Run (31 page)

“You weren’t kidding about her,” said the girl from the front desk.

Tip didn’t know how long she had been sitting on the bleachers beside him and even now he couldn’t turn his face towards her.

“No,” he said.

“Are you a runner, too? Did you hurt your foot running?”

“I don’t run,” he said.

“Something like that”—she shook her head—“you’d think it would have to be genetic.”

“Maybe it is,” he said, watching her shoot past them again.

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Kenya’s hands were open. Her face was easy and relaxed. She made none of those huffing sounds that would indicate the seriousness of her endeavor. “Maybe I should give it another try.” They were silent through the next lap and then the next. “I’m going to call the coach so he can come over and see this,” the dark-haired girl said, because the runner had still not flagged. If anything she seemed to be getting stronger.

“Not today,” Tip said. He kept his eyes on Kenya every second.

He felt like he was seeing greatness, like he was in the room watching Watson and Crick put the final touches on their model of DNA, or maybe he was seeing Rosalind Franklin with her magnifi cent X-rays . Wasn’t it the girl, after all, who had actually found the key to life? Kenya was a flame, a thin pink wick. “We’ve got someplace we have to be in a little while.”

“Well, somebody needs to see this,” she said.

“She’s only eleven.”

“She won’t stay eleven.”

There was a part of Tip that wanted to engage this girl, to fl irt with her, but he couldn’t turn his head. What would it be like to know at eleven the great thing you could do? This was what Doyle had always wanted from them, what Father Sullivan had wanted: a mission, a calling. Tip thought that he had found one in the fishes but it was nothing like this. Kenya running was pure ability: strength, grace, concentration, and the odd thing was that Tip believed her skill must be transferable. It wasn’t just that he was watching her run: he was watching who she was. It seemed perfectly reasonable to think that she could take this energy and pour it into anything.

It was not too long after that the little bird started to land, her leaps coming back to a trot, her trot smoothing out into a jog. The black-haired girl began to whistle and clap, and the other runners a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 244

who had been pressed to the side wall by Kenya’s centrifugal force clapped as well. Tip clapped for her and she waved her hand while keeping her eyes straight ahead. The blond boy came up and started walking beside her and they talked back and forth, something Tip couldn’t hear. This little girl from Cathedral and the Harvard boy were talking about—what, training techniques? She said something that made him laugh and he patted her on the shoulder and ran off at a modest pace while Kenya rounded her last turn. The three girls all came up and shook her hand, and then she headed back towards the bench.

“You’re something, kid,” the front desk girl said to her.

“Thanks,” she said, and took a giant inhale, “for letting me in.” Tip shook his head. “Secretariat.”

“Who?”

“It’s a horse. A very fast horse.”

Kenya nodded, taking long, deep breaths. “People say that to me. Not
that
horse. Some other one.”

“See you, Kenya,” the fast girl called as she left the track. Kenya waved.

“We should probably go pretty soon,” Kenya said.

“You can come back and run anytime,” the dark haired girl said.

“If I’m not here you tell them that Ariel said it was okay. I’ll leave a note at the desk. What’s your last name?”

“Moser.”

“You don’t need to come in with your brother. Anytime you want to run, you come here.”

There was something about this easy dismissal of his necessity that bothered Tip but he didn’t say anything.

Kenya spent a long time at the water fountain and then she walked another lap, stopping from time to time to stretch. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said to Tip when she finally got back in r u n

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her coat. “I had more running in me than I thought.” She hoisted up his backpack but he stopped her.

“Let me take that,” he said.

“Don’t be crazy.”

“Really.” He took it from her hand and pulled the straps across his shoulders. “I don’t even know why I brought this. You shouldn’t have to carry it.”

Kenya shook her head. “I don’t mind it, and anyway, you still don’t feel good.”

“I’m better now.” Just watching her had made him stronger. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

“Ariel can call the cab company.”

But Tip explained that the hospital was close. They could pick up the bus on the other side of the bridge. “We’ll be there in half the time on the bus.”

Kenya would have rather waited at the track. It was enough for her just to be in the building, standing on the right side of the glass, but she didn’t want to argue with Tip about transportation anymore.

In a way he reminded her a lot of their mother: once she made up her mind about how they were going to do something then that was the way it was going to be.

But when they were outside again she wished she had stood firm against him. She had sweated through her track suit and her coat offered no defense against the weather. The instant they turned into the wind she felt a paper-thin wash of ice form over her stomach and chest. They had forty dollars to spend! Tip was struggling, she could see that, and they weren’t twenty steps from the door. “Let’s go back,” she said. “We’ll call security. They’ll give us a ride.”

“It’s right across the bridge.”

“I’m cold.”

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“Anyone who can run like that has the fortitude to hang on for another block.”

Yes. That’s what her mother would have said.
If you have the
energy to run five miles, then I expect you have the energy to fi nish
your homework. If you really are the fastest girl in the state, then let’s
see how fast you can pick up your dishes.
“It’s freezing,” she said.

She did not whine but she wanted to tell him just in case the wind didn’t get through the fancy down coat he was wearing. She could have been to the bus in ten seconds flat but instead they took steps that could be measured in inches. Tip was even slower now than he had been. She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from saying it. She could see the pain on his face, the sag in his shoulders as the crutches ground into his armpits. His foot was dragging behind him in the snow, but they kept pressing ahead, crutch, crutch. They weren’t anywhere close to the bridge and the bus was on the other side of that. She said the word
Stop
very quietly but let the wind come inside her mouth and sweep the sound away.
Stop. Stop. Stop.

