Going for Kona (10 page)

Everything had gone so wrong so quickly. I wanted this done, and eventually they were going to talk to Annabelle. Better to bite the hollowpoint than take one from the blind side. I’d shut things down the second Marchetti went off script. If I knew Annabelle, she was hunkered down in the living room listening to every word. “Belle, can you come in here, please?”

Sure enough, Annabelle immediately rounded the corner, as quiet as the cat. I made the introductions and explanations and she sat beside me with Precious in her lap, stroking the cat behind her ears.

Marchetti pulled a napkin from my dispenser in the middle of the table. He dabbed at the back of his neck and his forehead. When he started talking, he asked the same basic questions of Annabelle that he had asked Sam, but in a gentler tone. She answered them in an earnest tremor that threatened to make my lips quiver, too.

Marchetti looked at me. “So, Annabelle, you don’t know of anyone that would have wanted to hurt your dad, do you, like an old girlfriend or someone that was jealous of your mother? Anyone?”

Annabelle shook her head no. “No one. My dad was awesome.” And then she started to cry, just tears at first, and then sobs, soft hiccupy sobs. I scooted my chair up against hers to slip one arm around her and guide her head to my shoulder with the other. “Is that all, gentlemen?”

“It is. Thank you.” Young ripped the top page off his yellow pad and slid it across the table at me. “Here’s my list of the documents you agreed to get for us. Please let me know if there are any developments, and we’ll be in touch.”

Marchetti spoke. “Is there anything else we haven’t asked you about that you want to tell us?”

I pressed my lips together hard and shook my head.

“Goodnight, then. We’ll see ourselves out.” Young picked up his notebook and pen and stood.

Marchetti lumbered to his feet, too. “Ma’am.” He lifted a pretend hat from his head.

I dipped my head in return, and they left. I patted Annabelle’s back gently as the anguish came off her in waves. Mine vibrated inside me like a plucked wire.

I knew only one way to deal with this. Run. Run hard, run fast, run away from these feelings.

“Sweetie, are you going to be okay?”

Annabelle’s head nodded against my shoulder. Her words came out muffled. “Can I go get ice cream with Jay?”

“Be home by ten thirty. You’ve got early practice.”

“I will. I promise.”

We got up and walked up the stairs together.

I stuck my head into Sam’s dark room. “Sam?” I whispered.

No answer.

I walked in and peered at his face. There was just enough light from the hallway for me to see his eyes were closed. “Sam?”

“If you can hear me, I’m going to go run. Belle is getting ice cream with her new boyfriend. I’ll be home in an hour or two, okay?”

He snuffled. Either he was truly asleep or a great faker. I knew I shouldn’t leave him, but I couldn’t do anything for him while he was sleeping, and he needed to rest. And I needed to run, to fly with my own two feet.

***

I left in a rush as dusk settled over Houston. I forgot my phone, Shuffle, and water bottle, but I didn’t go back for them. I drove to Memorial Park, to the mountain bike paths. Adrian and I never ran there after dark, and I never ran there alone. Tree roots crisscrossed the paths aboveground, and I’d taken tumbles in daylight. The deep woods spooked me and were peopled with crazies and homeless people, two categories that sometimes overlapped. That night I didn’t care. To hell with the bad guys and tree roots, to hell with all the promises I made to Adrian that I’d take care of myself. I needed a punishing run, I needed solitude, and I even needed the danger.

I took off much faster than my training or even my racing pace, craving the searing of breath in my lungs. I longed to hurt, to feel my heart exploding against my ribs. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and I ordered my weakness and hunger to go sit in a corner of my mind. I charged up and down the steep banks of the Buffalo Bayou, pushing myself, seriously anaerobic with my muscles screaming for oxygen and my parched mouth inverting itself as I clawed my way to a thinking- and feeling-free zone. Thinking sucked. Feeling was worse. I wanted numb. I needed numb.

Only numbness eluded me, and a ferocious onslaught of sorrow caught me in the wake of my anger and fear. I crumpled to my knees with my hands on the ground, gasping with dry sobs. I stumbled to my feet again, then leaned over. My hands slid off my sweaty knees. I choked and panted, then jerked myself nearly upright and started running again, ignoring the dirt and pine needles caked in my sweat. I passed a guy on a mountain bike with a headlight on its handlebars. I saw his lips moving—“Are you all right, ma’am?”—but if he was speaking aloud, I didn’t hear him, and I pretended I didn’t see him, either.

