Going for Kona (19 page)

“I think you should get your money back.” Robert sounded entertained.

“It’s not color. I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know when it happened.”

“That’s freaky.” Sam’s voice held a lilt.

Robert scooted forward on the couch and his knee started to bounce. I wanted to scream and clamp it still with my hand. “Since you’re going to be so busy for the next two months, I wanted to offer to let Sam stay with me. Kind of flip his living arrangement for a while.”

Sam scowled. “Mom’s fine. I have a car. We—”

I shook my head at him. “It’s okay, Sam.”

And shocking as it was to admit it to myself, it was. It was more than okay. This was the perfect solution to keep Sam safe from whatever it was that was still out there, whatever threatened me, and—I had to believe—anyone with me.

“You guys haven’t spent any time together this summer. Sam hasn’t exactly made himself available.” I turned a serious gaze to Sam. “I think it’s a good idea.”

“Mom?”

“You only have two years of high school left. You’ll regret it later if you don’t spend more time with your father.”

Sam slumped back on the couch, holding on to his elbows, one with each hand. “I do see Dad. I see him lots.”

Robert beamed. “This is going to be great, Sam, I promise.”

“Well, then, that’s settled.” I ignored the glares of my son.

Monday was a rest day. I got to Blake’s clinic before eight. I didn’t have an appointment. I only wanted to tell my story once.

The receptionist recognized me. “Michele, we’ve been worried about you. You disappeared on us. Then we saw the news, and I’m so sorry. Let me call Dr. Greene. We’ll work you in.”

She called her, but it was Blake who showed up. He smiled at me. “Michele, come on into my office.”

I didn’t want to, but all the resistance had gone out of me. His office was small, and diplomas hung on one of the walls. Texas State University chiropractic. Texas A&M bachelor of science. Pictures adorned another wall: Blake with clients, Blake in bicycle attire in a crowd of people in street clothes within a large crowd of other bicyclists in front of the courthouse on the square in La Grange, a spot I recognized instantly.

Blake saw me staring at the photo. “Me and my fan club. That’s the start in La Grange of day two of the MS 150. I’m a hometown boy, so every relative I have comes out to say hello.”

I nodded without replying. The MS 150 Houston-to-Austin ride for multiple sclerosis. Adrian and I did that together.

“You look like you could use a hug.”

I didn’t want a hug. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

He hugged me anyway, then sat down at his desk and motioned at the chair in front of it. I sat with my left leg out straight. “You’ve had a rough week.”

“Yes, I have.”

“And no privacy. It must be hard, everyone knowing your business. I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do?”

I shook my head.

He put his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands. “What are your plans for Kona?”

“The same.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He frowned slightly, then lifted his eyebrows. “Let’s go see Dr. Greene, then.”

We left his office and walked with Dr. Greene down to the first exam room.

“How’s your knee?”

I crossed my fingers in the hand they couldn’t see. “About the same.”

She probed my leg, knee to hip. “It feels like a rockslide from your hip down to your knee.”

Blake stepped in. “Okay, the question is how do we get Michele ready to run a marathon on the tail end of a hundred-and-twelve-mile bike ride and two-point-four-mile swim, in—” he looked at the calendar on his phone, “yikes, in eight weeks.”

I pressed my lips together hard. “I can do it. I only have to run this one race, then it doesn’t matter if I ever run again. Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it.”

Blake crossed his arms. “Michele, if you want to finish this Ironman, you have to follow our plan from here on out. If you stick to the plan, it will be doable, but painful. Very painful.”

I nodded. Pain was the only thing left that confirmed I was still alive.

***

An hour later, per my request, Brian met me at the rear entrance to Juniper. I was there per his. He held the door open and I ducked in. He followed me into what we called the “huddle room,” right next to the emergency exit. He shut the door behind us.

I turned to him, but he wouldn’t let me speak. “I’m batting first, Michele. That’s not a request.”

The old Michele might have fought him, but this Michele didn’t care. I sat down in a black swivel chair and leaned my head back.

