Chapter Twenty Ana
Chapter Twenty
Ana
Before—Ten Months at The Palace
Ana kept waiting, but none of the Orphans spoke about it again.
That night in the field. The black van. The four boys.
The man with the beaded necklace. Not even the bite marks on her neck.
She’d hidden them at the rink beneath a black sleeveless turtleneck Indy loaned her, and the rest of the time by wearing her hair down.
Kayla stayed in her room until the bruise around her eye was faded enough to cover with makeup. She had a stomach bug. She had a headache. She’d twisted her ankle on the stairs.
No one checked on Kayla. Not Edie or Dawn or Emile. Not even the school when she didn’t show up for the first day of junior year. She had the Orphans, but they were just teenagers, like her. To the rest of the world, she was irrelevant.
Ana watched the other Orphans for signs about how she should be now. Like nothing had happened? Or like their lives had all been set on a new course? Kayla’s had shattered. Or maybe not. Maybe the pieces had glued themselves back together the way her bruises and cuts had healed.
Somehow, Jolene became bigger and brighter. Her smile, her laugh. Glitter nail polish and bright-blue eye shadow. Pink dresses and white sweaters. Nothing but talk of movies and the new bleacher bee who’d arrived from California with her daughter, who couldn’t even land a double Axel.
And Indy—she became one-dimensional, like she’d gone deeper inside herself, focused only on the training.
On landing the triple Axel, hoping this would mean she could finally go home to Bobby Stark.
Dawn barked her orders—“Stay on your feet! Higher! Faster!” And Indy tried, stroking the length of the rink, crossovers at the corners, then cutting into the center, turning backward, shifting to an outside edge, then forward onto the left blade into the takeoff.
And then the fall, every time flipping off the right blade and landing on her hip.
She couldn’t get the rotation no matter how many times Dawn commanded her to “fight the fear!” Or how many sessions she had with the doctor, the one who was supposed to teach her how to override her brain in that last split second.
There was no way a girl as strong and powerful as Indy, who could also spin so fast in the air, couldn’t get the height she needed. It had to be in her head, he told her.
Then came the rumors about an altercation Kayla had with one of the bleacher bees, but she never said a word about it and neither did anyone else.
Eight weeks after that night in the field, she was gone.
A car from Pueblo parked outside Avery Hall.
Edie helping carry the bags, ordering the rest of them to “grab a duffel, a suitcase, a box.” Kayla had been kicked out of the program and was going into foster care because her grandmother was dead and a family had been found for her about an hour south, in Pueblo.
There was a quick goodbye at the front door, where only Jolene cried and hugged her for more than a second, saying “I love you Kay—always.” For Ana and Indy, it was too short for tears to come, or for words to form, other than stupid things like “I’ll miss you” and “good luck.” That night, Ana lay awake and stared at Mio’s cat poster.
Good luck? Seriously? Was that all she could come up with?
It happened fast and without warning. The changes kept coming.
Hugo and Jolene sat together at dinner and right next to each other when they were all watching TV, and even when they weren’t.
They would sit and talk, so close their entire sides would be touching, from shoulders to hips, thighs to calves.
Their feet would intertwine on the floor, like a pile of unsorted socks.
On Saturday nights, when there was no training the next day, Ana and Indy would look for Jolene to ask what they were doing. Cruising the strip near the downtown? Going for ice cream? A movie?
But Jolene would be gone, her red Jeep not in the parking lot, the smell of her perfume lingering in her room, where she’d gotten dressed and slipped out for the night.
Hugo would also be gone, his friends asking for him later in the TV room, or by the Ping-Pong table, or on the front lawn where Ana and Indy would sometimes sit and stare at the sky, waiting for Jolene to come home.
Mio returned to Japan for the season, and their room was given to a pair of girls from Norway, here for just a month. Ana was moved to a room across the hall with a girl from Holland, and later, a girl from Poland. And then no one.
