The Road to Canada

by Kate Christie

  After catching her breath, she met Angie at the side of the terrace for the next station: push-ups for a minute. The final station of the morning was throwing a medicine ball back and forth for—yep—another minute. This was their third and final time through the terrace stations. After this, they would be free for a couple of hours before lunch.

  “Take that,” Angie said, pushing the medicine ball at her chest.

  Jamie caught it easily. “You can do better than that, short stuff.”

  “Did you honestly just call me short stuff?”

  “Why, do you have a problem with reality?”

  They kept up the banter until the final whistle blew, and then they flopped down on the grass beside each other, stretching their tired muscles. The previous station had involved side planks, seated crunches on a yoga ball, and reverse crunches. Before that they’d done a circuit of the hotel’s weight room, preceded by 45 minutes of cardio. Some people had opted for a run around the peninsula, which was only nine miles long and on average a mile and a half wide. Jamie and Angie, however, had opted for laps in the hotel’s indoor pool that boasted wide windows overlooking the beach.

  “Too bad you couldn’t keep up,” Angie said now, clucking disapprovingly as she stretched out her hamstrings.

  “As if.”

  “Go on, laugh it up. We’ll see who starts on Sunday.”

  “Hate to tell you, Ange, but it isn’t going to be either of us.”

  “Probably not. But at least we’ll always have Quiberon.”

  Like everyone else on the team, she pronounced the peninsula’s name with suitable drama and an extra dollop of friction on the r, just like the locals. Well, maybe not just like the locals. But close.

  Once they were stretched, they headed indoors to get cleaned up and take a nap before lunch. Jamie knocked on Emma’s door, but she didn’t answer, so Jamie continued on to her own room. Probably Emma was still finishing up her fitness rotation. They’d been in different groups yet again. Angie and Maddie had noticed it too—right from the start of January camp, the coaches had begun dividing the team into groups that nearly always split the two couples. Angie and Maddie had called the imposed separation overkill, but Emma and Jamie had agreed privately that it wasn’t a big deal. As long as the federation didn’t try to tell them they couldn’t be a couple, they didn’t mind being separated at practice.

  Then again, Jamie thought as she scrubbed the smell of chlorine from her skin with the hotel’s French lavender body scrub, hadn’t the federation basically told them not to be a couple publicly? Caroline, the team’s PR rep, had recently counseled Emma to keep their relationship quiet. What had Emma called it? Oh, right: Keeping a low profile. She could call it whatever she wanted, but what it boiled down to was that US Soccer wanted them to stay in the closet. Even Jamie’s non-rostered player contract, required for participation in training and friendlies, had a relationship clause.

  For now, she would play their game. Once she earned a positon on the permanent roster, then she would set her closet door on fire, just as Ellie had done before her. Playing politics was one of many skills that elite athletes had to master. Or, you know, at least not flounder at. No one would ever accuse Jamie of being particularly shrewd, but she liked to think that she’d gained a modicum of sophistication over the years. She would never be at Emma’s or Ellie’s level, but that was fine. That’s what she kept them around for.

  Why they kept her around, she still hadn’t quite figured out.

  Her lack of political finesse was probably how, the following night, she found herself on a team of non-bowlers. Normally, this wouldn’t present a problem, but given they were currently at a bowling alley with the rest of the team, the situation was not ideal. The outing was a surprise, tacked on at the end of a planned practice at Stade du Moustoir, the stadium in Lorient where they would face France at the end of the week. The players had thought they were merely stopping at a seafood restaurant on the way back to the hotel, but after dining on fresh local catch, they’d filed back onto the bus only to gaze at each other in bemusement when the charter bus pulled up at a low-slung building that looked like a business park—except for the fluorescent “Bowling” marquee.

  Jo rose at the front of the bus and held up a hand to stop the tide of murmurs. “We thought you might appreciate getting out of the hotel tonight and doing something fun.”

  “And competitive, of course,” Melanie Beckett, the defensive coach, added. “The winning team gets to sleep in tomorrow.”

