You Will Know Me Page 4

  More than a dozen years later, two kids, a creaking split-level with water stains but strong beams, loose shingles but copper pipes, both working in jobs they wouldn’t have chosen but wouldn’t have fled, and where had all that energy, that exuberance, that sense of limitless possibility gone?

  For Eric, for both of them, it went to this.

  After all, who wouldn’t do anything for one’s child?

  Especially when that child worked harder and wanted something more than either of them ever had? Who wanted in ways they’d long forgotten how to want or had never known at all?

  * * *

  “This is just the beginning,” Eric said, unscrolling the design plan for Coach T.’s approval, Gwen flanking him, smelling strongly of perfume. Katie, behind everyone, unable to see.

  “We’ll have to go dark,” Coach T. said, reading glasses slipping down his nose. “And find another place to practice. But hell, I’m grateful.”

  During practice, high up in the family viewing section, all the parents could talk about was the pit.

  “Teddy’s been dragging his feet on this for years,” Molly Chu said to Gwen. “And you and Eric, it’s all because of you two. Our pit at last!”

  Gwen twitched a smile. “It’s simply required for a competitive gym,” she said. “And why Teddy hasn’t installed one is a major concern for me.”

  “The building owners wouldn’t allow it,” Molly said. “That’s what he told me.”

  “He told me good spotting means you don’t need one,” Kirsten Siefert said.

  But there were whispers among the boosters that Teddy’s true reasons were more personal. Rumors of financial strain—two sons at expensive colleges and one in law school, a house renovation, a new deck. It was his gym, of course, but given the high fees he charged, couldn’t he invest more in BelStars? And when Eric filled out the booster club’s tax forms and saw how much Teddy paid himself, he had to admit to Katie that it was frustrating.

  “Well, now we have everything,” Katie said, looking down at Eric on the gym floor, hands on Devon’s shoulders, talking and talking and talking.

  Construction took place during the Summer Olympics, the BelStars buzzing with Olympic fever, holding viewing parties and even, among the boosters, a small betting pool.

  Practice was relocated to the nearby middle school, an arrangement made possible, of course, by Gwen, though no one knew how.

  Meanwhile, under Gwen’s vigilant watch, a crew of men of Portuguese descent worked seemingly around the clock to dig the pit, splitting the floorboards like matchsticks, pouring concrete all day.

  When one of them fell ill, a substitute worker arrived in the form of Coach T.’s pool boy, a lean-hipped young man named Ryan Beck.

  This was how Ryan came into their world.

  Chapter Three

  The Foot might have been an end. Instead, it turned out to be the beginning. The Fall might have been an end too, were it not for the Pit, which offered a second chance.

  But the Pit brought Ryan Beck. And Ryan Beck, that sweet, chipped-tooth, handsome young man—well, he ruined everything in his own way.

  Walking into BelStars with Drew, Katie caught her first glimpse of Ryan, with his long, tanned arms swinging a piece of rebar like a baton, laughing at something one of the workers had said. Ryan was always laughing.

  Over the next two weeks, everyone came to watch the construction of the pit. And to see Ryan.

  Each morning, he stripped down to his undershirt, jeans hanging low on his waist, and climbed down into the pit, eight feet beneath the gym floor. And then it began, all the gymnasts, ages seven to seventeen, making excuses to visit, taking turns peeking over the pit edge, hoping for one of his smiles. And many of the booster moms too.

  But it turned out Ryan was already taken, by Hailey, everyone’s new favorite tumbling coach, who tended with such care to the younger girls, hands on their curling spines, their sprigged thighs, somersaulting them. The pair had been spotted sharing French fries at the Sundae House, their foreheads nearly pressed together, like Archie and Veronica.

  “I’m glad for Hailey,” Gwen said, and all the mothers agreed. Because Hailey was adored, and no one knew why she had so much trouble keeping a boyfriend.

  Soon enough, Hailey started coming to the gym too, arriving in her sprightly purple car and sitting in the center of the bleachers as Ryan worked and leaving only when practice required her to. Finally the other girls got the hint and stayed away.

