Dare Me (6 page)

I start to think of it differently, as a home filled not with ease and liberty but with irritation and woe. Who wouldn’t need the ministrations of the likes of Sergeant Will, and what he might give her? I wonder what he gives her and why we aren’t enough.

“I
knew,
” Beth
says, before practice the next day, lifting her leg into a heel stretch. “I knew there was something wrong with her. What a fake, what a liar.”

“Beth,” I say. But the warning flare in her eyes says I better tread lightly.

“Beth,” I say, “can you show me how you get your foot behind your head like that? Can you help?”

We are in Coach’s backyard after practice, just the two of us. She has invited me. Just me.

We haven’t spoken about Sarge Will, not yet.

Coach is trying to help me with my standing back tuck, which is weak at best. It’s really just a tight backflip from a standing position and is one of those stunts all real cheerleaders can do in their sleep. RiRi says college cheerleaders do them at parties—“Tuck check!”—to test each other’s drunkenness.

One of her hands on my waist, Coach uses the other to pull my knees up, flipping me hard as soon as I’m off the ground, her arms like a propeller.

She is in that focus mode where she doesn’t even look me in the eye but treats my body like a new machine with parts not yet broken in. Which is what it is.

“If you can’t back tuck,” she says, “you can’t land most tumbling stunts.” What she doesn’t say: since I don’t fly or do Bottom Base, I need to be able to tumble.

I need to nail it.

“The pull is just as important as the set,” she is saying, her breath fogging in near dusk. I can feel it on my face as she knocks her hip against mine. “You can have the best set in the world but if you don’t pull your legs around after it, you’re still going to land short.”

Over and over, I start strong, arms up brace-tight, only to land on my hands, my knees, the tips of my toes.

It’s a head thing. I feel certain I will fall. And then I do, my foot twisting beneath me.

“You think too much,” Beth used to tell me.

She’s right. Because if you think about it, you realize you can’t possibly jump into the air and rotate yourself 360 degrees. No one can do that.

Beth, of course, does a flawless standing back tuck, and it’s something to see.

It is incredibly high and perfect.

But Beth grabs from behind the thighs, not the shins like Coach likes.

“I don’t want that sloppy stuff from you,” Coach says. “Don’t waste my time with that.”

Again and again, my shins grass-streaked and the sky heavy with dusk.

“Chest up,” she shouts, every time I land, to keep me from falling forward.

Finally, I’m getting cleaner and she stops flipping me. And I start falling. She lets me fall every time.

“It’s a blind landing, Hanlon,” she says. “You’re trying to find the ground. You gotta know it’s not there.”

I try to pretend I’m her. Try to feel tight like she does, so tight nothing can touch her. I think of squeezing my whole body into a tight ball.

“Ride that jump longer,” her voice out there somewhere, vibrating in my ear, her hands there but not.

And then releasing.

“Open your body,” she keeps saying, and it’s shuddering through my whole head. “Open it.”

And I feel myself doing just that, an explosion from the center of me to my toes, my fingertips.

It is just after dark, the timered deck lamps leaping to life, when I start landing it.

The feeling is breathtaking, and I know I can do anything.

I feel like I could rotate myself forever and land every time, arms upraised, chest high, body both shattered then restored. Immaculate.

The night outside her front picture window is blue-shivery, but we are curled on her sofa, our legs folded under ourselves, our bodies loose and victorious.

“Addy, I know how it probably looks,” Coach is saying to me, leaning close, cigarettes and tall plastic cups of matcha green tea as my back tuck reward. “But you have to understand how things are. With Will and me.”

She runs her finger around and around the rim of her cup. Her eyes are ringed darkly and it’s like I always hoped it would be. I’m the one she’s telling. She chooses me.

“And Matt, Addy…” She sighs and arches her back, looking vaguely to the ceiling. “Maybe you think when you’re as old as I am, you couldn’t want things anymore. When I was your age, twenty-seven might as well be a hundred.”

“You don’t seem old at all,” I say.

We sit for a while, and she talks. She tells me how it started with Will.

Seeing her in the parking lot after the college fair, he told her she looked sad and wondered if she would like to sit with him in his car, parked on Ness Street, and listen to music. “Sometimes it makes me feel better,” he said, and maybe it would make her feel better too.

She hadn’t known she looked sad.

So they sat and they listened to some black singer she’d never heard of, a woman with a croony, needy voice.
Don’t go to strangers, darling, come to me.

