Each One a Nation, page 20
“Sloane,” he says, “you don’t have to compete with your friends, and if you feel like you do then you need to find new friends.”
“But we’ve always competed with one another.”
“I’ve never felt the need to compete with any of you,” he says.
“You’re competitive with Peyton,” she says.
“Not anymore.”
“That’s because he beats you in everything now.”
Seth stops and turns to Sloane who instantly knows that what she’d said was hurtful and wrong. He removes his hands from his pockets for a moment to adjust the hem of his sweater before returning them neatly.
“Seth,” she says, backpedaling, “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did,” he says softly. “You meant it and it’s true; but you know what? It says a lot more about you than it does about me. You’re willing to put him first even when he terrorizes you. Even when he is currently terrorizing you. And you know what? I think you enjoy that.”
“Seth,” she says.
“I think you enjoy the fact that he oppressed you and embarrasses you because it gives you a way out of feeling competitive with the girls, it gives you a chance to complain to them, and to assure you that they’ll be by your side and tell you it’s all somebody else’s fault because at the end of the day, Sloane, you’ve always looked for a villain. And you know what? Fair. Your world is full of villains but you don’t have to take me down to make yourself feel better about the fact that you enjoy being around them.”
They are both silent for a moment while children around them are chased by parents and a large, cartoonish pumpkin blow-up bends and waves before its noisy generator. Feeling very hurt and feeling shocked by his own instant bloodlust in trying to make Sloane feel the same way, Seth begins to plan a way out of the conflict and back into good graces with Sloane, but before he makes any headway, Peyton and Mallory appear at the other end of the path with Mallory leading by a few feet and Peyton struggling to keep up. Seeing the way out, Seth himself begins walking speedily toward the two and when he reaches them he bypasses Mallory and grabs Peyton by the arm.
“C’mon,” he says, “let’s walk.”
The two boys scurry off leaving Mallory and Sloane who both find each other somewhere between distraught and uncomfortable. Sloane begins to cry and falls into Mallory’s arms, and Mallory understands automatically that it isn’t at all a time for confessions. Moving away from them, the boys begin to chat.
“What’s wrong with her now?” asks Peyton.
Seth stops and looks at him.
“Dumbass, she’s mad at you because you planned a date and then turned it into a gathering. This is so simple, dude.”
Peyton processes this for a moment before saying, “I want Mallory.”
“What do you mean, want?”
“What do you mean ‘what do I mean’?” he asks, “I mean what I mean.”
“But you can’t have Mallory,” he says.
“Why, because you have her?”
“Because I…? Because I have her? No, idiot, because you are dating Sloane. You have been for a very long time.”
“Okay,” he says, “but just to be clear, you don’t want Mallory?”
TEN
In Austin, and not an hour into check in, Bobby Catman Jr. confirms he’d seen a crowd of media personnel beginning to form a wedge around the hotel entrance to speak to Eric Del Rio. From their room, Devyn looks at a picture from Sloane accompanied by a long and heartfelt good-luck text message. Her four friends are lined up in the park, none but Sloane smiling with any sort of effort. She is pierced for the first time with the thought that her success may be straining her relationship with them, and that there would not be any other reason for such a pathetic display unless they felt forced to participate. For the first time since she began her sessions with Bobby, she feels unconfident about what she is about to participate in, the weight of the moment finally hitting her, and the harsh reality that the time for dreaming was over, and the time for doing had come.
Though favored, she knows the challenge that lays ahead manifests in the form of Junior Girls Swimming’s phenom Dacia VanWoo, a tall, lanky, aggressive Berkley native only a year older than she, who was touted to be “The Next” by SWIM Quarterly. Having never seen Dacia in person, and having reduced her to a non-factor in her own training, her anxiety begins to tilt with every passing hour knowing that she will soon have no choice but to confront the straw woman of her dog days, and watch her grow teeth. Now she must do so carrying the weight of her resentful friends, and something very big brewing outside of her hotel.
