Chapter 54 2014
I returned to Prague and did my best to assimilate to my new life. I shut down my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I avoided the news. I didn’t return the dozens of calls from reporters asking for an interview.
I spent a lot of time with the animals and walking in the woods, trying to figure out what came next.
Return to the States? Stay in Prague? Go to regular high school?
Then college? And major in what? Be what?
My days were suddenly very long, and I felt restless, like a swarm of mosquitos was constantly buzzing about my head.
Esma and I talked about it, staying up for hours discussing what I could do to keep myself busy.
We both agreed coaching wasn’t for me. I knew how to do, not teach.
I had no idea how to explain to anyone else what I did.
I learned by watching, then mimicking what I saw.
As the judges loved to point out, my style was unconventional, which was not something I wanted to pass along to other skaters.
A few days after my return, a sports agent emailed saying Nike wanted to hire me as a spokesperson and feature me in their campaign for pushing boundaries and embracing potential. Since I had nothing better to do, I agreed.
The night before my flight to Nike’s headquarters in Oregon, I received a text from Mother:
It looks like you proved to the world, and to me, that you were indeed meant to skate.
Your grandfather would have loved seeing you at the Olympics.
He was an athlete in his day, a rugby player.
I suppose you inherited your ability from him.
You made it clear you want nothing to do with me, but it seems my sins have caught up with me, and the Lord is calling me home, so it is important I see you. Grace and peace be with you.
The text knocked me off balance. For nearly a year, since I’d filed for emancipation, I’d told myself I was done with her and no longer cared about her or what she thought.
Profe called me out on it. “She’s still family,” he said on her birthday, three months after I’d gained my independence, when I told him I didn’t intend to send her a card or even a text.
“She’s not my family,” I answered, pretending to be clearer on the subject than I was.
Which was perhaps why I was so undone by her summons. I still wasn’t sure how I felt and no longer had endless time to figure it out.
“You need to go,” Meryl said plainly when I sought her advice. “You’ll regret it if you don’t. And I’m going with you.”
“You don’t need to—”
“Of course, I don’t. Your mother is your business. But it’s an excuse to go to London. Pastels are out, and high waists are in, and I have too many of one and not enough of the other.”
It was a weak act. Her reason was clearly to go with me so I wouldn’t be alone.
Tears rose in my eyes.
Noticing, Meryl shooed me from her office with the backs of her hands. “Go on now. Get. I have skaters who actually still have a future in the sport to coach and no more time for the likes of you.”
I resisted throwing my arms around her, though never had I loved her more.
Meryl and I went straight from the airport to the Royal London Hospital. Mother was in the hospice wing. She had late-stage pancreatic cancer, and the doctors believed she had only a few weeks left to live.
Meryl stayed in the lobby, while I went to her room.
The bed was cranked up high, and around her machines pulsed, whirred, and beeped.
The woman in the bed was so emaciated and pale I might not have recognized her if not for her still-remarkable blue eyes, which appraised me openly before settling as they always did on the unmarred side of my face.
I stopped halfway to the bed as my feelings whirled—hurt, anger, pity, and back again.
“You came,” she said, the words barely a breath. “My little Olympian.”
I bristled with a sickly mixture of rage and pride.
Everyone likes a winner, I thought bitterly.
I considered fleeing. Why was I there? What did the woman in the bed even mean to me?
Mother. Boodo was the one who had raised me until I was seven and was sent to Gaines.
Profe had always been more of a parent to me than she ever had.
Meryl was the one who believed in me and made me who I was.
Perhaps sensing my desire to bolt, she nodded to the Bible on her nightstand and asked, “Will you read to me?”
On the afternoon of the third day, while I was reading Proverbs 30:5—“Every word of God is pure. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him . . .”—Mother took a shuddering breath, and I stopped reading and watched as her head lolled to the side and her mouth fell open.
The machines stopped pulsing, and the lines went flat.
I closed the Bible, set it on the nightstand, and walked out the door.
Some years later, I heard it’s possible to grieve for a relationship you longed to have had with someone who has died.