  Only little Drew remained.

  He was supposed to be in the game room, but Katie and Eric found him hovering a few feet from all the activity, watching the concrete mixer spin and whir.

  Inside the pit, Katie could see the back of Ryan’s head, the delicate curve of his neck. Earbuds in, he smoothed the concrete with the power trowel, his arms floating back and forth gracefully.

  “Ryan said it was okay to watch,” Drew told them, “if I stand back just this far.”

  “Well, he doesn’t know,” Eric said, pulling Drew away by his jacket hood. “He’s just a kid. He doesn’t know what’s safe.”

  As if he had heard, Ryan glanced up at the Knoxes but only grinned.

  Looking down, Katie wondered how deep they would go, digging that pit. How deep Teddy and Eric would make them go.

  Ryan seemed down so far that he might disappear.

  After that, while Eric took Devon to practice, enduring her stony silences, Katie chaperoned Drew at BelStars to view the progress: the installation of the rebar grid, the curing and coating of the walls, the padding on the edges glued and screwed down. And the best part, the filling of the pit with the vivid-colored foam cubes, cobalt and gold, tumbling down into it like alphabet blocks.

  “You sure are a nice mom,” Ryan once shouted up at her. “Bringing your boy every day.”

  Katie smiled, her face warm.

  The grand opening of the pit took place on the final day of the Olympics.

  As benefactor, Gwen led the christening, tossing in the final foam block, spray-painted gold by the Level 3s. Then her nine-year-old daughter, Lacey, leaped toward the runway, ready to perform the inaugural vault. But Gwen quickly put both hands on Lacey’s tiny shoulders, patting her white-blond braids and pulling her aside as all paths cleared for Devon.

  Of course Devon would be first. And more than one hundred gym members, relatives, and supporters watched as she took the floor, shaking her fingers, breathing deeply. She hadn’t vaulted since the Disappointment. Since qualifiers. Would she now?

  Lacey’s alarming white eyebrows slanted like antennae, and she said something under her breath. Katie could hear Gwen’s sharp response.

  “Well, life isn’t fair, Lacey. Do you think I asked for these ankles? But you have to be strong and push through. We all endure a lot of things. I slept with your father’s chain-saw snores every night for six years. I have him to thank for my tinnitus. You can sit through this. Watch how it’s done. Watch Devon.”

  Standing before the pit, padded on all sides and filled to the brink with foam blocks, each one a jewel facet, Devon couldn’t even speak. Her hand finding Eric’s arm, she set her right foot on one of its soft foam edges, and then she looked up at her dad as if unsure.

  But he nodded, and she nodded. Across the floor, Katie found herself envying them the moment, it felt so potent.

  As everyone watched, Devon walked over to the foot of the vault runway, eyes on the springboard, the vault table. Rotating her wrists, shaking them. Then, at last, charging down that runway with no hesitation at all, her body soaring into a double-twist Yurchenko that made the whole gym gasp and aah before nearly disappearing into the gaudy pit.

  Everyone cried. Katie couldn’t stop.

  Later that night, Katie found Drew at the kitchen table, viewing the Olympics closing ceremonies on her laptop.

  “Devon didn’t want to watch,” he said, shrugging at the hallway leading into the den.

  Walking by, she saw Eric and Devon absorbed
in old footage of Devon’s first meet, a bowl of popcorn between them. She almost felt like she was intruding.

  There was such a look of calm on Devon’s face, for the first time since Elite Qualifiers, that Katie found herself retreating, not wanting to disturb. So she sat at the table with Drew, the sound turned low so Devon couldn’t hear the fireworks, the jammy-voiced children’s choir, the big horns.

  After Drew went to bed, she could still hear Eric and Devon through the wall.

  “The new vault table, it’s the greatest ever, Dad,” she said. “And my landings are sticking. I’m going to do better.”

  “Devon, you don’t—”

  “It won’t ever be like that again. Like at qualifiers. I’m going to make up for everything.”

