Chapter 23
Emily,
I can’t wait to visit you at Harvard!
You asked me a question, and I’ll tell you, though I don’t like talking about it.
So I’m kind of glad you asked me in a letter.
I’m writing this in bed. My roommate is in class.
I’m supposed to be at practice but I’m not because I got yelled at.
No, I didn’t deserve it. Had some drinks with my trackmates and I admit I went a little hard.
Next day I paid for it in practice. Pulled a muscle.
Coach was all in my business, asking if I thought I was such hot shit that I didn’t need to put the work in, didn’t need to watch my choices.
Lazy, he said. Made me mad. For one night out.
One little thing. But one little thing, he said, could mean everything.
He doesn’t want me back at the track until I “figure out what I really want.”
Okay. Your question. I’m stalling, I guess.
My earliest memory is of the blizzard when I was four.
You probably remember it, too. When the blizzard was over and Gran opened the door, a second door made of snow stood there.
The dogs punched through. My mom and I lived with Gran then.
This was before my mother’s accident. She bundled me up.
We followed the dogs. They plunged ahead, making a path.
They peed everywhere. They’d been cooped up awhile.
Here’s the part that gets me. The snow had piled in such big drifts against the house that my mom walked up one and onto the roof. She took a shovel with her. There she was on the roof, chucking snow onto the ground. She shoveled the whole roof.
She didn’t need to. I mean, why? Looking back, I still don’t get it. Why not shovel a path to the barn instead? The snow on the roof wasn’t in anyone’s way.
Maybe she did it because she could. Because it was strange. Because it wouldn’t happen again. Have you ever done anything just for that? For the once-ness of it?
Watching her, I thought she could do anything. Still do, even though she’s gone. It breaks me. If she could do this weird-ass, amazing, hard thing for nothing, why can’t she be here—for me?
Seriously, fuck Coach. What does he know about what I really want?
Gen
Gen,
I took your letter with me everywhere. I folded it in half so that it would fit inside my coat pocket, but it wouldn’t lay flat. I thought about your questions and didn’t know how to answer them.
Maybe your mother wanted to make a memory for you. Maybe it was less impulse than purpose.
I imagine what you described. White clumps dropping from the roof. You below. Dogs bounding. Your mother digs snow out of the blue sky.
Maybe she wanted to be a future mirror for you.
Maybe she wanted to do an impossible thing so that one day you would believe that you could do the same.
Go back to practice.
Love,
Emily