On the drive, Drew seemed unmoored by everything, asking a hundred questions about Ryan (But how do you know he died right away? How does breaking your neck mean you die?).
But once they returned home, the science project focused him.
He looked so serious, measuring the rock salt, studying the dried shrimp eggs under the light, and taking notes, pencil tight in his careful fingers.
And he never said anything about what happened, seemed to have forgotten it deep in the marrow of his effort. Of the winning project he was creating.
He was like Devon that way.
Nearly midnight, Eric clapped his laptop shut, lifting his handsome head and watching as she turned off all the downstairs lights, one by one.
She couldn’t remember the last night they’d gone to bed at the same time. Eric working fifty hours a week, Katie working twenty-five from home, creating commercial logos, designing annual reports on her overloaded computer between carpooling, car repairs, more errands. They had such a meticulously coordinated schedule, calendars synced, pop-up reminders, both of them always needed somewhere and then always coming home to the rest of it. All their duties hung like heavy raiment over them all the time, only the sight of Devon spearing into the air lifting them up.
So it was nice to walk up the stairs together, the only balm on a gloomy day.
“I sent out a mass e-mail,” he said, “to try to settle everyone down.”
Walking past him earlier, she’d seen his in-box filled with breast-beating messages from parents, the gym’s Facebook wall cluttered with concern and prayers. What shocking news! Has anyone talked to Hailey? God bless him and keep him. He was loved by all.
“The Connors told me they already saw a wreath on Ash Road,” he said. “They said it’s that spot with that dangerous turn. The hairpin.”
Lying in bed with the cruel clarity that can come in late-night thinking, Katie foresaw how hard this would be for the gym, a tear in the seam of everything.
Ryan had been such a welcome and constant presence since that very first day he’d arrived at BelStars to help build the landing pit. That dark ruff of hair and easy smile, he was always around, waiting for Hailey in the parking lot, at competitions. Who could forget him selling raffle tickets out of the Weaver’s Wagon or wielding the power hose at the booster car wash, his T-shirt soaked through? The younger girls had squealed, whispering behind hands. The older ones, Devon’s age, twitched and fidgeted helplessly, their faces red.
For the BelStars girls, he was that perfect crush age, the older-than-high-school-boy-but-not-yet-dad guy. So many of them homeschooled or marginally schooled, he was the only young man in their lives. Part of it was an infatuation with Hailey too, unerotic (probably) enchantments with Hailey’s sun-bleached hair and swimmer’s shoulders and womanly body, so different from their own straight lines (whenever anyone asked her why she hadn’t been a serious gymnast herself, she’d laugh and say, “Not with these,” finger guns aimed at her apple-round breasts).
The girls marveled over Ryan’s gallantry, the way he carried her gym bag, opened doors for her, bought her perfume and chocolate-covered raspberries on Valentine’s Day. The flush of their love, his devotion. Even their lovers’ quarrels, like the epic one at the Ramada Inn that night almost two years ago, were part of their allure. Their fights were exciting, and always ended with a flashy clinch.
And now he was gone. For all of them.
Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.
The next day, Monday, they arrived to find no Coach T. again, his absence like a new scar.
“I don’t understand,” Molly Chu said, “why he can’t at least be in communication with us.” She looked at Katie. “Have you heard anything? There’s a rumor that the police are very involved.”
“I don’t know,” Katie said carefully. “Aren’t the police always involved with a hit-and-run?”
The other parents in the stands nodded, all eyes returning to the floor. Bobby V. and the skills coaches were straining to simulate a normal day, but without Teddy, that great oak in the center, it felt awkward, stilted.
There was a peculiar tension among the girls, all of whom wore the blank expressions and big eyes of figures in Keane paintings. No one would listen to the substitute tumbling coach pitching in for Hailey or to the halfhearted drilling by Amelise.
Girls kept falling. Dominique Plonski rolled her ankle in the landing pit and limped off to her mother’s arms.
At the vault, Devon struggled with her Yurchenko, the first twist so painfully slow she couldn’t make the second. Foot hopping on the dismount, her face dazed and puzzled.