Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  ‘That was a nice article you had,’ he said, leaving Joe for me to reminisce about on my own time. ‘Good coverage – even USA Today picked it up.’

  I lowered my chin in a noncommittal acknowledgment of his words. My eyes strayed to the stack of books at the edge of the table. The position for head coach of the women’s soccer program was officially open; I’d come to campus today with a printed copy of my resume and the intention to hand it to Mike later in the afternoon. The resume was now tucked beneath the pile of books as incentive to complete my studies first.

  Mike had read the article so it was time to harvest what I’d planted: He would like to fill the school’s head coach spot next year when interim coach Melissa Ziegler steps down. The old, cocky me had been returning slowly, so I decided to skip to the chase scene and pulled out the folder.

  ‘I was going to present this to you later today.’ I said as I handed him the papers which summarized my nearly twenty years of coaching and administrative experience with soccer. The resume was solid. I was confident it would at least get me an interview.

  Mike took the folder and opened it. ‘I was wondering when you were going to submit this to me,’ he said. His eyes skimmed the top page. Then he dropped the bomb: ‘I know you’ve been the one training the team. Some of the players have approached me on your behalf.’

  With an audible sigh, he placed both hands on his thighs and pushed himself up from his chair. As he slid the chair back under the table and nestled the folder against his side, I felt the warm weight of a hand settle on my left shoulder.

  ‘Stop by the office later and schedule your interview,.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Ah, the power of the press.

  ~~~

  There was a small noise from the other end, the sound of everything lining up, then Ellen’s voice galloped across the phone line as she exclaimed, ‘You got the job?!’

  ‘Well, not yet. Officially. He’s just asked me to interview.’

  ‘Scott, that’s fantastic!’ I grinned=. Like a kid who made final cuts for his first sports team, all I wanted was to celebrate but the real test had yet to begin.

  Before I could humbly segue into another topic, she proclaimed, ‘I’ll come out this weekend to celebrate… and look at properties.’

  Look at properties. The words echoed across my mind like a blanketing hug. Look at properties. Look at properties. It was really happening, everything I had wanted: Head Coach at a Division-I university, working towards my Master of Arts in Sport and Athletic Administration. Even some things I had barely thought to hope for were coming true, like a wife, a home, cat, and dog. How suburban, I thought and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. How wonderfully suburban.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I asked around a thick clog in my throat.

  For so long mine had been a journey of wavering highs and depredating lows. For every foot I gained, it seemed a mile was latterly lost. And now, here I was, about to gain ten miles, monumentally altering not only my life, but my wife’s as well.

  The clog in my throat plummeted and sank into the arteries of my heart. As Bob Fitzsimmons so cannily put it, The bigger you are, the harder you fall. It was a subtitle that could easily be applied to my life, though perhaps more accurately as: The higher you are, the farther you have to fall. Ten miles was a lot to gain, but also a lot to lose. Worst of all, it was no longer only me who had to suffer through such losses. Ellen was going to be here, by my side, through all of it. Did I really have a right to ask so much of her?

  ‘This is what you worked so hard to achieve. You deserve this.’ she affirmed, making me wonder how many of my thoughts I had uttered out loud. Of course this was Ellen I was talking to. It was more likely she had known what I was thinking before I had even thought it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said softly. She didn’t seem to hear.

  In the same assertive tone, she threatened, ‘And I’ll be damned if I’m not there to see you achieve it.’

  My lips curved into a smile and I felt the obstruction in my chest gradually shrink. Leave it to Ellen to fight for me even when I could not.

  ‘Now stop moping and find us a place to live.’

  ~~~

  I had scheduled my interview with Mike for a week from Tuesday, figuring I’d be in top form after a weekend spent at home in Olympia with Ellen. In the meantime, the days resumed their usual evenness. I kept my thoughts on the upcoming weekend and the trip home, and worked through the hours with alternating enthusiasm and banality. Perhaps the sole aspect of my routine that’s repetition never wore on me were my nightly calls with Ellen.

