The Sea of Light (14 page)

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I can’t.”

Then she’s down the hall before I can respond, walking very, very quickly, amazing for all that bulk. I ought to be pissed off but a warm, quiet pain fills me instead. Something in her has evoked it. So that, for a moment, I want to race down the hall, press her arm again and hold it and say,
Hey, hey, slow down, Big Girl, it is going to be all right.
But I don’t.

*

The Team Retreat. Brenna Allen believes in it, says it is good for the individual mind and collective head-set, so we do it at the beginning of every season: a weekend away at this place upstate that has cheap cabins, smooth hills, woods and lake. We’ll run together, do push-ups and sit-ups together, eat together, listen to her yammer on about goals and discipline and glory. Coach’s intensive seminar in teamhood.

On the other hand, aside from workouts, there won’t be much more regimentation for the rest of the year. I guess her theory is that it’s better to start out with a lethal dose. Catch us during dry-land month and we’re baptized, immersed before we even hit the water.

On the bus I want to sit back and plug into a Walkman, wear my wraparounds, shut out the world. My exalted team position doesn’t allow for this, though. The freshmen have questions. Everyone else, complaints.

As we head farther north, you can see leaves just beginning to tinge gold, sense a hint of cold in the air. Our Coach sits in a front seat, right next to Babe Delgado. Neither of them appears to be saying much. Delgado stares out the window.

After lunch there, and cabin assignments—I’m stuck with the freshmen, one of whom spends a great deal of time bemoaning the lack of a suitable electrical outlet for her blow-dryer—there’s the usual: talk, medicine ball, more talk, calisthenics, visualization. At one point we’re all lying flat on our backs on a breeze-rippled grassy hillside, eyes closed, arms and legs outstretched, creating mental images of our race. I try, getting through each lap in detail up to 200 yards. I can push the details on to 250, then 300. After that, though, it blurs. People in the stands yelling
Pull! Pull! Pull!
turn into people laughing. I breathe in water, snort and choke, cling to a wall and then turn badly. It rushes by me—chlorinated foam and wake against plastic lane dividers, the hollow swoosh of an arm, gasp of breath, skin and limbs glowing in the bright pale blue like ghostly elements, breathe, stroke, pull, stroke, pull, up, around, breathe, twisting my mouth sideways over the waterline to suck in air. After a while I can feel it, a little—the rhythm. But I still catch myself cheating on each turn, cutting almost, dangerously, too close or flipping too soon, barely brushing toes against tiled cement, gasping lung pain, losing treasured seconds. Smashing pool gutters with outstretched legs. Scream of the ambulance as I am rushed to a hospital, shattered left ankle wrapped in ice, and multiple murmurings in the background:
See, Coach, you should have let her stick
with the one and two. Never should have made her do distance. Oh, why? Why?

Enough already.

I open my eyes to blindingly sunny sky, puffs of clouds, Brenna Allen gazing down at me with a hard, dark irony in her face.

“Are you all right, Ms. Marks? You look like you’re in pain.”

“Last hundred!” I shriek. “Oh no! It’s the wall!” And everyone around me laughs, their female tones light, giggling, sharp music in the bright, bright air. I grin up at her mirthlessly and don’t laugh at all. And I can tell by the glint of understanding in her eyes that she knows, how for just that moment, I hate her.

*

Her lookout post, we call it—the porch to Coach’s cabin, scattered with broken-down old lawn chairs that she’s folded and stacked neatly in a corner. Except the one that she sits in herself every night after dinner, facing out to the lawn and lake and mossy-smelling woods, watching.

That first evening I’m heading past the lookout post on my way to shower. She’s sitting there, legs crossed and feet propped on a porch rail while the sky purples, mixed gray and red around the edges of trees. She’s entirely in shadow. I can feel her watching, though, and I wave.

“Ellie. Come on up for a minute.”

I creak on five ramshackle steps.

“A nice sundown, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Awesome.”

“Have a seat.”