I wish I’d known that in the weeks and months that followed Mother’s death.
I returned to the institute in a strange state, on the verge of tears one minute and despondent the next.
Profe called each day to check on me, and Meryl, Esma, and Heinrich hovered close, wanting to help but unsure what to do.
It was the finality that was so hard to accept.
She was gone, this enormous vexation in my life that I’d convinced myself I didn’t care about, but which it turned out I very much still did.
I’d never said the things I wanted to say, so our relationship ended as it had existed, confused and with misunderstanding and bitterness between us.
And with no chance to fix it, regret gnawed unrelentingly at my brain.
A week after her death, I went to the Nike headquarters in Oregon to pose for photos and to skate in a custom-sewn siren-red Nike jumpsuit for a commercial.
I went to the opening of Levi’s Stadium in California, the new home of the San Francisco 49ers, and I posed with the football players, which amused everyone, with me being so small and the players being so big.
I agreed to give an interview on 60 Minutes dressed in Nike clothes, which was a very big deal.
They wanted to film it at the institute so they could also interview my coaches and teammates.
So I flew back to Prague. The director offered up his office, a grand space with a marble fireplace and gold-framed paintings of snowy mountain landscapes.
I sat across from Lesley Stahl in a very fancy chair. She wore a navy blazer over a beige dress, and I remember thinking how much she reminded me of Mother before she got sick. She had the same bobbed blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and pink painted lips.
We talked about the institute and about Meryl and about the rigors of figure skating and how I’d dreamed of winning a medal at the Olympics since I was a little girl.
“It’s quite a dream,” she said, “and many would say it was stolen from you. Is that how you feel?”
I offered the answer I’d been trained to give by Nike. “I’m proud of my performances and honored to have represented my country and to have been part of such an incredible experience. The three skaters who won did amazing jobs, and I’m happy for them.”
“Yes. But objectively, most would say you outskated them. Many are even calling you the Goat. Do you think that’s true? That you are the greatest female figure skater of all time and were not recognized as that because of how you look?”
I answered carefully, “It’s hard for me to answer that because, at the end of the day, figure skating is an aesthetic sport, and the artistry is as much a part of it as the athleticism. Which means looks are part of it.”
“Yes. But I suppose that raises the question of whether there is only one aesthetic. Wouldn’t you agree that beauty comes in many forms?”
I hesitated, the strange illusion of sitting across from Mother throwing me off-kilter and spiraling me back in time to that long-ago day when I was six and she had returned from London early.
“It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us,” I said, repeating the words Profe had said to me that day, which caused a current of bitterness in my veins as I also remembered the callous way she’d let Profe go.
“So what you’re saying is that, if the judges could learn to open their hearts and expand their narrow view of things, the sport might evolve?”
That wasn’t what I was saying. The truth was I didn’t know the point I was trying to make.
Because of the strange chimera of Lesley being Mother, I’d lost the thread of the conversation, my thoughts on Mother and how she would talk to me the way Lesley was talking to me, focusing on the left side of my face, as if the rest of me didn’t exist.
“Do you think your performance might already have had an impact?” Lesley asked.
I blinked several times, hoping to straighten my thoughts. “I’m only one person, but as my mentor’s always said, on the backs of ants, sands shift, and mountains are moved.”
“You’re referring to Meryl Fairbanks?”
The thought of plainspoken Meryl saying something so profound was amusing, though when I watched the interview on television a week later, my lips never curled.
I looked like a stone statue, the words coming out of my mouth one thing, while my blank face and stiff, upright posture were something else entirely.
Watching myself, it was clear I was in a strange state and never should have agreed to do that interview.
Looking Lesley squarely in her pink-lipped face, I said, “While I’m incredibly grateful to Meryl for everything she’s done, the greatest influence in my life is more like a father figure.
The person who said that was the man who raised me.
He taught me that the exception is often the exceptional and our only limitations are the ones we set ourselves.
His name is Andres Osvaldo Marcel, and I owe him everything. ”
Two days after the interview, on a rainy Tuesday morning in April, Profe was arrested at his apartment by Ice, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.