Chapter 24
When Sasha wakes up the next morning, the Hartmans’ house is silent, which means Danny isn’t up yet.
For a few minutes, he lingers in the comfortable guest bed, debating whether or not to wait for Danny before eating breakfast, but eventually his growling stomach wins out.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes, he heads downstairs to the kitchen, looking forward to some quiet time before everyone else gets up.
“Good morning.”
Startled, Sasha trips over his own feet and almost crashes into the island counter. Catching himself, he looks up to find Danny’s father already seated at the kitchen table, a newspaper spread out in front of him.
Thankfully, Andy doesn’t comment on Sasha’s lack of coordination. “Sleep well?”
Sasha nods. After turning off the lights, he’d kept hearing an indistinct murmur through the walls—and then he’d realized it was Danny, talking to Buddy about God knows what. He’d listened for a while, smiling, until he drifted off; it was the best night’s sleep he’s had all year. “You?”
“Can’t complain.” Andy gestures towards the counter. “Coffee’s still hot.”
Sasha opens the cabinet with the mugs—Diane had given him another tour of the kitchen cupboards after dinner, “Just so you know where everything is”—and grabs one at random, not realizing until mid-pour that it has a drawing of a golden retriever wearing sunglasses.
Life is golden, it says.
Sasha stifles a laugh, then starts figuring out how to make breakfast in an unfamiliar American kitchen.
After some trial and error with the stove, he manages to get a pot of water boiling for his buckwheat; with nothing else to do while it cooks, he awkwardly joins Andy at the kitchen table, wishing he’d brought his phone with him.
“You read the paper?” Andy asks.
“Uh. Sometimes,” Sasha replies, though “almost never” would be closer to the truth.
Andy smiles. “Well, everything’s online now. But Diane still likes doing the crossword by hand. There’s a sudoku in there if you’d like.”
He goes back to the sports pages, mercifully relieving them both of small-talk obligations, and the next half hour passes in companionable silence.
Once the buckwheat’s ready, Sasha fixes up a bowl and brings it to the table, pulling over the current events section.
He doesn’t normally care about the news—in fact, he’s been avoiding it ever since he left Russia—but it’s a good way to practice his English, and he’s curious to see what the Americans are talking about.
Their president, apparently, and not much else.
Each article takes him a long time to read—it turns out that airport signs, restaurant menus, and Danny’s haphazardly punctuated texts have not, in fact, prepared him for anything more substantial—and he’s only gotten through a couple when he hears movement on the second floor, followed by muffled voices and the click-click-click of dog paws on the stairs.
“Here comes the cavalry,” Andy says, lowering his newspaper.
Buddy and Luna burst into the kitchen, Danny and Diane bringing up the rear.
It’s pure pandemonium: the humans all saying good morning to each other, the dogs barking back as they race in circles around the table.
Even after Andy lets Buddy and Luna out into the yard, the noise barely subsides, Diane and Danny carrying on at least three separate conversations as they fill up the dog bowls before making their own breakfasts.
“Well, we’ll have to take them to the vet next week, so I’ll see what they recommend—oh, can you grab the milk? Thanks—Sasha, honey, how did your buckwheat turn out?”
“Sounds good—here—oh yeah, wait, what does buckwheat look like? I wanna see.”
“Um,” Sasha says, trying to remember Diane’s question as Danny comes over to peer at his breakfast (leaning maybe closer than he should, a hand on the back of Sasha’s chair). “Good?”
Andy raises an eyebrow at him in silent amusement, then disappears behind his paper.
“So, what are you boys up to today?” Diane asks when things are finally calm again. Everyone’s at the table now, including the dogs—Luna lounging on Sasha’s left foot, Buddy with his chin on Danny’s thigh.
“We’re going to the gym. Coach wants to meet Sasha and go over some camp stuff.
” Danny bites into a strip of turkey bacon, then catches sight of Buddy’s hopeful expression and laughs, breaking off a piece for him.
“Aw, here you go, Buddy. And then, I don’t know—Sasha, did you wanna work out? Like, at a regular gym?”
Sasha nods. He’s been stretching every day since he got to California, and alternating between jogging and weightlifting depending on what’s been available at the hotels; it won’t stop him from being sore after camp and practice tomorrow, but better a light workout than nothing at all.
