Safe Passage (19 page)

    
Percival ran up beside the track and said, "What's the matter?" It was against the rules to run alongside another runner on the track.

    
"Mouth's dry."

    
"I've had that happen. It comes back."

    
"When you stop?"

    
"Even while you're running."

    
"Get the hell away from him!" the coach yelled at Percival. Percival ran back to the sidelines. The water did not come back into Gideon's mouth, but he was able to pass one other runner and not come in last. When he finished the race, he bent over and put his hands on his knees to get his breath. A great swell of nausea overcame him. He puked in front of everybody.

    
After that Gideon managed to walk away from the stands before he threw up after
rumiing
the mile. His mouth went dry every single race. But because of
Percival's
help that first day, he never stopped and he never walked. The next year the coach would let him run the two-mile, where the pace was slower, and he would feel all right.

    
Mostly, during Gideon's first year of high school, he and Percival were kind to each other. Once Percival missed winning a race by half a step, and Gideon said, "You got beat by a guy who had a beard. Wait till you grow your own beard and see what happens."

    
Percival slapped hands with him, but the joke about the beard was really no joke. Other guys had whiskers and looked like men. Percival looked like a toothpick. But that day, even though Percival only came in second, the important thing was that they got a nice trophy to put in their case.

    
The summer after Gideon's freshman year, just before he turned fifteen, he suddenly grew six inches and filled out. Percival, a year older, did not. That fall, everything between them changed. It changed the day they ran their cross-country race in a little mountain town called Brunswick.

    
They had both run at Brunswick High School before; they did it every year. The course was pretty standard. You started out in the stadium,
then
ran around the school and into a wooded area on the school grounds. There was one bad hill leading out of the stadium, but after that, just rolling ground and then a narrow path leading through the trees. You ran the circle twice. The finish line was inside the stadium gates, right in front of the bleachers where everybody could see you.

    
It was a cool day with an overcast sky—purplish clouds, and a breeze coming down from the mountains, but no wind on the ground. It was the weather Gideon liked best: gray, sunless weather. He never liked to run in heat. On the second time around—he could not remember now how this had happened—he had been looking at the sky and at the back of the runner in front of him. He was running sixth or seventh just then. He picked up his pace to pass the man in front of him. "If you're going to pass, you have to blow around him so he won't
repass
you—so you'll break his heart and he won't have the will to catch up with you again," his father often said.

    
He passed the other runner with no effort at all. It was as if he were a spectator watching
himself
do it. It was that easy. Another runner was in front of him, and he set his sights on him. As he picked up his pace to narrow the gap, he seemed to be an observer and a participant at the same time, aware of his breathing, aware that the increased effort didn't hurt, but also as detached as a bird in that purple-gray sky, looking on as he passed the next runner and the next. He was fast. Strong. Picking them off one by one.

    
In the trees the path was wet from a recent rain,
a slick
yellowish clay.
His footing held, his pace didn't slacken.
When he came out of the woods, he immediately sprinted past several more runners. He did not realize one of them must have been Percival; he did not look at them individually and was not thinking that at all. He was outside himself, watching himself head toward the stadium and into the gate, across the finish line.

    
Afterward, winded, he no longer felt the sense of detachment from himself, but the strength stayed with him. It was his first cross-country win in high school. He could have run the course again.

    
When Percival came up to him afterward, he was smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. "All
right
." He slapped Gideon's hands. But
Percival's
eyes didn't smile.

    
His father said to him, "Some run, Gideon." But his eyes, too, were serious, and Gideon knew he'd hoped that Percival would win.

    
After that, Gideon won most of the races. After that, his father expected it. But for the rest of high school, Percival was not his friend. He spent his time with Tim 0'Neal and ignored Gideon almost completely.

    
If he had been younger, it would have broken his heart. But it didn't. Sometimes he still thought: I couldn't help winning that day. When they were younger, he couldn't help letting Percival get the better of him in a fight, and on that day he couldn't help winning.

    
The Brunswick trophy was still on the shelf. Funny, Percival might have hidden it or disposed of it, considering. But there it was—tacky, as anonymous as the others. He supposed Percival didn't care about it so much anymore. Last summer, when he was home on leave, he hadn't seemed to. But he couldn't be sure. Maybe even now Percival held it against him that he had won at Brunswick and kept winning afterward, while Percival did not.

    
Or maybe he was dead, and didn't care about anything.

    
Gideon moved his hand toward the trophy shelf, but his fingers were heavy and did not want to go. This morning, when he had not been able to run anymore, he had thought: This is just from the shock. But all day and all night, traveling in planes and cars and buses, it had only grown worse. On the last stretch, when he had to walk, the paralysis had been like a great cat poised above him, ready to pounce. It was like the end of a bad race when you hang on through the finish and then collapse. And now it was as if the race had ended. He did not know if he would be able to run again. He did not know how long he would be able to walk or lift his hands. In the light from the reading lamp it was impossible to tell whose trophies were whose. It was as if they were a history of him and Percival, as if the two of them were the same, jumbled together, Percival in Lebanon and Gideon in Maryland, and as if both of them might be dead.

