Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
DREW
“Okay if I put on some music?” Ally asks as we turn out of the condo parking garage. It’s seven-thirty Saturday morning, and we’re heading to Toronto for my neurology appointment.
“Sure,” I reply, and Ally reaches over to tap the screen on the dashboard.
I hadn’t planned to tell Ally about this appointment, and I definitely hadn’t planned to ask her to come with me. But, as often happens when I’m with this girl, the words just slipped out.
I can think of a lot of excuses for telling her, and some of them even make sense.
She already knew about the tremor, and I wanted her to know I was taking her advice and getting it checked out.
I didn’t want to have to lie to her about what I was doing today.
And I thought she might enjoy a day trip to Toronto.
Another explanation involves a mind game: by telling Ally, I was dismissing the possibility that there was something seriously wrong with me. Only a very selfish man would bring a woman he’d recently met to an appointment where he could receive life-changing news.
But the real reason I told Ally is a hell of a lot simpler: I wanted her to come with me.
She finishes tapping the screen, and a song starts. It sounds familiar but I can’t place it, so I glance at the screen to see what she’s picked.
“Pink?” I ask.
Ally nods. “‘Just Like a Pill.’ It’s what I listen to when I’m anxious about something.”
I glance over at her. “I’m not anxious, Ally.”
She shoots me a speaking look. “It’s a normal human emotion, Drew. Anyway, I used to listen to this song before my tennis matches. It’s so angsty, but for some reason it settles me down.”
I’m unlikely to get a better opening, so I decide to ask the question that’s been bothering me for weeks. “What happened with tennis, Ally?”
She pretends not to understand. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a lot of people in your position wouldn’t shut up about the fact that they’d been a professional athlete, but you keep it a secret. And you started to go by Alexandra instead of Ally—”
“It’s my real name,” she cuts in.
“And your hair’s different, and you wear glasses—”
“You don’t like my glasses?” she interrupts.
“I love your glasses,” I reply. “But I hate the idea that you’re hiding behind them. It’s like you don’t want to be recognized as a tennis player.”
“Former tennis player,” she corrects.
“Whatever. It’s like you’re ashamed of it, and it doesn’t make sense.”
She turns her head away and looks out the window, and for a moment I think she’s going to brush off the question and shut the conversation down. And she’s got every right to do that. She doesn’t owe me an explanation.
But maybe she realizes that I’m not just idly curious; I care about her answer because I care about her, even if I haven’t told her yet.
Or maybe she just takes pity on me, and figures I need a distraction from this morning’s appointment.
Whatever the reason, she starts to talk.
“I started playing tennis when I was six,” she says, turning back to meet my gaze. “The summer after first grade, my parents put me in a tennis camp for a week. I loved it, and I was good at it. The instructor told my parents I had a lot of potential.”
The light turns green, and I reluctantly drag my eyes back to the road. Fortunately there’s hardly any traffic yet.
“And I’m pretty sure it was the first time anyone thought I had potential,” she continues, “because the teachers at school sure didn’t. I wasn’t the slowest kid in my class, but I was average. Barely.”
“You were six,” I interrupt.
“Yeah, but even at that age, they could tell, and I could too. And it surprised everyone, because the rest of my family is really bright. My dad’s a Greek history prof and my mom has a master’s. And my sister Hayley learned to read when she was three or something.”
“Ah.” It’s probably unfair, but I dislike Hayley already.
“Anyway, I begged my parents to let me take tennis lessons. At first it was once a week, but I kept asking to do more, and by the time I was ten I was playing every day. I started competing in junior tournaments, and I did well.”
Ally pauses and takes a deep breath. “Then, when I was fifteen, I went to a tennis academy in Florida. My parents didn’t want to let me go at first—it was really expensive, and they thought I should be focusing on school.
Tennis was a hobby, not a career. But I convinced them that if I went to Florida, I’d have a real shot at a tennis scholarship in the States. ”
“You went to Florida by yourself?”
“Yeah, I boarded at the academy. It’s where I met Sarah Hayes, we were roommates. I won quite a few junior tournaments and got some good scholarship offers. I could have gone to Stanford. But I turned them all down to join the pro tour.”
She sighs. “My parents thought I was crazy, my dad especially. A lot more players go the college route now, and join the pro tour after they get their degree. So they have something to fall back on if tennis doesn’t work out.