  A cheer went up through the chartered coach, and Jamie grinned before she remembered: Bowling was not a skill she had ever cultivated.

  “Don’t look at me,” Lisa said once the teams had been divvied up. “Bowling is one of the whitest sports on Earth.”

  Jamie glanced at Jordan and Rebecca, who were laughing at each other’s rented shoes. “What about you guys? VB, didn’t you live in Arizona for a while?”

  Jordan shot her a quizzical look. “Yeah, but Tucson isn’t exactly known for its bowling scene.”

  “So none of us know what we’re doing?” Jamie lamented.

  “It could still be fun,” Rebecca tried.

  “If you don’t mind losing,” Lisa said.

  They exchanged weighted glances. As if that could really be a thing.

  Mentally preparing for the worst, Jamie went to find a bowling ball. She was lucky to be here, she reminded herself. L-U-C-K-Y.

  Despite the fact they came in dead last, Jamie and her mates on Team “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gutter” (ironically named, given that they threw more gutters than anyone in the history of bowling) did end up having a good time. They were with friends, and they were inside a warm, dry establishment rather than outdoors freezing their butts off in the cold wind off the Atlantic. Part of Jamie’s enjoyment involved watching Emma’s approach, her hips swinging in her low-slung jeans, her eyes deadly serious as she took aim at the white pins arranged at the end of her lane. The exaggerated flourish at the end of her delivery would have been almost embarrassing if she didn’t throw strike after strike. Her perfect bowling form derived from her years at UNC, Jamie knew, as did her similarly noteworthy skills in beer pong, darts, pool, and quarters.

  Team “Bowling Stones” took top honors, a fact that Emma and Angie made sure to rub in during the hour-plus ride back to the hotel, engaging in the usual shit-talking while the rest of the team acted like they couldn’t care less who had won. But they cared, Jamie knew. Every last one of them. Even Rebecca.

  “How did you get so good at bowling, anyway?” Maddie asked Angie at one point, presumably to distract her from the annoying bragging.

  “Are you kidding? There’s nothing to do in Jersey except bowl.”

  A description that Jamie was pretty sure also fit North Carolina’s Research Triangle region.

  The bus let them off at the hotel’s main entrance. Jamie followed her teammates across the beautiful lobby with its cozy fire and murals of Celtic dragons, heading for the corridor that led to the team’s room block. The majority of their rooms had two single beds, though a few players had to share rooms with one king. Since bed sharing was involved, the coaches had taken more input than they usually did in roommate assignments. They couldn’t exactly force Jamie, for example, to share a king room with a homophobe like Jessica North.

  As a result, Maddie and Emma had ended up in a two-single room while Jamie and Angie had volunteered to take a king, and then had proceeded to spend most evenings before curfew with their girlfriends in one or the other room. One night, Jamie had gone for a walk with Lisa, Gabe, and Rebecca, and when she came back, Angie wasn’t in their room. In fact, Jamie was pretty sure she hadn’t returned until the wee hours of the morning. When she’d asked Emma about it later, Emma told her that Angie and Maddie had fallen asleep together in Maddie’s twin bed, exhausted from the never-ending double sessions.

  Which was sweet and all, but the thought of breaking the federation’s rules so blatantl
y creeped Jamie out. She couldn’t imagine taking that kind of risk with her still-nascent national team career, inadvertently or not.

  She was almost to the stairwell when she felt a hand on her arm. Emma.

  Her girlfriend nodded to a door that led to the main terrace. “Do you want to build a snowman?” she asked, her eyebrows waggling.

  Jamie burst out laughing as she stepped out of the stream of players crowding into the stairwell. “Seeing as there’s currently no snow…”

  “Want to take a walk out to the point, then? The moonrise looked pretty amazing, and curfew’s still an hour away.”

  “Um.” The answer was yes, of course she wanted to go for a moonlit walk with her gorgeous girlfriend at whom she had been gazing longingly for the past couple of hours. But at the same time, it was freaking cold here at night. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t mess around.

