Girl Runner (21 page)

I let her think so.

We part ways on the corner of Queen and Spadina. I run all the way home and resist the urge—this time—to glance over my shoulder, to look back.

I
’
VE LOOKED BACK BEFORE.
I’ve looked back enough.

That photo at the finish line, taken August 10, 1928—it does not show what it seems to show. It does not show the victorious stride of a golden girl runner. It shows the finish of a girl who couldn’t have won if she hadn’t stolen victory from a friend.

In the photo, I am looking over my shoulder, but not at the German girl, whom I’m besting at the line, no—I am looking for Glad.
Where are you? Where have you gone?

The race does not go as planned.

Right at the start, the American jumps out to a strong lead that begins to seem, far too soon, too wide a berth for comfort. I’ve woken this morning feeling not quite myself, my nightdress damp with sweat. Nerves? Illness? I don’t mention it to Miss Gibb, nor to Mr. Tristan. I can’t eat my breakfast; instead sip half a cup of strong coffee, and here I am, tight as a bow, progressing around the track. Here we are. As we complete the first four-hundred-metre lap, I feel depleted, washed with doubt. The emotion is unfamiliar and it is utterly crushing.
You won’t catch that girl. You can’t.

There is something wrong.

This happens in races. It happens to excellent athletes: it has happened so very recently to Glad. There are those who shine in practice and training, and who cannot turn their minds to belief, against resistance, when under pressure. I am shocked to find myself in this position as we approach the turn where, I know, I must make my move. But I hurt. It isn’t a physical hurt, it is an enveloping, almost sweet-tasting interior pain—the pain of acceptance. I am going to accept that this is happening. I am going to let it happen. I am not going to make my move after all.

I am going to give up.

That is when Glad arrives, at my shoulder. We move as one into the turn, with Glad on the outside, boxing out a girl who presses from behind. As we straighten onto the back stretch I hear her say—
Now, Aggie! Let’s go!
—though I can’t put straight whether she’s said the words out loud, or whether her mind has spoken to mine. We are picking up the pace down the stretch, side by side, and at the final curve, again, she boxes out the girl behind us—it’s the German girl—and I see the American falter. Minutely. I see her stride express a stagger of doubt.

Glad makes a move to pull ahead and the space between us stretches like an elastic band, widening.
When it matters, you let her win
, I hear Mr. Tristan’s prophecy.
You let her win.
It is astonishing the density of thought that can be compressed into a single moment, into one or two strides on a flat grass course.

The space between us widens, our connection stretched to its limit. But the band does not break. Instead, it is as if I am being flung forward, like a pebble inside a slingshot, as if she is pulling on me, launching me to victory. In a few quick steps, I hurtle past Glad. I feel her giving me something—I feel it like a surge of electrical power, and I open my stride and kick down the homestretch, gaining on the American like she’s standing still.

I will win this race.

I have no thought of Glad until that final step, when I turn to look for her.

And she isn’t there. Not yet, not yet, not yet.

I cross the line alone, the German girl on my heels, the American fading for third, and Glad well back in fourth, out of the record books. Her joy at my victory seems unconditional. I think that scares me more than if she were to slap me.

Because I’ve seen her bent over in wailing agony as the girls run the 100-metre dash without her. I’ve seen her rise up and vanish, helped by Mr. Tristan, under the stands. I’ve seen her composed that very evening at dinnertime, laughing off sympathy, approaching the American girl who won with her hand outstretched.

Because the pictures do not fit together. How can anyone be so jagged, so broken, and so rapidly, smartly healed?

She was ahead of me, and I chased her down and crashed past her, and I am certain, sick with certainty, that in those final heedless, aggressive strides I stole what should have been hers, ruthlessly. I don’t think she gave it to me, for all that it would make the more comforting tale to tell myself. I think I took it, because I’d seen her weak and fallen, and I knew that I could.

And now. And now. What do I owe to Glad? Aren’t we even, after all?

It’s just a race.