Change and more change and more change—the air growing cold, the first gusts of snow, and a new competition season underway.
She sometimes thought about her brother, who was now in college, across the country in Ithaca, and her father and mother 289 miles away.
None of them would tell her about Connie’s condition, just that she was in a new trial or on a new drug, and wasn’t that exciting?
Wasn’t modern medicine something? Only it wasn’t excitement she heard in her mother’s voice.
Her family was slipping to the back of her mind.
She noticed it one morning in the dining room, making a peanut butter sandwich.
That was what her mother had always packed for her in the car.
Peanut butter sandwiches in plastic baggies.
Oranges cut into quarters. The smell of either of these had choked her up for months after she’d arrived at The Palace.
Sometimes even sending her to the closet with the Pine-Sol.
But then that one morning came when she opened the jar and smelled the smell and thought, not about her mother, but about Dawn and her lesson later that day.
And whether she would be folded into the blue puffer coat, or left sprawled out on the ice after a fall, alone.
Just the smell of Dawn’s cosmetics became a hit of dopamine, and the need for her approval a gigantic weed inside her. The kind her mother had to pull from the garden using all her might. She wondered how she would stop it now, without Kayla. She was the only one with arms that were strong enough.
But then came a reprieve—the Midwestern Sectionals being held in Denver that November.
Even though the sky was gray, and the city was coated in a brown blanket of dirty snow that sprayed up from the road and down from the exhausts of passing cars, it felt like a burst of sunshine.
The three remaining Orphans were there together, sharing a room in the hotel.
Indy and Ana in one bed. Jolene in her own across a small nightstand. A little cocoon.
Dawn had ten skaters competing and insisted everyone who wasn’t commuting from Echo stay at the same hotel near the rink so they could walk to the practices. None of the Orphans’ parents made the trip.
Ana’s father was tending to her mother.
Patrice told Indy this was just a formality. Everyone knew she would make Nationals, and she had just been here for the show three months ago.
Mr. M. and Mrs. M. were on a trip to Asia. Another continent checked off the list.
So here they were. Together and alone. When Ana walked into the room on the first day, she hopped onto the bed near the window and jumped up and down like a little kid. Indy joined her, taking her hands, the two of them jumping together.
“For fuck’s sake, IndyAna!” Jolene said. “Grow up!”
But she was laughing when she said it.
She sat down on the other bed and picked up a small folder by the phone.
“Shhh,” she told them. She flipped the pages, then grabbed the receiver and dialed a number.
“Hello. I’d like to order room service, please.”
Indy and Ana sat on the edge of the bed, eyes wide as Jolene ordered two pizzas, french fries, three ice cream sundaes. And while it made no sense because Ana had been in plenty of hotels before, this felt like the best day of her entire life.
That morning, Ana had a perfect run-through of her free skate.
Four triples (two toe loops and two Salchows), one in combination, a double Axel, and six more doubles.
The spiral sequence, footwork, and four spins, including the final flying camel spin into a whirring scratch.
Dawn waited at the boards and pulled Ana into her arms like there had never been any doubt.
But all eyes would be on Indy tomorrow during the senior ladies’ free skate.
She still hadn’t landed the triple Axel clean.
Sometimes she stayed on her feet with a quarter-turn cheat.
Other times, she fell—just like she had at the show, landing on that same hip so hard you could feel her bone crack the ice.
Then came the knock on the door. Ana got up, thinking it was room service. But Jolene held her arm.
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Ana asked Indy. But she didn’t answer.
Jolene looked through the peephole, then opened the door.
It was Hugo—Hugo, who skated for Spain and should have been back in Echo.
And yet Indy wasn’t surprised to see him. “Do you have it?” she asked.
Hugo glanced around the room to make sure they were alone.
“It’s fine,” Jolene told him, planting a kiss on his cheek.
“I’ve got it.” He had a backpack that he set on the ground. He unzipped it and pulled out the contents.
