Chapter 17
seventeen
PHOEBE
The tape went on a little after one o’clock and that’s when all of it got real.
There’s a physiotherapist in every tennis locker room on earth who tapes the same way, and this one taped my ankle exactly the way a man in Melbourne taped it when I was twenty-two, and my body understood where it was before I did.
Heart rate up. Hands cold. Mouth dry in the specific way that isn’t thirst.
Marta stood in the corner holding my son and said absolutely nothing. It was the most useful thing anybody did for me all day.
My father came in with a banana and a bottle and put them down and didn’t give me a speech.
“Anything? Last words? Condolences?” I said, fighting the urge to go find a nearby trash can to politely puke into.
“He’ll go to your backhand early and try to make you run around it. Don’t. Take it early and go up the line and make him come forward, because he doesn’t want to come forward, he’s thirty-eight and his knee is worse than yours.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He picked up his coffee. “Play the ball, not the story.”
He left and I put my hand flat on the wall for a second and let the tunnel noise come up through it.
Then Marta handed me Colby, and I held my son with the stadium going wild overhead, and there’s nobody in the world qualified to tell me those two facts don’t sit perfectly together.
They walked us out into the afternoon.
I’d played that stadium more times than I can count.
I knew the exact place in the tunnel where the sound changes from a hum you feel in your feet to something with edges on it.
I hit that spot and it went up my spine and I laughed out loud, and Edwardo, walking behind me with his bag on his shoulder, said, “Oh no. She’s enjoying herself. ”
Then there was the light.
Twenty thousand people stood up.
I tried to be cool about it, but failed.
I stopped walking. I stood at the mouth of that tunnel with a racquet bag on my shoulder and a body held together with rehab and stubbornness and I looked up at all of them and I let it hit me, and it went on and on, and there were signs, and there was a woman in the second row crying, and I thought: they came to see this.
Whatever they think happened to me, they came.
Edwardo bumped my shoulder with his.
“Walk, woman,” he said, gently. “You are on television.”
My body did nothing for the first three games. It was a stranger’s body. I was late on everything, I chased two drop shots I had no business chasing, and he broke me in the third game with a forehand I saw the whole way and couldn’t get to.
Then in the fifth game he came to net on a ball he shouldn’t have, and I put a backhand pass up the line past him so hard he didn’t move, and something switched on behind my eyes and didn’t switch off again for the rest of the afternoon.
It’s still there, and it’s been there since I was fourteen.
I broke him back. Then we both held serve, over and over, neither of us giving an inch.
We went to a tiebreak in the first and I lost it because I got greedy at five-all and he made me pay, and he pointed his racquet at me in a way that meant well tried, and the crowd made a noise like a held breath going out.
Second set I stopped trying to be the player I was.
That was the match, if you want it. I stopped playing the highlight reel and I played my father’s tennis. Take it early. Up the line. Make him come forward. Make him keep coming forward until his knee tells him about it.
I listened to Dad and it was the best choice I could make.
Edwardo came forward. His knee told him about it.
I took the second set and my abs were screaming at me by the end of it and I didn’t care in any way at all.
In the third set, at three-two, I looked up.
You’re not supposed to. You look at your strings and your feet and the tape on the net and nowhere else. But there was a changeover and I was sitting with a towel over my head and I came out from under it and I looked at the box.
My father. Zoe. Two empty seats where the Newmans should have been, which the broadcast had certainly noticed, and Francis was going to have opinions about that for the rest of her life.
And then I looked past the box because something moved, and I found my husband.
Not in the box.
He was in the overflow along the wall by the corner of the court, in the rows where they put the spouses who don’t get badges, in a plain grey shirt with no sunglasses and no hat.
For Troy that’s the equivalent of walking down a street naked.
And he was holding our son against his chest with one hand flat on his back.
My father put him there. There’s no other way that happened. Leon Powers had my son in a stadium and gave him to Troy Newman and then sat down in a box and said nothing about it.
The camera found them. Of course it did. There’s a red light on the front of it and I watched it come on.
And my husband didn’t look at it.
He turned Colby’s face into his shoulder, away from the lens, and put his hand up over the side of his head, and he kept his face down and looked at nothing, and he stayed like that until the camera got bored and left.
I’ve watched that man find a lens in a crowded room like a plant finds a window. I’ve watched him work a rope line in the rain for as long as it took. I have never in seventeen years seen him refuse a camera.
Edwardo said, “Time.”
I got up off the chair.
I’d like to tell you I played beautifully after that. I didn’t.
I got broken immediately, because my head was on the wall by the corner of the court with a man in a grey shirt, and Edwardo took the game without losing a point and looked at me across the net with genuine irritation, because being handed something is an insult and we’ve both known that since we were fifteen.
So I put it away.
That’s the actual skill, incidentally. Not the forehand. Anybody can learn a forehand. The skill is being able to take the single most important thing in your life and set it down on the ground next to your bag for the length of a tennis match.
I took his serve away from him again to level it at five-all, with a return I’d have been proud of at my peak.
Then I was serving for the match. One more game and it was over, and everything above my knees was on fire.
I went to the deuce court, the side of the court my father has been complaining about since I was a child, and his voice was so loud in my head it was practically a violation. Front foot down. Out wide.
I hit the best serve of the afternoon.
Edwardo got a racquet on it and the ball came off his strings low and dying and went into the net, and that was the match, and I had won it.
I don’t remember the crowd at all. I remember the net moving where his ball hit it, and one very clear thought arriving: that was the last one.
He came around the net, which you don’t do, and picked me up off the ground, which you really don’t do, and said something in Spanish into my hair that I’m not translating for anybody.
Then he held me out at arm’s length by both shoulders.
“You are the most irritating human being I have ever met.”
“You came forward.”
“I came forward because my knee is a disgrace and I wanted it over.” He was laughing and out of breath and there was nothing false in any of it. “Say it now, in front of all of them. Say you are not coming back.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Louder, Phoebe!”
So I turned around, in the middle of a court, in front of all of them and a live broadcast and every camera in the sport, and I said it into a microphone somebody put in my hand about a minute later, when I could breathe.
“That’s the end,” I said. “That’s the last one. I came out here to find out whether I could still do this and it turns out I can, and now? I’m going home.”
And somebody in the crowd shouted something and everybody laughed, and I laughed, and then I said the rest of it, because I’d decided in the tunnel that I was going to.
“Everybody’s spent two years telling me what I lost. I didn’t lose anything. I put it down. On purpose. While I was still good enough to do that.” And thank God my voice held. “I’m going to go home to my son now, and I’d be grateful if the whole country would stop grading me.”
I gave the microphone back.
I looked at the wall by the corner of the court and my husband was standing up with our son on his shoulder, and he wasn’t clapping, because he had both hands on the baby.
He was just looking at me. Like a man watching somebody, from the inside.