…
The training session the next morning at the Jamail Center on the campus of UT gives Devyn her first look at Dacia VanWoo, and she begins to sweat the second she sees the tall Californian live. Dacia’s fingers dangle parallel with her kneecaps while she stands with her arms at her side. The Speedo suit, sucked tight to her abdomen, is dull pink and rumpled from the hardbodied musculature underneath. Her face is smoothed and oblique, goggled to the bright lights of the sticky arena. As Devyn watches her, she slips in and out of sarcastic reverence and tries to make light of her presence. She continues watching while Bobby signs her in. She watches Dacia step to the block with large feet and bony ankles and just after she finishes her final warmup movements, she looks directly at Devyn, smiles the most secure smile Devyn has ever seen, and waves politely. The buzzer sounds before Devyn can return the gesture, and as Dacia plunges into the water, Devyn feels severely out classed and wishes to return to Georgia.
…
Eric watches nervously from the window, secluded to his hotel room desperately planning an escape route for the coming day. Deciding not to encourage the swarm, he’d sent Bobby along as Devyn’s primary guardian but he would be damned, he thinks, if he missed Devyn’s meet the following day. While he sits and wonders alone, with the tv showing business news, he considers, like fathers do, the journey from one thing to another. He remembers Devyn, as fathers also do, as a child. She was, as he remembers, a cold little striker, a child who showed very little interest in much of anything until she did, and then that thing was in grave danger. He hadn’t even asked her to try swimming competitively; as soon as she knew he’d done it, she wanted to do it better. His phone rings, pulling him back into the present.
“E,” says Ian on the other side, “bad news. The flight attendants are threatening to strike and if they do the pilots will too. We need to have an all-hands.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says.
“It was something you said,” says Ian, clearly exhausted, “to a flight attendant who told a pilot something. Look, it doesn’t matter, ALPA is involved and now the pilots are threatening a strike.”
Eric drops his head into his hands and moans quietly to himself before looking back out the window and then at the news. Ian is saying what he already knows to be true: that a strike would mean the end of Astra, and that they would have to concede a massive amount of money to stop that from happening.
“Pirado wants to send a charter to get you ASAP,” says Ian. “He wants you here by the evening.”
“Ian,” says Eric doggedly, “I’m sure you know this isn’t a great time.”
“I don’t know if he cares. This is code red, E.”
Eric notices that his friend is out of breath on the other line.
“They can’t be serious about a strike. We’ve been too good to them,” he says.
“Eric, you blamed a crash on one of them.”
“Because it was his fault!” Eric shouts.
There’s a long silence on the other end of the line.
“He flew without permission, Ian. You were there. He went rogue and he killed those people.”
The silence continues.
“Do you understand me?”
After a few more moments of silence, his employee responds.
“Sure, E. They need you in St. Louis tonight, okay?”
Ian hangs up.
Eric is left to his thoughts in the empty hotel room where he begins to panic. Panic is not something he’s used to, having trained himself to wiggle and strain out of it through years of subjection to stress. His phone rings again, this time it’s his assistant giving him travel information. Then he makes a call to Chimen.
“Hey,” he says, “where are you?”
“Miami,” she says, “about to board for Atlanta.”
“Don’t,” he says, “say you’re sick, do whatever you need to do but get on a flight to St. Louis. Any flight but an Astra flight. Use my card.”
“What’s going on?”
“They’re going to ground the fleet. I’ll explain when I see you tonight. Text me when you’re in St. Louis.”
“Okay,” she says.
He hangs up and looks again at the media crowd and makes a plan to leave without their knowing. Next he calls Bobby Catman.
“Bob,” he says, “I have to go to St. Louis. Is she still in the pool?”
“Yeah. You have to go?”
“Bob, get her attention. I need to speak to her.”
“She’s in the middle of a warmup set,” he says, confused. “She just started, I won’t be able to get her attention for a little bit.”
Eric’s panic fades to a fury. He squeezes the phone in a manner that challenges it structurally and begins to pace in a five-by-five foot square.
