Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
When I wake, predawn light filters through Adrian’s shutters, casting the room in an indigo sheen.
It’s the same cool light that has illuminated breakfasts spent standing in the kitchen, smoothies drunk on the way to the boathouse, an expanse of unbroken water, misty in the warming air.
It’s the light of discipline and hard work. The light of my real life.
Carefully, I extricate myself from the sheets and hunt down my clothes.
My sports bra lays discarded by the bedside.
My yoga pants and tank top are still in a crumpled heap below the granite countertops.
When I return to the bedroom fully dressed, Adrian’s chest rises and falls with the soft ease of sleep, his hair whispering against the pillowcase.
I won’t see him at practice this morning—he’s going to a recruiting event in San Francisco today—so if I leave before he wakes, I’ll have a few hours to think about “next time” before we talk again.
I hunt through the living room until I find a pad of paper and a pen in the drawer under the coffee table. I scratch out a quick note, trying to keep my scrawl as legible as possible:
Thanks for an amazing day. Needed to change for practice. See you soon.
Kath
It’s true, but also purposefully neutral. Hopefully, it’ll also keep Adrian from worrying before I have a chance to sort through my feelings.
When I get to the boathouse an hour later, I expect to be the only one there.
With Adrian away, the performance team has the morning off.
Yet when I drop off the last creaky stair beside the bays, I find Peter running through a set of warm-up lunges underneath my beech-tree.
He’s facing the pale expanse of water, watching the mist rise from it with intense concentration etched between his eyebrows.
I observe him for a moment, thinking about a young teen girl who used to stretch in that same spot, feeling like she’d finally found a place where she could be herself.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stopping next to his shoulder.
Peter startles and his glasses slip down the bridge of his nose. He shoves them back up and tugs his earbuds out.
“Sorry to sneak up on you,” I say. “You didn’t want to take the morning off?”
“The other guys are but…” He chews at his bottom lip, gaze sailing toward the long expanse of water before pinging back to me. “We only have a month until Nationals.”
I nod, because that’s explanation enough. Youth Nationals are the weekend after Pan Ams, so I have a rough idea of how much urgency Peter feels right now. I shrug my bag higher and motion toward the bays. “Right. Good. Well, I’ll just…”
“Hey, do you—” Peter starts, then ducks his head. He rubs at the back of his neck, looking somewhere over my shoulder. “Do you want to, maybe, paddle together? Today? I’ll do whatever workout you want and I know I won’t be able to quite keep up, but…If you’re up for it.”
I smile. “Yeah, okay, then.”
“Yeah? You’re not just humoring me or something?”
“Nah, it’ll be good to have someone to pace me. I’ll give you a head start on the intervals so we can end at the same time.”
Peter’s lips crack into the widest smile I’ve seen on him yet.
Twenty minutes later, we cruise out from the docks and, from the moment I dip my oars into the water, I feel good.
Strong. My muscles respond to my intentions with an unexpected energy.
My lungs feel clear and weightless, and my shell slices toward our line of buoys as effortlessly as a butcher’s knife running through paper.
Peter starts our first interval fifteen seconds before me and I push hard to catch him, each stroke prying through the water in rhythmic progression until I overtake his bow just at the end of our row of buoys.
“Next one,” I tell him as I let my blades skim across the surface in a bumpy swish.
Peter pushes up his glasses with a shoulder and grins back. “Give me twelve seconds next time.”
“I gave you fifteen on this one.”
He pulls on one oar to start turning his bow back around. “Sometimes I do my best work when things feel impossible.”
I nod my approval. “Twelve it is.”
My watch screams twelve seconds after Peter starts his interval.
I hit my first stroke hard and fast. Although Peter will have a good view of me as I race toward him, I decide to avoid looking for his stern when I check my line.
Still, I hear the splash and groan of his strokes as I gain on him.
An image of my bow ball coursing up the side of his hull flits through my mind and I drive my legs harder, pushing past the initial flood of acid that already has my blood feeling like it’s on fire.
My shoulders burn. Peter’s stroke rate picks up as we near the finish.
With a few meters to go, I pour on the gas, pumping my legs and core as hard as they’ll take me.
We hit the end buoys. I glance to my side. My oarlocks are nearly even with his, but not quite. Peter won that one.