  It was Wednesday – or maybe Thursday – that she broke the news. She had been uncharacteristically soft-spoken for most of the call, and there was a tension to the pauses between us that spoke volumes. The stops and starts, uncertainties and hesitations in her tone reminded me of the first phone call I’d ever received from her. Just as when she’d asked me out for coffee, I knew now that she wasn’t saying what she had called to say. And like then, I simply waited, trusting that she would tell me when she was ready.

  At length, after a stumbling recount of the events of our days and procrastinating conversation that spiraled around the silences, she confessed, ‘I missed my last period.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said noncommittally, breath frozen in my lungs.

  ‘When I noticed I was spotting I went to see my gynecologist.’ She was talking so softly yet with clear determination that every word should be made clear. She’s afraid, my mind told me.

  Afraid of what? I asked it in return. Of me? No. That wasn’t possible. What would make her afraid of me?

  In the same instant as she spoke, my mind gave me the answer: She’s afraid of telling you.

  ‘I’ve had a miscarriage.’

  ‘What?’ I sputtered, speaking out of reflex.

  ‘I was pregnant, but I lost it.’ I could hear the anxious pain in her voice and cringed at the way she said it, like a woman from an eighteenth century period piece. I lost it. I lost it. As if it were her active doing that caused this and her fault alone that it had occurred.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m fine. It’s just the baby…’ Her voice hovered across the line like a blank that needed to be filled.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. As long as you’re okay.’ Quiet, throbbing and febrile, bubbled up like a boiling liquid between us.

  I held my tongue until she whispered with a weary sigh, ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Good.’ I took a breath to stabilize myself and relieve the tension trembling in my chest. ‘I know we’d talked about maybe having children, but it wasn’t a plan.’

  I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, each exhale like a passing thought flitting across her mind. She didn’t offer any comments, though, so I went on.

  ‘Just take care of yourself, okay? I’ll be home this weekend and we can talk about it more then, if you’d like.’

  ‘Mm-hmm. Love you.’

  ‘I love you, too.’

