He had, although they left Lauren feeling as groggy as sleeplessness did. Two months?
But in the end it didn’t take anywhere near that long.
The week passed. Wednesday a conversation with her mother, Friday a session with Min, two more practices, four broken nights, and all the while Lauren’s mind fretted over the question.
Could it have been something other than a cat?
Oh, yes. But what?
Saturday dawned, four endless weeks after the cat had fallen from the sky and into Lauren’s mind. There was a game this morning, and Lauren dragged herself reluctantly from bed, made herself a pot of forbidden coffee, and drove to school. The girls were excited, the new uniforms looked good, the other team was strong enough to challenge but with definite exploitable weaknesses, and the bleachers were full of enthusiastic supporters. Lauren’s own problems, for once, retreated.
It happened in the last quarter, the blow that hammered the wedge all the way home and split her memory clean up the middle.
The score was 47-45, the home team hanging on to its slim lead through the quarter, when the visitors called a time-out and sent in three new players, girls who separately were a threat, but together bonded into something formidable. A tipped-in rebound tied the score, a gorgeous shot from what seemed like center court put Lauren’s girls three points behind. They made up two, the others matched it, then got two more, and with ninety seconds left on the clock, the struggle was in earnest. As the visitors brought the ball down, Marisol’s hand darted out to slap it away; Juana was there as if by magic, and the two girls flew down the court with a stampede on their heels. The crowd stood and roared as Juana leaped up to drop the ball through the hoop. Then the other team had possession, sprinting down toward the basket with the determination of aristocrats threatened by the lower classes. They slammed into the home players, tried for a shot, missed, and as Marisol struggled to position herself for a rebound, the opposition’s six-two forward rose past her, spiked the ball in, and came down again with her elbow centered squarely over the top of Marisol’s skull.
The crack must have been more imagined than actual, since the noise level in the auditorium was so high only a gunshot would have risen above it, but the impact was nearly as great. Marisol’s knees turned to water and she staggered back into the girls behind her, collapsing slowly until she was sprawled flat on her back, her short hair spiky with sweat, eyes wide, mouth in an astonished “O.” Three hundred throats went abruptly still as the girl lay briefly stunned, then Lauren, in a narrow gap between two players, saw the comprehension come back into Marisol’s eyes, saw the girl’s focus snap onto the clock to see if she had time, saw the determination to regain those points, to get back into play, to win.
The tall forward was nursing her elbow with stifled curses and the other coach was racing across the court to see if either girl was badly hurt, but Lauren stood rooted in place. Thud; bewilderment; spiky hair; a determined struggle to rise. The faint lapping of waves against wood reached Lauren’s ears. Marisol sat up, the opposing forward stopped hugging herself to reach down and pull Marisol to her feet, the crowd applauded its relief, and players from both sides gathered around the two girls.
Nobody was expecting one of the coaches to collapse. No one even noticed Lauren at first, standing rigid on the sidelines, both hands clapped over her mouth, her face as bleached as the team’s new shorts. She stared at Marisol, who was rubbing her head and shrugging off the concern of her teammates, and then Lauren’s knees gave way and she dropped to the court, completely limp. It was Lauren for whom the paramedics came.
In the hospital emergency room, with the curtains drawn and a call in to Min Henry, Lauren saw it again and again, a twenty-six-year-old movie playing itself out in her mind’s eye.
The bench beneath her had been the unpadded seat of an old wooden skiff, her tiny shoes dangling free of the boards; the gray expanse of concrete was really the cold surface of a wooded river in winter. The young man in the water had been, she could only assume, Arty. She had adored him-that she remembered-not just his fragrant cigars, and he had gone into the river with a huge and bewildering splash, to surface, spluttering, head bolt upright and eyes popping at the shock of cold, a look of astonishment on his face. He had shaken his head like a dog, making his dark hair go spiky; his naked hand, surprisingly delicate without the glove, had reached up, in supplication or to ward off the next blow of the upraised oar. His eyes had been frantic, locked into a determined search for support, for haven from the icy water. He had been about to lunge for the boat when the oar hit him a second time, with a weird, hollow thunk.
She had been little more than a baby, too immature to make any sense of what her eyes had witnessed, too young to remember this confusing event in a confusing world. Until the cat had dropped in front of her and shaken loose her father’s deed.
Lauren looked up at the rattle of the curtain being pulled back. Min Henry’s kind face was pinched with concern.
“The sound was an oar,” Lauren told her without preamble, reaching out for the therapist’s hand. “I was too young to make any sense of it, but it was an oar, hitting the head of a man in the water. A man named Arty, my father’s manager, whom I loved, and used to follow around like a shadow. I think my mother was having an affair with him. My father set him up, made it look like Arty was the one who stole the company into bankruptcy. When Arty was never found, everyone assumed he had fled to Mexico.”
It explained an awful lot, Lauren thought, about what I became. When I was two and a half years old, a young man with spiky hair passed in front of me, and was gone.
MRS. CASH by Mike Lupica
They were inside the blue and white Academy tour bus, on their way down Fifth Avenue from the Pierre, on their way to the Garden, and Billy Cash was talking about Monica again.
Somehow it always came back to Monica these days, even when he was talking about all the other girls in his life, the ones Billy said he wanted to fuck, not have it be the other way around. Didn’t matter where they were, either, or who was listening. They could be talking about whether or not the Magic-Billy’s team-could hold off the Nets and Sixers for home court in the playoffs. Or whether Billy could score enough points the last two weeks of the season to hold off that little tattooed shit from Memphis, Taliek Moore, to win another scoring title, which would make it only ten in a row.
Billy didn’t even seem to pay much mind to his injured foot, that fascia deal he had going, whether or not he could mess himself up good by playing on it between now and when the playoffs started.
He was fixed on his wife. Mrs. Cash, he called her most times. At least when he wasn’t calling her “that bitch.” The former Monica LaGuerre. Most times Billy talked about her like she was some defender he couldn’t shake, not even with the famous step-back move he liked to use right before he shot his patented fade jumper. Or that move he’d make starting to his right, then planting his right foot-the one hurting him so bad now-so that the guy guarding him would go flying past just before Billy’d make another fifteen-footer, the ball usually hitting the net like hair hitting a pillow.
“You see that guy in the lobby last night, we got back from the club?” he said to Gary Hall.
Gary said, “Course I saw. You pay me for that, right, dog? To see shit?”
Billy Cash leaned back in the first seat on the left, behind the driver, the one that was always his seat, on the way to a shootaround or a game or to the airport in the night. Gary was where he always was, across the aisle.
“He coulda had a camera on him,” Billy said.