But I didn’t want to go to college. There wasn’t anything I really wanted to study, and it felt like it’d be a distraction from tennis. ”
She goes quiet for a beat. I wish I could see her face, but we’ve made it to the highway and I really have to focus on the road.
“So you joined the pro tour,” I prompt.
“Yep,” she says softly. “I joined the pro tour, and it all went to hell. It was a whole different league from the juniors, which shouldn’t have been surprising, but somehow it was.
I felt like I couldn’t win anything, and I didn’t understand it.
And since I wasn’t winning much, I wasn’t earning much, and I had to keep asking my parents for money. ”
“That must have been tough.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see her shrug.
“They helped me out, but I could tell they thought it was a bad investment. And in their defense, they’re well off, but not so rich that they didn’t notice the money.
Anyway, I limped along on the tour for four years, hoping for a breakthrough that never came. ”
“You did better than most people,” I point out. “Most tennis players never even make the pro tour.”
“I know that,” she replies. “But I had so much potential, Drew. I was the runner-up at the Wimbledon Juniors. I didn’t need to go to college because I was going to be a star. In retrospect, it was a big mistake.”
I remember the videos of her matches, of the look on her face when she hit a good shot, and something pinches in my chest. “You decided to chase your dream. I wouldn’t call that a mistake.”
She gives another little shrug. “Maybe not.”
“You didn’t consider a career in sports?” I ask. “Like being a tennis pro at a club or something?”
“No. After I quit, I didn’t want anything to do with tennis. I came home, and my parents offered to pay for me to go to college, but I didn’t want to do that either. It would have felt like admitting they were right, that it’s what I should have done in the first place, and I couldn’t do that.”
“So what did you do instead?”
“I went out to the west coast, around Vancouver,” she says. “Surfed and mountain biked in the summer, skied in the winter.” She pauses. “When you’re staring at the ocean, the fact that you can’t hit a ball over a net more times than the next girl doesn’t seem to matter very much.”
“Yeah.” I can see what she means. “When did you come back?”
Ally sighs. “I’d been there for almost two years when I got sick with a horrible flu.
It might have been mono, I don’t know, but whatever it was knocked me completely flat.
I’d been working as a waitress, but it didn’t pay very much, and anything extra went to sports.
So when I got the flu and couldn’t work for a month, I couldn’t pay rent.
I had to call my parents and ask for the money to fly home. ”
I feel another pinch in my chest at the thought of her in Vancouver, sick, broke, and presumably alone.
“It was a wake-up call,” she continues. “And I was lucky; my parents sent me the money and let me move home. I got a part-time job as a barista and enrolled in community college, got a diploma in medical office administration. You pretty much know the rest.”
There’s so much I want to say, but I spit out the first thing that pops into my head. “I shouldn’t have pushed you to play tennis.”
“No, it’s okay,” she says. “It’d been four years, it was time to stop avoiding it. I kind of liked it, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Before I can figure out what to say next, she changes the subject. “There’s a service station up ahead, with a Tim Hortons,” she says. “Do we have time to stop for a snack or something?”
I glance at the clock on the dash, then signal to pull off the highway. “Yeah, we’ve got time.” We both skipped breakfast this morning, so a snack’s a good idea.
We buy bagels to eat on the road, and make it to Toronto forty-five minutes later.
“I’ll probably be about two hours,” I tell Ally, as we walk from the parking lot to the hospital. “So if you want to go shopping, the Eaton Center’s a block away—”
“No, I’m good,” Ally says. “I’ll wait in the waiting room.”
“Okay.”
I lead Ally through the lobby and up the stairs to the MRI department.
I trained at this hospital, so I know it like the back of my hand, but it feels weird to be here as a patient.
As I hand my health card to the woman at the desk, I wonder if she’ll recognize my name, but she doesn’t.
Of course she doesn’t, I’m just a regular patient.
They’re running ahead of schedule, so they take me in right away. I leave Ally my wallet, keys, and phone, then follow a tech to a cubicle to change into a hospital gown.
The scan feels like it takes forever, even though I know it can’t be more than half an hour.
My nose itches, and I start to wish I’d claimed claustrophobia and asked for an Ativan.
But finally, mercifully, it ends. I resist the temptation to ask the tech to let me look at the images on the computer.