I shook my head.
“I know, Michele, I know now. But I didn’t know then. Have you even listened to my messages from last week?”
I shook my head again. I had deleted them all.
“Well, that explains some things. When I woke up last Saturday morning and Evelyn handed me the paper, that’s when I found out. That’s when I realized the extent of this, this—” He stopped. He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Michele. About everything you’ve been through. It’s been a tough season. I can’t believe Juniper had anything to do with it, but we did, and at the end of the game, it’s my team. I was blind to Scarlett.” He dropped down hard into the chair across from me, and it oomphed in protest. “I don’t care if we ever sell another goddamn copy of My Pace. I don’t. Or if you write any columns. Or do the Ironman. Or come back to work with us, even though I would love if you did. I just want you to forgive me.”
Just as I knew Adrian hadn’t betrayed me, I knew the same of Brian. How to explain it to him, though, I didn’t know. What I felt wasn’t anger. I didn’t have the energy for that, but I didn’t have the energy to make him feel better, either.
“Brian, it’s okay. We’re good. I’m going to see this through with you and Juniper.”
He nodded over and over, quickly, biting his lower lip. Then his eyes narrowed and he leaned toward me. “Michele, where’s your locket?”
***
That evening while I was heating up dinner, a red blur out the side window caught my attention as Sam’s 4Runner pulled into the driveway. My stomach clenched. I was barely managing to keep Sam and Annabelle at a distance. I didn’t begrudge him visits—this was his home, too, after all. I just couldn’t bear a confrontation. I was doing this to keep him safe, and I would protect him until my last breath. Maybe someday he would understand.
The door from the driveway opened with a bang and closed with a slam.
“Sam?”
He clomped down the hall, and when he entered the kitchen, I caught my breath. Whiskers had sprouted on his cheeks and he looked thicker, stronger. Angrier. Only two days had passed since I’d seen him last. But then, my hair had turned gray in an instant.
He smacked his keys down on top of the microwave and took a seat at a barstool. He picked up the papers in front of him before I could stop him and started reading.
“Those are mine. Give them to me.”
After a few pages, he threw them back down on the breakfast bar and they spread out like a game of fifty-two-card pickup. He pointed at them. “What are these, Mom?”
“Things I need to do to get ready for Kona.” I tried to gather them up, but he picked up a list and held it away from me.
He read aloud. “Stop newspaper. Cancel housekeeper. Give Precious to Sam. Empty refrigerator. Send Annabelle jewelry. Give clothes to Salvation Army.” He shook the paper at me. “What is this about?”
“Someone has to take care of the cat while I’m gone.” I snatched it from him and turned away.
He picked up a jar of pickles from the counter and threw it at the floor. It shattered. The sharp smell of vinegar filled the air. I whirled back around, staring at him. Neither of us looked at the broken jar, and I tried to pretend he hadn’t done it.
“Don’t you even care about Belle, Mom?”
“What?”
“Check out her Facebook status.”
I scooped up the fan of papers and walked carefully through the pickles and glass to the office. He was just baiting me.
He raised the ante. “She hates New York, not that you’d know, and she wants to come home. Only she doesn’t think you care enough to let her.”
I stopped. He was so mad at me again, so fast, like he’d been after Annabelle first left, and leading up to our showdown in the car about him lying to the cops. Why couldn’t he even try to understand? I retrieved my phone from my pocket and opened the Facebook app Annabelle’d loaded for me. Had I even opened it all summer? I went to Annabelle’s profile page.
Her status was one word. “Alone.”
Me, too, Belle. Me, too.
I looked back at my son. He had his hands behind his head and was leaning back with a stubborn look on his face.
“I’m coming with you to Kona.”
Panic took flight like a winged creature in my chest. “Oh, no, you’re not. You have school.”
“It will be okay.”
“Well, it’s not okay with me. Your grades this year are what count for your college applications next fall.”
“I can make up the work.”
