“Oh, I am so sore and this feels so good,” Laird said, his words murmuring together.
He meant he was sore from practicing. Or maybe he was sore every day, with his muscles always tearing and repairing themselves. Maybe he was happy because his life revolved around his body. Stephanie wanted some of that happiness for herself and pulled him closer, leaning into him.
Chapter 5
The boys’ cross-country coach had the healthy yet grizzled look of a long-distance athlete, a body and face chiseled by extreme exercise and a lot of time spent alone. His name was Erik Philips and Dean had never talked to him at length, although he had always been impressed by his athleticism. His long legs were muscular, especially his skinny calves, which had been recently shaved for a cycling trip. He had a kind of pent-up energy about him, as if he might break into a sprint, and he spoke with intensity, a vein on his forehead bulging as he discussed the finer points of cross-country racing strategy.
“It seems easy now, right, nice and flat?” Philips pointed to the soccer field, a pristine expanse that the runners had been instructed to circle twice. “But when you get in the woods, it’s uphill for a mile. One of those sneaky, slow-burning hills that doesn’t seem like a hill until you’re five minutes in and your legs are dying and you say to yourself, ‘Why am I so friggin’ slow?’”
They were doing the course walk, a prerace ritual that Philips took seriously. Dean had hoped to convince him to take over the girls’ team officially, but the first thing he said to Dean was that he was so relieved he didn’t have to coach girls anymore. He didn’t know what to do with them; he worried about injuring them accidentally. “Girls have loose ligaments,” he told Dean. “It has to do with their hormones. And then their periods get synced up, that’s another thing you have to keep track of.”
Philips was a true runner, a man who liked to start his day with “a six-mile jog.” On the weekends he biked, planning all-day road trips along the Potomac River where he could ride on the flat, shaded C&O Canal trail. Dean didn’t even have to ask to know that he didn’t have a family.
“I gotta catch up with my men,” Philips said. “There’s a turn coming up that I want them to take note of. Tell the girls: it’s good to catch people before a turn.”
He jogged ahead, disappearing as he passed a herd of Middletown runners. They seemed like royalty in their white-and-gold uniforms. Dean’s girls were trailing behind them in faded blue singlets. Dean noticed that Jessica had dropped back and was now walking a few yards behind Aileen and Lori. (See-See, who knew the course well, had stayed behind.) He approached Jessica cautiously; there was something stern and quiet about her, with her delicate body and her neat French braid going straight down her back.
“So what do you think of the course?” he asked her.
“Oh, I love it. I love trail runs. And I think this one is one of the prettiest. But it’s slow. No one’s going to get a PR.”
“What’s a fast time?” Dean asked. “What does a first-place runner usually get?”
“It depends on the course.” Jessica pointed to a runner ahead of them, a girl from Middletown. “See that girl over there? The one with the high ponytail?”
“The short one?”
“That’s Adrienne Fellows. She’s going to win the race. She wins every race.”
“Does that mean Middletown wins every meet?”
“Usually,” Jessica said. “But not always. They have a lot of runners, but none as good as Adrienne.”
Jessica then began to explain the intricacies of cross-country scoring, which she likened to the scoring of card games. You could win a game of gin rummy even if you never won a hand, simply by playing smart and never getting stuck with a high card. Same with cross-country meets. Even if none of your runners cracked the top five, you could still win if your top five runners managed to beat the fourth and fifth runners of other teams.
Clearspring’s coach, who was leading the course walk, interrupted them. “We’re going to make a sharp U-turn up ahead,” he said, yelling to be heard. “Then you’ll be going downhill for about a half mile, back toward the school.”
“This is my favorite part,” Jessica said.
“Seems like it would be everyone’s.”
Jessica shook her head. “Some people hate going downhill. They get so afraid of falling that they slow down. And then they fall anyway.”
Dean had a vision of Nicole and Stephanie running down the hill behind the farmhouse — before it was Joelle’s house, when Nicole’s parents still lived there. It was summer, and Stephanie was little, maybe four years old, with squat legs and arms that motored to keep up with her mother. Nicole was trying to run slowly, so as not to get too far ahead of Stephanie, but at some point she gave up and let gravity take hold. The joy in her body was obvious as she leaped across the last few yards of grass. Dean remembered feeling as if there was something eternal in that joy. As if it was some salient quality that would never leave his wife.
LAIRD’S HOUSE WAS filled with morning light; it shone unimpeded through the bare windows. Stephanie woke up in a mellow, observant daze, faintly hungover and hungry. Laird’s broad back faced her, an amazing situation. She tickled the back of his neck. Then a flicker of urgent feeling prodded her to remember something about the morning.
“Shit!” she said, sitting up. “The meet.”
Laird rolled onto his back, rubbing his sleepy eyes with his big hands.
Stephanie was already getting dressed, changing out of Laird’s Pearl Jam T-shirt and pulling on her skirt. She felt self-conscious changing in front of him, but when she turned away from him, she was facing the unadorned window. And there were houses nearby! Where had they come from? Last night, she and Laird had lived in their own moonlit world. She picked up their empty beer cans and tied them up in the plastic bag. She put the chairs back and rubbed the wall-to-wall carpeting with her foot, trying to erase the indentations the chairs’ legs had made. Everything seemed so sordid, the rental furniture dingy. She remembered her father at the bar, sitting at some flimsy table, with that Laura across from him. How long had he been seeing her? Had her mother known?
She thought of her mother trying to cut the lemon in the morning light.
“What meet?” Laird asked.
“It’s nothing, I have to go. We have to fix the quilt. What if the Realtor comes?”
“I can drive you,” Laird said, pulling on his boxers.
“I have to go to Clearspring. That’s, like, an hour away.”
“You think I have someplace better to be?”
She felt a wave of affection for him, this boy standing in the guest room of his old house.
They stopped at Sheetz for doughnuts and coffee drinks from the cappuccino machine. The sugary brew cut through the fog of her hangover, as did Laird’s music, a worn-out mixtape of hard-edged rock bands like Korn and Nine Inch Nails, bands that would normally be too aggressive for her. But that was what she wanted to hear now, as she stewed over her father’s transgressions. Outside, the overcast sky was giving way to sunshine, and by the time they reached Clearspring, the place was an illustration of its name, seeming to exist in its own cloudless atmosphere.