somebody has to look after you. Might as well be me.”

  Emma laughed, the sound rumbling against Jamie’s shoulder as she tugged her along the boardwalk back the way they’d come. “Too bad you didn’t feel that way about the bracelet I gave you.”

  “Dude! I totally regret that now.”

  “To be fair, you couldn’t have known then that we’d end up together.”

  “I don’t know. I might have guessed.”

  Emma stared at her as they passed a surf shop with a rainbow sign. “I thought you didn’t ever want to see me again.”

  “I didn’t at first,” she admitted. “I was so angry with you. But that passed. Eventually, I realized that more than anything else, I missed you.”

  Emma was quiet. Then she said, “I missed you too. I thought I would see you in North Carolina at the College Cup finals your junior year, but you weren’t there.”

  “Wait.” Jamie frowned, doing the math in her head. “Why were you there? You graduated the year before, didn’t you?”

  Emma shrugged. “No, actually, I had to take a leave of absence for the Olympics. I came back to UNC that fall to finish up.”

  Jamie remembered that College Cup. For the second year in a row, Stanford had qualified as a number one regional seed, this time with an 18-1-1 record. Unlike the previous year, they’d made it out of the round of 16, defeating Portland in the quarters to earn an invitation to the College Cup in North Carolina. But Jamie and Britt hadn’t gotten a chance to participate in Stanford’s attempt at a championship run. The day before the first round of the NCAA tournament, they were on an airplane headed for Chile, where they would compete for—and eventually win—the 2008 U-20 Women’s World Cup.

  “Britt and I were bummed not to be there,” she said, “but obviously there was no choice.”

  Emma nodded. “You can’t turn down a national team call-up, no matter what’s going on in your regular life.”

  “You missed your last high school match, didn’t you?” Jamie remembered.

  “I did. I used to think the federation was hazing us on purpose, testing us to see how we would respond to being pulled between club and country. Probably it was good training, but in ’08 it meant I missed seeing you.”

  “Did you even want to see me then?” Jamie asked.

  Emma side-eyed her. “Of course I did. I always want to see you, Jamie.”

  She said it so easily, so certainly, that Jamie felt the last vestige of her hurt from earlier melt away. “I always want to see you too.”

  “Duh,” Emma said, nudging her with her hip.

  Jamie laughed. “Jerk.”

  “You know you love me.”

  “I do,” she agreed, and tightened her grip on Emma’s hand as they walked on, seagulls cawing while the ocean surf gleamed in the morning sun.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’ll take the meeting,” Joel said. “But you owe me, Emma.”

  Emma grinned into her cell phone and offered Jamie, who was pacing nearby, a thumbs-up. “In a few months, Joel, you’re going to be thanking me for this opportunity.”

  Her agent laughed. “Ellie just told me the same thing.”

  “She did? When?”

  “I was hanging up with her when your call came through.”

  “So you were already planning to meet with Jamie?”

  “Can’t put one past you,” Joel deadpanned. “I see why you’re the captain of the nerd squad.”

  “Whatever. Thanks anyway,” she said, rolling her eyes. She’d been working with Joel for close to eight years now, since just after she’d made the permanent roster. He could be kind of a dick at times but mostly in a good way.

  “You’re welcome, Emma. Talk to you soon.”

  That was certainly true, Emma thought as she ended the call. Media scrutiny and fan pressure would mount in the coming weeks, and Joel’s USWNT-related work obligations would rise commensurately. If the US did manage to win the whole thing, his phone would ring off the hook for months afterward.

  “So? What did he say?” Jamie asked, dropping onto the
bench beside her.

  They’d stopped at the Hermosa Beach Pier to people watch despite the fact that the number of surfers, fisher people, and tourists out and about on a weekday morning was not high. Jamie had been too distracted by Fitzy’s call to focus, though, so Emma had decided to check in with her agent. With the scrimmage scheduled for the afternoon, they might not get another chance soon.

  “He said forget it. No way.” She slipped her phone back into her fleece pocket.

  “Emma!”

  “Of course he’ll meet you.” She gave Jamie the same thumbs-up she’d offered her less than a minute earlier.

  “Yes, but what did he say?”

  “That Ellie had already called him to recommend you. Which seems curious, seeing as I’ve been with you all morning, and I could have sworn you hadn’t talked to her.”

  “I might have texted her while you were in the bathroom,” Jamie admitted, looking adorably sheepish as she hunched her shoulders into her hoodie and blew noisily into her to-go cup of tea. They’d stopped for more coffee and tea along the way, though they’d both gone with decaf this time.

  “Strike while the irons are hot?” Emma asked.

  “No, I was just excited. I mean, it’s Nike, Emma! Like, holy crap!”

  Emma smiled into her coffee cup. Sometimes she forgot how new all of this was for Jamie. In Emma’s mind, Jamie’s place on the national team was a done deal because of course she should have a roster spot. She was like a quarterback, a talented Drew Brees type who saw the entire field. With one look, she could predict the next play and the play after that. But in point of fact, Jamie’s current contract was still only temporary, which was why she’d never needed an agent before.