She serves one deep into the corner. I run like hell, even though my knee is starting to ache. I return it into the net.
15–love.
30–love.
40–love.
CARRIE! For fuck’s sake, pull it together!
Her serve. Match point.
She sends the ball screaming over. I return it, fast and clean. She hits a groundstroke. I return to her backhand. I can feel the hum in my bones. I can feel this match coming to me—later than I want, but it’s here.
Antonovich takes the ball out of the air early. I reach it, return it cross-court. Before I complete my follow-through, she’s under it, chipping it over the net. I dive, my chest hitting the ground, sliding with my racket outstretched.
The ball hits the clay and I’m still feet away. It’s over.
The crowd erupts for Antonovich. I lie frozen, staring at the dent in the clay where the ball landed.
When I finally get up and dust myself off, I am covered in red clay—my shoes, my knees, my skirt, and tank top are all rust. It is in my hair and in my mouth. It feels like it is in my lungs.
My eye lands on a woman in the crowd a few rows back. She is in her twenties or so, and she’s holding a sign that says Oui, oui, Carrie!
I cannot bear the sight of her.
“I didn’t play my best! So if that’s what you’re about to say, Dad…don’t.”
I am standing in the tunnel about to head to the showers. My knee is screaming. I need a massage and ice. I need a lot of things.
Antonovich comes up behind me and passes by. I can feel her trying to catch my eye as she walks into the locker room, but I continue to stare at my father instead.
He is standing against the wall, his eyes closed.
“Carolina,” he says. His voice is calm and slow. “Now is the time for perspective. We talked about this.”
“Dad!” I say. “Don’t pretend that what I did out there was good enough! It wasn’t!”
“I understand that you didn’t win the match as you’d hoped….”
“Didn’t win the match as I’d hoped?” I yell. I can hear the other coaches and players coming down the tunnel, so I pull him into an open room off the corridor. “I just lost my second shot at a title,” I say. “I only have four chances!”
“I understand that.”
“I think we should all be pretty fucking worried that I am not going to be able to do what I set out to do!”
“Do not swear at me. I told you yesterday I was concerned about this possibility.”
“I went out there and told everyone that I am the greatest living tennis player, and now I’m proving myself wrong! In front of the entire world!”
My father nods but says nothing.
“You’re just going to stand there? Say something!” I shout.
“What do you want me to say?” he asks, throwing his hands in the air.
“Tell me that you can see the colossal fuckup I’ve just committed! That you know I’m a better player than I was today! That I am as good as I think I am! Or I’m not! If that’s what you think! But say something. I’ve lost my shot at the goddamn French Open, and we both know Nicki’s gonna take it! Say something!”
He looks at me and frowns. He begins to pace, shaking his head. There’s a folding chair next to a card table, and just when I think he’s approaching the chair to sit down, he pulls back and kicks it into the wall. “What do you want from me?” he yells.
“I—”
“You may not be the greatest living tennis player anymore!” he says. “I don’t know. We don’t know! You want me to keep telling you that, but I don’t know, Carolina.”
“I—”
“I’m not allowed to have any doubts! I’m not allowed to see you as my daughter, as a human being. I’m not allowed to say that years after retirement there might be better players now, to express any uncertainty whatsoever. So I tell you what you want to hear! So that you have what you need to feel okay. So that you’re in my life. Those were the terms you set up! And I live by them! What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to be honest!”
My father shakes his head. “No, you want my honest opinion to be the exact thing you need to hear.”
I can feel an ache in my teeth from clenching my jaw. I try to loosen it, but it tightens right back up.
My father looks at me. “Carrie, I do not know how to have an honest conversation with you about your tennis game. Because as good as you are, you have never been able to make peace with failure.”
My chest tightens. My eyes feel dry. “And why the fuck do you think that is?”
“I think it’s because—”
“It’s because of you!”
My father shakes his head and looks down at the floor. It’s as if he’s not disagreeing with me so much as he’s disappointed that this was the turn the conversation took so quickly.
But I feel the exact opposite. I feel like it’s taken decades to get here.
“You told me I was supposed to be the greatest player in the history of tennis. You said it since the day I was born! You told me it was all I was ever meant to be! And then one day I wasn’t anymore. You weren’t even sure that I could beat her!” I say.
“Are we talking about Stepanova?” he says.
“I asked you if you thought I could get the number one ranking over her, and you said, ‘I don’t know.’?”
“And you’ve never forgiven me for it,” he says. “I’m paying that price even today.”
“You should pay it for the rest of your life!” I say. “For making me believe in myself like that and then pulling the rug out from under me. For giving up on me when things were at their hardest. I never gave up on this. Ever. And you did!”
“Carrie, you asked me if I thought you could take number one from Paulina. And I said I didn’t know. Because I didn’t. I don’t know what the future holds. And I can’t promise the world is going to always turn out the way you want it to.
“I owed you that honesty, I thought. So you could assess better—how to grow, how to widen your perspective. It felt like it was time for that. But you didn’t want to do that then, and you don’t want to do that now.
“I’ve messed up a lot as your father, and I take responsibility for that. But this one, I’m sorry, only you can solve it. You have to make peace with not being a perfect player,” he said.
“That is giving up. I won’t do it,” I said.
My father shakes his head. “You have to find a way to be right with who you actually are, to face what life is really like. I expected you to figure that out by now. But you haven’t. And if you don’t, I can’t see how you ever get past this…this moment. You have accomplished so much, but you are instead so focused on keeping it, rather than going out and finding something else in the world.”
He walks toward the door. “Everything we achieve is ephemeral. We have it, and then the next second it’s gone. You had that record, and you may lose that record. Or you may defend it now and lose it in two years all over again. I wish you’d accept that.”
I shake my head and try to look at him. “I can’t.”
“Well,” he says. “It kills me that I cannot fix that for you, hija. But I can’t. Nobody else can.”
And then, as if the door were the lightest thing in the world, he opens it and walks right through, leaving me there alone.
* * *
—
When I finally make my way back to my floor at the hotel, I come out of the elevator to see Bowe standing in front of my door, signing an autograph for a teenage girl. She walks away before she sees me approaching.
When I get to Bowe, he says, “I wasn’t sure if you’d want me here or not. But I figured you wouldn’t be shy about telling me to fuck off if you didn’t.”
I drop my things and hug him. I can feel his surprise, but he quickly puts his arms around me. He does it gently, mindful of his ribs.
“Dust yourself off. Your best surface is just around the bend,” he says.
His arms are warm and sturdy. His body is strong. I feel like I could go slack against him and he’d hold me up, that he could bear my weight—the weight of my body, the weight of my failure.
* * *
—