  “Hey, Devon,” Eric said, and Katie could hear him shushing her, soothing her, telling her she was perfect as she was and that all he and her mom wanted was for her to be happy.

  Katie listened, closing the hot laptop to muffle it.

  The Olympics over, the foam pit and new equipment in place, along with a sense of renewed purpose, it felt like a spell had been broken.

  To celebrate, Teddy engineered a (booster-sponsored) overnight trip to attend something called Gymnastics on Ice at the state capital. It would have been a forgettable experience had Hailey and Ryan not been invited and had Ryan not arrived two hours late, long after the postshow dinner during which Hailey texted helplessly at the table, certain he had perished on some remote roadside. What would I do, Mrs. Knox?

  An hour later, all the BelStars and booster chaperones looked on from their balconies at the Ramada as Hailey and Ryan, resplendent as a pair of movie stars, bucked and brawled down by the pool, or Hailey did. You couldn’t help but watch, Hailey crying and casting the sunflowers he’d given her into the searing chlorine, and Ryan still as a statue, gently pleading, or so it looked.

  “Teddy must’ve taken a whole bottle of Nyquil to sleep through this,” Eric said, coming up behind Devon. “Should I go down?”

  Katie shook her head, watching from the sliding glass door.

  “Why does he just stand there?” Devon asked, but she looked captivated, moving closer to the balcony edge, her toes curling there. Her face open in ways Katie rarely saw.

  “Give them some privacy,” Eric said, summoning her back into the room.

  “That’ll be Devon someday,” Katie whispered to Eric. He gave her a queasy look in return that made her laugh.

  Everyone inside, Katie stayed a moment longer. Soon enough, as the sunflowers, dark and sodden, drifted across the acid-blue surface of the pool, Hailey had pressed herself against Ryan’s chest and all was forgiven.

  The next morning, Katie saw them in the lobby sundries shop, their arms around each other sloppily, their faces glazed with sex.

  Ducking behind a rack of energy bars, she tried to sidle past them unseen. She could hear Hailey whispering, over and over, in his ear, “You make me crazy, baby. You make me crazy.”

  Turning sharply, Katie hurried into the lobby, thick with exultant eight-year-old gymmies, high on mochas, nose-high with whipped cream.

  But Ryan had spotted her.

  “Mrs. Knox,” he said, running after her as Hailey paid for something at the register. (What had she bought? All Katie could think was condoms, the word whirring in her head.)

  “I’m sorry,” he added, shoving his hands in his pockets. “About last night. I saw you guys on your balcony. What a couple of jerks we were.”

  “Young love,” she blurted, trying not to look at Hailey’s ballet-pink lipstick on his jaw.

  “Young idiots,” he said, shaking his head.

  His hair still wet from the shower, the wrinkled shirt—boys that age, everything was so easy, and that ease was the centerpiece of their charm, wasn’t it?

  “You should enjoy it. It’s a great time,” she said, without even thinking. “You…you feel things so deeply.”

  “But then you stop?” he said, smiling. “Feeling deeply?”

  She was startled to hear her own laugh, sharp and fast, almost a bark.

  Then, in an instant, Hailey was behind him, smiling at Katie, giggling. “This creep!”

  Her arms wrapped tight across his chest, like a shield.

  When they returned from the trip, Coach T. convened a strategy meeting at his home, Mama T.’s famous sun tea and biscuits, Eric and Katie in those stiff-backed dining-room chairs.

  Pulling out his flow chart again, he directed their pensive faces back to the Track, dog-eared, coffee-rippled.

  “It’s not over,” he said, his voice firm, eyes intent. “Not for our girl.”

  “You think she can try again? For Junior Elite next year?” Katie asked. They’d talked and talked about it, she and Eric, endlessly.

  “She could,” Teddy said. “But I think she feels like she’s going backward. And she’s aging out soon, and if she—she won’t—but if she fails again, the crush to her confidence, the impact on her ranking…”

  “So what are you saying?” Eric asked. “Tell us.”

  “I didn’t want to raise the possibility before, but that pit, it’s a game changer,” he said, slapping one hand on the damask tablecloth. “Listen to me, you two: There’s a loophole. A shortcut.”