And the music did something, and suddenly they were talking about big things, personal things.

She told him the way she felt after Caitlin was born, like the secret of life had been told to her at last and the secret was this: in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

And then he told her about his wife.

“Do you remember the story on the news?” she whispers to me, leaning close. “A few years ago. That meth head from upriver drove through the front window at Keen’s pharmacy? And the customer inside who died?”

I didn’t remember exactly, these stories like static on faraway currents, but something about a photo they ran on the news and in the papers that alarmed everyone. A plate glass window sheeted red. A figure slumped behind it.

“That was Will’s wife,” Coach says, so solemn. “She was five months pregnant.”

Sitting together that night, under the pin oak on Ness Street, he told her all about it. About the things it had done to him, the way he saw the world. His year in Afghanistan nothing like the dark hole her loss drilled in him.

They talked for an hour, two, and by the time his hand dropped, almost as if by mistake, into her lap, it was like it was meant to be there.

The feeling took her by surprise, a buckling in her stomach, and he saw it, and then everything started and, eyes shuttering back, she thought,
This is happening, right now. And it had to happen. How did I not know this?

You have something that I need,
he told her. But he had it backwards.

The backseat, the seatbelt buckles cutting into her, her foot sliding on the windowpane.

After, her own hands tingling and helpless, he buttoned her shirt back up, slid her barrette back in her hair. The tenderness, like when Matt French buttoned Caitlin’s pinafore, when he tied her little shoes.

When I get home, Beth is waiting in the middle of my front lawn, which she hasn’t done since she was nine, and it has the same quality of ominousness it did then.
Why did you go to Jill Randall’s birthday party when we said we hated her?

Or like last summer, legs dangling from my upper bunk at cheer camp, asking when I decided I wasn’t bunking with her after all.

“Where were you?” she asks. “We have items to discuss.”

“At Coach’s,” I say, unable to stop the giddy hiccough in my voice. My body still feels stretchy and my heart proud and strong.

“She is so transparent,” she says, eyeing me head to toe. “Now she wants to be your best friend, huh? Sharing secrets on her outlet mall sofa? She thinks she can work us like two-dollar whores. I hope you are not a whore, Addy. Are you a whore?”

I don’t say anything.

“Are you a whore?” she says, walking toward me, “and is Coach your sweet-lipped Mack Daddy whispering promises in your ear?”

“I was practicing,” I say. “She’s the coach.”

Beth folds her arms and stares me down.

I don’t say a word.

“Haven’t you learned anything, Addy?” she says. I’m not sure what she means, but I know I have to settle her.

We are both quiet, my hands getting cold and Beth in her puffy jacket unzippered.

I see something in her eyes I know from back when, from some girl-recesses of time spent hiding in playground tunnels together, nursing schoolyard wounds.

Nobody might understand about Beth because her seeming power overwhelms. But I can see behind things.

And so I find myself reaching my pinkie out to twine hers, and she shakes it off and gripes some more, about Coach’s treachery and false friend ways, but I do see her rest the smallest bit inside, her shoulders unhunching from a toadlike curl.

We end up back at her house, down in the basement. No one ever goes down there except Beth’s brother when he used to robotrip with his friends.

We lie on the sofa and the moonlight tumbles through the high window and I start it this time, our favorite thing. Or what used to be our favorite thing, but we haven’t done it in so long.

Taking the vitamin E oil from my backpack, I do a soft massage on Beth’s right knee, where she tore ligaments landing on the marble floor of the school hallway, which is the kind of thing Beth sometimes does.

I do these light-as-a-feather tap-taps with my fingertips, which she likes.

After, hands pearled with her sweet almond salve, she does her hard magic on me.

We started this at age ten at PeeDee Tumbling Camp and it was our thing and it was the way, always, to soothe us. Sometimes it was like a visitation, a trance.

She once said, breathless after, that it was a coolness that stilled her like nothing ever did.

We stopped when we hit fourteen or so, I guess, which is when everything changes or you realize it has. I wonder why we stopped? But time gets away from us, doesn’t it? That’s a thing I know.

In the basement now, there is a powerful nostalgia. This is a Beth I haven’t seen for a while, the Beth of subterranean nights, our self-whipped adolescent fears and JV yearnings:
I will never what if we never will we ever.

I’d forgotten we were like that, before we were everything.