“Bob, listen. The pilots are going to strike because of something I said on the way here. I have to leave right now and I’m going to miss the event tomorrow. Can you keep an eye on her? I’ll cover everything just make sure this all goes as it would have gone had I been here? Can you do that for me? Devyn has a card.”
“Sure, E. Is everything going to be good? What should I tell her?”
“Just tell her there was an urgent issue and that everything is going to be alright. Make sure that you tell her that everything is going to be all right.”
Eric hangs up the phone with a red face and trembling hands. He gathers his luggage and leaves the room. In the lobby, he sneaks a payment to a bellhop to take him through the kitchen and out through the loading dock doors where a car is waiting. On his way to his charter, he fights his fury, knowing that he’ll have to act with grace when he reaches HQ. Stepping onto the chartered jet waiting for him on the runway, he is greeted by a pilot. He wonders if this pilot knows, too.
Dacia, Devyn is sickened to learn, is fluid and effortless in her stroke, and as she emerges from the water, barely huffing, she stands high and strong with a predatory confidence that causes Devyn to shrink unconsciously within herself, all of the confidence from the spring and early summer evaporating into the center’s ceiling too high for her to recover it. She feels stupid and ugly in her Astra-colored suit, having worn it as a nod to her captive dad, and tries not to attract any attention as Dacia strides by flanked by Swim Media members, teammates, and coaches. Devyn begins to feel sick, completely swamped by fatigue and discomfort, until Bobby puts a hand on her shoulder and says, “All right, Dev; just like home.”
When she falls into the water and begins to acclimate her body, she returns to herself. She goes to the place she feels most comfortable, where there is no world and there is no her, there are no competitors, no coaches, no expectations, there is only a fluid and a certain speed to accelerate to. From the surrounding stands, the people that follow the sport stop what they’re doing and turn their attention to the girl who, until today, they’ve only known as a name and a time on paper. The raven-haired girl in the water is slim but solid, undersized but twitchy. They watch her operate the fluid smoothly, each reach, pull, and kick both well-rehearsed and improvised. At the other end she touches and turns, jetting just below the surface like an early torpedo. It isn’t until she finishes that she realizes all of the eyes are on her. The confidence she’d newly regained begins to fail her once more as she thinks of her dad in his hotel room and not there watching her.
When Devyn is finished training, she showers in a locker room full of strangers that customarily she knows she should introduce herself to. When she’d pulled herself from the pool, she’d sensed a change in Bobby’s demeanor, and she is quick to rinse and change to return to him to find out what’s wrong. When they both sit down in the car, he tells her the news. She’s exhausted already, and somehow unsurprised, and she just says “okay” and leans her seat back for the ride back to the hotel. Bobby brings a meal by the room and then leaves Devyn to herself where she begins to sob furiously into her pillow out of frustration with herself and her father, feeling somehow silly about being hundreds of miles from home to participate in a competition, feeling suddenly that it mattered very little, and seemed unwinnable in the presence of her real competitors. She thinks about her friends at home, and how they were likely together having fun without her. Before long, there is a knock on the door and she opens it to see Dacia VanWoo standing tall before her.
“Hi Devyn,” says Dacia with a sunny confidence. “I’m Dacia.”
“Hi,” says Devyn.
“I’ve really wanted to meet you. I’ve watched so many of your races. Are you okay?”
Devyn remembers for the first time since she’d opened the door what she’d been doing before.
“Oh, yes,” she says, wiping the moisture from her eyes. “It’s just a family thing.”
Dacia smiles a clean and honest smile and steps through the door, pulling Devyn into a warm hug. Devyn’s face nestles just below Dacia’s chest which is padded by a warm, fragrant sweatshirt with a Berkley bear on its front. Devyn surrenders herself to the arrangement, handing her arms loosely around Dacia’s torso as a teardrop rolls down her cheek and disappears into the soft cotton.
“Hey,” she says, “we all have those.
