by Megan Abbott
Oh, Coach…these two, toe-to-toe, puffing their chests out, practically thumping them.
“I’d like to, Coach,” she says. “Really, I would. But haven’t we all seen enough blood lately? Shouldn’t we really be thinking of our loss?”
Coach’s face motionless, but I can see something in there, something caving in deep.
Look at her, Coach, I want to say. Look at it. See how she is fearless now. See how long she has been waiting for her chance and now she has it.
I have to make Coach see.
And I have to keep my eyes on Beth, ceaselessly.
We drive side by side down Curling Way, Beth play-gunning the gas. We’re driving out to Sutton Ridge, where the red-scalped PFC, Jimmy Tibbs, agreed to meet with Beth.
She’s pumping him or someone’s pumping someone, and suddenly they are like comrades, passing briefcases and taping Xs on telephone poles.
The spooky rustlings of the ridge are spookier than ever now that the air’s gone cold and everything’s glass-bright. Or maybe it’s the cryptic pause I feel in Beth. Like a thing arrested between coming and going. Like the second before a crouch becomes a bound.
We’re to meet the PFC in a clearing up by the easternmost edge, and we walk in a hush, sneakers tramping, ankles twisting on strange clumps and roots and other things of nature. Why can’t the world be as flat and smooth as a spring-loaded floor, as hard and certain as a gym’s merciless wood?
We hear him before we see him because someone is whistling tinnily somewhere. It seems to put a little scare even in Beth, who doesn’t suffer the red-tinted terrors behind my eyes.
But we get closer and the whistle sounds more like a young boy’s. A whistle to ward off demons and night terrors.
He’s whistling what I finally recognize as some quavering version of “Feliz Navidad.”
Waving from the clearing, he heads toward us, jogging soldierlike and extending his hand as we nudge down the crest of our twining pathway, shoes skidding.
Beth gives him her golden hand and a look of great charm, the powerful illusion of delicate girlhood.
I see how this is with them.
Beth knows her mark.
“Listen, girls, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”
His freckle-rubbed face looking rubbed twice over, the PFC paces as he talks, scratching the back of his neck until it turns red.
“He was our Sarge,” he says. “And he’s still Sarge to me. And I got his back.”
“Of course you do,” I say. “None of us want any trouble.”
“But the thing is, now our superiors are involved. The Army’s doing their own investigation,” he says. “And we have to cooperate fully.”
He looks at us and it’s then I realize he knows we know about Sarge and Coach, and I am guessing Beth told him.
“We understand,” Beth says, all big-eyed sympathy. “It’s your duty. What choice do you have?”
“We just want what’s best for Sarge,” he says, nobly. “And I want to protect your…sarge too.”
Beth nods, slowly, her slowness a hint to him that maybe she has no “sarge” other than the truth.
“So they can’t rule out anything yet?” she asks, fishing. I marvel at her big-eyed frail routine. It’s like she can make her body smaller somehow just standing there. She can make her rough-skinned voice go soft and helpless.
“Well, the detective said that a lot of times the autopsy only tells you so much,” he says, talking slowly so we can understand. “You have to look at the behavior the weeks, days, hours leading up to the death. That’s how you figure out what was going on in a guy’s mind. To figure out if it’s a suicide or homicide.”
“Homicide?” I blurt, almost a laugh. Then it is a laugh.
He’s not laughing, though.
There is a long second when both of them look at me.
“What are you two talking about?” I ask, trying to keep the laugh going.
“A young guy, prime of his life,” the PFC says, swapping a grave look with faux-grave Beth, the two of them admonishing me. “There wasn’t any note. They have to look at all possibilities.”
“But his wife…he…”
He bows his head, sighs, then looks at me intently. “The point is, they’re trying to figure out what was going on with him, they’re going to ask questions, and I’ve got to answer them.”
I look at him, at Beth squirming delightedly beside him. These two. Who do they think they are, citizen soldier and good Samaritan?