“Sam.” I tried to regroup. “Thank you for offering. I’m going alone, though.” Not that other people hadn’t offered. My parents, Dr. Greene—even Blake, however inappropriate that was. I had politely declined them all.
I put the papers on my desk and came back to the kitchen, stepping over the pickle debris again. I scraped my uneaten barbecue sandwich into the trash. I walked over to Sam and put my hands on both of his shoulders. “I am proud of you. You are a wonderful son. I’m sorry you can’t go with me.” I kissed him on the cheek and my lips touched wetness.
I went to my bedroom, and a few minutes later I heard the door slam again. His engine revved, and then there was only the silence of the house and my fragile heartbeat, the heartbeat of a butterfly.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Nearly two months later, the morning before Kona, the town of Kailua-Kona was buzzing with tension and activity. I thought I’d be wound tight, but I wasn’t. My seas were dead calm and my sails hung slack. I stayed to myself, mostly, trying to keep still enough that Adrian could find me. I had to believe he’d come.
I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. I’d been at work since before sunrise. By nine a.m., I was sitting at a mock desk in a borrowed office requisitioned by ESPN for a redo of our foiled shoot at Juniper the month before. Stephanie Willis had upped my news quotient again, not that I cared. Brian brokered a deal with ESPN and I’d agreed to the interview in return for a promise: they could film me all they wanted the day before and the day after the race, but I got the race day to myself, for my husband.
They sent the same producer I’d sort of met in Houston. The top of his bald head shone under the lights as he gave everyone their instructions. No surprise, but after he’d got an eyeful of me last time, he’d brought hair, makeup, and wardrobe people with him. The entire set smelled like Aqua Net. From my glossed lips and coiffed helmet of dyed-black-again hair to my aquamarine sweater set and strand of pearls, they had me looking like their vision of Michele, the widowed editor and author.
“Right now we just want day-in-the-life shots, like we got earlier today of you training.” Pretending to be training, rather, in garb emblazoned with the logos of ESPN’s Ironman sponsors, but I didn’t quibble. “When we have enough, we’ll hold up cue cards and you’ll turn to face the camera and answer the questions.”
“Like this?” I typed at the keyboard.
“Yes, good. Now, we’re rolling, so I want you to act naturally, and don’t talk to me anymore.” I nodded. “In five, four, three, two, one, action.”
My computer displayed nothing. I typed, “I miss you, Adrian. Come back to me.” I reached for a paper on my desk and read it, then typed, “I love you and I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” I dialed my desk phone and told imaginary Sam I was sorry, and pretended Annabelle was on the line and told her I loved her more than ever. Probably doing it make-believe didn’t count, but maybe they’d read my lips on TV. I listened to silence and ended with, “Buh-bye now.” Buh-bye now? I never say that. The cameras were making me an idiot.
I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. The producer had signaled someone. The pouty male makeup artist walked to the camera and held up a cue card. “You lost your husband, training partner, and co-author, Kona qualifier Adrian Hanson, two months ago. How has this impacted your training?”
I had practiced this the day before. Thirty- to forty-five-second sound bites and done. I could do
this. I took a deep breath through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, then started. “It’s much harder without him. Adrian coached me, but it was more than that. He made it fun, and that made it easier. It was like date time for us. But he’s still with me.” Or he was, I thought. “His words are in my head, and in our book, and I have his memory to carry with me. He never even knew I’d gotten into Kona. I’d saved that as an anniversary surprise for him, and to be truthful, waiting to tell him allowed me to make sure I could really do it, that my head was in it and my body would hold up. Since he died, I’ve stuck to this because of him, and for him, through tragedy, loss, and injury. I wouldn’t be going for Kona without him.”
I left out a few things, like the part about Adrian joining me for workouts after his death, and his desertion after Stephanie died. That his missing savings account tormented me during the long hours I trained with nothing to distract me. That I couldn’t sleep at night because I was worried about dangers he should have explained to me so I could protect our kids.
Sometimes the real story isn’t the story, I thought. Sometimes the real story is just no one else’s damn business.