  “We can borrow winter coats from the front desk,” Emma offered.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I asked. You don’t get what—”

  “—you don’t ask for,” Jamie said, finishing Emma’s father’s motto. “Yes, I know. It just never would have occurred to me to ask for something like that.”

  Emma smiled and, kindly, didn’t point out the disparity in their incomes and world-traveling experiences.

  “If there are winter coats involved, then I’m in,” Jamie decided.

  “Awesome.” Emma started to reach for her hand, but bit her lip instead and turned away. “Follow me.”

  Five minutes later, they were bundled into white ski jackets with faux fur-lined hoods—at least, Jamie hoped it was faux fur. They headed down the footpath that led to a promontory 50 yards from the hotel, picking their way carefully over the rocky shore. The path was semi-lit by garden lights and a fair amount of moonlight, but Emma turned on her phone’s flashlight anyway. Neither of them could afford to twist an ankle or knee on an after-hours stroll.

  As they walked, Jamie slipped her arm through Emma’s and pulled her closer. They were well outside the reach of the hotel’s lights, and while they might not be the only people out here, she doubted the coaches were around. Even if they were, Jamie could blame the cold. She wouldn’t even be lying.

  Overhead, the moon rose bright and nearly full. At the end of the trail sat a bench with the hotel’s logo. They dropped onto it, and Emma shut off her flashlight and snuggled in against Jamie’s side, their arms still looped. It almost reminded Jamie of—

  “It’s a little colder than Del Mar, isn’t it?” Emma commented.

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Jamie said, smiling at her in the moonlight while white-crested waves crashed against the nearby Breton rocks.

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, huddled together in their borrowed hotel couture, the tide shifting farther out to sea with every passing moment. Then Jamie asked, “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we’d never taken that walk?”

  “Sometimes,” Emma said, her eyes dark in the shadows cast by the moon. “But I still think we would have ended up here. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jamie admitted. “You were there for me at a really crucial time, Emma. I’m not sure I’d be here if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Do you mean here, like in France with the national team? Or…?”

  “Both,” she confessed. It was easier to be honest with Emma’s eyes focused on the crashing waves, the white surf glowing in the moonlight. “Your father wasn’t wrong. I was a mess when you met me.”

  Emma hesitated before asking, “Did you ever think of ending everything?”

  Jamie swallowed and said honestly, “I think so. The time right after the trip is a little blurry now, so I don’t really remember. I just know I wanted it all to go away. I felt like I couldn’t stay in my skin anymore.” She shivered, remembering the despair that had filled her with heaviness, the fear that had lurked just below the surface, ready to seize control of her brain at any given moment.

  Emma found her hand in her jacket pocket and squeezed, her touch reassuring.

  “I don’t think I would have actually done anything,” Jamie told her, not because she knew for a fact that this was true but because she wanted it to be. “I had a really hard time sleeping afterward, and I think that made me a little crazy. When you and I met, I couldn’t fall sleep without smoking up. Even then, half the time I would wake up from this nightmare that was basically my brain replaying what had happened, over and over.” She shook her head. “For the longest time, I was convinced I would never be totally free of that dream.”

  “And now?” Emma asked, her voice careful.

  “I haven’t had one in years.” The realization made Jamie sit up straighter, the burden she carried—the one she would always carry—suddenly a bit lighter.

  “Good.” Emma paused again, and then she said, “You know, I might not be here either—with the national team, I mean—if it weren’t for you.”

  Jamie frowned slightly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Without you, I might have gone even more off the rails than I did when my dad died.”

  “You did kind of go off the rails. I mean, come on, Tori Parker?”

  Emma huffed out a laugh. “Yes, I’ve heard once or twice that she and I were not the best idea. No one has said anything like that about you, though.”

  “Yeah?” Jamie smiled over at her.

  “Yeah.” Emma touched a cold hand to her cheek. “I think I see why.”