“Just say it. You’re going to tell them about how it was,” I say. “With Coach.”
“I have to.”
I look at him, a bristling rising up in me.
“Sorry,” I say, after a pause. “I was just thinking of the last time I saw you. Watching me knot this one’s legs together in the parking lot of the Comfort Inn.”
He looks at me, stricken.
“But back to your point,” I say. “Yes, I guess you’re going to tell him everything then. Like about all the booze you fed us, even fourteen-year-olds. You do know that JV is fourteen. And about Prine.”
The PFC’s face bursts redder than ever, a blaring siren.
Beth harrumphs like she’s both annoyed and impressed. My lieutenant, my lieutenant.
“Girl looks out for her Coach, like she’s a mama tit,” Beth says to PFC, shrugging. “Point is, scrub, we all wanna protect our top dogs.”
The PFC grates the back of his scarlet neck till it blazes, then nods, white at the mouth. White at the mouth like he’s a little scared of both of us. Like he might need to start whistling again.
That word homicide snakes through my brain, its tail snapping back and forth.
Walking side by side back to the car, Beth twirls a finger through the bottom of my braid.
“Foul play,” I say, eyes rolling.
“He’s no JV runt, Hanlon,” she says. “You get more honey from that hive if you buzz softly in his ear. You with your fucking chainsaw. Bringing up the Comfort Inn.”
“I studied at the feet of the master lumberjack,” I say, sounding like no one if not Beth.
“But our goal isn’t to intimidate into silence,” she says. “It’s to find out what happened.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right?”
Of course this is neither of our goals.
“And I’m sure Coach above all wants to know what happened to her man,” she says, dipping her head closer to mine, so enjoying all this. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful to know. I’m surprised you’re not more eager to help her.”
“I don’t want him getting any of us in trouble,” I say. “I’m looking out for the squad.”
“Spoken like a born captain,” she says, grinning. “I always knew you wanted to be captain.”
“I never did,” I say, turning from her to continue down the trail. It’s so dark now, and I can hear her behind me.
“Of course not,” she is saying, and I can hear a grin on her.
She’s wrong, I never did. Not once. It was hard enough being lieutenant.
“Besides,” she says, sidling next to me, “it does seem weird, now that I think of it. A man in the prime of his life. And bang, bang, puts a gun to his temple?”
“His mouth,” I correct her.
As the words come out I feel myself go ice cold.
“His mouth?” Beth asks, lightning quick.
My whole life with Beth, under the hot lights. Standing beside her as she hotlights someone else.
“That’s what I read, I think,” I stumble. “Wasn’t it his mouth?”
With her or against her, you better be on. Game on. Like when you’re out there, grandstands thrumming, sneakers squeaking on polished floor, and you gotta fake-smile till it hurts. Till you want to die from it.
Ramrod that back, hoist those tits, be ready, always. Because she always is.
“I don’t know, Addy,” she says, her eyes on me. “Was it Sarge’s mouth?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve got it
all wrong. I’m blood-sugar bottomed-out.” I begin tugging my braid loose, bobby pins flying, scattering to the ground.
I can almost feel her disappointment at how poorly I’ve kept up with her, stayed in the game.
For hours after, I’m cursing myself for ever thinking I could run with Beth, for thinking I could keep up.
If you could have seen him, I want to say to Beth, you would know it was suicide. You would see. If you saw that dark smudge where his face was…you would feel his desperation and surrender.
Wouldn’t you?
Is that what I felt?
I’m not so sure.
I think briefly, darkly, of that apartment, legions deep now in my head. A glugging, boggy cove in the center of the earth.
Still, to me, it had felt like stepping in the marsh swirl of a man underwater, a man drowning.
Hadn’t it?
It had felt bad. That’s what I knew. It had felt like the worst place I’d ever been—and now that place, it was inside of me.
That night, at last, Coach calls.