    
Mag
turned out all but one of the lights in the family room, but she was wide awake. Here is another truth, she thought: She loved them best when they were winning. Another strike against her: never to achieve any great heights herself, but to expect them from her children. She had felt trapped when they were little, but when Percival won the Junior Olympics at the age of twelve, she had ridden on a streak of pure joy for days…and when Alfred was elected student council president, when
Izzy
got his scholarships…and especially when Gideon started winning—year after year, race after race—she felt, truly, that she was capable of producing champions. Yet tonight something seemed wrong with Gideon, even more than his distress over Percival or his exhaustion after his trip. It was not like him to look so unconcerned when she asked about his race and not like him (even at a time like this) to pretend he couldn't remember how many seconds Farley had beaten him by. It was as if losing made him ashamed. She'd never thought of the price to any of them.

    
Ultimately, the only important thing—wasn't it?—was the price.

    
Alfred's cold heart, Gideon's obsession with running,
Izzy's
brooding, Simon's silent fingers.
It seemed to her they were all the result of trying too hard to win. And wasn't a mother who condoned that somehow to blame? In the dim room
Mag
stared out the sliding glass door exactly as she had twenty-four hours ago, into the predawn darkness that told her no more now than it had then. The rain had stopped. Gideon had come and they were complete except for Percival. She did not care about their winning. Only let them all come home.

    
But how could she expect it? She'd given them the names of champions right from the start—Alfred the Great, responsible for a kingdom. Isaac Singer, the intellectual. She had never considered that golden-haired Gideon might end up as he was tonight, dragging his bag upstairs as if the legs that carried him to victory were made of putty. And Percival—the knight….
 
Didn't knights always go to battle? Wasn't he one of the ones looking for the Holy Grail? And wasn't it someone else who found it?

    
Gideon's shower stopped running. She heard him walking around the bedroom, and then silence. The idea of all of them sleeping, dreaming, as if life were the same as it had been before, seemed absurd.

    
Outside a car came down the street, braked, and stopped. It was the delivery man with the
Freestate
Sentinel
, dropping Simon's papers in a bundle in the driveway, for him to roll when he got up. She heard the car drive off. She should go out there; she should look at the headlines. She should read about Beirut.

There would be some mention of Percival and Tim O'Neal: Local boys stationed at bombed-out airport; fate uncertain. She could not make herself do it. She turned out the light and went up the stairs.

    
Down the hall, in
Percival's
room—the room where
Izzy
and Gideon were sleeping—a small reading lamp was shining. She thought maybe Gideon was still up. A small comfort bloomed in her chest, though she knew Gideon was tired. She wanted someone else to be awake.

    
Peering in, she saw
Izzy
first, snoring the way Patrick snored, hair tangled, clutching the pillow for dear life. All day he had been observing Patrick's blind spell and recovery with what she assumed was scientific interest, absorbed and yet apparently pained by his need to examine his own father that way. And now—if she knew
Izzy
—he was having nightmares about it. But Gideon looked even stranger. He had fallen asleep sitting on the floor in the corner, next to the bookcase with the trophies. His knees were bent to his chest, his head had drooped onto his shoulder, and one of the trophies was lying by his foot, as if he had drifted off studying past triumphs. For a moment she wondered if he had come home so solemn because the waiting and the possible mourning would keep him from running just when he needed to the most—when he needed to intensify his training because conference championships were coming up.

    
Maybe he was simply afraid to tell her. He was afraid because she expected him to win no matter what. But in that case, after they had urged him to stay in Utah…in that case, why did he come?

    
His face was pale and strained-looking. She realized he had not been gloating over old victories or future races, either one. The trophies on that shelf were not just his, but
Percival's
too. A wave of sadness filled her. She started toward him, to shake him awake, get him into bed. He would be sore and stiff when he woke up in that position. But before she could touch him she remembered something. She remembered what he had tried to do for Percival the night Darren got arrested.

    
It had not happened because of any terrible crime. All the Singer boys after Alfred had learned to drive before they were old enough. As soon as
Izzy
got his license he taught Percival (who was thirteen at the time), and Percival taught Simon when Simon was twelve. Discovering this,
Mag
and Patrick issued an ultimatum: "If we ever hear of any of you driving without a license again, you can rest assured you'll never
get
a license and the one who taught you doesn't drive for a year." But once they paid the matter lip service, it was largely ignored.
Mag
and Patrick were both at work all day and felt it unwise to make too many rules they couldn't enforce. The older boys were careful about the cars because they needed them to get to part-time jobs and track practice. Also,
Mag
had visions of catastrophe striking while she was away—another broken ankle like
Izzy's
, or an illness that required a trip to the emergency room—and was relieved that even Simon could drive his brothers to the rescue if necessary. It did not occur to her that Darren, fifteen years old, would decide to go pick up Merle one night because the house was momentarily empty and Merle was stranded at a friend's.
Or that, on the way home, they would be pulled over by the police.

    
Darren was not stopped for speeding or weaving down the road, but rather for going too slowly. He had never driven at night before and was disoriented by the headlights and the difficulty of seeing where his lane was on the road. The twins rarely thought before reacting to each other, so in his haste to get his brother, Darren had left even his learner's permit at home.

    
Mag
suspected he might have gotten off with just a warning had he been somebody else. But his pale hair and skin made him look younger than he was—an effect accentuated by an identical brother in the passenger seat—and
Mag
could well imagine him trying to explain about his learner's permit in such a thin, shaky voice that Merle finally got upset, too, and the policeman decided from the sound that they must be guilty of something.