I perch near the stair railing, holding my towel and bottle of shampoo, ease away from a rough spot threatening splinters. Her face is hard to see. Once in a while, there’s the flash of glistening eyes, white teeth. Sometimes a hand gestures, and the flesh seems to shine against all the sawdusty wooden dark.

“Well, how is everything going so far?”

“Okay,” I say, without quite meaning it. Knowing, anyway, that it’s not quite what she wanted to ask either. She smiles briefly.

“Keep your hand on the pulse, Ellie. What does it tell you?”

“Listen, Potalia’s afraid of being cut. Come to think of it, so am I.”

“Nonsense.”

“Maybe you should tell
us
that.”

I blush and am glad the darkness hides it. My voice sounded harsh just now, very clumsy, surprisingly bitter. Not my own at all.

Brenna Allen’s chair tilts backward. I can’t see her expression, but the even keel of her own voice doesn’t change.

“I certainly will. I will tell her that. And I’m telling you now.”

“Good.”

“Now, there’s something I’d like you to do.”

The last time she said that signaled the end of all my modest expectations. I steel myself. More bad news for Miss Captain Drill Sergeant Team Workhorse. But this is the reason I was called up onto the porch and invited to have a seat. So I listen.

“I’d like you to keep an extra-careful eye out for the new team members this year. Especially Babe Delgado. Please try to be her friend, if you can. Show her the ropes.”

I laugh. “Ropes? You think she needs
me
to show her the ropes?”

“You might be surprised.”

I kiss even my dreams of relaxation good-bye. Last year. Last chance. It occurs to me that I was probably always destined to be just this—Hammerhead Marks, Coach’s hand on the pulse, good for a giggle—nothing more. Destined always to strive, never to improve. Bus rides to meets will be me doing the mother hen, team nanny number again.

But in the dark, now, something’s changed for me. I look in her direction without adoration or fear. Words leave me, as thoughtlessly as the day I was conceived by naked survivors—two beaten people rolling on top of each other—that was all it took.

“Can I ask you a question, Coach?”

“Of course.”

“Why did you do it? I mean, make me change events? I’ve been working so hard! And it’s my last year.”

“I just think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Why? Because you’re the coach, and I’m not?”

She nods. And we both know it—but don’t say it: Someday soon, the answer won’t be good enough any more, and I will want to hear something real. The truth, for instance. Babe Delgado.

“I don’t like it,” I mutter.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“No? You promised me! Stick to this program, Ellie, you’ll have your chance. But now it’s, like, you take away that hope, you basically just take away my faith—and you think it doesn’t matter?”

“Not as much as
you
think. See, from my point of view, perseverance is really much, much more powerful than faith. Or hope. You’ll find, as you get older, that you really don’t always need hope in order to go on. You only need an ability to see things through. An active will—with or without hope—that’s much stronger than any instinct for happiness.”

“You’re wrong! Completely wrong.”

“Well,” she says, “we’ll see.”

“What—I mean, what, exactly, do you think we’ll
see?”

“What you’re made of,” she says quietly. “We’ll see what, exactly, you, and all of us, are made of. Things are shaking up and shaping up a little differently this year, we’re in unknown territory, so it’s a good opportunity—right? It’s a good opportunity to see what we all are made of.”

“I can tell you
that,
Coach. Personally, I am made of this—here”—I hold out an arm, pinch the flesh—“See? Skin, muscle, et cetera.” I tug my hair. “This too. You can cut it, shave it, kick it—burn it—you can even kill it. And that’s all there is.”

“No—that’s not all there is.”

“What do you mean? You’re always saying it yourself—all that stuff about the body, how truth is in the body—”

“No, Ellie. You haven’t listened. I said that truth is
in
the body—I did not say that it
was
the body.”

“Fine, great. Well, that’s just a little too heavy for me!” And now I’m scared. Because I’ve never talked to her this way: challenging, mocking and nasty. “So where does all this leave me?”