Her hands move quietly to my calves, of which I am newly proud, the muscle there, tight as a closed bud.

Her thumb slides up the diamond shaped middle of the calf, and notches there, working slowly, achingly, pressing down to the hardest place then sliding her thumb up, the two muscle heads forking. It’s like her thumb is a hot wand, that’s how I always used to think of it.

I can feel Beth unloose it the way the last back tuck unloosed it. It feels warm and wet under my skin, and everything is lovely.

“You were burning this tonight,” she says, so dark I can see nothing but the whites of her eyes, the silver eyeliner.

“I was,” I murmur. “Back tucks.”

And there’s this sense that somehow she knows.

“How did it feel?” she whispers. “To nail it.”

“Like this,” I say, curling under the hard pressure from her hand. “But better.”

“It’s to thank
you,” I say. “It’s like a thank-you.”

We’re in Coach’s driveway.

“For the back tuck,” I say.

She holds it up to the car light, examining it.

“It’s my hamsa bracelet,” I say. “You said you liked it.”

When she saw me wearing it, she’d said, “What, you some kind of wicca, Hanlon?”

I’d shown her its hand-shaped charm—mirror-plated, with two symmetrical thumbs, an ancient amulet for magical protection from the evil eye.

“Sounds like something I could use,” she’d said. And maybe she was kidding, but I wanted her to have it.

And now she’s holding it, its crimson cord laced across her three middle fingers, like she doesn’t know what to say.

Reaching out, I spin the hand charm with my index finger so she can see the big eye planted in the middle of its mirrored palm.

She holds up her wrist so I can put it on.

“It wraps around twice,” I say, showing her.

“Twice the protection,” she says, smiling. “That’s what I need.”

“You’re Addy, right? Colette’s favorite,” he says, when I get in the backseat. Upfront, Coach is putting lipstick on in the mirror, a deep garnet shade I’ve never seen on her before. It makes her mouth look wet, open. It’s distracting and I try not to look.

Addy,
she’d said, looking at the hamsa bracelet tight on her wrist.
I have an idea.

That’s how it comes to be that it’s late at night now and I’m in Sarge Will’s SUV, so big it’s like being in the center of a velvet-lined box, everything dark and buffered, soft sides and hard corners and the sense of nothing out there touching you.

I look at him, thinking how strange it all is. Sarge Will, but not in his uniform, and his shirt still finely pressed but some stubble on his jaw, and his eyes, most of all his eyes, not coolly watchful, as in school, as when he scours the teeming, sweaty masses of students for recruits, pinpointing all the lost souls that fill our halls, all the ones who live close to the freeway and the ones I never notice at all.

No, his eyes aren’t like that at all now. There’s a looseness, and an openness, and some other things I can’t name. All the remoteness gone and he’s this man, and he smells a little like laundry detergent and cigarettes, and he has a nick on one knuckle of his left hand, and when he turns the steering wheel I see faint sweat scalloping under his arm.

Will is drinking from a pint he’s holding nestled between his legs as he drives. When he hands it to me, the bottle is so warm.

Come with us tonight,
she’d said.
I want you to understand how it is.

And now I do.

We drive to Sutton Ridge, the fall air shivery and the smell of burning leaves drifting from somewhere.

“I thought there was no place left,” Will says, “where people still burned leaves.”

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

It seems Will knows this older world and it binds us together and I realize we are meant to be close because, like she does, he opens deep pockets in the center of me I never knew were there.

“Let’s go to Lanvers Peak,” says Coach, voice light and high, a girl’s voice. She’s looking back at me now, that mouth of hers red and glorious. The excitement, and Will grabbing her thigh so hard that I can feel it, I can feel his hand shaking my own thigh to gritty life.

Lanvers Peak is not a place for cars, but it is a place for Will’s Jeep, because nothing will stop him.

Driving up, Will is talking about the gorges and how they were gouged by glaciers hundreds of times over two thousand years like God’s own carving hand on the dark earth, or so his grandfather used to say.

We’re higher than I’ve ever been and we’re drinking bourbon, which is the most grown-up thing I’ve ever had and I pretend I like it until I do.

Up high, where the sky looks violet against the peak, Coach and I kick off our shoes, no matter how cold it is, the silvered grass crunching under our feet.

“Show me,” Will is saying, and he is laughing. “Show me.”

