Latitude Zero

by Diana Renn

  The screen showed an ambulance and a figure being loaded onto a stretcher. The reporter’s words filled the tent. Everyone in the tent stopped talking. Patricia turned to see, too.

  “The crash victim has been identified,” said a familiar-looking male GBCN reporter. The same guy who’d tried to stop Jake and me for a pre-ride interview. “He is eighteen-year-old Juan Carlos Macias-León, an Ecuadorian citizen, and a cyclist for Team Cadence-EcuaBar.”

  Juan Carlos! No! I leaned forward, ignoring the stabbing pains in my right side. My hand flew to the necklace. I squeezed it through the cloth of my jersey.

  “Witnesses say he had become separated from his team even before the race began,” the reporter went on. “The young cyclist has already led the local upstart team to victory this season, in a number of national races. He’s been predicted to do so again at the upcoming Pan-American Cycling Tour, a tri-country series of road and circuit races that will culminate in his hometown of Quito, Ecuador. But it looks like this young cyclist’s racing future will be an uphill battle. He has sustained injuries to his head and neck and remains in critical condition.”

  Somebody cried out. Mari. She stared at the screen, which now showed the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance.

  And a familiar yellow diamond sign in the background. SLOW DEAF CHILD.

  Oh, no. Juan Carlos had crashed maybe ten yards behind me. Close enough to have been affected by the pileup.

  The pileup I had caused.

  10

  BACK AT our house, my mom helped me into loose-fitting shorts and a tank top, easing them over my wound dressings. Her touch was soft. Her words were harsh. She launched into a lecture, which might have been titled “How Could You Lie to Us—We Raised You with Values!” At least it was better than the stony silence I’d endured on the half-hour car ride from Cabot to Cambridge.

  “Tessa? Are you even listening?”

  “I’m listening.” I glanced at her, then looked away, unable to face her angry expression. Not to mention the glittery alien antennas she wore. My mom had left her portrait studio so fast to come get me she hadn’t removed the prop she wore to get little kids to smile.

  The antennas reminded me of the fun things Chain Reaction riders mounted on their helmets. “You might want to lose the antennas,” I mumbled.

  “What?” She felt the top of her head. “Oh.” She snatched them off and flung them aside. Then she pointed at my chest, almost accusingly. “Speaking of odd accessories, what’s that?”

  I looked down. Juan Carlos’s necklace was now exposed, as I wore a scoop-neck tank top. My hand flew to my chest and covered the cross. “Nothing.” The necklace. Fresh worries. How was I going to give this back to him? Could I get to the hospital? He probably needed this necklace now more than ever.

  “It’s not nothing. Let me see that.” She moved my hand away and looked more closely at it, tracing the body on the cross with one finger. “Why are you wearing a crucifix?”

  “Why not? Is it a crime or something?”

  “Of course not. It’s just not like you.”

  “Mom, chill. It’s just a friend’s necklace, okay? I borrowed it. I thought it looked cool.”

  My mom pressed her lips together.

  After she delivered Lecture #2 (“You Will Use Your Own Money to Donate to This Charity, Young Lady, Oh Yes You Will”), I limped over to the screened-in porch, like a dog slinking off to lick its own wounds. A sprinkler hissed in the neighbor’s yard. Kids played ball in the driveway. An ice-cream truck cruised down the street, its music unusually shrill. Everything seemed false and wrong while Juan Carlos was in the hospital, his life in the balance.

  News. I needed news.

  I sat in the wicker love seat, wincing from pain. I propped my hurt leg on the coffee table and turned on my laptop. While it booted up, I tore open an EcuaBar that I’d grabbed from the stash in my room. Mocha-Cinnamon Fiesta. It melted in my mouth.

  I went to the GBCN site and learned Chain Reaction had not been canceled. There were still hundreds of riders out on the course. Team Firestone-Panera had won the competitive portion of the event, with Team Trident-Crisco taking second and Bose Pro-Cycling in third. Cadence-EcuaBar, thrown off by Juan Carlos’s ride, had not even placed on the podium.

  I clicked on a link to eyewitness accounts of the crash and forced myself to watch.