  I felt the click of the line as she disconnected reverberate inside me. It was a long time before I could lift myself from the chair and take steps towards going to bed. Over and over, like a broken record caught in the same groove, a single thought kept replaying in my mind: I hadn’t been there.

  ~~~

  There were a few inches of snow caked on the sidewalks and storefronts, but the roads had been meticulously cleared and dried. It was such a stark and unnatural juxtaposition, with the road cutting through brinks of snow like a straight, black scar slicing across the land, but for some reason it felt right. This was the way the world was supposed to be. Not unnatural at all, this surgical division of nature and man, but rather innate – instinctive.

  As I steered the car right at a stoplight, heading across town towards the grocery store, it began to dawn on me that this was an odd reaction to a snow-cleared road. Why would something as mundane as that cause such a feeling of contentment within me?

/>   No, I realized with sudden clarity. It wasn’t the snow and the road at all that engendered this serenity; it was the woman, my wife, sitting in the passenger’s seat beside me. That was what felt so right: her – us, together.

  Complacency warmed inside me as I glanced at Ellen. She was humming some obscure tune, a small smile curving her lips as she strummed her fingers on her thigh. Tomorrow I’d be heading back to Spokane. But for today we could be a regular married couple, living to the same rhythms of a shared home. Man, did I miss this, I mused and took a deep breath as if savoring the scent of happily married life. In the counterintuitive way of things, it was when I returned to Olympia and Ellen that I became the most acutely aware of how much I longed for them every day we were apart.

  I never miss Spokane or Gonzaga, though, I realized with a curious frown. Odd. It seemed only fair that if I could yearn for my wife so sharply when I was in Spokane, I should feel at least some desire to return to Gonzaga while in Olympia. But I didn’t. Quite the contrary, I was almost dreading my return to Gonzaga. The sudden comprehension of that fact stole the breath from my lungs and sent a nauseating weight into my stomach. I don’t want to go.

  But I had to go. This was my dream: I was returning to interview for the head coach position and to effectually reach the pinnacle of my career. Everything I had been working for, striving for since fifteen, was in Gonzaga. I couldn’t leave that behind.

  But I don’t want to go. The thought wouldn’t leave me alone. I looked at my wife, savoring the way the light softened the depth of her hair, giving it a coppery glow; relishing the way her lips curved in such a way that the apples of her cheeks swelled beneath her thick lashes. How could I ever leave you? I wondered and had to turn my face back to the road lest the agony of the thought drive me into despair.

  On the same note, though, how could I ever leave my career? It had meant so much to me – everything – it had meant everything to me for so long. Soccer was what got me out of the hospital. Soccer was the driving force of my ambition. Soccer was the catalyst behind my dreams. I lived, breathed, ate, and slept for soccer.

  But to what end? I wondered. In all my years of devotion, I had never stopped to consider what else there may be to life. My vision had been tunneled, resolute, obsessed. Blind.

  How could I not see it? Oh, it was so obvious now! My aspirations, my objective; it had all been a quest to prove something. To prove that I could do it, with or without hands. But I didn’t need to prove anything anymore. I already had. No one could have foreseen my making it this far, not even me. I had a wife and was about to walk into the Head Coaching position at a Division I school. Everything I had striven for, I had achieved. And then some, I thought as my eyes drifted back to my wife. Never would have thought such a beautiful, compassionate, intelligent woman would want to marry a man with no hands. She and her love for me amazed me every day.

  ‘I don’t think I should take that Gonzaga job.’ My voice cut through the silence of the car so abruptly I couldn’t be sure it was me who had spoken at first. But when Ellen’s eyes snapped from her window to my face, I knew it had. I saw the bewilderment, confusion, and concern in that heartbeat of a glance and rushed to explain.

  ‘I don’t need it. And it doesn’t make sense for us to move away from here. You’re settled. You own a great practice. It doesn’t make sense to move just so I can coach.’

  She held her lip between her teeth for three breaths after I stopped talking. ‘But this was your goal,’ she said eventually, unhappy disquiet straining her words. ‘You wanted to be at a Division-I school.’

  ‘I know. I’ve busted my ass to get a shot like this, but now I know I can do it. Making it to this level was the real challenge and now I’ve done it. That’s enough.’

  I could scarcely believe the words I was saying, and yet, even as I uttered them I felt the veracity of the declaration. It was enough. I had done enough and now my wife and my life with her were more important. What a sense of freedom it was to finally realize where my heart truly lay!

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. I wanted to shout an exuberant yes! in response, but she wasn’t finished speaking. ‘I mean, when I watched you coach, you seemed so happy. I saw you on that field and knew I was seeing you in your element. I always thought soccer is for you what medicine is for me. You really want to give that up?’

  She was right: I was happy on a soccer field, I always had been. But the true serenity had come only when she’d arrived in my life. It was only with Ellen beside me that everything finally felt right.

  ‘Yes.’

  I pulled into the grocery store parking lot and took the first empty spot that I found. After I put the car in park and turned off the ignition, Ellen twisted in her seat to look at me face-on. Her gaze imploring and pained, entreating and afraid, she pleaded, ‘Scott…’ I felt the syllable reaching for me like a grasping hand and understood.

  ‘This isn’t about that,’ I told her, my gaze level, my voice steady. She must never think her miscarriage had anything to do with my decision. This was about our future.

  ~~~

  ‘You’ve reached Michael Roth, Director of Athletics at Gonzaga University. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible… Beeeep.’

  ‘Hi, Mike,’ I greeted the machine. ‘This is Scott Martin. I’ve decided that I’d like to stay in the Olympia area, so please remove my name from consideration for the position of Head Coach of the women’s soccer program. Thank you for your consideration. You’re doing a great job. Take care.’