Let me leave her here, forever behind me, forever beyond me. I wonder at my love for her. Sometimes I think I must have loved her more than I ever loved Johnny. Sometimes I think she must have loved me too, more than him, in some strange way. I know that sounds delusional—may be delusional—but I can’t think of a better reason to give and take as we gave and took, except for love.

She sends me a Christmas card, two years running, at the newspaper. She’s seen my byline. This is a few years on, after the war has begun. She and Johnny have a boy and a girl—the millionaire’s family, she writes—and a home in Calgary by the river. They can see the mountains while sitting at their dining room table.

The second card, the following year, is less newsy. She signs her name and Johnny’s under the salutation, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”

I reply to neither. I’m not the Christmas card type.

THERE IS MORE
to the story of this summer: 1931.

I owe the trajectory of my life to Mr. P. T. Pallister, owner of Rosebud Confectionary and, briefly, patron of the elite Canadian female athlete. I’d saint him if I believed in sainthood. But Mr. P. T. Pallister would never have found me save for my brother George. I was a long shot. Improbable. I was a bet made by my brother—a gambler whom no one would ever saint. And so it is to George that I owe the greater debt.

Tattie sends her eldest, the boy, to my door with a message to visit, please, and I accompany the child home, not wanting him to walk the streets alone. It is a summer Sunday and my legs ache from a long early run, pain in my shins.

Tattie greets me at the door with kisses on both cheeks, reaching up.

I don’t know what I’m expecting. Not this.

George: “Come in, come in, sit, recline in our parlour, said the spider to the fly. Tattie, a cup of brew for my world-famous sister.”

I perch on a wooden chair that teeters on rickety legs, missing several rungs.

George is in a fine mood. Expansive, desperate, wrapped in a greasy knitted blanket. He wants to talk and talk, and not about this—what is happening right now. He wants the past to cram into the room, to transport us all. He conjures up his own pestering letters written these vanished years ago to Mr. P. T. Pallister, singing my praises from on high. (I can only imagine their grammatical flaws and hyperbolic claims.)

“I just went on writing ’em till he had to agree to have you.”

“But, George! I never knew!”

“Didn’t you wonder why the famous P. T. came knocking at your door?” George wheezes between coughs, laughing.

“It wasn’t P. T. himself on the doorstep, you know. Not personally.” I’m near tears, seeing George like this. How could he have got so bad? I wouldn’t have known—I chide myself for being a negligent sister, a reluctant visitor—if Tattie hadn’t sent for me, thinking I might help, and won’t I? I will help however I can.

“So it wasn’t old P. T. himself banging down your door?” George wants a story from me. He hasn’t got breath for his own.

“It was his secretary,” I say, trying not to spy too obviously around the crowded room that is furnished with unrelated objects, some of them not, strictly speaking, furniture. The curtains are drawn, and I see they aren’t curtains, but blankets too worn and thin to be otherwise useful. “A man in a black suit and proper hat, knocking at the door of 445 Bathurst, sending Mrs. Smythe, our landlady, into fits. I wasn’t even there. Remember? Olive had found me a job at her factory—that was Packer’s Meats, before we went to Rosebud. She’d got me a job as a runner.”

“Good job for you.”

“Wasn’t it? But then P. T. offered me a better one.” I’m embroidering the story, a trick I learned from George himself, because it wasn’t Mr. P. T. Pallister who offered me a job, not directly, and I only ever met the man but once, when he shook my hand after the team arrived home from Amsterdam, hauling our gold and silver. That’s three years ago, now, and Mr. P. T. Pallister locked up and insane, or so the story goes, but what use such details? I purge them from my version.

“You were quite a runner.” George reclines on his side on what looks to be a narrow bed, although the room we are in seems to be one where the family does its living. Tattie and the children hover in the corners like so many fluttering moths.

“Wasn’t I?” I say.

“Still are,” George says.

“Nice of you to say so.” But my words are lost under a spell of coughing that brings Tattie running with a cloth, and I see there is blood. Tattie cradles his face in her hands. I sit stiffly and stare at the wall over George’s head, unpainted plaster that is coming away in chunks, exposing the greying lathe.