The pink-haired stylist’s turn. She held up her cue card. “You have a customized bicycle that will make it easy to pick you out during the bicycle leg of the race. Tell us about it.”
“Adrian called me his little butterfly. He customized a Trek Pilot to fit my rather undersized frame,” I smiled, “and had it painted orange and black like a monarch butterfly and had ‘La Mariposa’ stenciled on the center post—that’s Spanish for butterfly. My papa’s originally from Mexico, and he nicknamed me Itzpa after an Aztec butterfly goddess years ago. Adrian told me that on that bike, I really could fly. A month ago, my husband’s killer tried to run me down while I was on La Mariposa, and it was totaled. I’m riding an exact replica on Kona, thanks to Pilar at Southwest Cyclery in Houston.”
The makeup artist held up another card. I read the words, but they weren’t ones we had practiced. “Adrian gave you another butterfly gift. Tell us about the locket you’ll be wearing at the race.” What kind of sick joke was this? I’d told them earlier that I lost the locket in the wreck.
Brian walked toward me from off-camera. He’d come to Kona to handle the book promotions and media until he could find a replacement for Scarlett. Good, he would explain it to them again. “Michele, a replica of your bicycle might work, but not for your locket.”
I bobbed my head. My hands were suddenly cold. “Exactly.”
“I couldn’t stand it that you lost it. I called the Waller police and HPD. Neither of them had it in evidence. I searched the crash site for it. I walked that ground over and over. I went back and used a metal detector. I couldn’t find it. It was sudden-death overtime.”
Movement from stage left caught my eye again as a police officer came and stood beside Brian. He looked so familiar. When he addressed the camera and said, “I’m Officer Dodge, from Waller, Texas,” I knew his voice instantly. What in the hell was he doing on Kona? Had ESPN brought him here? Or Brian? A rush of emotion and memory swept over me like a tsunami. Terror. Hope. Joy. Sam. “Your boss called me originally to check evidence for your necklace. He called me again and asked if I could think of any other places to look.”
My eyes left Dodge for a moment to take in Brian’s face again. His cheeks were bright red, like a cherry on top of the blueberry ice cream of his damn Texans jacket. I wanted to run from the set so I could cry in private, cry for having ever doubted Brian, for all the times I shut him out in the last two months.
Dodge continued. “So I remembered our long ride in my squad car, and I looked for it there. I couldn’t find it. Brian asked me if he could look. Darned if he didn’t take the seats out of the car. I told him this must be one hell of a necklace, and he said yes, but it was more that Michele was one hell of a woman.”
That was too much. My lips trembled, my eyes flooded, and a wretched sob escaped from my throat.
Brian put his hand in his pocket and lifted my locket from it. He held it toward me. “God knows how, but it ended up caught in the bottom of the front seat and I found it, a three-point shot at the buzzer. It’s in perfect condition, without a scratch.”
I clasped my hand around the cold butterfly. I turned my hand over and stared at it, but I couldn’t see anything through my tears. “Dios mío.”
Dodge put his hands in his pockets and lifted his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have believed it could have been in there if I hadn’t watched him disassemble my whole car in front of me and pull it out of the bottom of that seat.”
As the butterfly sat in my hand, it grew warmer. I pressed it to my face and could almost imagine the little monarch’s heart had started to beat.
Brian clasped my upper arm. “The chain was broken, but I had it repaired.”
I dangled the butterfly against my chest and pulled the two ends of the chain to meet in the back. By feel, I fastened the clasp. The warmth of the butterfly spread across my chest. I had a piece of Adrian back. I stood up and embraced Brian, then Dodge, then again Brian for much longer.
“Thank you,” was all I could manage, but I patted him to make up for it.
The ESPN staff clapped. I’d forgotten they were there.
Chapter Twenty-nine
After the sobfest of my interview, I had to spend the rest of the morning doing other press and signing books before I could escape back to my room. I wanted a nap, but I had a long way to go before I could rest, including the need to fuel and hydrate in preparation for the race, and to send Brian one last blog post before I went to sleep. If I slept at all.