  “I was ten feet or so behind the guy,” one out-of-breath man said, as he was interviewed at the mile fifty water stop. “He’d slowed down, but then he started going faster, maybe twenty-five miles per hour on a downhill curve. A bunch of us tried to give him room to do what he needed to do, especially since the road was wet. We figured he was trying to catch his team.”

  “I heard this horrible sound up ahead,” said a woman. “I was cresting the hill, and I didn’t even realize what I was seeing at first. People falling off their bikes. Arms and legs . . . flailing.”

  An older cyclist said, “I saw el Cóndor go down, right in front of me. It was like his bike blew apart. He must have been going even faster than I thought.”

  “Did an endo. End over end, right over the handlebars,” said a teen cyclist.

  I could hardly breathe. Juan Carlos had never passed me. His crash had to have been a result of my own.

  My hand shaking, I clicked on “Team Cadence-EcuaBar Reacts.” Juan Carlos’s equally stunned teammates could barely stammer out sentences.

  “El Cóndor always rode on the edge, man. But he always stayed in control. I don’t know what went wrong for him today.”

  “He seemed okay in the morning. He was amped for the race.”

  Coach Mancuso, his face lined with worry, added, “But he never showed up for the team photo. Or to the starting line. We had to make the tough call to start the race without him.”

  I gasped and replayed that statement to make sure I’d heard him correctly. He’d never made it to the team photo? He’d started the race late?

  So where had he gone after talking to me by the woods on Great Marsh Road?

  The next clip was an interview with Dylan Holcomb, the heavily tattooed and pierced team mechanic. He spoke from the team trailer. He looked shell-shocked. “He came running up here after the race had already begun,” he explained to the reporter when she asked about the last time he’d seen Juan Carlos. “There wasn’t time to talk, so I don’t know what made him late. After he rode off, I saw he’d dropped his radio earpiece.” The camera zoomed in on the device in Dylan’s palm. “I guess that’s why he couldn’t reach anyone once he was on the course.”

  Dylan didn’t say where he thought Juan Carlos had come from. Nor did he mention a missing spare bike. Maybe Dylan didn’t even know yet that Juan Carlos’s spare bike was missing. He’s the person I should tell about what I saw in the woods. I should find a way to get in touch with this guy.

  But I couldn’t resist watching another video clip. An interview with Preston Lane.

  The dazed and bleary-eyed EcuaBar entrepreneur faced the camera in front of Mass General Hospital.

  “I heard you were signed up to do the recreational ride. Where were you on the route when you heard the team leader was down?” the reporter asked Preston.

  He glanced away, his eyes watering. “I never made it out there. Some of the junior riders and I were looking for him, right up until race time. Then the race started without him. I couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t with the team in time.” Lines appeared in Preston’s forehead. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. The Chain Reaction event was important to Juan Carlos. You see, he lost his own mother to cancer.”

  He did? Juan Carlos had mentioned his mom’s cooking to me once, something about her perfect empanadas. He’d told me he had two younger sisters and a dad who worked in a factory that manufactured windows. He’d mentioned a best friend nicknamed el Ratón, or the Mouse, whom he’d raced with in Ecuador.
He’d never said a word about his mother having cancer. Yet he’d probably been through everything Kylie was going through now. The waiting and worrying. I felt an ache of sympathy for him.

  “He was airlifted from Emerson to Mass General, because of the severity of his head injury,” Preston went on. “So I immediately left the race site and followed him here.”

  The reporter murmured something vaguely sympathetic. “And how long do you plan on keeping vigil here at the hospital?”

  Preston ran his hands through his hair. “As long as I need to. We’re trying to reach his family in Ecuador. I doubt they’ll be able to fly out here. It’s the least I can do.”

  The last link I clicked on was to an interview between my idol, Bianca Slade, and Chris Fitch. I sat up straighter, ignoring the throbbing pain in my limbs. Bianca’s interview was sure to be different. Avoid the obvious. Look for the unusual angle. Dig deep, and you’ll hit the truth eventually, she’d advised in her blog post about investigative reporting.