“Addy, why don’t you come over?” The warmth in her voice, and the desperation. “Stay at my place tonight. Matt’s out of town, remember? It’s so lonely.”
I can’t guess at the haunted feeling in her, given how it is with me. I’m glad to know she’s feeling these things, because you’d never know it to look at her.
“I’ll make us avocado shakes and we’ll sing Caitlin to sleep and drag the velvet blankets out on the deck and wrap ourselves in them and look at the stars. Or something,” she says, trying so hard.
I’d’ve dreamed of such courtship a month ago, and something about it does speak to me even amid all this, maybe even especially. It’s a singular and troubling stake we share, but it binds us always, doesn’t it? A stake that gives me new panics by the hour, yes, but now, for the first time, it warms me too.
So I go, but Caitlin’s already asleep and Coach doesn’t have any avocados, and it’s raining slimily on the deck.
As I dangle on a kitchen island stool, without purpose, she makes a grocery list. She pays an electricity bill. She wrings out kitchen towels, twisting them across her hands and staring vaguely out the window over the sink.
It’s almost like Coach doesn’t want me there at all now that I’m here.
It’s as if I remind her of bad things.
Once, I come back from the bathroom and see her looking at my phone, resting on the kitchen island.
“Can you just turn it off?” she says. “You didn’t tell anyone you were here, right?”
I say no.
She pauses, fingertips still grazing the phone. Watching as I turn it all the way off, waiting for the screen to go blank.
“Oh, Addy,” she finally says, “let’s do something, anything.”
And this is how we end up in the backyard close to midnight, doing backbends in the rain. Extended triangles. Dolphin plank poses.
There’s a holiness to it, the wind chimes on the deck carrying us off to the deepest Himalayan climes, or wherever the world is peaceful and clear.
We sweat even in the cold, and I catch, amid a streak of light from some passing car out front, Coach’s face looking untroubled and free.
The crying starts just after, when we’re back in the house. Walking down the hallway, she bends over at the waist and sobs come hard and hurtful. I hold onto her shoulders, their tensile thew rocking in my hands.
She stops in the middle of the hall and I try to hold on and she cries for a very long time.
I sleep next to her that night, under that big dolloping duvet.
We face opposite directions and I think, this is where Matt French sleeps, and I think how big the bed is and how far away Coach is, the duvet snowbanking in the middle, and if she’s still crying, I wouldn’t know.
It makes me feel lonely for both of them.
Sometime in the night, I hear her talking, her voice hard and strangled.
“How could you do this to me?” she snarls. “How?”
I glance over at her, and her eyes almost look open, her fists wrenching the covers.
I don’t know who she’s talking to.
People say all kinds of things when they’re dreaming.
“I’m not doing anything,” I whisper, as if she were talking to me.
22
THURSDAY: FOUR DAYS TO FINAL GAME
Turning my phone on, seven a.m., I see our squad Facebook page studded with new wall posts, from Brinnie, Mindy, RiRi:
Monday=FINAL GAME!
Go Eagles!
Slaussen, you better KICK ass! Our ticket to the tourney is on YOU!
I long to be a part of it. I long for it.
I find Coach in the kitchen, making toaster oven waffles for Caitlin, who chews on the bottom of her pigtail and watches the oven’s orange glow, hypnotized.
“Did the phone wake you?” she asks, spoon in hand, slicing a banana over Caitlin’s pearly lavender plate.
It’s then that I realize it did.
“I have to go talk to them at the station again,” she says, her eyes graying. “In a half hour.”
“They’re talking to the Guardsmen,” I say quietly, as if Caitlin might understand if I spoke more loudly. “The redhead PFC. Tibbs.”
The spoon, banana-slicked, slips from her grasp.
She pauses a beat, her hand still outstretched.
I go to reach for the spoon, but her hand shoots out to stop me.
“They have to talk to his men,” she says. “I figured on that.”
