Chapter 1 #2
My body knew what was coming before my brain did. The low private ache rose by a degree under the sternum, how air pressure rises before a storm you haven’t yet seen on the horizon. Sometimes the body just knew. The body had always known.
She crossed the rubber matting to me. Nova had drifted off toward the vending machine in the corner with the air of a six-year-old who has been told to give the grown-ups a minute.
“Coach Maria.” Kate’s voice was the calm-and-pleasant version of her voice, which is the version I had learned, over twenty-nine years on this earth, to be most afraid of. “Can I talk to you about Nova for a minute?”
“Of course,” I said.
It was the voice I used when I was about to say no to something I had not yet been asked. Warm. Open. Absolutely closed. I had been using it since I was twenty, and I had gotten very, very good at it.
I sat down on the bench. Kate sat down beside me.
“Nova needs more than I can give her.”
Kate said it plainly. No preamble. I appreciated that about her, in the abstract, like how you can appreciate the design of a knife while it’s going in.
“She’s six,” Kate said, “and she’s already further along than I was at ten.
You’ve seen it. You see it every Saturday.
She’s bored with the cones. She watches your hands when you’re explaining and she’s understanding you, Maria, she’s understanding things I’m not sure I understood until I was fourteen. She needs more.”
“She’s beautiful out there,” I said, and meant it. “Truly. I was just telling you—her outside edge today—“
“She needs you to actually show her how to do it.”
I felt my face do the small still thing it did.
“Get on the ice with her,” Kate said. The pleasant-and-calm was still on, but there was something underneath now, something that had probably been underneath for two years and had finally found its day.
“Demonstrate. Just an inside three-turn. Just a spiral. Anything. She’s a visual kid.
She needs to see it done by someone who can actually do it, not—Marcus, Maria, I love Marcus, but he was a hockey kid until he was nineteen, you know that, his three-turns are competent and they’re competent, they aren’t—they aren’t yours. Nova needs yours. Just to see.”
The word demonstrate landed in my body the way a hand lands on a throat that wasn’t expecting one.
It was only for a half-second. Maybe less. Fast as a flinch, fast as the small bright thing that happens when you touch a stove and your hand is already moving before your hand knows why.
But inside that half-second, the rink went away.
Tokyo. March 2016. The free skate. The cold of the air at the top of the jump.
Then the landing. The wrong edge. I had felt the wrong edge before I had left the ice, which was the unbearable part, which was the part I had never told anybody—I had known, on the take-off, that my right blade was on the wrong edge, and I had gone anyway, because I was twenty-one and undefeated since juniors and the program was already in the bag if I just landed it.
The wrong shoulder, mid-rotation, opening a quarter-turn too early.
The ice meeting my right hip. The skid. The silence of the crowd.
The held silence of fifteen thousand Japanese spectators who knew, with the immediate and perfect literacy of people who loved this sport, exactly what they had just seen.
And then—and this was the part the clip used, the part the YouTube algorithm had decided was the part—the second fall.
The recovery. The half-rotation I tried to put back in on the next combination forty seconds later, because I had still been trying.
My knee buckling in instead of out. My body going over my blade and into the boards. The sound the boards had made.
The sound the boards had made.
I came back into the rink café feeling stunned, empty.
The navy fleece. The cougar with the loose paw.
Kate Linden’s calm pleasant face six inches off mine, looking at me.
The Disney playlist, dear God, the Disney playlist, on Part of Your World, and Hannah’s mother long gone and Hannah long gone and the chiller humming and Nova in the corner pushing the buttons on the vending machine in the order that meant she was just bored, not actually expecting a snack.
Half a second. That's all it was.
“Maria?”
“I’m here.” I unstuck the smile. It came on the second try. “Sorry. Sorry, Kate. I drifted for a second. Long week.”
“You went somewhere.”
“My grocery list.”
She didn’t laugh.
I folded my hands in my lap. They were not steady. I covered the right one with the left. It was an old trick.
“Kate.” I made the voice the warm one. The one I used with the kids.
The one I had not earned the right to use with adults, but used anyway, because it was the only one I had left that did the work.
“I don’t skate anymore. I haven’t put my own boots on since 2016.
