Out of Breath

by Blair Richmond

  I wish I could do that now—find a way to take my mind off everything, or at least to divert my thoughts somewhere, anywhere. I’ve been tossing and turning all night, not with thoughts of the race but of everything else. I wish the race itself were enough to distract me. I welcome it now more than ever—a chance to get out on the trails, to put my body up to a task so challenging that during those hours I’ll be able to focus on nothing else.

  But eventually the race will be over, and whatever happens during the race won’t change what I have to face after I cross the finish line. Because then, for me, the real race will just be beginning.

  I look over at my alarm clock. Still a half an hour to go. At this point, sleeping will only make me groggy, so I sit up and turn it off.

  The sun hasn’t risen above the hills yet, and in the darkness of my cottage, I stand and stretch. I eat an energy bar and drink some water. I have two hours before the race starts.

  I sit down, continuing with a few gentle stretches, letting my body warm up. I think of Stacey. How much I want to win this for her. I’m still so grateful to her for taking me in. For giving me a job. For never asking the questions I’ve been so afraid of. No one ever has, until last night. Until Roman.

  And again I’m realizing that he and I are not so different after all. Maybe this is what I’m afraid of—that I’ve been drawn to him because we are both cut from the same murderous cloth. Our reasons may be different, but in the end, am I any better than he is?

  Roman’s reaction last night was odd. When I told him I killed my father, he nodded sadly. He touched my face, briefly, and he said, Such secrets can seem impossible to bear, can’t they, Katherine? That was all he said. And I told him nothing more. If nothing else, Roman understands the nature of secrets. How they can’t be revealed too soon. And sometimes not at all.

  I wanted to cancel my scheduled jog with Alex, but I knew it was too important to get in that last run. I was silent the entire time, wondering whether I could tell him what Roman now knows. Whether he would understand. He asked me what was wrong, but I ended up telling him I was nervous about the race. I couldn’t take the risk that he will hate me for what I’ve done.

  I stand up and jog in place for a few moments, then put on a layer of sweats over my running shorts and top. It’s almost time to go.

  The last time I competed was in high school, my junior year. It was June, during the state championships for cross country. I had yet to win a race, but I knew I could win this one. I knew I was ready. The week before, I’d won a training race against the seniors, though it was totally by accident. I had misheard Coach Penn, and I thought we were running a 10K instead of a 15K. So I set off at a 10K pace, and the girls shouted at me as I passed them. What are you doing? Slow down! But I didn’t understand—in fact, I was surprised at how slow they were going. Soon I had left them far behind. We were on a trail, doing five-kilometer laps, and as I came up on the end of lap two, I saw coach Penn there with his trusty wristwatch. I picked up my pace, ready for my big finish—but when I crossed the mark I heard him yell out, Great job, Katie! Only one more to go!

  I thought I’d heard him wrong, but when I stopped and looked back at him, he stared back as if to say, Well, what are you waiting for? So I started running again, too embarrassed to confess that I had made a mistake. So I had to do one more lap at this breakneck pace. Those were the longest three miles of my life. My arms grew heavy, and my lungs heaved for oxygen, but I refused to stop. I began slowing down, and I could sense the pack catching up with me. I pictured the grins on their faces, their smug expressions. I knew they were waiting for me to crash. She started out too fast, they would say. We knew she’d never make it.

  I couldn’t let them have the satisfaction. So I hobbled on. And when I neared the end of that final lap, I saw Coach Penn and knew I was going to win. With a hundred yards to go, knowing I could do it gave me the energy to pick up the pace. I finished strong, setting a personal best.

  The coach was impressed. If this were a race, you’d have set a course record, he said.

  As I cooled down, pacing through a patch of grass, I watched the rest of the team come in. They no longer looked at me dismissively, as they’d done all year. I had earned their respect. And I felt something I had never felt before. I felt important.

  I won the state title that year, and I started getting emails and calls from recruiters. I could hardly believe it: College—freedom—was within my grasp.

  Until the morning that my dad, coming home drunk at seven o’clock after being out all night, drove over my left foot.

  I’d been on the sidewalk, waiting for the bus, when he called me over to the car. He said he had to ask me something, but I never found out what it was. I was standing next to the driver’s-side window when suddenly the car pitched backward, rolling over my foot. He’d put it into reverse instead of park, and he was still so drunk that he stepped on the gas without even realizing it.

  The pain was excruciating, but he was no help. He couldn’t even drive me to the hospital, so I had to call a cab and wait. I sat on the curb, shaking and sick with pain, for twenty minutes before crawling into the backseat of the taxi.

  And so my senior year was over before it began. I wouldn’t run again for months, and the recruiters moved on. My dad never apologized. Up to the day I ended his life, I’m not sure he remembered doing it. I’d always been too afraid of his anger to remind him, even to ask.

  Even if he had remembered, he wouldn’t have admitted to doing it. He never thought he did anything wrong. I was the reason he was miserable in life. And before me, it was my mother. Years before, Mom and I used to have each other, but after she died, I was alone, his anger and bitterness directed squarely at me.

