My beloved, sick and stretched out on the ground, how I felt like kicking him. Not hard. Only once. I told Sebastian I would play.
On that day I was a bad girlfriend, a bad actress, a bad drinker, but by god I could play tennis. The magic that tequila had brought to the performances of Duke and Homer and Sal came to me on the tennis court. Who knew? I started slow and built my game. I knew that Sebastian was probably operating at two percent of his ability and I didn’t care. I was confident, loose. I gave him everything. I slammed my return to the opposite corner of the court and got one honest point off of him. Pallace whooped and called my name. Duke turned gingerly onto his side and opened one eye. I remembered myself in that backlot pool, in the bikini I still wore. They had wanted to see if I could swim.
“The cricket’s coming for you, brother,” Duke shouted, inasmuch as he could shout.
I was running, reaching. I didn’t care how I looked. Again and again I found a way to get the ball back over the net. The universe had conspired to grant me a single decent game of tennis, and I went in with everything I had. I could see the light change in Sebastian’s eyes. He was taking me seriously, not as an opponent, but as a person on the other side of the net, and the attention enlivened me. He shouted instructions, encouragement. He was a wonderful teacher, and he was doing his best to improve me. I leapt for a serve beyond my range, leapt and lunged and was felled by something like a gunshot I hadn’t heard. That was my exact thought, not that I had fallen but that I’d been shot. I crumpled onto the hot surface of the court. Duke was still there, lying a dozen feet away. He wiggled his fingers at me. How had he been lying on the court all this time? It was hot like a cookie sheet straight from the oven.
“You get used to it,” he said.
Sebastian was crouching down beside me, his dark eyes warmed by concern. All summer long I had conscientiously failed to notice his beauty but having his face that close to mine made it unavoidable. “Hey,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder gently. “Just stay there a second, catch your breath.”
“I’m fine.” I blinked. I was fine, more surprised than hurt. “I didn’t scrape my knees.”
“Is she okay?” Duke raised up on one elbow for a moment then eased himself back down.
“I don’t know yet.”
“She might be faking it,” Duke said. “She doesn’t like it when I get too much attention.”
Pallace was there, her hand on my face, her face so close to my face. “Are you very hurt?”
Everything had stopped and everyone was watching. I felt so foolish. I pushed myself up to a seated position. I swayed at first and then sitting seemed fine. Still, the question of what had happened, the explosion inside my calf that had very clearly come from outside my calf, was unresolved. “Did someone shoot me?” I asked her.
Pallace rocked back on her heels. “Oh, fuck.”
“Oh fuck what?”
“It’s her Achilles,” Pallace said to Sebastian.
Sebastian squeezed my shoulder. He did not disagree.
“You ruptured your Achilles?” Maisie asks.
“How did we never know this?” Emily asks.
I lean over and pull up my right pant leg, show them the thin white line that runs from my heel up the middle of my calf. “Apparently they’re much better at this now. Now they only make a tiny incision.”
Maisie leans over, runs the tip of her finger down the scar. “How have I never seen this before?”
“I’ve had this scar a lot longer than I’ve had any of you.”
“How did Pallace and Sebastian know what had happened?” Nell asks.
“Dancers and tennis players know about legs. If someone falls over and says they think they were shot, chances are they’ve ruptured their Achilles.”
“Partial or complete?” Maisie is still marveling at the neatness with which her mother was reassembled.
“Total rupture. Go big or go home.”
“Could you walk at all?” Emily asks. Why does it matter so much, the way she’s looking at me this minute? Like I am on the tennis court curled on my side and she is there, her hand on my shoulder.
Maisie shakes her head. “She can’t walk.”
“Wait,” Nell asks. “This happens to dogs?”
“Yep.”
“So you had to go back to the hospital,” Emily says. “Was Uncle Wallace there?”
I shook my head, smiling. “Elyse had already taken him back to Chicago. That would have been something though, wouldn’t it? Uncle Wallace and me in a double room.”
“Pallace had to take your part,” Nell says. “She had to go on that night.”
Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times. Her sisters turn and stare. “You’re doing it again,” Emily says.
“What?”
“You’re thinking about the performance, the understudy, and not your own mother lying on the ground with a ruptured Achilles.”
“You did the same thing with Uncle Wallace,” Maisie says.
Nell won’t bite. “She’s on a tennis court. Sebastian is there. It’s not like she’s facedown in the dirt.”
Emily is irritated with Nell, which is noteworthy because none of us get irritated with Nell, the sweet one, the small one, the baby. “But why do you always care about the understudy? Why is the most important thing in life whether or not the show goes on?”
Nell is standing beside me. She puts her arm around my waist in solidarity. “You’re not getting it,” she says. “This is when everything changes. This is the beginning of the second act. She can’t walk. She can’t walk for—-” She stops to look at me.
“A long time,” I say, though walking can be defined in different ways. “No cast, no crutches, it was probably six months.”
“So it’s not just Emily Pallace is going to play. She’s going to play Mae, too. Pallace is going to finish out Our Town and do the entire run of Fool for Love. Why can’t you understand that?” she asks.
“We can understand it,” Maisie says. “But we’re more worried about Mom than we are the play.”
Just like that Nell is crying and then sobbing, a fierce storm blown up out of nowhere. She turns her back on Maisie and Emily in shame and presses her face against my breastbone, both of her arms tight around me now. I don’t for a minute think she is crying because of her sisters, though surely part of her is crying for herself. She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she’ll have to stay. She is losing this time when she is beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth. But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the pieces together. She knows I am finished.
I insisted on trying to stand, and so Sebastian got on one side with Pallace on the other and together they lifted me like a marionette whose string had been cut. My leg was rubbery, almost liquid. “I need to rest it for a minute,” I said.