My feet pounded rhythmically. “Gone,” they said. “Gone, gone, gone, gone. Adrian is gone. Belle will soon be gone. Sam has Robert, he’ll be gone. Everyone’s gone. You are gone. You can stay gone if you want to, and no one will notice. You should stay gone. Gone. Gone.” And God, how I wanted to make it so. I wanted out of my body, my feeling, my life. Why did I have to keep going? Why did I have to do the hard part? Adrian didn’t have to outlive me; he got to skip all this pain. I, I, I had to feel it.

Adrian, help me,
my mind screamed as rage surged through me again. I didn’t know who to be angry at, and it didn’t matter. I wanted my partner there to hold me, to whisper with me in the early mornings, to make love to me when we woke in the middle of the night, to help me handle all the things that were swallowing me alive.

Adrian made life a party, but he did much more than that; he managed the messy situations that drove my pulse into the stratosphere. Adrian had a way with people. He had a way with
me
. For the stuff of high emotion and no answers, I turned to Adrian. When I had trouble getting Sam into a class because I couldn’t deal with the woman at the front desk in the high school registrar’s office, Adrian took over. When I got in a hopeless deadlock with a belligerent American Airlines gate agent at Intercontinental, Adrian stepped in. CitiMortgage sent us the wrong bill three months in a row and the customer service representative from India who barely spoke English told me the error was mine. I turned to Adrian, and he talked his way through it with them, holding me in his lap and tickling me while he did.

I couldn’t handle all of this; I couldn’t fix any of it. “It’s not my job.” The humidity absorbed my scream. I didn’t know what to do. So I cried, and I ran harder and faster and farther into the dark woods.

I never checked my Garmin. I could have been running for fifteen minutes or five hours, for all I knew. But I knew it was several miles before my terrors eased at all. Slowly, that blessed numbness I sought came over me. My earthbound feet didn’t lift from the ground, but I grew lighter, and I kept going. God knows when, but awareness of my body finally returned to me. And when it did, a searing pain in my left knee that I’d never felt before had taken hold. I considered stopping. Adrian would tell me to stop.

“Listen to your body, Michele. You’re your own worst enemy.”

“Mind over matter.”

“Yes, and your mind should be smart enough to tell your matter to stop when you’re injured, or at least slow down and take care of it. You’ll set your training back. Ironman training is all about staying healthy and sticking to the schedule.”

“Easy for you to say when you’re gone.”

“I’m not gone. I love you, and I’m right here.”

Maybe he was. Maybe he was here now, and that was all the more reason to ignore his advice. Because what would hurt worse? My knee if I kept going, or my heart if I stopped?

So I ran on. For a very long time.

Sam and I stood in the newly remodeled contemporary cool lobby of Hobby Airport, five feet away from Annabelle and Jay, who had discovered first love, true love, in a blindingly short period of time. Their impending separation was going down with the drama of
The Notebook
. Jay had to bend halfway over at the waist to hug Annabelle. She buried her face so far into the nape of his neck that it looked like he had a long curly beard. From the heaves of her back, I imagined he’d emerge with a soggy chest.

“You need to go, sweetie.” I spoke just loudly enough to be heard over her sobs and just short of shouting. Ah, but I’d been seventeen once, too, and I didn’t begrudge her a scene. In fact, current emotionality aside, Annabelle had passed her terrible teens about six months before—not that she hadn’t driven Adrian and me bonkers with her rollercoaster moods for a few years prior.

Sam leaned down to my ear. “Is she going to be okay?”

I smiled, sort of. “She won’t think so, but she will.” Louder, I added, “Belle, time to get in the security line. It’s pretty long.”

Annabelle pulled her face from Jay and turned her swollen eyes toward us. She leaned into Jay, clinging to his hand. “I can’t go. I just can’t.”

I damned Diane silently with every Spanglish curse word I knew. “Think of it as a visit. You can come back anytime you want, as often as you want.” As long as your grandparents will let you, I added silently.

Belle nodded and wiped her eyes. She turned back to Jay. “I’ll text you.”

“I’ll text you, too.”

She pulled Jay over to me like her Siamese twin and hugged me with her free arm.

“Take good care of Precious for me.” Diane was allergic.

“Of course. I love you, Belle.”

“I love you, too, Michele.”

She hugged Sam the same way. “Have a great baseball season. You’re going to start, I just know it.”

“Yeah. I hope they have a good swim team at your new school.”

This brought out a gasping sob from Annabelle. Sam looked stricken, and I patted his shoulder.

“Okay, this is it. Goodbye, guys.” She let go of Jay’s hand. She walked to the security line and showed her boarding pass and driver’s license, then looked back at us once more.

“Goodbye, Belle.” I mouthed the words and waved.

She waved back. Then she lifted her chin, just like I’d seen her father do a thousand times, and entered the line.

