by Dan Bryan
The Glow
by Dan Bryan
Copyright 2013 Dan Bryan
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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The Glow
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Chapter 1
Outside it had been the coldest day all winter, but they were sheltered in the depths of the athletic club. Sweat ran down their burning faces. Marcela was teaching him racquetball and competing with ferocity. Not once in a month had he defeated her. Experience thus far had trumped his strength. Now they played the deciding game in their best of three match. It was the first time Marcela hadn't won 2-0.
Her biggest advantage was her skill at imparting spin to the ball once it caromed off the front wall. He was never quite positioned well and his returns were mediocre at best. However, when he got a direct shot on the ball he was able to hit it frighteningly fast at times. On the balance though, he was shocked to win a game from her. She had clearly been playing since she was very young.
Marcela was leading him 10-5 in their third and final game with match point on the line. Her serve proved almost impossible to play, hitting two walls near the front corner and ricocheting in a rather oblique direction when it hit the floor. The resulting return was feeble and the point was easily closed.
"Sorry Quentin, you do not have me beaten yet." she said.
"I was close that time. This is hard."
"You weren't that close." she told him.
As they walked to her apartment the wind blew cold off the frozen lake and their hands and feet went numb. She lived in a mid-rise and they passed through the lobby and up into the elevator. Back at her apartment they showered together. The water droplets were steaming and they both felt the stinging of their fingertips as the blood flowed back. They pressed together naked and made out as water sprayed onto their eyelids.
Afternoons with Marcela were the substance of his winter. The cold days and freezing nights had kept the two of them indoors, and by the time they left for Christmas break he knew she was his girlfriend. The night before she caught her flight to Santiago he placed her gifts beneath a miniature tree. She was the kind of girl who would get a little Christmas tree to spend three nights with before she flew to the other side of the world. It was a little stupid, to be sure, but it was a smaller thing that made no sense not to humor.
His gifts for her were a small necklace, Amores Perros, and a black and white photography book of the Andes. His rationale was that by getting three things, there would have to be something that she enjoyed, but she told him she loved everything. Together they watched the movie while she was still around.
"How much Spanish can you understand?" she asked him.
When he couldn't duplicate the speech of Gael Garcia Bernal, she teased him mercilessly.
Now it was in the middle of their frozen February afternoon and they were sitting up in bed, leaning against pillows pressed against the wall. They were warm again from the shower and the quilt that they were nestled under. The ground and the water outside of the window was white and the expanse stretched for miles.
"How did you learn to put that kind of spin on the ball? Sometimes it's just like Jesus Christ out there."
"My father taught me all of the tricks. He loved to play tennis when he was young. He wanted to take it seriously, but he suffered a bad injury when he was twenty years old. When I was a girl he taught me racquetball and tennis both. There were many courts at our gym."
"Did you ever beat the old man?" Quentin asked. Marcela chuckled at the suggestion.
"Why do you think I play against you now? I need to know what it feels like to win at that game, because never did I win when I was young. My father did not believe in taking it easy."
"Did you play against other girls?"
"Not much in racquetball. There were tournaments for tennis in Santiago. Usually three or four per each year. For some reason I found it very stressful, whether I won or lost. Those games may have been good practice, but they were never good entertainment."
"Yikes homegirl. At least you were just playing for yourself. When I used to screw up playing football there were another fifty guys on the team who I had to worry about."
Marcela pulled on a t-shirt and sat up straighter. She grabbed a blanket and wrapped it tightly around her shoulders, and then she turned back to face him.
"You yourself were an athlete, as you tell it. How did you come to play football?"
"I played Pop Warner since I was six years old. Everyone played in Virginia. We were all Redskins fans--"
"I hate that name."
"I could care less now, but that's who we watched when I was little. They won the Super Bowl when I was in second grade or something and our school had a huge rally to celebrate. It was that kind of thing."
Marcela put her hand on his thigh.
"How was it playing football in front of everybody? What was your worst mistake?"
"Well... I fumbled in the fourth quarter of our high school playoff game when I was a junior. I pretty much quit playing after that." Quentin said, shrugging his shoulders.
"What is this fumbling?" Marcela asked.
"So my last year playing we were nine-and-one in the season and we won our conference. I mean we had a really good team that year. I was ok, but we had two linebackers who play in college now."
"Yes, but what does this have to do with a fumble? You never just explain anything right away." she said.
"Fine, I guess I won't explain it at all." Quentin teased her, but instead of bothering him further Marcela just grabbed her computer from the nightstand and started typing on it. After a couple of minutes she found something.
"My goodness. A fumble is when you drop the ball and the other team can get it? That sounds terrible!"
"See, you've got the computer. What do you need me for?" Quentin said.
"So your team lost the ball because of you?"
"Ok, I was in the process of telling an admittedly long story. Do you want to hear it?"
"Of course! You never tell long stories. Usually you just sit here in my bedroom like the Sphinx."
Marcela nudged him with her elbow as she said this, but he kept on with the story.
"Like I said, we won nine games, lost one, and won our conference. So because of that we advanced to the Virginia state playoffs--"
"Yes. Divisions and playoffs! It's all very confusing to a lady, but go on."
