“What a shame,” Katie said, feeling it more sharply than she should, blaming it on the rum. “Thanks.”
He draped it over her head, its dampness tickling her, his sneakers nearly slipping on the rimy concrete. A squeak, a skid. Later, she would wonder if he’d slipped like that on Ash Road seconds before he died, his sneakers on the sandy gravel as the headlights came.
“Careful,” Katie said, a catch in her voice. “It’s not safe.”
“Nothing ever is,” he said, winking, his white tee glowing under the lights, backing away, into the dark of the emptying lot. “Good night, Mrs. Knox. Good night.”
I.
“The eyes of a young girl can tell everything. And I always look in their eyes. There I can see if I will have a champion.”
—Neshka Robeva, gymnast and coach
Chapter One
If she ever had to talk about it, which she never would, Katie would have to go back, back years before it happened. Before Coach T. and Hailey and Ryan Beck. Back before Devon was born, when there were only two Knoxes, neither of whom knew a tuck from a salto or what you called that glossy egg-shaped platform in the center of the room, the vault that would change their lives.
And Katie would tell it in three parts.
The Foot.
The Fall.
The Pit.
You could only begin to understand what happened, and why, if you understood these three things.
And Devon’s talent. Because that had been there from the beginning, maybe even before the beginning.
In proud-parent moments, of which there were too many to count, she and Eric would talk about feeling Devon in the womb, her body arching and minnowing and promising itself to them both.
Soon, it turned to kicking. Kicking with such vigor that, one night, Katie woke to a popping sound and, breathless, keeled over in pain. Eric stared helplessly at the way her stomach seemed to spasm with alien horrors.
What was inside her, they wondered, her rib poking over her sternum, dislocated while she slept.
It was no alien, but it was something extraordinary.
It was Devon, a marvel, a girl wonder, a prodigy, a star.
Devon, kicking her way out. Out, out, out.
And they had made her.
And, in some ways, she had made them.
For years, Katie would touch the spot the rib had poked, as if she could still feel the tender lump. It was reassuring somehow. It reminded her that it had always been there, that force in Devon, that fire.
Like that line in that poem, the one she’d read in school, a lifetime ago. Back when life felt so cramped and small, when she never thought anything so grand could ever happen.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
“She’s been doing it since she was three? How is that even possible?”
That’s what other people, never gym people, always said. Making private judgments, unspoken charges of helicopter parenting, unmet maternal, or paternal, ambitions, Olympic dreams. No one ever believed Katie and Eric had never cared about sports, or even competition. Eric had played high-school baseball, indifferently. Katie had never been athletic at all, devoting her adolescence to art class and boys and sneaking off to see bands, the vestige of which was the Fight Like a Grrrl tattoo snaking around her left thigh.
“My three-year-old just wanted to play,” they’d say smugly. “We just let her play.”
As if it had ever been a choice, or a decision.
“It started as play,” Eric always told people. “It started with the trampoline.”
Then he’d tell them how, one long Sunday, he’d installed it in the yard, leaning over the auger rented from the hardware store, a pile of chicken wire, empty beer bottles at his feet.
The trampoline was the better story, an easier one, but it wasn’t the truth.
Because the trampoline came after the accident, came after the Foot. And the accident was how it truly began. How that force in her found its fuse.
Three-year-old Devon, barefoot, running across the lawn to Daddy.
Her foot sliding on a grass mound, she stumbled into their idling, rust-eaten lawn mower, her foot so tiny it slipped behind the blade guard, the steel shearing off two toes and a squeak of soft foot flesh.
A few feet away, face white with panic, Eric slid to his knees beside her and somehow managed to pluck both toes from the grass.
Packed in ice, they looked like pink peas and Katie held them in her hands as Eric drove with careering ferocity the six miles to the hospital where doctors tried (but failed) to reattach them, like stringing beads, Devon’s face blue and wet.
“It could have been worse,” their pediatrician, Dr. Yossarian, told them later. “Sometimes with the riding mowers, the whole foot pops off.” And he made an appalling pucker sound with his mouth.
“But what can we do?” Eric asked, even as Dr. Yossarian assured them Devon would be fine. “There must be something.”
So Dr. Yossarian suggested kiddie soccer, or ice-skating, or tumbling, something.