“What’s happening?” Ana asked again.
“It’s for the bruise,” Jolene said.
Ana felt a quick breath fill her lungs. A little gasp of surprise she tried to swallow because Indy and Jolene had made these arrangements behind her back. At least, that was how it felt. The sunshine beginning to fade.
Hugo pulled out a plastic container with a screw top. It was clear with no label, like a giant water bottle.
“What is that?” Ana asked.
“It’s DMSO,” he said. “A chemical compound that speeds up healing.”
Indy asked to see it. But Hugo told her, “There’s nothing to see—it’s not labeled or anything.”
“Is it safe?” Indy was worried.
Ana froze, just like she’d done that night in the field, and back at Emile’s house when Kayla lay in his bed with her busted lip and bruised eye. It was still in her—this instinct. In spite of her sessions with the doctor.
“Yes,” Hugo insisted. “We use it all the time back home.”
“What do I do with it?” Indy asked.
Ana listened to the conversation about how the liquid chemical worked. How it passed easily through membranes in the skin and reduced inflammation. Jolene read things from her laptop—dimethyl sulfoxide, a colorless liquid, a by-product of papermaking, a solvent but also now used for wound care.
Ana’s head was spinning with each new piece of data. Hugo was so brazen, so certain. Jolene so trusting of everything he said, blinded by love.
“There’s a vet who mixes it with something that numbs the pain while it’s healing,” Hugo said. “It’s totally safe if you just put it on your skin.”
Hugo went on about how it was used to treat animals here but hadn’t been approved by the “backward government” and “political bullshit,” even though everyone knew it was safe, but they were all so paranoid about painkillers.
“Indy . . . I don’t know about this,” Ana said, tugging at her arm.
“What else am I supposed to do?” Indy’s eyes welled with tears, which she quickly brushed away. “I need that stupid jump.”
Dawn was never going to send her home, and her mother was never going to let her, not until she had the triple Axel.
Ana saw a flash of Patrice when she’d been here for the show. The way she’d been practically skating Indy’s program herself from the boards, her face like that of a young girl, on the ice, jumping and spinning.
She searched her brain, but nothing came forward to answer the question. What else could Indy do?
So Indy went into the bathroom with Hugo and Jolene, the door cracked open enough for Ana to see inside to the mirror and the reflection of Indy in her underpants—in front of Hugo—who was now dripping the liquid into the palm of his hand, covered by a latex glove, and rubbing it into her leg, and Jolene’s hands on Indy’s shoulders and Indy’s face getting red.
And Hugo: “This bruise is fucked up.”
“Will it really help?” Indy asked.
“Yes,” he promised.
And there she was, in her underpants, with Hugo’s hands on her hip and butt cheek now, rubbing DMSO into her skin while Jolene looked on, holding her so she wouldn’t cry.
Because Indy knew the morphine in the DMSO might kill the pain, but it couldn’t make her jump higher and make the rotation.
And it couldn’t fix her mother and Dawn, and their rivalry, which was more fucked up than the bruise, and so was the fact that neither one could see past it to the beautiful girl they were using to serve their ends. Patrice’s own daughter.
Three words formed in Ana’s head, surprising her as she thought about her best friend, the person she would fight for and sacrifice for, almost anything. No, not almost—she would do anything for Indy. She let the words burn inside her.
Fight the fear. She thought about that moment in the black van and watching Kayla in Emile’s bed, both times frozen.
The impulse taking over. And now here she was, watching this scene unfold.
All because of Dawn. Indy was desperate to get home.
She would never give in. And Patrice—neither would she.
It’s easy to say you’d do something. Like leaving Dawn’s side to try the triple flip, promising not to slow down this time. Ana was all talk. When it came time to fight, she froze. She was a coward.
The doctor said the fear needed to become rage to change the impulse.
So she closed her eyes and began to search for it.
The rage that would help her fight for her best friend.