"This team came down from Arlington for the first game. Half of the town was packed into our bleachers. My entire family was there with my girlfriend, plus basically anyone else I'd ever met in my entire life. It had been over a decade since our school had made state. I caught the first pass we threw and I was feeling great. The first time we had the ball we scored a touchdown, and then we scored a second one to go up by thirteen points. When we scored the second time it really seemed like we were going to win. None of us thought, as good as we'd played that season, that we would ever lose a lead like that."
"Since you're telling me this story, I'm guessing that your team lost the lead." Marcela said, sadly.
"We were behind 21-16 when the fourth quarter started." Quentin said, nodding. "Nobody scored any points for awhile and we got the ball with about four minutes left, with most of the field in front of us. Everyone knew that this was it."
Quentin put his arm around Marcela's shoulder.
"We were t
hrowing the ball every single play, and things were going well at first."
Marcela nodded.
"And we got three first downs and we were past their fifty yard line. I was starting to think in the back of my mind, you know, that if I could catch a touchdown pass there with a minute left in the game, that I would be the biggest hero in town since--"
"And then the fumble happened? I see now." Marcela said.
"Number 28." Quentin replied.
He had caught the most beautiful pass over the middle, inside the thirty yard line. All he saw between himself and the goal line was a lone safety. Number 28 was the player who he didn’t see. Right as he started to juke, he got hit from behind as hard as he’d ever been hit, with no warning, and before he even knew what happened the ball flew out from his hands and landed five yards down the field. His team never got it back.
"That’s right, bitch!" the guy screamed at him while he was down. Number 28. Their season ended in those five seconds. Marcela grasped the import and her face turned sour.
"And you just had to lay there in front of thousands of people while it happened? How did you do it? I would have been crying. I would have collapsed."
"It put other things into perspective. I started reading more that winter"
Marcela kissed him on the side of the neck.
"Que triste." she said.
"Que whatever. Let's drink some of your wine. It's getting dark outside."
He rolled out of bed and went to the kitchen. She had several bottles but one of them, a red Malbec, was already open so he took it and filled two glasses with it. He took them both and sat by Marcela on the living room couch. Next came a subject of conversation that she was broaching for not the first time.
"I would love it if you came to Chile this spring." she said.
This suggestion, while intriguing on the face of it, was also somewhat discomfiting. It would be the "meet the parents" trip. They'd sit down over afternoon coffee and in the next twenty minutes his entire fate would be decided, and perhaps in the negative. It seemed terribly soon for all of that, given he had never seen Marcela in his life as of the start of fall quarter.
Lacking the effluence to speak while these thoughts rattled around in his head, Quentin had inadvertently left an awkward silence in response to Marcela.
"Or not..." she added.
Quentin sighed.
"Marcela, I would absolutely love to go with you this spring. It's just that there's a very specific trip planned to Seattle that will happen only once and I don't want to miss out. I've never been out there before."
"You've never been to Chile either."
"Yes, I know. What I mean is that I'll definitely go to Chile in the future, but this might not come up again. And Kjell has really good stories about his brother. He sounds like a cool guy."
"You mean you'd rather drive into the middle of nowhere with a guy you've never met in your entire life than go with me to Chile? It's ok, Quentin."
She put Cicero to shame with her facility at rhetoric. It was mandatory to feel sorry for her after a sentence like that, was it not?
"I think we should be more serious, you know, before you run me out in front of your family."
"Run you out? Are you like a little puppy dog at an animal show? You're my boyfriend Quentin. We're in a serious relationship. My parents are going to love you! My family loves intelligent men."
"You'll be there in the summer, though. I'll have plenty of time to visit."
"Most likely. Next month I will be doing interviews and meeting with friends of my father. However, summer here is winter in Santiago." she said.
Her intonation made it sound like a Santiago winter was nothing but an ice-coated, Antarctic dystopia. Wasn't it actually kind of nice there? Quentin made a note to look it up at some point.
"I just really want to go on this thing. Alessandro is going too. And Kjell's told me too many stories about Carson. Carson used to take him to campus at Washington when he, Kjell, was like fourteen years old, and Carson would sneak him a shot of Jameson's or a beer here and there. That was how Kjell started to experience life."
"Carson sounds like a wonderful person."
"You know what I mean though."
"I know, I know. If you want to go to Seattle it's fine. We can go to Chile this summer." she said.
Quentin was sure that he'd have ample time to assess the sincerity of that concession. What he hadn't told her was how Kjell had made assurances that the entire car ride would be nothing but drinking, taking pictures, speeding, and taking speed to make sure that they could make the entire drive in two or three days. It seemed very imprudent to divulge any of that information. Instead he showered Marcela with questions about her own break and she told him about beaches, interviews, relatives, banks, and copper companies. She had more plans for those nine days than Quentin had for his entire senior year -- to her own occasional consternation.
"Thanks for being interested." she said after they had talked awhile.
"Of course."
"Sorry to make you feel uncomfortable. It's just that March is such a nice month in that region and it will probably rain all summer. I want you to see Chile when it is nice."
"Rain doesn't bother me."
"I know. But you know... Let's make dinner now."
They went to the kitchen and Marcela cooked fettuccine mixed with chicken, giving him directions on what ingredients to hand over to her. This was the entire contribution he made to the preparation of the meal, but they ate together on her couch and the food tasted sumptuous, and she seemed not to mind that most of the effort was hers.