  He didn’t hit me often in those last years—I learned how to stay away. But that didn’t make it much easier—what I wanted most was something I could never get from him. My mother had been the only one who made me feel loved.

  I still miss her. And I know that one of the reasons I was so happy to have met Stacey was that she was about my mother’s age, early thirties, when she died. Not that Stacey could have taken my mom’s place, but whenever I was with her I had that same feeling of being looked after, being taken care of.

  When I win this race, it will be for both of them. I try to picture them together, somewhere, watching me run. Cheering me on.

  I pick up Stacey’s cap and put it on. It fits me perfectly.

  ~

  There are almost two hundred runners near the starting line, shedding their warm-up suits, stripping down to tank tops and shorts, hopping from foot to foot as they try to stay warm. I look up to see where the race is headed, but the trail is hidden in clouds. The fog drips down the hills like dry ice.

  I stretch my legs and look around. I recognize a few faces from town, and I can tell they recognize me. I don’t see either Roman or Alex. A man in a Cloudline T-shirt and a Race Official badge stands on a platform and blows the whistle around his neck. Everyone quiets down.

  “Hey, folks, listen up! We got the latest weather report from the top of the mountain, and it’s ugly.”

  The crowd erupts in cheers.

  “Be advised that you will encounter freezing rain, heavy fog, and, at four-thousand feet, snow. Hypothermia is a real danger, as are broken limbs and frozen fingers. The race will go on, but I am urging anyone who is not one-hundred percent sure of themselves to take this year off. Please.”

  The crowd is quiet as his words sink in, and I can see people taking a gut check.

  “There is no shame in that,” he continues. “I’ve run this race a dozen times, and even I would consider taking a pass this year. It’s that nasty.”

  I watch the runners look at one another, as if waiting for someone else to make the first move. Then an older guy in a green tank top turns and walks away. And it’s as if he has given permission to a dozen others, who also begin walking back to their cars. I look down at my new trail runners, and I shudder
at the thought of ruining them on the climb. Or of falling, breaking something, getting frostbite. But there is no way I’m skipping this race.

  I touch the “S” on my cap. I know I am meant to be here, to be running now. Especially when I look ahead and see Erica, wearing her number 1, heading through the crowd toward the front. I know Stacey wouldn’t let a little snow stop her.

  Then I see Roman walking toward me. He seems the same as always, undaunted by what I told him last night. He looks at my running cap. “It looks as though you’re running for Stacey.”

  I nod.

  “Good luck, Katherine,” he says.

  “Good luck to you, too.” I watch him follow Erica to the front.

  I hear someone call my name, and I look behind me to see Alex jogging over. He’s wearing the number 11. I’m wearing number 117, so I am stuck in the back.

  “What are you doing all the way back here?” I ask.

  “I like to hang back in the pack. Maybe it’s an underdog thing.” He grins. “You mind if we start together?”

  “Fine with me,” I say. “Though it won’t be long before I leave you in the dust.”

  He laughs. “Actually, I hope you do.”

  “Any last-minute pearls of wisdom?”

  “Pace yourself,” he says. “The race doesn’t begin until you reach the boulders.”

  “The boulders?”

  “You’ll know them when you see them,” Alex says. “From there to the finish line, anything can happen.”

  The man on the podium is now holding up an air horn. “Folks, we are thirty seconds from the start.”

  “Go get ’em,” Alex says.

  “See you at the top,” I say.

  My stomach is all nerves, my legs and arms numb from the cold. I’m ready to go. I look up the mountain and see trees extending into fog, then thick dark clouds, then nothing. It’s probably better that I can’t see the top of the mountain; it feels closer this way.

  The horn blares. I’m shuffling as runners push toward the line, then I’m walking, then jogging, then running.

  Twenty-three

  So much about running is about time. In a competition, you’re racing time as much as you’re racing the other runners. But what I have found is that you often have to lose track of time in order to improve your time. That is, you have to silence the clock in your head and let yourself go.

  This is one reason I no longer wear a watch. And I no longer need to: Right now, as I head up into the mountains, there is a small plastic device, about the size of a tube of lip balm, fitted to my shoe, woven through my shoelaces. This device sent a signal out when I crossed the starting line, and it will send out another when I cross the finish line. So I don’t have to worry about keeping track of my race time, even though I began at the rear of the pack.

  The trouble is, during a race, it is nearly impossible to avoid thinking about time. There is usually somebody standing at each mile marker shouting out splits. And there are the incessant, recurring beeps from the wristwatches of other runners, helping them keep pace, which in turn reminds me of mine.

  Back in the days when I ran regular races, I learned to separate myself from the other runners; I learned how to rediscover silence, even if it was only in my own head, and this is what I am trying to do now as I reach mile four. We have not yet entered the clouds hovering just above, but the trail is already blurred with mist. There are two men about twenty yards ahead of me and a few others close behind me. It’s hard to run side by side on this trail because it is so narrow. As I pass other runners, I often have to sprint around them to avoid slipping off the trail’s edge, where the forest envelops us like thousands of wooden arms.