  “Oh, you think, do you—?” Jamie started to tease her, but then Emma’s lips were on hers, and she willingly gave up speaking.

  “Let’s come back here someday on a real vacation,” she whispered a little while later. “Just the two of us.”

  “I would love to.” Emma smiled up at her, eyes and teeth glowing in the moonlight. “But maybe when it’s a little warmer.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She imagined it: long nights together between high thread-count sheets, sunny days swimming in the hotel’s private cove, evenings dining on the patio near the ocean because it would be warm enough to have dinner outside the next time they visited. Or the heat lamps on the hotel’s patio would make it so, anyway. She wasn’t convinced Brittany was ever all that warm.

  They stayed on the bench until just before curfew, and then they went back to their separate rooms, reluctantly saying goodnight in the hallway as their teammates returned from the hot tub and the pool and wherever else they had gone to kill the final hour of the day. Then Jamie returned to her and Angie’s room, where she took a long shower, waiting for the hot spray to warm her frozen legs all the way through.

  It took a while. Then again, her showers almost always did.

  Angie was already in bed with the bedside lamp off when Jamie emerged from their bathroom. Apparently it was exhausting to win a fake bowling tournament.

  “Emma texted you,” the diminutive midfielder said, not bothering to remove her sleep mask.

  “How did you…?” Jamie started to ask, but then she realized that the notification she’d chosen for Emma’s calls and texts was easily recognizable: a crowd erupting in cheers. “I mean, thanks.”

  “Welcome. Please note that I am blindfolded and have ear plugs in.”

  Was Angie saying she and Emma could have phone sex? Or even Skype sex? Because, ew.

  “Meaning,” Angie added, “that if you were to vanish from this room, I wouldn’t know. Plausible deniability, bud.”

  “Got it,” Jamie said, even as she grimaced at the memory of the last time she’d snuck out of a French hotel. Besides, Emma would never go for such a thing. Would she?

  Jamie grabbed her phone and checked her messages. Emma had texted a picture of her bed and added the caption, “Wish you were here… XOXO”

  She hesitated for a moment before typing, “Miss you too. Goodnight! XOXO.”

  Emma’s reply came back a moment later: “Sweet dreams.”

  “Sweet dreams to you too.” />
  This was the right decision, Jamie told herself as she turned off her phone. Team rules existed for a reason, and even if they didn’t, that didn’t make them any less real. Angie, Maddie, and Emma had contracts that couldn’t easily be scrapped. If they were caught breaking the rules, their consequences would be more along the lines of a reprimand. Even Jenny Latham, who had once gotten caught skinny-dipping drunk at a team hotel—with a random dude, no less—had only been suspended for a couple of months. Jamie, on the other hand, was operating on a temporary agreement that made it easier for the federation to terminate her than to promote her to the full roster.

  She had made the right decision, she assured herself again, stretching out on her bed with her iPad tuned to Archive of Our Own. There would be other trips with romantic moonlit walks where it was just her and Emma, with no one from US Soccer within a thousand-mile radius. They would have plenty of time in the future to be themselves together—she hoped.

  #

  A few days later, Jamie gazed out the window as the bus sped along the two-lane road that connected the Quiberon Peninsula to the main coast of Brittany. Currently they were headed to Lorient for their friendly against France. After the game, they would catch a charter flight to London, where they would train for a few days before the second match against England on the 13th. Valentine’s Day would see them back on a plane, headed home after nearly two weeks in Europe.

  At least she and Emma would be spending V-Day together this time, even if they would be traveling halfway—a quarter of the way?—across the planet that day. They wouldn’t have much time at home before the Algarve Cup started, though, assuming they both made the roster for Portugal. All of this ping-ponging back and forth from Europe to the US was difficult, and for most people would only end when NWSL preseason started. Not for Jamie, though—Arsenal was set to meet Paris-St. Germain (PSG) in the Champions League quarterfinals in late March, and if they won those two matches, they would play Lyon in the semis in April.