“Very nice,” I say.
He can barely contain his smile through heaving breaths. “Again?”
The sun is high in the sky by the time we coast back toward the docks. The inlet radiates harsh light, and a mix of sweat and briny water has darkened my shirt. It’s rarely warmer than temperate in Berkeley, even in the summertime, but today is unusually hot.
“Best practice I’ve had in a while,” Peter says as he braces an oar against his knee and lets his boat drift to the dock.
“Me too.” I heave off my seat and dip both legs into the water by my hull, letting the cool liquid soothe my heated skin.
He’s right—this practice was great. Maybe it went so well because I was setting pace for Peter.
Maybe it’s my new commitment to Adrian’s coaching cues.
Maybe it was corn dogs and mini golf and everything that happened after.
“I can tell why Adrian keeps raving about you and your quad. You’re going to kill it at Nationals. ”
I think I must have said the wrong thing, though, because Peter’s smile falters.
“What?” I ask.
He still hasn’t gotten out of his boat, and he runs a hand through the water without looking up. An eddy ripples behind his fingers. “What do you do when you think you might fail?”
“I’m not sure I…Sorry, what do you mean?”
Peter frowns at his eddy as the current swallows it. “I’m just—how do you get yourself to keep going when the pressure gets big?”
I swallow because I can’t help but think about the way this conversation echoes the one I had with Adrian last night. “Is someone putting pressure on you?”
“No. No. It’s just like…my dads keep getting calls from coaches at all these big schools, big names, and they’re saying they’ll be there at Youth Nationals, watching.
And Coach Adrian and my parents are great—just happy for me and everything.
But I feel like…what if I’m not as good as everyone thinks? Does that make sense?”
The high-pitched screech of a seagull rings through the still morning air.
“Yes,” I say. “That makes sense.”
“What do you do?” he presses. “When it feels that way.”
Peter looks up at me full of hope and crushing expectation and, god, how do I live up to what he needs?
Talking to Adrian about this stuff is one thing, but a seventeen-year-old kid is something else entirely.
I don’t know the right thing to say. That everything will be okay, win or lose?
That he should be proud of second place even if he expects to get first?
Those would be lies and we’d both know it.
The truth is that the pressure only increases. Winning only makes losing that much harder. Striving for excellence means never being satisfied. Sometimes, the price we pay for success is giving up our contentment.
“Rowing is rough,” I say, trying to find a way to tell the truth without being disheartening. Besides, a variation of this line seemed to help Adrian yesterday, so why not Peter? “Sometimes that’s just how it’s going to feel.”
Instantly, I know I’ve said the wrong thing because Peter’s eyes slip from mine. The sheen of expectation in his face dulls.
“Yeah,” he says. “It is. I still love it, though.”
“Of course,” I say, floundering to find better words. “I’m sorry. I’m sure your coach has better advice on this stuff.”
He nods. “He tells me he believes in me all the time. That helps.”
“Good,” I say. At least someone knows what they are doing with this kid because it definitely isn’t me. “That’s good.”
Peter lifts himself from his boat and hoists it out of the water.
“Thanks for practicing with me,” he says, before stepping over his oars and striding up to the boathouse.
. . .
I’m still haunted by that conversation when I scale Mom’s porch steps. The warm chorus of my childhood awaits me on the other side of the door: a whistling tea kettle, Mom’s feet dancing across the hardwood floors, and a symphony of chimes piped from her ancient stereo.
A peal of Mom’s laughter rises from the kitchen, tinkling in near harmony with the music.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says as I close the front door. She has her phone cradled on her shoulder so she can pour a cup of tea. “I’m not flexible enough for that pose.”
I toe off my sneakers and move past the kitchen, aiming for the stairs.
Adrian will be back from his recruiting event in a couple of hours and, since I didn’t have much time to think on the water, I still haven’t decided what to say to him.
Plus, I didn’t see Mom when I came home to change before practice and she’s sure to have noticed I didn’t spend the night in my bed.
I might be an adult, but it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever done something like that.
Despite my best efforts, though, the creaky floorboard by the couch announces my presence.
Mom spins, facing me with lavender-colored eye masks. Abruptly, she tells the person on the line that she needs to go.
“Kath.” She lets her phone drop to the counter. “Good morning.”