Brian lumbered back and forth across the room, punching the air in front of him with his index finger as he talked. “Juniper has canceled Scarlett’s contract. Even when you ran out of here last week, she didn’t admit a thing. I thought you’d lost it, honestly. It’s not like you’ve had an easy time of it.” He held up his hand so I wouldn’t interrupt, but I wasn’t going to anyway. “At that point, all I wanted was to make it okay for you to come back when you had calmed down. Everything’s changed now, though. I didn’t call that play she ran, and I didn’t even find out about it until that newspaper article came out last weekend.”

I shook my head.

“I know, Michele, I know now. But I didn’t know then. Have you even listened to my messages from last week?”

I shook my head again. I had deleted them all.

“Well, that explains some things. When I woke up last Saturday morning and Evelyn handed me the paper, that’s when I found out. That’s when I realized the extent of this, this—” He stopped. He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Michele. About everything you’ve been through. It’s been a tough season. I can’t believe Juniper had anything to do with it, but we did, and at the end of the game, it’s my team. I was blind to Scarlett.” He dropped down hard into the chair across from me, and it oomphed in protest. “I don’t care if we ever sell another goddamn copy of
My Pace
. I don’t. Or if you write any columns. Or do the Ironman. Or come back to work with us, even though I would love if you did. I just want you to forgive me.”

Just as I knew Adrian hadn’t betrayed me, I knew the same of Brian. How to explain it to him, though, I didn’t know. What I felt wasn’t anger. I didn’t have the energy for that, but I didn’t have the energy to make him feel better, either.

“Brian, it’s okay. We’re good. I’m going to see this through with you and Juniper.”

He nodded over and over, quickly, biting his lower lip. Then his eyes narrowed and he leaned toward me. “Michele, where’s your locket?”

***

That evening while I was heating up dinner, a red blur out the side window caught my attention as Sam’s 4Runner pulled into the driveway. My stomach clenched. I was barely managing to keep Sam and Annabelle at a distance. I didn’t begrudge him visits—this was his home, too, after all. I just couldn’t bear a confrontation. I was doing this to keep him safe, and I would protect him until my last breath. Maybe someday he would understand.

The door from the driveway opened with a bang and closed with a slam.

“Sam?”

He clomped down the hall, and when he entered the kitchen, I caught my breath. Whiskers had sprouted on his cheeks and he looked thicker, stronger. Angrier. Only two days had passed since I’d seen him last. But then, my hair had turned gray in an instant.

He smacked his keys down on top of the microwave and took a seat at a barstool. He picked up the papers in front of him before I could stop him and started reading.

“Those are mine. Give them to me.”

After a few pages, he threw them back down on the breakfast bar and they spread out like a game of fifty-two-card pickup. He pointed at them. “What are these, Mom?”

“Things I need to do to get ready for Kona.” I tried to gather them up, but he picked up a list and held it away from me.

He read aloud. “Stop newspaper. Cancel housekeeper. Give Precious to Sam. Empty refrigerator. Send Annabelle jewelry. Give clothes to Salvation Army.” He shook the paper at me. “What is this about?”

“Someone has to take care of the cat while I’m gone.” I snatched it from him and turned away.

He picked up a jar of pickles from the counter and threw it at the floor. It shattered. The sharp smell of vinegar filled the air. I whirled back around, staring at him. Neither of us looked at the broken jar, and I tried to pretend he hadn’t done it.

“Don’t you even care about Belle, Mom?”

“What?”

“Check out her Facebook status.”

I scooped up the fan of papers and walked carefully through the pickles and glass to the office. He was just baiting me.

He raised the ante. “She hates New York, not that you’d know, and she wants to come home. Only she doesn’t think you care enough to let her.”

I stopped. He was so mad at me again, so fast, like he’d been after Annabelle first left, and leading up to our showdown in the car about him lying to the cops. Why couldn’t he even try to understand? I retrieved my phone from my pocket and opened the Facebook app Annabelle’d loaded for me. Had I even opened it all summer? I went to Annabelle’s profile page.

Her status was one word. “Alone.”

Me, too, Belle. Me, too.