***

Sam didn’t say a word to me leaving the airport. I took a call from my mother as we pulled out of short-term parking. She didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

“Did you know some policemen hassled your father for an hour last night?” Her voice hurt my ear, and I knew Sam could hear her.

I turned the volume down on my phone and swallowed. “I’m sorry. Is he okay?”

“It was so humiliating. They came to our house, Michele. To our house. They all but accused Edward of killing Adrian. And Sam—they kept asking if Sam had problems with Adrian. It’s because of the things that woman has been saying on the Internet. Can’t you make her stop?”

Explaining to my mother that the Internet is a forever concept and that the articles had stopped would do no good. She takes pride in rejecting technology. I couldn’t get her to use email, much less text. “It will die soon.”

I heard Papa’s voice in the background. “Tell Itzpa hello for me.”

She didn’t. “I think your father should sue her, and the police.”

That would keep Rhonda going for another two years. “Probably not a good idea.”

“I’m going to call a lawyer.” The word “real” was omitted, but implied.

My tension meter read 7 at my most tranquil those days. At her words, it went directly to a 9. “Yeah, good idea, Mom.” Count to ten, Michele, I told myself. “Uh oh, traffic is bad and I’m on the freeway. I need to hang up now. Love you. Sorry. Bye.”

I glanced at Sam and saw tears in his eyes. I’m with you, kid, I thought, I’m with you. I changed the radio station to his Young Country. If he noticed, he didn’t give a sign.

***

That afternoon, I shipped Annabelle’s car and all her belongings to New York. It was hot and exhausting work, and afterwards, I lay down on the bed in her empty room and cried. Gone. It was like I had dreamed a beautiful dream of Adrian and Annabelle, then woken up. I had nothing Hanson left.

“You don’t want another baby, do you?” I asked Adrian a few months after we met.

“Not if you don’t, and even then I wouldn’t say I wanted one.”

“A baby might embarrass Annabelle and Sam with their friends or trap them into years of babysitting.”

“And add another eighteen years of parenting for us. We’re going to have so much fun when the kids move out. It’s fun now, of course, but we’ll have less responsibility and more time for naked Twister in the living room.”

I laughed, and we played naked Twister, or something close to it. I didn’t regret the decision, but for some reason, I missed what would never be as much as I missed what I’d had. Honestly, I could barely take care of Sam or myself anymore, so why did my eyes burn when I thought of it? Somehow I ended up the squat Hispanic version of my tallish blonde mother, with one child and too much on my plate. Brittle. I was brittle and hollow.

***

The next morning at her usual five a.m., Precious walked across my head, and I leapt out of bed for my first workout, and to go find Adrian. “Good morning, love.” I kissed my fingertip and pressed it to the top of his urn on my chest of drawers.

Half an hour later, I pushed my locket into the top of my swimsuit and threw my bag down at the edge of the JCC pool for a seventy-five-minute swim. Sometimes I swam those minutes tethered to the edge of the pool with a bungee cord for strength training. Not that day. That day, I planned to swim freestyle the whole time, and hopefully I’d cover nearly all of the 2.4-mile Ironman swim distance. Annabelle could swim it in sixty-five minutes, and Adrian in less than fifty-five. I wasn’t born a Hanson, but I did the best I could.

I had a ninety-minute playlist on my MP3 goggles. That gave me a fifteen-minute reserve for warm-up, cool-down, and false-start time, like if I had to jump out and run to the bathroom and left my music running. I couldn’t risk the music ending at seventy-three minutes in the pool. I’ve relied on music during workouts since I started running in law school. My roommate Katie made me a mix tape for my Walkman when she saw me suffering through one- and two-mile runs. Adrian always rolled his eyes at me when I pulled out my Shuffle or MP3 goggles.

“It’s a crutch, Michele. Those things aren’t allowed in a race.”

“I have adrenaline in a race.”

“You’re stubborn, you know that?”

I smiled at the memory and jumped in the water. U2’s “Beautiful Day” kicked off the workout, and Adrian must’ve been waiting for me, because I heard his voice immediately.

“Bono has the vocal talent of a monkey.”

“Don’t ruin my music with your opinions, mister.”

“It’s a beautiful day,” Adrian sang, a deliberately off-key parody of Bono.

I smiled underwater. I squeezed my eyes shut until I could almost see him. I felt the water move beside me and Adrian’s hand trailed the length of my side going the opposite direction, just like he always used to do when we shared a lane. The laps went by one after another, and I rode high on the water, high on the joy of Adrian’s presence, his banter, his touch. Before I wanted it to be, the swim was over and I had to get out of the water and leave Adrian behind.