I think,
I need to tell Mother.
It doesn’t matter how old I get, nor how far away I live, I will always turn first to that thought: I need to tell Mother. Maybe she could help. Is he dying before my eyes?

I glance quickly, not wishing to disturb this private moment, and my brother’s eyes catch mine and I can’t look away, his face streaming with tears. He is six years older than me, and I am just twenty-three.

The sound of his thickened lungs lays waste to the room. The spell is coming to an end. He is still alive.

At last it stops. I’ve forgotten what we’ve been talking about, but George hasn’t. He wants to make a joke. “I’m dying. I’ll say anything.”

I laugh, but it comes out as a sob.

“You’ll run for Canada again,” he wheezes, urgently. “You’re that good. I just know it.”

I can’t tell him how my luck is up.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “What matters is you getting better.”

Now he turns from me, furious, stares at the wall, the crumbling hole. Slowly, it comes to me that the hole is fist-size, the shape of his fist. He is burning, again.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I only meant . . .”

“Not getting better.” Low, in his chest. He starts up the coughing.

I don’t understand his anger, but then, I’ve never understood it. We do not come from angry people, we Smarts. We are born whimsical, maybe, impractical, perhaps, a little bit baffled at the machinations of the world around us, a little bit lost. But not angry, not that. Even Cora, who has trained as a nurse and now works alongside our mother, with the goal of applying different principles to the troubles that come seeking their help—even Cora does her best to engage, to connect with the strangeness of the world in a way that will do no harm. George. He seems to want to do harm. Or it seems that he can’t help himself. He will rage. He will lose control and fury will spill from him, he is made impatient—or is it terrified?—by the world around him, and what it owes him, and what it will never yield to his demands.

He wasn’t always like this. Remember that. Forgive him.

“I’m sorry,” I’m saying to George, but he won’t look at me. I’ve lit his invisible, unquenchable fuse.

Tattie hurries to attendance, gently urging me to standing. “It’s lovely of you to come, Aggie. We thank you.” She doesn’t pretend that George will say good-bye. She doesn’t pretend that our parting, now, can be anything other than abrupt.

“George,” I’m saying. “I’m so sorry.”

Tattie pats my shoulder and pushes me toward the door that leads outside, and opens directly into this room. I do not need to retrieve my hat, which I haven’t removed.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I don’t say good-bye, I don’t get the chance, or understand that I am leaving, maybe that’s what happens. The door is right there in the same room. Tattie and I are outside quite suddenly. Tattie comes with me onto the crumbling stoop, pulls shut the door behind us, tugs the edges of her sweater close at her neck even though it isn’t cold out here—it is very nearly hot. Her hair is covered with a dull-coloured kerchief, tied at the back of her neck.

I am shocked to hear birds.

I dig around in my purse for what money I have, next to nothing, really, loose silver coins and a few copper pennies, which she accepts, thanking me.

I am speechless.

Tattie is waiting for me to leave, and when I don’t, she nods without looking directly at me, and goes back inside to the crowded room, shutting the door behind her. I hope this garden belongs to their family. It is only a few feet in diameter, but healthy with greens and tomatoes and runner beans, reminding me of our garden on the farm. I push open the gate in a daze and turn into the alleyway and walk the short distance to the busy street, and then, farther, to one even busier.

My eyes are fixed in their inward focus. I turn down another busy street, a good head taller than any other woman walking here, bumping shoulders with the men.

“Watch where you’re going!” “Look alive!” “Now see here—”

I spot a narrow opening between two storefronts, a passageway for rats. I press between the buildings and slide down the wall until I am sitting on the damp, filthy ground. I can sell the fur coat. I can sell the gold medal. But it won’t be enough.

I am as alone as ever I will be. I’m glad to say so. I’m glad there is this moment, because never will I be so very alone again.

In my head I begin composing a letter to Miss Alexandrine Gibb.