And then, just like that, his left crutch turned against the ice and shot out as if it had been kicked away, and just as fast the right one went as well, but he pitched to the left, the whole balance of his body thrown into chaos by the backpack. His left arm splayed out to follow the trajectory of the crutch and Tip slammed into the ground without a moment to release his hands, to curl his hands up around his head the way anyone would do if they were falling. Kenya heard the sound of his head hitting, distinct from the heavy sound his body made, the sickening thud of shoulder and hip and boot and books, the rush of air being forced from his lungs. He was a big man. It was easy to forget that about a person until you saw him fall.

“Shit,” Kenya said, and dropped to her knees.

They were still in the parking lot outside the track and when Ken ya looked around she saw no one. Goddamn backpack. She r u n

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pulled the crutches free from his hands and then tried to get him turned in such a way that she could pull the pack off of him and get him straight on his back, but he was heavy. His left arm was at a bad angle, both above his head and behind it. It also appeared to be longer. Her head darted up and she scanned every direction. At least he hadn’t broken his neck, it wasn’t that kind of fall. She moved his head and saw a smear of blood in the snow.

“Tip!”

“What?” he said, his eyes stayed closed, the left side of the face pressed into the snow as if it were a pillow and she was the one throwing open the curtains.
Wake up, wake up! It’s time.

“Can you move your arm and help me get this off you?” Tip took a big inhale. “One minute.”

She kept on tugging until finally she turned his shoulder the wrong way and he made a terrible face. His closed eyes pressed tightly down and he pulled back his upper lip to show his teeth the way a dog would show its teeth. “Don’t.”

She couldn’t get anywhere without help. She struggled out of her coat, which seemed to be frozen to her torso, and lifted up his head.

“Lay on this.”

He panted a couple of times and then seemed able to compose himself. “You’ll get another badge.”

Kenya looked around again and then she filled her powerful lungs to their very edges with air cold enough to stop a life and she screamed, “
Help me!”

“Shhh,” Tip said. “I’m going to get up.”

She got up and tugged at his legs so they didn’t look so twisted.

It was wrong to leave him and impossible to stay. “Two minutes.

You stay here two minutes and don’t move. I’m going to get help.”

“Smart,” he said, but did not open his eyes.

Two minutes, set your watch by it, because she was up and gone, a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 248

a shot bullet hot from the fired gun. Back to Ariel who had dismissed her, to the arms of Ariel who now adored her, she flew, ripped the door open so that it banged the wall, letting the air fill the room with its arctic storm. “He fell!” she screamed at the mass of curls bent over a calculus book, not a human head but a sheepdog poised over the desk, reading calculus.

Ariel could have been asleep. She shot up, startled. “What?”

“In the parking lot. He fell. Get somebody!” And then she was gone. There was nothing left to say. One leap, out the door, one leap, down the stairs, and now she was crying, crying for her mother to come and save her from this, from having to be in charge of grown people.
Mother save me,
beat out her heart for one leap, one leap, over and over until she was beside him again. She skidded to the ground, taking his right glove into her mittened hands. “I’m right here,” she said. “Everything’s fi ne.”

“Fine,” Tip repeated, “except that I’m an idiot.” Then he squeezed her hand, and she cried even more because of it.

She had scarcely touched the surface of her own despair when she heard voices behind her calling her name, “Kenya! Kenya!” It was the step-lunge boy, the nice boy who had asked her about her times and events. His arms were full of towels and he was running towards them in the snow, and Ariel was behind him and she was running, too.

“Help,” Kenya said again. She could not stop herself. It seemed to be the only word she knew.

Tip stirred in the snow just as they were coming up beside him.

He wanted to take the weight off his arm but he couldn’t fi gure how to do it. He thought about the myriad ways he had always been so lucky until now, and then he opened his eyes and saw her there.

There was no one he could think of at that moment that he would rather have bending over him, no one more competent, no one who knew him better. “Didn’t this already happen?” he asked Kenya.

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c h a p t e r 1 0
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T
EDDY
WOKE
UP
IN
HIS
OWN
BED
ON
THE

F O U R T H
F L O O R
B U T
I T
T O O K
H I M
A
M I N U T E
T O

F I G U R E
T H AT
O U T .
He had been running. He couldn’t remember if he was running from something or to something but his heart was beating like a jackrabbit’s and the covers from the bed were lying across the floor in sweaty twists. Teddy lay still in the bright light of his room, legs sprawled, and let the heat rise off of him. It was as if his body were working hard to warm the frozen air. He listened to his heart thumping inside his ears and that sound took every other thought away. He couldn’t quite grab hold of where he had been and who else was there. While he had been running the dream had run faster, and before he could get his hands around it the whole thing slipped past him and was gone. He flipped over on his stomach and faced Tip’s bed where Kenya had slept the night before. It was more expertly made than he had ever seen it, made the way he imagined a marine would leave his bunk, all the corners tucked in tight and the top spread smooth. Teddy closed his eyes against the sight of such order. He was sorry he had gone back to a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 250

sleep. It never worked for him. The sleep he went back to was never the one he left. Now he was anxious, feeling like there was something important he had forgotten. If he had simply stayed awake, the only thing he would have to contend with would be exhaustion and that, comparatively speaking, was nothing at all. He got up, leaving his own bed unmade, and went to the dresser to tap the halo of his mother’s statue three times, saying three fast Hail Marys to himself as he did every morning. Doyle had taken him to see a psychiatrist once when he was ten because he was certain that Teddy had an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the psychiatrist had been unable to find any more taps than those three, and three, he said, was nothing to be worried about. “Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith,” the doctor said to Doyle without asking Teddy to step out into the waiting room. “It’s all ritual.” Teddy hadn’t been able to touch the statue when he got up the first time this morning since he’d been sleeping on the couch, but now that he’d done it he felt more settled in his skin.

Teddy showered and went downstairs where he found his father and Sullivan sitting in the kitchen reading the paper, his father with the business section, his brother with a special supplement on travel.