He doesn’t believe we can do the shoulder sit, just we two and dizzy on bourbon.

“You say it’s so dangerous, but compare it to offensive tackle, which left me with these,” he says, lifting his pretty lip to show me his front teeth, snowy white. “Caps, like my gramps. That’s what real sports do to you.”

Baiting us, he makes me want to turn my body into the lightest, most miraculous thing, makes me want to show him what I can do so that I will feel perfect and loved.

So Coach and me, we show him, without a spotter and in spitting distance of the depthless purple gorge so beautiful I want to cry into it.

I feel my phone buzzing and I don’t even look at it, dropping it to the ground.

Coach and me, we’re laughing now, Coach’s hair tumbling against me as we scramble to the most solid patch of an unsolid turf.

Lunging forward, she calls to me and I set my bare foot high atop her bended thigh, lifting myself, swinging my other leg over her shoulder, as she rises to her feet. Wrapping my thighs around her, twining my feet behind her, and we are one.

We are one.

I never did a stunt with Coach before.

At first, we are a sorry case, weaving and laughing, and Will drill-sergeants us until we get focus, my thighs locking tight around her and Coach grinding her feet into the frosty grass.

Then I unlock my feet and thrust my legs forward, Coach reaching under and between my thighs to grab my clammy hands in hers. Dipping down, she gives me a pop, pulling me over her head, my legs swinging from behind her, then together again, my feet landing hard on the ground.

The sear up my leg is nothing at all. Nothing.

We are stupendous and Will is cheering and yelling and hip-hollering and it echoes through the ravine in bewitching ways.

Up above her shoulders, fixed tight upon her, it is something. My eyes wander down to the icy bottom of the gorge and we are higher than we ever thought we’d be.

My house is farther, and Coach gets dropped off first, which is a mind-bending prospect.

Will pulls over a half block from her house. Watching them kiss, watching the way he opens her mouth with his, her sneaky looks back at me, the pleasure on her, I feel myself go loose and wondrous inside. I want to be a part of their kiss, and maybe even they want it too.

It’s only a five-minute drive to my house, but it feels like it lasts forever, all the misted lightness of Lanvers Peak gone.

“Tonight was the first time I ever saw you without that other girl,” Will says. “The one with the freckles.”

This seems the craziest way to describe Beth ever, but it makes everything go tight in my head and I remember, coming off the peak, flipping open my phone and seeing
missed call,
missed call,
missed call.
A text:
you’d best pay attn to me.

He looks at me and smiles.

Suddenly, I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone.

“Seeing her tonight, I understand now,” he says. “She needs this.”

For a second I think he means himself. And, thinking of her that night, so carefree, all the antic restlessness blown out of her, I think he is surely right.

But then he gestures toward my Sutton Eagles duffel bag, and I see he means being coach.

“She needs you girls,” he adds.

I nod, meaningfully as I can.

“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”

These are the words he says, but they sound like something I’m overhearing, a conversation I’d never be a part of.

“I guess it’s funny, me talking to you like this,” he says.

I guess it is. Sometimes Coach doesn’t seem that much older than me, but Will, with his tragic dead wife and tours of duty, sure does.

“I know we don’t really know each other,” he admits. “But we know each other in a strange way.”

I nod again, though really we don’t know each other at all. It makes me think Will is one of those people who just tell everybody everything right away, and usually I don’t like those people, those girls at summer camp sharing tales of cutting and kissing their babysitters. But this feels different. Maybe because he’s right. Because we share a secret. And because I saw them together that day in the teachers’ lounge, which felt like seeing everything.

“She has it hard,” he says. “Her husband, he’s not the guy you might think he is. She has it very hard.”

Maybe it’s the bourbon, or the bourbon wearing off, but this doesn’t sound exactly right either, not really.

“He gave her that house,” I point out.

“It’s a cold house,” he says, looking out the window. “He gave her a cold house.”

“It’s her house,” I say. “I mean, even if it’s cold, it’s hers.”

He doesn’t say anything, and I feel him slipping from me.

“And Caitlin,” I say, but this sounds even less convincing. “There’s Caitlin.”

“Right,” he says, shaking his head. “Caitlin.”

We both sit for a moment, and I feel suddenly like we both might know something we can’t name. About how, in some obscure way, Caitlin was another thing that wasn’t a gift so much as the thing that stands in place of the gift.
My wedding, my house, my daughter, my cold, cold heart.