  I’ve already lost time trying to pass two men who were chatting with each other. See, there I am, thinking about time again—it’s more difficult to put it out of my head than I remembered. So I remind myself that if I’m going to win this race, it will be by coming from behind. That it’s still early. That it’s okay to be where I’m at right now, far back. I know that Erica is at the front with a small group of elite female runners, and that they are pushing each other plenty hard. But, as Alex told me last week, the mountain pushes you hard enough as it is. You don’t need anyone else.

  Before long, we are in the clouds, and though I hear the sounds of breathing and footsteps ahead of me, behind me, and on the trails below and above me, I rejoice in the visual silence, the sense that it is just me and the mountain right here, right now. It’s only an illusion of solitude, I know, but it relaxes me.

  Yet it also, I realize, frees my mind to wander. And this isn’t such a good thing.

  Despite my best efforts, I find myself thinking back to that night in Houston. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent all these months trying not to think about it that the memories come rushing back, as steadily as the wind in the trees above me.

  And then there’s the private investigator and what he told Roman. That he’d been hired by my father. Which is impossible.

  Unless my father had lived. Could it be?

  I replay that last night in my head. My father drunk, as usual. Waving around the gun that he kept in his bedroom, which was not usual. Even he knew better not to touch that gun when he was drunk. He wasn’t a smart man, but he was smart enough to know he couldn’t be trusted around it in that condition.

  So I took it from him, snatched it out of his limp hand when he was reaching for another beer. He yelled and spun around, taking a swing at me. He stumbled as I ducked out of his way. And then I pointed his gun at him.

  I have to admit, I was tempted to pull the trigger right then. To be free of him forever. I’d stayed with him all that time only because there were so few places to go. I didn’t want to be on the street. I wanted to go to college, to get away—and I thought the only way to do that would be to stick it out with my dad. To put up with it all because it was a free place to stay. And because it wouldn’t be for long.

  But sometimes even a short time can be too long.

  I used to wonder what my mother saw in him. He was never nice to me, or to her, at least not that I can remember. I don’t know if he ever loved us; he sure never said so. Every once in a while—one of the rare times when his gambling paid off instead of driving him deeper into debt, or when he was between his first and third beer—in these brief moments, sometimes, I could see that he was once a happy man. That there might’ve been a tiny chance he could be happy again one day, if he ever wanted to be. But I guess he didn’t see that for himself, and he never did anything differently, except to drink more, create more debt, and blame everyone but himself for the problems he caused.

  When I held that gun on him, I felt in control for the first time in my life. I told him to sit down, and he did. It was the first time he’d ever done anything I’d asked.

  But I’m not the violent type, and he knew it. And he knew I didn’t even know how to use a gun. I never went near it, and I wasn’t even sure if this was his only one. So when he began to tease me, to dare me to shoot, I found my finger on the trigger; I found myself coming close. But still I couldn’t do it.

  When he rushed at me, it was a shock—partly because I thought he knew, even as I pointed the gun at him, that I wouldn’t actually shoot; and partly because he was so drunk I didn’t think he was capable of moving that fast. But he leapt at me, knocked me down, and then his hand was on the gun, trying to take it from me. I heard a firecracker in the alley next door, and he went limp on the floor next to me.

  That’s when I knew it wasn’t a firecracker. That the gun had gone off.

  He was lying facedown on the floor, not moving.

  I had shot him. Or he had shot himself—I didn’t even know, with both of our hands on the gun at the same time. I didn’t even know what had happened until he collapsed. But in that instant I remembered that a small part of me had been tempted to do it. And then it didn’t really matter whether it was me who pulled the trigger or not—just the knowledge that I’d wanted to made
it feel like first-degree homicide.

  I saw my life slipping away—for good this time, not in the tiny little ways it had been slipping all those years before—and I knew that I couldn’t take the chance of hoping someone would understand that it was an accident. That it was self-defense. That he might’ve even done it himself. It felt like the final act of someone who’d lived in fear for her whole nineteen years.

  So I dropped the gun and ran. And I’ve been running ever since.

  Along the way, I checked the papers, the police reports. Nothing. But I didn’t know what this meant. We had no family. He had few friends. He was always in trouble, and just one more drunken murder in Texas wasn’t likely to be big news outside the neighborhood. So I kept running. I held my breath, and finally, around the time I arrived in Lithia, I was feeling as though I might finally be free.

  But you’re never free from your past. Never truly free.

  Could he really be alive?

  I’m not sure what to wish for. I want the reassurance that I didn’t kill him, that he is okay. But on the other hand, if he is alive, if by some dark miracle he did survive, he’ll make my life worse than it ever was. That private investigator is only a sign of what’s to come, none of it good. I’ve seen only two things motivate my father—money and revenge. And nothing would motivate him more than getting back at the person who shot him in the chest and left him to die.

  A sharp left on the trail brings me back into the race; we’re heading up a steep grade. The half-dozen runners in front of me downshift into slow motion, leaning into the hill, gasping for breath.