Devyn is confused by Dacia’s lightness and dexterity as she moves by her and into the room. She falls into the chair at the desk and points to the tv.
“Business news?” she asks.
“It helps me calm down,” says Devyn. “I’m trying to calm down.”
Devyn closes the door and is unsure whether she should sit on the bed or just remain standing.
“I, um. I should be forthright with you; I know what’s going on with your family. I’m so, so sorry.”
Devyn, still standing, stares blankly at Dacia for a moment before nodding and saying, “Thank you.”
“I actually have read quite a lot about it and well, I just honestly wanted to stop in and ask how you were holding up.
Devyn, who has never once openly cried in front of a stranger, sits down on the bed gently and begins to weep into her hands.
“Oh no,” says Dacia, shifting from the chair to the bed and taking Devyn in her arms. “I feel so bad now, Devyn. I swear I didn’t mean to come in here and do this. Really, I will withdraw from tomorrow if you feel that I did.”
“No,” says Devyn meekly.
“I will call them right now if that is what you need.”
“No,” says Devyn. “No. No, you don’t have to. See, I don’t know about it.”
“Know about it?” asks Dacia, confused.
“The thing you’re asking about. I do not know what happened, but I know that something bad happened.”
Dacia puts her hand over her mouth and her eyes expand and focus on Devyn. She feels that she must have the wrong person, or that she has the right person but is talking about something markedly different from her.
“You…Well, why?”
“Because my mom refuses to know, and if I know I will tell her.”
Dacia’s hand moves from her mouth to her forehead though she still maintains a general posture of human shock. All that she can think to do is to take Devyn in her arms once more. This is the second embrace between them, and they begin to feel to each other like old friends rather than brand new opponents. Concerned, and sick to know that such a life exists, Dacia begins to ask questions. She questions Devyn for the next hour until Bobby knocks and opens the door for lights out. He gives the girl on the bed dwarfing his athlete in size a warm smile and says, “Couple minutes and it’s lights,” before closing the door again. Dacia stands first.
“My dad will be looking for me soon enough anyway,” she says, and for a third time embraces Devyn. “Good luck tomorrow,” she adds, and opens the door. She stops in the doorway while Devyn looks on.
“Do you want to know?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Devyn, “but not tonight.”
ELEVEN
The next morning in Latreuo, Darlene hangs up the phone with her daughter in a mood that begins as light and airy but quickly fades to low grade jealousy and finally gives way to inadequacy. Her next call is to her husband, whose sandy voice and pregnant pauses suggest that he’s been crying, and the first thing that Darlene can think to worry about is the possibility that he is with Chimen, and that Chimen is comforting him about it. The two of them ramble on to each other in short, canned bursts of language. When they are done she hangs up the phone. She wonders again about Chimen and wonders how they treat each other, whether he is more gentle with her or he is equally cruel. It breaks her heart to consider that former as a possibility.
She spends the next twenty minutes pacing the home in a blank fury, not knowing why, wandering the home, repeating the names of her family members and friends as if reprogrammed as something that’s only function is to inform people of those names.
“Devyn,” she says to herself. “Devyn and Eric and Martha. Devyn and Martha and Ian and Neal. Devyn and…”
She stops in the family room just before the foyer, looking up the empty stairs, counting the steps silently to herself, thinking of Devyn through the years running up and down them, thinking of the moments she climbed them just hoping that her husband would be upstairs but wasn’t.
“Devyn and Neal,” she says to herself, “and Martha and…”
She stops again.
“Neal,” she whispers to herself. “Neal. Neal. Neal.”
She leaves the stairs and pushes through the door out into the warm morning. The sound and the heaviness of late August is upon her as she goes down the driveway and out into the street. She walks through the neighborhood by feel, drawing not from any map or compass but on the past steps of her own two feet. She passes neighbors as they walk dogs and listen to music but does not seem to notice them. She seems only to notice something at the end of a very long line that draws her closer and closer to the home of Neal Streeter, to Point Origin. He answers the door to find her just staring at him with a strange blankness.