The room was spartan except for La Mariposa the Second leaning against the wall outside the bathroom. Maybe that wasn’t fair. The space was spare, but it was tasteful. The white wicker furniture and pale yellow cushions were brand new. A pillowy white comforter covered a sturdy mattress. Maybe if Adrian were there I would have had more enthusiasm.
A few years ago at one of my first triathlons, Adrian gave me his take on pre-race hotel rooms. “Some coaches warn their athletes against sex the night before a race. The theory is that it saps your energy.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “What does my coach advise?”
“Your coach thinks that for every orgasm you have, you’ll shave a minute off your personal-best time.”
“Well, don’t just stand there.” I’d pulled my short silk nightdress up and over my head. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I shut the door on the room and my memories with a click.
I ate a seafood salad lunch at Splasher’s Grill, which Adrian would have enjoyed, then walked back toward my hotel. My knee felt tight. Maybe the walk would warm it up before I had to go set up my transition area and run through a light workout on the course.
As I stepped outside, I noticed the sign on the coffee shop across the street. “Serving only the freshest homegrown Kona.” Another thing Adrian would have liked. And I heard a woman’s voice. “That’s her.”
I glanced across the street and saw multi-time world champion Ironman Mirinda Carfrae. Wow, I thought. She’s amazing. And almost as short as me.
A door bell jingled and a store I hadn’t noticed before caught my attention. A small sign swung from the awning: The Flying Flower. I stopped in the shade of the awning to look at the time on my Garmin and the woman’s voice caught up with me again. “She’s cute, but not gorgeous like he was. I read on People.com today that her publicist used to buy flowers and tell her they were from him.”
A second woman answered. “Poor thing. People say she looks like that Mexican actress, but I don’t see it . . . did I ever tell you about the shiteous movie I watched that she was in? Señorita Justice. Don’t waste your time.”
I swallowed. They weren’t talking about Mirinda. They were talking about me and Eva Longoria. I had to get away from their eyes. I pushed backwards against the door of The Flying Flower and it swung open. I stumbled in and pushed it closed. I stood sto
ck still, straining to hear them, but in the sanctuary of the store I couldn’t make them out anymore. Good. The veil over my other senses lifted as I turned around to look at the shop. I inhaled vanilla and coconut. Cool air licked at my sleeveless arms and I shivered, but not from the cold.
The tiny space was filled with butterflies. Giant suspended gauze monarchs. Blue butterfly tea sets. Yellow butterfly aprons. Butterflies of every color and type danced through delicate paintings and vibrant photographs. I walked into their midst and turned slowly in a full circle.
“Let me know if I can help you,” I heard. The voice sounded creaky and aged and like it had come from the direction of the counter, but I didn’t see anyone. I searched the room for a silvery butterfly with blue-rimmed wings that matched the voice, then I caught myself. I shook my head. I couldn’t allow my imagination to start jacking with me. I only had to get through two more days, and then it wouldn’t matter what my crazy head told me anymore.
Gray waves popped up behind a counter. See, Michele, I thought. Human, not butterfly.
“Your shop is amazing.”
“Thank you.” The head rose farther into the air, revealing lapis lazuli eyes and impossibly white skin with so few wrinkles that the hair made no sense. But then neither did mine. “Ah, dearie, are you here to do the big race?”
“I am, but how did you know?”
“Because you look hungry.”
A laugh shot out of me from I don’t know where. “Yes, I guess so.”
“You like butterflies?”
“My husband did.”
She lowered her chin, looking up at me from the deep of her eyes. “My partner, Johnna, did, too. She was a lepidopterist. A scientist. I just think they’re pretty.”
I watched, fascinated, as golden strands of light made their way from her chest to the floor and over to me. They shone up my leg and my stomach until they reached my chest, then the slack went out and I felt a tiny tug and heard a pop. I stepped closer to her. As soon as I did, I saw what I was doing. Again. Stop it, Michele. Get out of your head. “She studied them here?”
Going for Kona Page 22
