“Sorry, Mom.”
But she looked in the rearview mirror, watched the man amble toward a panel van. Something in the way he’d stood there holding the door—the way he’d rocked from foot to foot as Helen passed through—felt familiar. Like her uncle Don, who also rocked like that, back ruined by years of lifting drywall. He used to carry around sandwich bags filled with blue pills. One day he came to the house streaked with gray sweat and tore the TV out of the wall and stole the new rims off her mom’s car.
That was all a long time ago. Sometimes it was like none of it ever happened.
“I’m sorry he’s sick,” Devon said, dragging the spare air mattress into the basement. “But I can’t be around it, Mom. You know I can’t. Qualifiers are thirty-six days away.”
“He’s on antibiotics,” Katie assured her. “By tomorrow he won’t be contagious.”
But Devon refused to share a bathroom or even a hallway with her brother (Sometimes he licks his hands when he’s nervous, Mom).
Instead, she disappeared into the basement, the treadmill vibrating through the ceiling, and no one seemed interested in dinner, Eric on the phone with booster after booster, Drew tunneling into a narcotized sleep, his mouth open, his comforter and pillows massed on top of him in that cavelike way he liked, the humidifier purring beside him.
“Mom,” he said as he drifted off, “the shrimp are dying. Or dead already. The science fair…”
“That’s days away, honey.”
Lysol bottle in hand, Katie started by wiping down all the chair rails, the doorknobs and jambs. Her head humming with thoughts, so many none could take shape.
At Devon’s empty bedroom, she stood in the doorway, bleach stinging her fingers.
It was always so quiet, so clean and pin-neat, so contained.
Occasionally, Katie would see the bedrooms of the other girls. Pink-zebra-striped, sparkly G-Y-M-N-A-S-T-I-C-S! lettering across purple padded memo boards, mounds of leotards swirled onto mamasan chairs.
But Devon was different, once again.
It isn’t how I pictured it, Kirsten Siefert said once when Katie found her sneaking a peek during a booster meeting downstairs. I thought you must’ve covered the walls with gymnastics posters, inspirational quotes, seven-point creeds. She looked at Katie. I don’t know what I thought.
Parents always wanted to know what they’d fed Devon as a child, if they’d ever tried homeschooling, if she’d ever been given hormones and was she vaccinated. They always thought there was a code they could crack.
They never understood that it was all Devon, just like the room. Spare, almost puritanical.
All her awards were in the family room, the special shelf Eric built for all the trophies, wooden dowel pegs beneath to hang all the medals and ribbons. In here, everything was simple.
A small corkboard with a meticulously pinned printout, Elite Compulsory Program Rules, REV. A desk wiped clean with a feather duster every night. File boxes with labels. Everything labeled: Algebra. History I. Routine Music. Family Photos.
The quote taped to the side of her computer monitor: The only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your feet.
Her first grips looped in a ribbon and hanging on the wall.
The only odd piece: that gaudy LeRoy Neiman tiger poster from their old gym. The day they left Tumbleangels for BelStars, Eric had torn it from the wall and given it to her. Devon had always loved it, its million colors teeming and frothing from its whiskers, shooting from its slanted eyes.
Spraying from door frame to baseboard, the air in the room misted with bleach, she heard a chirp.
There, on the floor, was Devon’s phone in its tidy plaid case.
Leaning down, she picked it up.
She didn’t mean to look, precisely. But she didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t.
Swiping her thumb across the screen, she saw the flare of the Missed Calls icon, the harsh red arrows.
And then the same number, over and over again. Every ten or fifteen minutes for hours.
Hailey Belfour.
Hailey Belfour, Hailey Belfour, Hailey Belfour.
*
She found Eric in the kitchen, halfway through the screen door to the backyard, deep in a phone conversation.
She could tell from the way he spoke—earnest, enunciating, patient—that Gwen was on the other end.
“First, competition fees. That’s eighty dollars per gymnast and forty dollars per level, per team. Then coaching fees at one hundred dollars per session, sixty-four cents per mile for travel times four coaches, plus thirty dollars for coach meals times four coaches—no, the bylaws require us to pay for meals, even for the skill coaches…Well, that’s what we voted on.”