Love Game - Season 2012 (32 page)

She had hardly slept that night and during
her practice she had checked the watch that often that Freddie had asked if she
had a date. Yes, she did. A date with the draw sheet that had to be hung up in
the players’ lounge building by now. Not only did she need to check against
whom she would play in the first round but more importantly she needed to find
out if Sasha was in the draw.

Gabriella entered the building. At the end
of the hallway she could already make out a crowd of players and team members
who had gathered before the wall with the draw. Gabriella lined up in the back
of the crowd, tiptoeing so as to get a glimpse of the draw, but she was still
too far away and the huge sheet of paper wasn’t hung high enough.

“Hi,” a voice next to her said. Gabriella
turned around.

“Hey Elise, how are you?”

The German shrugged. “So, so.”

Gabriella raised her eyebrows. That was an
atypical response from the German who was known for her cheerfulness.

Didn’t Elise crash out of the Olympic Games
rather unceremoniously after a good run in Wimbledon? Gabriella couldn’t
remember. She had been so preoccupied with her own worries that she didn’t
follow the other players’ results. Amanda lost pretty early too, she thought.
But again she wasn’t sure.

“Are you okay?” Gabriella asked.

Again Elise gave a shrug. “Amanda and I are
in a bit of trouble,” she whispered, so the other players didn’t hear.

Oh dear, Gabriella thought. Amanda and
Elise were such a nice couple. She often saw them sitting together in the
players’ café, laughing and chatting. They never gave the impression that all
this was a façade, but of all people, Gabriella should know better. She was the
perfect example for living a masquerade.

“I am sorry to hear that, Elise,” she said,
giving her German friend a little hug. “I’m sure you will work it out.”

Elise nodded. They reached the draw sheet
and began looking for their names. Gabriella found hers – she would play
against Teresa Santayana – but she couldn’t find Sasha’s. As the No. 2 player,
the Czech would have naturally been at the bottom right of the draw, opposite
to the No. 1 player Carina, who was in the top left of the sheet. Again
Gabriella went over all the sixty-four fields in the draw. Sasha wasn’t there.

***

“You are a genius!”

Martina gave Antonia Sapore a kiss on the
cheek, as best as she could while they were running down the hotel hallway.
Behind them was Tom Richardson. He was carrying Anastasia’s laptop.

After weeks and weeks of fruitless waiting
for Anastasia to leave her room without her laptop they had decided they
couldn’t wait any longer. Instead they had come up with a daring plan.

At 10:03 a.m. the telephone in Anastasia’s
hotel room rang. According to the tournament schedule the umpire would call the
first match on Court 1. They had calculated that the umpire would be heading
out to the nearby tournament site at 10:15.

“Yes?” the umpire answered. She already
sounded stressed. Good. Phase I had begun.

“Anastasia,” Martina purred. “Listen,
bonita
,
me and the girls need your help.”

“I’m on my way to the tournament,”
Anastasia informed her. Martina could hear her rummaging.

“No, no,” the Argentine cried out. “It’s
muy
importante
! You are our last hope.”

“
Asta mi-o mai lipsit
,” Anastasia
moaned.
Martina didn’t speak
Romanian, but she understood that her call was very inconvenient. She grinned
widely.

“What is it?” the umpire demanded to know.

“Please go on the internet quickly,”
Martina whispered. She waited while Anastasia started her laptop, muttering
unhappily.

“Don’t you have internet on your phone?”

“The connection is bad.”

Anastasia sighed but Martina could hear the
little melody when the computer was started.

“What are you looking for?”

Martina gave Tom a little nod. It was time
for Phase II.

“I need you to find out the location of
that lesbian bar we want to go to tonight,” she said with a smile.

“What?” Anastasia couldn’t believe it.

At this moment her hotel room door trembled
with vigorous knocking. Another barrage of bangs followed. Anastasia ripped her
door open.

“Tom? What is going on? Is my cab waiting?”
The umpire was out of breath and seemed confused.

“Anastasia, there is an emergency at the
tournament,” he croaked, not responding to her question. “We need you there
now!”

Anastasia hesitated for a moment. She
looked at Tom, then at the phone she was still holding, then at her running
laptop.

“I need to go, Martina,” she stuttered,
disconnecting the phone call.

“Yes, you better hurry,” Tom pressed,
rushing Anastasia out of the room.

“My computer!” she yelled.

“I’ll take care of that,” Tom assured her.
“You better hurry. Ask for Candice. She will inform you about everything.”

Anastasia nodded with wide open eyes, then
turned around and hurried down the corridor. After the umpire was out of sight,
Antonia and Martina peered around the corner and Tom gave them the thumbs up.
He took the running laptop and they all retreated to Antonia and Martina’s room
on the same floor.

This was Phase III and no password was
needed for it.

Tom opened the search function on the
laptop to look for the files.

“DSX?” Antonia asked.

“That’s the prefix my camera automatically
assigns to every photo I take with it. If Anastasia has the pictures they
should show up in no time,” Tom explained. He pushed the return button and they
waited. A handful of pictures were listed. Tom opened the first. It showed
Anastasia with an older woman in an apartment. The woman had her arm around
Anastasia. In front of them was a birthday cake. The next picture was from the
same occasion and so were the rest.

“Probably her mother,” Martina said
disappointedly.

Antonia had an idea. “Perhaps she gave the
files new names.”

Next they combed through Anastasia’s
picture folders, checking every single picture file the search had brought up –
to no avail. There were no delicate pictures of the players, only private
pictures and not even raunchy ones.