  “Mr. Fitch, we understand there have been complaints about Cadence bikes,” said Bianca. “Two product liability lawsuits, for which settlements were reached, and a recall on the Cadence Navigator two years ago. Could el Cóndor’s bike have played a role in this crash?” Bianca demanded.

  “Absolutely not,” said Chris, practically glaring at her. “First of all, those were consumer bikes, not racing bikes, and they came out of a factory we no longer use in Hong Kong. Team Cadence-EcuaBar bikes are custom-made in our factory right here in Massachusetts. They are rigorously tested for quality control. And Cadence has a strong record of proactively addressing potential safety issues. We have the highest standards for quality and integrity.” He looked directly at the camera. “Cadence owners should have no cause for alarm. Whatever caused this incident had nothing to do with the integrity of the bike frame.”

  Bianca pursed her lips. “This accident must bring up a lot of emotions,” she said. “Your brother, of course, the founder of the company you took over, died tragically on a bike. It must be unsettling, to be so close to two bicycle crashes involving head injuries. One of them fatal.”

  “Yes, this crash hits uncomfortably close to home,” Chris said, robotically, as if he’d said these words a hundred times before. “But my brother was hit by a car, so at least we knew the cause. My heart goes out to this young cyclist’s family in Ecuador. We all want to figure out what caused Juan Carlos to go down in the way that he did. And our prayers are with him for a speedy recovery.”

  I should just come forward. That was the right thing to do. But what if someone accused me of negligence? Was Jake right that I could incriminate myself and get into worse trouble? When Bianca advised reporters to “dig deep,” she probably didn’t mean “dig one’s own grave.”

  Normally information calmed me. News comforted me. I’d been falling asleep to the murmur of news on a tiny radio on my nightstand since I was eleven years old. Knowing was better than not knowing, I always told myself. Even when news was horrific—bombings, tornadoes, airplane crashes—there was something about journalists trying to find the human stories in the chaos that always made me feel better. But now these testimonies from people in Juan Carlos’s inner circle just fueled my guilt. I massaged my stomach to calm my nerves.

  My emotions must have shown. When my mom came in to check on me, she promptly closed my laptop. “Media break,” she announced. “Sorry, hon. Obsessing about this crash isn’t healthy. You’ve just been through a shock. Your body needs rest. So does your mind.”

  “But I want to know what’s going on with Juan Carlos.”

  “You mean that guy Jake raced with? From El Salvador?”

  “Ecuador. And yeah. He crashed. He’s still in critical condition at Mass General. Unconscious, with a head injury.”

  “Oh, my. Well, I’m sure he’ll pull through,” she said, sitting opposite me on the wicker ottoman. “Cyclists are tough. Though it does seem strange how one of the most skilled cyclists out on that course got hurt the worst.”

  “I know.”

  “I wonder if something went wrong with his bike,” my mom suggested.

  I remembered Juan Carlos looking down with a grimace, as if the bike were handling funny. Jake had taught me about how picky cyclists could be about seat and handlebar adjustments, down to the millimeter. The slightest difference could throw off their game.

  But he was riding his main bike, with the green handlebars. That bike should have been fine-tuned and ready to ride.

  “Or he could have been sick,” my mom went on, reaching for a Mexican blanket on the floor and folding it neatly. She was weirdly obsessive about that blanket, a threadbare souvenir she’d bought on a trip to Mexico approximately one hundred years ago.

  “But when he beat Jake in Colorado at the junior nationals last summer, he had strep throat and a sprained wrist,” I pointed out. “If something were wrong, it would be serious.”

  “Well, maybe it was. Like a bad reaction to something.” She paused. “Like drugs.”

  “God, Mom. Can you give it a rest? You and Dad are always assuming drugs and bike racing go hand in hand. They don’t. El Cóndor rides clean. Everyone on Team EcuaBar does.” Team EcuaBar was actually created to counteract the doping stigma. Several years ago, Preston Lane had bailed out a struggling, upstart cycling team, then added the junior development team. Combined, they’d be “the pure team”—a new generation of untainted cyclists.