I’m not being precious about it, I’m just—I’m telling you the truth.
It’s the way it is. I’m not the person to demonstrate for Nova.
I’d be demonstrating something nine years out of practice, on a body that doesn’t move like that anymore, and she’d be learning a lie.
Marcus is competition-trained. He came up through Eastern Sectionals, his programs are clean, and he’s the right person to move her up.
I’ll talk to him on Monday. I’ll set it up. Tuesday at six. He has a slot.”
I said it steady. Practiced.
Kate didn’t look away.
Behind us, the playlist rolled to Reflection, which I want to note for the record was not my fault.
The low ache rose another degree under the sternum and settled there, patient as a tenant who had paid for the room.
I waited her out.
“I’ve watched the clip, Maria.”
She said it gently. That was the worst part.
“Everyone in this rink has watched the clip. The kids haven’t, because the kids are four.
But every parent in that lobby has, Maria, every single one of them, and most of the ones in the lobby on Tuesday and the ones in the lobby on Thursday, and Marcus has, and the woman who runs the snack bar has, and so has the man who fixes the Zamboni.
We’ve all watched it. You don’t get to live in Spokane and coach at Glacier Edge and pretend that you don’t have a past that we can all look up on YouTube in three seconds. ”
“Kate —“
“You were the best in the world.” She said it flat, like a fact she was setting down on the bench between us so that I could not pretend she hadn’t said it.
“You were the best in the world, Maria. In 2015 you were the best in the world, and in 2016 you fell, and that was nine years ago, and whatever it is that happened in Tokyo—whatever the ice did to you, whatever the press did to you, whatever you’ve been doing to yourself ever since—you still know things.
You still know things that Marcus does not know and never will.
You can keep that to yourself if you want.
You’re allowed to. But I’m asking. As a mother and as someone who used to do this.
I’m asking. Just one demonstration. One. For Nova. Just so she can see.”
She had not raised her voice. Kate Linden did not raise her voice. That was, in fact, the entire problem.
I looked at my hands. The right one under the left. I kept them there.
“No, Kate.”
I said it quietly.
“I’m sorry. I really am. I know what you’re asking and I know why you’re asking and I know that you’re not wrong about any of it. But the answer’s no. Marcus on Tuesday. Six o’clock. I’ll talk to him Monday morning. He’ll be ready for her.”
Kate held my gaze a beat longer than was comfortable. Then another beat. The chiller hummed. The playlist had moved on. Somewhere in the corner, the vending machine made the small electronic boop of Nova pressing the coin return for the fourth time without putting in any coins.
Kate exhaled. It was a small sound. It was not unkind.
“Okay.” She stood. The camel coat went over her arm in one fluid practiced motion. “Tuesday. Six o’clock. Thank you, Maria.”
“Thank you, Kate. Truly. I—I see what you see, in her. I want her to have all of it. I want her to have more than all of it.”
“I know you do.” She didn’t look at me when she said it.
She looked at her daughter, in the corner, in the pink puffer with the unicorn patch on the shoulder, who was now pressing the buttons on the vending machine in what I was pretty sure was a Beethoven motif.
“I know you do, Maria. That’s what makes this so—“
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. I was, on balance, grateful.
She walked across the rubber matting toward the lobby, toward the rack where Nova’s jacket was hung on the kid hook, and I stayed on the bench with my hands in my lap and the playlist on Reflection, still, because the playlist had loops and the playlist did not know.
Nova came over.
She came over in her ice walkers, the orange plastic guards over her blades, with the small careful clack-clack of a six-year-old walking off the mat.
She did not look at her mother. She looked at me.
She had the unblinking forensic attention that small children have for the conversations they have been pointedly excluded from, and she stopped about two feet in front of the bench with the strap of her skate bag held in both hands, and she looked at my face the way I had once, twenty-three years ago, looked at the face of an adult who I had decided was lying about something important.
“Coach Maria.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“If you used to skate . . .”
Her voice was small and clear and entirely without malice. That was the part that did it. She wasn’t accusing. She was six. She was asking.
“Why don’t you anymore.”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
I had, in nine years, prepared answers for this question. Whole paragraphs.