“Okay, cool, and then we can hit up this amazing taco shack for lunch—”
“Carmen’s!” Diane exclaims triumphantly. “That’s the name of the taco place I was telling you about, the one that Jen loved. It’s somewhere in Glendale, you’ll have to google it.”
“Sweet, maybe we can check it out next weekend.”
Danny beams at Sasha, who decides not to mention that he’s really not that into tacos. He has a feeling this would make Danny sad—like actually, legitimately sad—and tacos are fine, they’re just not his favorite food, so whatever.
“And then this afternoon, we can, like, chill and play video games, or we can take Buddy and Luna on a hike—not a crazy one, obviously, but like, there’s some cool trails around here, and one of them has a dog park—but we don’t have to go to that if you don’t want to—or we can hang at the beach…
” Danny pauses in thought, then shrugs and grins at Sasha. “Or we can just do everything.”
And Sasha can’t help smiling back, because at that moment—sitting there in the Hartmans’ sunny kitchen, Danny close enough to nudge under the table, two more weeks of this ahead of him—the possibilities really do seem endless, as long as Danny keeps talking about them.
“Everything is good,” he says.
*
When they walk into Sunnyside Gymnastics Academy, the first thing Sasha sees is Danny’s face, gleaming and grinning on a red, white, and blue banner that says “Welcome to Sunnyside – home of 2x Olympian Danny Hartman!”
“Advertising,” Danny mumbles when he notices Sasha looking at it. “For the parents.”
Sasha’s vaguely aware that American gyms don’t get any funding from their government and have to rely on student enrollment, but this seems like overkill.
The small lobby is practically a shrine to Danny, an entire wall covered in photos of him at competitions—usually with a medal or a trophy in his hands—not to mention all the newspaper articles chronicling his successes as a senior elite, a junior elite, and even younger, a bright-cheeked kid cheesing for the camera.
“Where are other Olympians?” Sasha asks, looking around.
The rest of the walls are mostly filled with pictures of past and present teams, endless rows of uniformed boys and girls; there’s also a handful of older athletes posing with sweatshirts and flags, he’s guessing for their university teams. But no one has as many photos as Danny.
“There aren’t any,” Danny says. “I’m the only elite here.”
“Really?” Sasha knew Danny practiced alone with his coach, but he’d assumed that was an arrangement between them; he hadn’t realized there was no one else at all.
Between Round Lake and his own club at home, which churns out elites like a factory, he’s always trained with the best of the best—he can’t imagine having no one else to push himself against.
“I mean, there were others back in, like, the eighties, but Coach said it was a huge hassle cause of, like, politics or something? And it’s super expensive, too.
He wasn’t even gonna do it again, but… I don’t know, I guess I brought him out of retirement.
” Danny smiles at Sasha. “Come on, I’ll show you the gym. ”
Sasha follows him through a doorway into a waiting area, separated from the competition floor by a wooden half-wall, with cubbies for the students’ belongings and rows of silver bleachers for the parents.
Since it’s a Sunday morning, the place is empty, and Sasha’s gaze sweeps over the usual detritus of water bottles, sweatshirts, and wristbands before turning to the rest of the gym.
He’s already seen parts of it in Danny’s training videos, but he’s surprised by how small it looks in person.
The floor is wedged into a corner between the vault runway and a long, narrow trampoline running perpendicular to the waiting area; on the other side of the trampoline, three balance beams are squeezed together so tightly, Sasha wonders if the girls can even fall off of them without hitting their neighbor.
The parallel bars, a pommel horse, and a set of rings are crammed onto a single mat behind the beams—presumably to avoid taking up space needed for the vault, whose landing zone seems worryingly close to the bathrooms—and further back, there’s a high bar sandwiched between two sets of uneven bars, chalk barrels tucked in tight under the cables.
A lone janitor is scrubbing at something on one of the mats, either ignoring Danny and Sasha or unaware of their presence.
Thinking of Round Lake, with its spacious layout and multiple setups for each apparatus (including two floors, three vaults, and every major equipment brand to help them prepare ahead of time for different countries’ arenas), Sasha’s actually a little shocked that Danny’s training here.
He’d have thought the Americans, for all their chest-thumping about the Olympics, would have provided better facilities for their athletes.
“Hey, Coach!” Danny calls, and the man Sasha mistook for a janitor glances up. He waves them over, still scrubbing at the mat, so Danny motions for Sasha to follow him across the gym. “Did someone puke?”