I looked back at my son. He had his hands behind his head and was leaning back with a stubborn look on his face.

“I’m coming with you to Kona.”

Panic took flight like a winged creature in my chest. “Oh, no, you’re not. You have school.”

“It will be okay.”

“Well, it’s not okay with me. Your grades this year are what count for your college applications next fall.”

“I can make up the work.”

“Sam.” I tried to regroup. “Thank you for offering. I’m going alone, though.” Not that other people hadn’t offered. My parents, Dr. Greene—even Blake, however inappropriate that was. I had politely declined them all.

I put the papers on my desk and came back to the kitchen, stepping over the pickle debris again. I scraped my uneaten barbecue sandwich into the trash. I walked over to Sam and put my hands on both of his shoulders. “I am proud of you. You are a wonderful son. I’m sorry you can’t go with me.” I kissed him on the cheek and my lips touched wetness.

I went to my bedroom, and a few minutes later I heard the door slam again. His engine revved, and then there was only the silence of the house and my fragile heartbeat, the heartbeat of a butterfly.

Nearly two months later, the morning before Kona, the town of Kailua-Kona was buzzing with tension and activity. I thought I’d be wound tight, but I wasn’t. My seas were dead calm and my sails hung slack. I stayed to myself, mostly, trying to keep still enough that Adrian could find me. I had to believe he’d come.

I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. I’d been at work since before sunrise. By nine a.m., I was sitting at a mock desk in a borrowed office requisitioned by ESPN for a redo of our foiled shoot at Juniper the month before. Stephanie Willis had upped my news quotient again, not that I cared. Brian brokered a deal with ESPN and I’d agreed to the interview in return for a promise: they could film me all they wanted the day before and the day after the race, but I got the race day to myself, for my husband.

They sent the same producer I’d sort of met in Houston. The top of his bald head shone under the lights as he gave everyone their instructions. No surprise, but after he’d got an eyeful of me last time, he’d brought hair, makeup, and wardrobe people with him. The entire set smelled like Aqua Net. From my glossed lips and coiffed helmet of dyed-black-again hair to my aquamarine sweater set and strand of pearls, they had me looking like their vision of Michele, the widowed editor and author.

“Right now we just want day-in-the-life shots, like we got earlier today of you training.” Pretending to be training, rather, in garb emblazoned with the logos of ESPN’s Ironman sponsors, but I didn’t quibble. “When we have enough, we’ll hold up cue cards and you’ll turn to face the camera and answer the questions.”

“Like this?” I typed at the keyboard.

“Yes, good. Now, we’re rolling, so I want you to act naturally, and don’t talk to me anymore.” I nodded. “In five, four, three, two, one, action.”

My computer displayed nothing. I typed,
“I miss you, Adrian. Come back to me.”
I reached for a paper on my desk and read it, then typed,
“I love you and I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
I dialed my desk phone and told imaginary Sam I was sorry, and pretended Annabelle was on the line and told her I loved her more than ever. Probably doing it make-believe didn’t count, but maybe they’d read my lips on TV. I listened to silence and ended with, “Buh-bye now.” Buh-bye now? I never say that. The cameras were making me an idiot.

I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. The producer had signaled someone. The pouty male makeup artist walked to the camera and held up a cue card. “You lost your husband, training partner, and co-author, Kona qualifier Adrian Hanson, two months ago. How has this impacted your training?”

I had practiced this the day before. Thirty- to forty-five-second sound bites and done. I could do this. I took a deep breath through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, then started. “It’s much harder without him. Adrian coached me, but it was more than that. He made it fun, and that made it easier. It was like date time for us. But he’s still with me.” Or he was, I thought. “His words are in my head, and in our book, and I have his memory to carry with me. He never even knew I’d gotten into Kona. I’d saved that as an anniversary surprise for him, and to be truthful, waiting to tell him allowed me to make sure I could really do it, that my head was in it and my body would hold up. Since he died, I’ve stuck to this because of him, and for him, through tragedy, loss, and injury. I wouldn’t be going for Kona without him.”