“With at least two hundred new yards to learn about. Or maybe several thousand. But whichever way you take it, the rest of your life.” The chair thuds upright. She leans forward. “I’m not playing games, Ellie—I’m serious, you know. You must set an example. If you can’t do that by immediate accomplishment, you need to do it by your attitude. Pull people in, help them when they ask—even if they don’t ask out loud. Sometimes the things you need to do to win hurt much, much more than you’d ever believe. That’s probably why losing is normal, in the end—most people
don’t
win.”

“Why?”

“Because normal people cannot stand the abnormal pain of it.”

I twist my towel, feel myself give in a little. For a second something in me opens up, like a tiny slit or crack through which you can glimpse things. I want to love her again. But the slit closes, leaves me lonely. I can feel how all alone I am inside: lightless, talentless, tiny and desolate, without a win to my name.

It comes to me as a little voice. When I listen, it’s a plea. But when I say it out loud it is merely bitter.

“Why me?”

“Because it’s what you
can
do.”

“Thanks,” I spit, “thanks a lot”

She chuckles—gently. The softness stuns and disarms me. “Ellie, don’t be so hard on yourself. Or on me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the old saying, my favorite one? Talent gets you fifty yards, the rest is all just guts and work.”

“Sure. And then there’s Babe Delgado.”

“Ah,” she says, “but it’s true for her, too.”

Closest she has ever come to being motherly. For a second I stop hating her.

“Listen, Ellie, just give it a try. What you simply cannot do, believe me, your body will not do. But at least unexplored territory is always interesting, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.” I stand. Feeling very angry, totally ripped off. Otherwise, I’d never speak to her like this. “And I’ll still do it for you—I’ll do whatever, anything you want. But I want
you
to know something, too: I intend to tell you from now on,
Coach,
when I think you’re right. And also when I think you’re wrong.”

“Then do it,” she sighs, tiredly. “Just do it.”

I wait at the top of the steps facing her, as if there’s something more to be said. Maybe I’m waiting to be dismissed. Or put at ease. She doesn’t
do
or say anything, though, just sits tilting the chair gently, back and forth, in the night. After a while I turn and leave her behind on her lookout. The creak of the chair mingles with the breeze, with the faint leafy rustle of trees.

*

More talk the next day. More push-ups, sit-ups. More grassy outdoor visualization exercises, during which I take a nap.

Afterwards, she divvies us up into pairs. Running buddies, she calls it, and everybody groans. I am paired with Babe Delgado. Then she maps out a few cross-country courses to take—over a couple of hills, into and out of woods. The trails are marked, the other edge of the woods not far, and everything borders civilization. Unfortunately, there is no hope of getting lost.

“Half an hour,” she stays. “Run. Don’t cheat.”

Delgado, for all her heft, can really move. I find myself chasing her down, stumbling over field rocks and mole holes. Speculating on the general unfairness of it all—here I am, in what is basically the best shape of my life—and here she is, in what is probably the worst shape of hers—and she’s cutting me to ribbons. Reminding me again that she has national-class heart and lungs, whereas I most assuredly do not. When we get into the woods, leave the others to take their own paths, I am nearly brained by swinging branches and have to face facts: I can’t keep up.

“Hey,” I gasp, “will you just
chill,
goddammit!”

She doesn’t hear. Too far ahead, bouncing through the trees. There’s a flash of flopping T-shirt, straining flesh.

“Babe!” I yell. “Slow down!” Then silence. I wait several minutes. Until I hear her big feet brush mud and moss, the rhythmic crunch of leaves louder. She’s breathing hard now, standing right in front of me with a pleased look on her face that makes me feel mean.

“We’re supposed to stick together, you know. This isn’t a race.”

“I’m sorry, Ellie.” She says it gently. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing surgery won’t fix.”

She starts to laugh but stops herself. Then slaps my shoulder tentatively, says to come on, there’s a place up ahead, we’re not supposed to cheat but we can check it out, anyway, and take a rest.