“There’s nothing,” Tom declared. The girls
nodded in defeat.

They had been wrong about Anastasia. She
wasn’t the anonymous deliverer of the pictures. Tom shut down the laptop,
closed it and sighed.

And there was still Phase IV. He had to
explain to Anastasia why a fun photo shoot with the tournament ball kids and
the umpires was an emergency.

***

Carina let the ball bounce and fired a high
ball back over the net. On the other side Yelena had trouble dealing with the
moonball. She swung her racquet and sent a ball back even higher. Carina
answered with another moonball. The spectators chuckled.

Polly followed the rally on the screen and
had to giggle. Sometimes the two players sent the ball back so high that it
flew outside the camera frame. In the end Yelena won the rally with a powerful
forehand down the line that ended the moonball exchange.

Polly laughed out loud at the spectacle.
But then she stopped herself and turned to the hospital bed. Her mother lay
with her eyes closed, breathing steadily and looking small. A narrow tube led
from a drip to a needle in her arm.

It had been one week now since the family
was informed that a matching donor had been found and that her mother would be
taken to the Montréal hospital immediately. In the long hours since the
surgery, Polly had become obsessed with observing the steady trickle of the
drip and comparing its rhythm with the recurring beep of the heart rate monitor
and her mother’s breathing. Curiously, the heart rate and the breathing were
not synchronized most of the time, and the drip had a different rhythm
altogether. The three beats created a minimalist and – by its arrhythmia –
hypnotic symphony for Polly. As long as it kept going, everything was fine.

She turned back to the tennis match and
watched for another hour, then stood up and went down to the cafeteria to buy a
coffee and a sandwich.

Even though she was so close to the
tournament only Morgana Doré had visited her so far. What a surprise it had
been to see the French player peeking in. And how nice of Morgana to bring her
some new
Tennis Nurse
novels.

“I am a bit reluctant to hand out any more
novels,” the French woman said while they were taking a stroll through the
hospital garden. “I’ve learned so much about the background of these novels.
It’s fascinating and scary.”

“What do you mean?” Polly asked her.

“My source, Larissa Perkins, knows
everything about the connection between
Tennis Nurse
and some players,”
Morgana revealed. “
Tennis Nurse
novels have the same effect as drugs.
The reader gets hooked – and docile. It took me hours to pick out these two
novels. They seem the least manipulative.”

Polly took a look at the novels.
Tennis
Nurse and The Diamond Racquet
and
Tennis Nurse and The Grand Slam
Chapstick
. She had never heard of them before. Probably because they were
not very popular and therefore not traded at the
Tennis Nurse
meetings.
She thanked Morgana anyway and even began reading
The Diamond Racquet
right away – until the tennis started. She missed the commotion of the
tournament. Not even a good
Tennis Nurse
novel could keep up with that.

Polly bit in her sandwich and stepped into
the elevator to go back to the fourth floor. When she opened the door to her
mother’s room she had to smile. Her mother had woken up from her sleep.

“You slept for a very long time,” she said
to her mother. She didn’t close the door yet. “Do you want me to get you
something to eat?”

Her mother smiled and shook her head. “I’m
fine.”

Then she waved her daughter inside the
room. Her movement was still fragile, albeit swift.

“You have a visitor.”

Polly straightened up. Had Morgana come
back again? Perhaps she had changed her mind regarding the novels. She stepped
inside the room and looked behind the door. Mint Rickenbacher was standing at
the window.

“Your mom said I could wait for you here,”
she said shyly.

“Yes, of course,” Polly’s mother said. “We
had such a nice chat. Mint told me the story behind her unusual name.”

Polly grinned. Her mother had a knack of
teasing the worst secrets out of everybody. Even grumpy Mint was no exception. While
she still wondered how Mint wound up in this hospital room after their
discourteous meeting at the Wimbledon party, her mother had engaged the
American in conversation about her last two tournaments in California.
Reluctantly at first, but then more confidently Mint reported about her good
runs in Stanford and Carlsbad with Polly and her mother asking about the best
points and crucial moments. Mints eyes glowed and once in a while she gave
Polly a warm smile.

Polly smiled back. Only a little though, with
her mother watching them. Perhaps hospitals weren’t such bad places after all.

***

“Lulu?” Gabriella couldn’t remember the
last time that her sister had come over to her hotel room.

“May I come in?”

Gabriella hesitated.
Then she opened the door wider and stepped back into
the room.

“How are you?” Luella asked.

“Great,” she answered. “And you?”

“Good.”

An uncomfortable silence came between them.
Gabriella positioned herself next to the window while Lu was still standing in
the middle of the room. Gabriella didn’t offer her a chair. Why should she? Her
sister always took a seat without being asked anyway.

But this time she didn’t sit down on the
chair or fling herself onto the bed.

“Congratulations on your Grand Slam win,”
Lulu said into the silence.

“My second,” Gabriella stated. She could
see that Lulu breathed in sharply. But then she steadied herself.

“Yes, your second,” Lulu admitted to the
younger twin’s surprise.

“Want to sit down?” Gabriella pointed to
the chair and Lulu nodded.

“Did you enjoy the Olympics?” she asked.

Luella knew that Gabriella had tumbled out
of the competition in the second round. That was a moot question. She didn’t
know however that Gabriella had been miserable throughout the Olympic
tournament because of Sasha. No, she didn’t enjoy the Olympics.

“Tennis isn’t everything,” she said coolly.