  I lowered the phone into the cradle and a sigh of liberation escaped my lips. When an echo of my own sigh whispered from the doorway, I spun in the office chair to find Ellen standing in the doorway, her expression wavering between remorse and anticipation. I met her uncertain gaze and she held mine in return. It was done…

  So now what?

  26

  Words That Represented Us

  ‘We need to move – build our own house.’

  ‘Huh?’ I turned to look at Ellen’s profile as we drove from Spokane to Olympia one last time, Ellen having taken the first leg of the trip along I-90 West. We had been driving for close to two hours now, mostly in silence, and her sudden interjection caught me off guard. Not that I had been doing anything in particular, alternately closing my eyes against the afternoon sun and gazing out the window at the soggy world passing by.

  Yesterday’s four inches of snow had turned into today’s slush leaving the world damp and matted like a wet dog. I watched the rows of spindly, lifeless trees and piles of muddy hills stream past and felt oddly left behind. The last few weeks of the fall semester had rushed by in a downhill flood, each moment since I told Mike of my decision disappearing before I could fully comprehend it. The soccer season ended uneventfully. My semester coursework had come and gone, culminating in a series of final papers which would mean nothing now that I had left the master’s program. Everything was shifting; the spotlight on my life slowly panning left, searching for the next focal point. I only wished I could catch my breath long enough to decide if I did in fact feel the need to mourn the loss of the former center of attention.

  ‘Next week,’ Ellen enunciated, glancing my direction as if to visually convey her meaning into my mind. I struggled to drag my thoughts forward to the present and concentrated on her words. ‘You should start looking for land for us to buy and build a house on.’

  Did she say land? But I wasn’t staying at Gonzaga, so what did we need land for? I frowned at her. Was the rest of my life going to pass in this rush? With everyone else zooming by in the left lane while I rode the potholes on the right?

  When I didn’t offer a response, she glanced at me again, this time more uncertainly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since we saw that property in Spokane,’ she explained, taking me back to the beginning I had clearly missed. ‘It was so beautiful; so full of possibility…’ I watched her expression melt into complacent reverie as her wo
rds faded to momentary silence. I, too, stayed quiet, letting her sojourn in her mental realm of possibility for as long as she wanted. I was in no hurry.

  When a few minutes later she resurfaced with a delicate clearing of her throat, she continued her thought as if there had been no break. It had occurred to her, she said, that in order for us to move forward we needed to move out of the house she had shared with her ex-husband. And she thought now was the perfect opportunity to make such a change seeing as I’d just left Gonzaga.

  I nodded, but held my tongue. I needed time to catch up; to determine if the idea itself was what felt premature or if it was the speed with which it was introduced. Was it me who was behind or Ellen who was ahead? I kept my expression carefully blank as I rewound our conversation and then played it back in slow motion – much more my speed these days.

  Next week you should start looking, she’d said. Next week was two days away.

  The perfect opportunity seeing as you’ve just left Gonzaga, she’d said. Translation: Without Gonzaga, I’d have a lot of time on my hands. And since I’d just given up my lifelong career, there wouldn’t be much to occupy said time.

  So this was probably her way of giving me something to immerse myself in and fill the void left by soccer; something for the spotlight to shine on so other things could stay in the dark.

  After a few more seconds of waiting, I shrugged and turned back to her. ‘Sounds like a good idea. Have anywhere in mind?’

  We spent the rest of the drive tossing around ideas for the design of our new home, occasionally detouring to news concerning Ellen’s clinic when the creative juices slowed. In all the five and some odd hours we spent on the road, soccer never came up.

  ~~~

  I pulled the car over at the end of a cul-de-sac, not trying overly hard to wedge it among the untamed brush that bordered the asphalt. I hadn’t seen another human being for over a mile and it was unlikely anyone who had wandered out here would care if my tires were still in the lane.