I left out a few things, like the part about Adrian joining me for workouts after his death, and his desertion after Stephanie died. That his missing savings account tormented me during the long hours I trained with nothing to distract me. That I couldn’t sleep at night because I was worried about dangers he should have explained to me so I could protect our kids.

Sometimes the real story isn’t the story, I thought. Sometimes the real story is just no one else’s damn business.

The pink-haired stylist’s turn. She held up her cue card. “You have a customized bicycle that will make it easy to pick you out during the bicycle leg of the race. Tell us about it.”

“Adrian called me his little butterfly. He customized a Trek Pilot to fit my rather undersized frame,” I smiled, “and had it painted orange and black like a monarch butterfly and had ‘La Mariposa’ stenciled on the center post—that’s Spanish for butterfly. My papa’s originally from Mexico, and he nicknamed me Itzpa after an Aztec butterfly goddess years ago. Adrian told me that on that bike, I really could fly. A month ago, my husband’s killer tried to run me down while I was on La Mariposa, and it was totaled. I’m riding an exact replica on Kona, thanks to Pilar at Southwest Cyclery in Houston.”

The makeup artist held up another card. I read the words, but they weren’t ones we had practiced. “Adrian gave you another butterfly gift. Tell us about the locket you’ll be wearing at the race.” What kind of sick joke was this? I’d told them earlier that I lost the locket in the wreck.

Brian walked toward me from off-camera. He’d come to Kona to handle the book promotions and media until he could find a replacement for Scarlett. Good, he would explain it to them again. “Michele, a replica of your bicycle might work, but not for your locket.”

I bobbed my head. My hands were suddenly cold. “Exactly.”

“I couldn’t stand it that you lost it. I called the Waller police and HPD. Neither of them had it in evidence. I searched the crash site for it. I walked that ground over and over. I went back and used a metal detector. I couldn’t find it. It was sudden-death overtime.”

Movement from stage left caught my eye again as a police officer came and stood beside Brian. He looked so familiar. When he addressed the camera and said, “I’m Officer Dodge, from Waller, Texas,” I knew his voice instantly. What in the hell was he doing on Kona? Had ESPN brought him here? Or Brian? A rush of emotion and memory swept over me like a tsunami. Terror. Hope. Joy. Sam. “Your boss called me originally to check evidence for your necklace. He called me again and asked if I could think of any other places to look.”

My eyes left Dodge for a moment to take in Brian’s face again. His cheeks were bright red, like a cherry on top of the blueberry ice cream of his damn Texans jacket. I wanted to run from the set so I could cry in private, cry for having ever doubted Brian, for all the times I shut him out in the last two months.

Dodge continued. “So I remembered our long ride in my squad car, and I looked for it there. I couldn’t find it. Brian asked me if he could look. Darned if he didn’t take the seats out of the car. I told him this must be one hell of a necklace, and he said yes, but it was more that Michele was one hell of a woman.”

That was too much. My lips trembled, my eyes flooded, and a wretched sob escaped from my throat.

Brian put his hand in his pocket and lifted my locket from it. He held it toward me. “God knows how, but it ended up caught in the bottom of the front seat and I found it, a three-point shot at the buzzer. It’s in perfect condition, without a scratch.”

I clasped my hand around the cold butterfly. I turned my hand over and stared at it, but I couldn’t see anything through my tears. “Dios mío.”

Dodge put his hands in his pockets and lifted his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have believed it could have been in there if I hadn’t watched him disassemble my whole car in front of me and pull it out of the bottom of that seat.”

As the butterfly sat in my hand, it grew warmer. I pressed it to my face and could almost imagine the little monarch’s heart had started to beat.

Brian clasped my upper arm. “The chain was broken, but I had it repaired.”

I dangled the butterfly against my chest and pulled the two ends of the chain to meet in the back. By feel, I fastened the clasp. The warmth of the butterfly spread across my chest. I had a piece of Adrian back. I stood up and embraced Brian, then Dodge, then again Brian for much longer.

“Thank you,” was all I could manage, but I patted him to make up for it.

The ESPN staff clapped. I’d forgotten they were there.