  “I know. ‘Pure energy, no additives.’ Just like the energy bars. It all sounds good. Still”—my mom shrugged and set the Mexican blanket on the arm of the love seat—“the scrutiny of crowds, his sponsors, the media, his team—it seems like so much pressure.”

  I wanted to buy my mom’s theory. If he had reacted badly to some drug, then I was less responsible. But I just couldn’t believe Juan Carlos was doping! He visited schools. He was deeply religious. His faith, his training, and his natural talent all combined to make him win.

  If he had doped, only drug tests could confirm that. Or an autopsy report if he died.

  If he died . . .

  I curled up into a ball on the love seat, drew my mom’s wool Mexican blanket over my head, and tried to shut out the world.

  If he’d crashed because of the domino effect of my swerve, I was, in some way, responsible for his hospitalization now. An invisible fault line connected our crashes.

  And if he died? I would be responsible, too.

  11

  A RHYTHMIC scratching and snapping sound startled me awake—I must have drifted to sleep on the love seat.

  The scratching was on the porch screen. I didn’t know what the snapping was.

  I remained frozen under the Mexican blanket, suddenly thinking of that guy in the woods, and the snaps of the underbrush as he had chased me.

  “Tessa!” a girl’s voice called out. “Are you awake? Didn’t you hear the doorbell?”

  I emerged from under the blanket and sat up to find Kylie and Sarita outside the porch. Kylie was scratching the screen with a twig to wake me up, and Sarita was loudly snapping an enormous piece of gum. Behind them, parked at the curb, was the Fingernail: Kylie’s ten-year-old maroon Ford Taurus. The car had earned its nickname due to its uncanny resemblance to a press-on nail. It was our portable home away from home, where we’d had heart-to-heart conversations, taken crazy road trips in search of New England’s best ice cream, and collectively consumed about a billion lattes.

  All that stuff suddenly seemed a lifetime ago. Even my friends standing there didn’t seem real. Sarita’s black curls were damp against her brown skin. I could see the tie of a bathing suit halter around Kylie’s sunburned neck, and her auburn, pixie-cut hair looked recently towel-dried. They smelled of chlorine and coconut sunscreen. They’d been having a normal summer day. I wished I’d been on their ride.

  “Oh my God! What happened to you?” Ky
lie pointed to my arm and leg bandages.

  “Long story.” I limped to the front door and let in my friends. They joined me on the porch, where we took up our usual perches: Sarita sprawled on the chaise longue, Kylie cross-legged on the ottoman, and me, curled up on the love seat.

  “Nice necklace,” said Sarita. “I’ve never seen you wear crosses or anything like that. You’re not becoming Catholic, are you?”

  Kylie reached out and touched it. “Is that real gold?”

  “I think it is. It’s heavy.”

  “I’m not sure. Kind of seems like metal.”

  “Well anyway, it’s not mine. It’s a loaner.” For some reason I felt funny telling them who’d given it to me. I slid the crucifix on the chain so that it hung over my back instead, and so they’d stop staring at it. “It’s jewelry, guys. It’s not that weird.”

  “Not judging. Just noticing,” said Kylie, not taking her eyes off the necklace.

  We were together now, yet separated by an invisible screen. Something had shifted in me at Chain Reaction. I was now a person capable of doing devious and harmful things.

  “You look like hell. What happened?” asked Sarita.

  I sighed. “Did you hear about the big bike crash on the cancer ride in Cabot?”

  “I did.” Sarita’s eyes widened. “I saw the news on my phone when Kylie was driving here. I thought of you right away. I heard el Cóndor got hurt. Didn’t we meet him, when you dragged us to one of Jake’s races?”

  “You did meet him. And yeah. He got hurt. Bad.” I took a deep breath and plunged in to the whole story, since my mom was in her photography studio out back and couldn’t hear the details. As I talked about bandit riding on the cancer ride, I couldn’t meet Kylie’s eyes. I would have understood if she walked out.

  But she didn’t. Neither did Sarita. They both hugged me. They expressed alarm about the man in the woods, and agreed with my theory about him: he was a fence, a middleman between a bike thief and a black-market sports memorabilia collector who wanted the young cycling protégée’s bike.