  With the thickest marker he had, he drew a line that went from Level 10, through the doomed Junior Elite, and straight to the next arrowed box.

  Stopping there, he circled Senior Elite, drew a looping star around it.

  “You can do that?” Eric asked. “You can skip?”

  “No one does that,” Katie said. “Do they?”

  Teddy looked at them, the pouches under his eyes quivering with intensity.

  “Very few. But there are exceptions.” He drew another line, even thicker this time. “And we all know Devon is deeply exceptional.”

  Eric nodded, Teddy nodded, their eyes locked on each other’s. After countless nights spent talking about Devon, raising money for the gym, watching footage of Devon’s routines, standing below her as her feet fastened on the practice beam, the two of them didn’t even need to speak.

  “And she’s stopped the clock,” Coach T. added. “You know?”

  At first Katie didn’t. Then she did.

  “Devon’s going to get breasts, Teddy,” Katie blurted. “And hips. And everything else. She’s going to be a woman.”

  “No one’s disputing that,” Teddy said, smiling tightly. “After all, only Peter Pan gets to keep his baby teeth!”

  Katie turned to Eric, but his gaze was fixed on the chart, on the thick black arrow leading off the page.

  “But what if she doesn’t want to?” Katie asked Eric that night, brushing their teeth side by side. “Is it even good for her, all this pressure? It’s been so hard since qualifiers.”

  “Well, we’ll ask her,” Eric said. “She’s the one who has to decide.”

  So they did. And her eyes shuttled between Katie and Eric, watching them, doing that one-sided lip-biting thing that meant she was thinking.

  Then she said, “Okay.”

  The plan was in place. The new one.

  For the next twenty months, Devon would compete as much as she could, increase her ranking and improve her prospects and get better and better and better. It would mean out-of-town trips, out-of-state trips, invitationals, classics, all the state and regional and national competitions—which meant arrangements had to be made with Devon’s school, Eric pleading Devon’s case, pointing out this unique opportunity, her strong GPA, her immense promise. He would handle everything, get tutors, pay for private lessons. Whatever it took.

  Then, in July of her sixteenth year, Devon would try for Senior Elite. The first qualifier of her sixteenth year.

  Just knowing they were back on the Track, even if it was a new one, made everything better. Brought order back into their lives.

  So Katie had forgotten about it, or tried to. The possibility that the foot injury could have been to blame for what happened at
qualifiers, and everything that might mean. Until months later.

  She hadn’t meant to do anything but deliver the laundry, the teetering basket of leotards and warm-up sweats, and change Devon’s sheets. Tugging the mattress pad, that awkward crawl to the corner that pressed too close to the built-in bookshelf, her hand hit something soft. The felt fabric of a fat diary—I Heart Everything across its crimson cover.

  The idea that Devon kept a diary, and hid it between mattress and wall, felt so charmingly old-fashioned, or out of time entirely. Devon wasn’t ordinary or typical in any way, after all.

  Katie, her hand on the cover, hesitated.

  These are the things you just don’t do.

  But your child’s privacy, what did it even mean after you’d spent so many years with your daughter’s body at the center of your life? So much energy focused on whatever hurt most—the once-sprained arm, the soft-backed left knee, the chest bruised after Devon drove her own knees into it. All the talk, the open talk, about bras and panties, which ones might show during meets and lead to deductions, and when it was time for bikini waxes. And all those nights: hard strokes on her calf muscles, ice on her bar-bruised pelvic bones, on the inside of her beam-bitten thighs, and, not in years, but still, rubbing Vaseline where the seams of her leotard rubbed and bristled.

  Katie opened its pages.

  Today: straddle jump ½, ¾ & full on the beam…Working on: Giant ½ + front giant ½, giant full, toe-shoot, double layout dismount.

  Entry after entry about gymnastics, chronicling the minutiae, and photos of her favorite gymnasts glued onto pages, silver-Sharpied arrows and circles over their poses, stance, muscles.

  It wasn’t a diary at all. It was more like a training log.