“It’ll help with balance,” he said.
In years to come, this would feel like a moment of shimmering predestiny, in the same way everything about Devon’s life eventually came to feel mythic within the family. Fate, destiny, retroactivated by a Sears Craftsman.
That fall, Katie drove Devon to the Tumbleangels Gym on Old Taylor Road and signed them both up for Mommy & Me Movers & Shakers.
“At first, she’ll be overly cautious,” Dr. Yossarian warned, “but try to push her.”
Except it was just the opposite. Within a few weeks, Devon was forward-and backward-rolling. Next came chin-ups, handstands, cartwheels as accomplished as those of girls twice her age.
The Human Rubber Band, Katie called her.
Supergirl, Eric called her. Monkey-bar superstar!
And, in some mysterious way, it was as if the foot were helping her.
Frankenfoot, Katie dubbed it. Making it their private joke. Show Mommy how you work that Frankenfoot.
By the end of her first month, Devon had graduated to Tiny Tumblerz, and within a year, Devon was the gym’s VIP, her cubbyhole sprayed silver and festooned with sticker stars.
Watching her on the practice beam, Katie would think, This piece of wood is four inches wide, two feet in the air. Four inches. And I’m going to let my daughter plant her dimpled feet on that and do kicks and dips?
“Do the O,” the other girls would say, cheering as Devon arched her back from a handstand until her tiny bottom touched the top of her head. Every now and then, Eric would lift her up in the air to see if her backbone was really there.
Prodigy, Katie whispered in her most private thoughts but never said aloud. Eric said it. He said it a lot.
And so Eric installed the trampoline.
Hours, days devoted to making the yard ready for her talent, laying thick mats like dominoes. Just as he would eventually do in the basement, hanging a pull-up bar, scraping the concrete bumps off the floor, covering it with panel mats and carpet remnants, wrapping foam around the ceiling posts. For Devon.
And so gymnastics became the center, the mighty spine of everything for them.
Devon turning five, six, seven, thousands of hours driving to and from the gym, to and from the meets, a half a dozen emergency-room visits for the broken toe, knee sprain, elbow popping on the mat, seven stiches after Devon fell from the bars and bit through her tongue.
And the money. Gym tuition, meet fees, equipment, travel, booster fees. She and Eric had stopped counting, gradually becoming used to swelling credit-card debt.
Then, when Drew came along, their delicate, thoughtful son, nothing changed. Quiet, easy, he fit so perfectly—in temperament, in disposition—with everything that was already happening. Devon was happening.
After one meet, Devon medaling in three of four events, in the car on the way home, their fingers stiff from cold, Eric asked Devon, age nine, how it was, how it felt.
“I beat everybody,” she said, solemnly. “I was better than everybody.”
Her eyelashes blinking slowly, like she was surprised.
And Katie and Eric had laughed and laughed, even though Katie felt sorry, always did, for all those other girls who just weren’t as good, didn’t have that magical something that made Devon Devon.
“You gotta get her out of there,” a competition judge confided to Eric the following day. “Ditch that strip-mall gym. Get her to BelStars. Get her to Coach T.
“You keep her here, it’ll all go to waste.”
And that very night Eric began researching second mortgages.
It was, Katie had to admit, exciting.
Coach Teddy Belfour watched Devon’s tryout, rapt.
“Let me offer you a big, mouth-filling oath,” he told Katie and Eric, never taking his eyes from her. “Bring her to BelStars and she’ll find the extent of her power. We’ll find it together.”
That was how he talked, how he was.
The next day, Devon was on the BelStars beam, under the tutelage of the exalted Coach T., the most decorated coach in the state, the silver-maned lion, the gymnast whisperer, the salto Svengali, molder and shaper of fourteen national champions at the Junior Olympic and Elite levels.
That night, Eric told Katie how he and Devon had walked past the long rows of beams and bars, the fearsome BelStars girls whippeting around with faces grim as Soviets’.
He thought she would be terrified by the time they finished the gauntlet. But instead she’d looked up at him, her eyes dark and blazing, and said, “I’m ready.”
And overnight BelStars became their whole world.