I dunked my head under one more time to smooth back my hair after I removed my goggles.

“Only a hundred meters short of Ironman distance. I might make a swimmer out of you yet. Now you just have to do this offshore in October with two thousand of your closest friends thrashing around.”

“You’ll be with me, right?”

“Of course.”

“Piece of cake, then. Goodbye, my love.”

“Goodbye, my beautiful little Butterfly.”

Using my upper body, I levered myself up and out of the pool with the help of a good jump onto the warm cement coping. For a split second, I was fifteen years old, laying out beside the city pool with the sun baking my skin.

“Hey, Michele,” a voice called to me from across the pool. Not Adrian.

“Hi, Terrence.” I waved to the black lifeguard with the high-crowned set of shoulder-length braids. I walked toward the table where I’d left my towel.

“You’re limping.”

“Huh?” I stopped and looked down at my legs. “Oh, yeah, I guess I am. My knee has been hurting.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine.”

His voice rose in pitch. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You work harder than anyone I know. What if you don’t take care of it, and you can’t do your big race? That happened to me in high school, with my shoulder. I couldn’t pitch for eight months. It cost me a scholarship to the University of Houston, and now I’m going to community college part time and living with my mother.”

“Luckily I won’t have to live with my mother.”

“No, I’m serious. You should get it checked out. And I gotta say it—if your man was here, he’d be saying it.”

Were, I thought. Were here. “Yeah, I probably should.”

Terrence had nailed it. Adrian would have made me a doctor’s appointment and taken me in himself. I knew this, but a doctor might tell me to stop training. That I wouldn’t do. Still, the doubts—and Adrian’s voice—stayed with me. All this training and my need to do Kona for Adrian would be in vain. I let the thoughts keep rolling around in my mind as I drove home to wake Sam up and get ready for the day.

***

Sam scooped Cinnamon Nut Clusters into his mouth and stared at the table. He had gone into a fugue state when we left Belle at the airport.

I tried to make conversation. “I sent the last of Belle’s things to her yesterday. The big bedroom is all yours now.”

“That’s Belle’s room.” His voice fell to forty below zero. His black stare sucked me into its vortex.

“Okay. I understand.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t even care.” He got up and headed for his room, leaving his half-eaten breakfast on the table.

“What’s that supposed to mean? I do care.”

He didn’t answer.

***

Later that morning I worked on my piece for Adrian’s column. Second to training, that’s when I felt closest to him. Adrian had made an editorial calendar for his columns leading up to Kona. Actually, we had made it together, since planning was more my thing than his. I’d pulled ideas from him one by one and typed them into our shared Google calendar. I smiled as I pictured him pacing our office, ready to bolt.

This week we had decided he would write on the dangers of heat, dehydration, and exhaustion. Fitting, since it was hot like a steam room in Houston. Like it would be in Kona. We wrote about this in
My Pace or Yours
, so I pulled up the Word file on my computer. Copy and paste is my friend, I thought. Especially since the words Adrian brought to my surface were sinking into the deep again. I’m not a writer. I’m just a word wrangler who lived out her author fantasy through her lover.

Stop it, I told myself. Enough. Just do this.

I wrote an intro:

I closed my eyes, remembering. It had scared the hell out of me. Of course Adrian bounced back. That was Adrian. He was invincible. I put my head down on my desk and concentrated on breathing.

The irony of life after Adrian was that as much as I didn’t want to let him go, I couldn’t have if I tried. Between the column, Brian, Scarlett, the book, and the Ironman tribute, I was in purgatory—with Adrian and without him. I was a wreck. I’d started to believe that if we could just stay connected, I could
do
this, I could be a good mother again—or at least an adequate one—I could survive.

I lifted my head and stared at my screen. Ay chingada. I didn’t want to leave the privacy of my office, but I’d sucked down a bottle of Nuun-boosted water, and now I had to go. I clicked save and got up. I looked both ways down the hall from my office door, then made a try for the bathroom.

“Michele, do you have a minute?” Mierda. Brian.

I stopped at his door. “Yes?” He looked like a giant blueberry behind his desk in his Texans jacket.

“Are you all set with Scarlett for next week’s publicity schedule?”

Scarlett was dragging me to speak or sign books or answer interview questions a few times a week. It reminded me of when Dad took me to the rodeo when I was seven and a little dappled pony balked at the entrance to the arena. His lathered flanks heaved and the whites of his eyes bulged as they locked on the crowd—not on the barrels he was supposed to run his cloverleaf around. I was that pony. “Yes. Two speeches, two radio shows, and one TV spot.” And it is my hell.