“But, Coach,” I say, with as much knowingness as I can impart. “No one wants to get anyone in trouble. No one does.”
She looks at me, searchingly, and I’m not sure why I’m being so mysterious—something about Beth, eyes on the back of her ponytail, something about Caitlin’s blinking stare.
“There’s plenty of trouble to go around,” she says, holding my gaze.
“Right,” I say. “I’m sure that’s what everyone realizes.”
“Is that what PFC Tibbs realizes?” she says.
“I think so,” I say.
But Coach must see something on me, some dread gathering under my skin.
“So what might make the PFC share such details with you?” she asks, her sticky hands still lifted in front of her, her body frozen.
“He shares them with Beth,” I say, after the quickest of pauses. It still feels queasy to tell her, but it would feel queasy not to.
It takes her a second for this new bit of knowledge to descend.
“It’s Beth,” I repeat.
“Got it,” she says, those slippery hands still raised up, like a doctor ready for surgery. Ready to lay his hands upon your heart.
In the first-floor corridor, after second period, after her visit to the police station:
“It’s fine,” Coach says, brisking by me. Her French braid is very tight, temple vein pulsing. “No problems. It’s all good.”
After lunch, Beth finds me in the school library, where I never go and where no one should ever have thought to look. But she looks.
“Back in my day, libraries had books,” she says, as we internet surf side by side at tall terminals, “and we walked five miles in the snow to school.”
“So that’s how you got such thick ankles,” I say, clicking aimlessly through sundry nothingness. Celebrity crotch shots, Thinspiration: Secrets to Fasting Only Anas Know.
“The PFC went in this morning,” she says. “He told me his sad, sad song over malteds.”
“And?” I say, twirling my finger in ballerina circles over the touch pad.
“He said they’d called Coach in.”
“Yeah, she told me. It went fine.” I don’t look at her. I don’t like the feeling that’s coming, that prickling in my forehead.
“Ah…,” she says, and though I’m not looking, I know she’s smiling, can hear the gum clicking to the corner of her grinning mouth.
It reminds me of the time Beth’s mother swore
to me over her morning coffee that Beth was born with sharp teeth.
Better to drink the blood of JVs, Beth had said.
“So,” Beth says now, “what has Coach told you about the hamsa bracelet?”
“What hamsa bracelet?” I say, fingers to my forehead.
“The one they found in Will’s apartment.”
I click on the ad for Wu Long Vanishing Tea.
“Wait a minute,” she says, smacking her head. “Didn’t you have one of those bracelets? The one you gave to Coach. Back in your puppy dog phase. To ward off the evil eyes of wronged husbands, I suppose.”
I look at her. I hadn’t even realized Beth knew about the bracelet.
“What about it?”
“Well, I guess she must have left it at Will’s, at some point,” Beth says. “During some…encounter.”
“Lots of people have those bracelets,” I say.
She looks at me, and something pinches in my chest, a memory of something, a connection. But I can’t hold on to it. She’s watching me so closely, but I can’t grab it.
“Do they think it’s hers?” I say.
“Is it hers, Addy?” Beth asks, her left eyebrow lifting. “She must have told you they asked her about it. You two thick as thieves.”
“We haven’t really had a chance to talk,” I say, holding tight to the edge of the terminal.
“Well, she’s pretty busy,” Beth says, with a slow nod. “Four days to the Big Game and all.”
Turning away from the terminal, she flings one golden leg onto the nearest library tabletop.
“Look how tight I am,” she says, surveying herself. “I’ll grant Coach that. But you think Li’l Tacy Cottontail’s up for Top Girl? The balance is all. One of her calves is bigger than the other. Did you ever notice that?”
“No.”
“I bet you have. Your balance is impeccable. Four inches shorter, you would’ve been a perfect Top Girl.”
I pause a second.
“The PFC doesn’t know she has one, does he?” I ask.
“Has what?” Beth asks, maddeningly, surveying my legs now with her cold captain-appraisal gaze.