Runner in Red

by Tom Murphy

“Good. Give it to Junior. And thank you.”

  “The girls will enjoy seeing themselves on TV.”

  “I don’t mean thank you for that. I mean thank you for catching me before I destroyed an innocent old lady.”

  I smiled. A moment later she said, “Colin? You still there?”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling ear to ear. I was happy I had made my choice to stick with her.

  Bridget doesn’t think only about Bridget.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The knock on my apartment door came in the dark, past midnight, and it woke me with a start.

  The rap came again, this time more insistently, and I was shocked to see Ellen standing in the doorway in her running clothes.

  “What are you doing here? I thought Roman and his crowd had swept you away to L.A. for a promotional gig.”

  “Roman plays my mom like a harp, not me. Will you run with me?

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “I came to find the guy on this card,” she said, and she handed me my Red Sox rookie card, the one she had bought for three bucks. “I came on my bike. You take the bike. I’ll run beside you.”

  I slipped into a pair of running shorts and pulled on a sweatshirt, but she said, “Whoa!” as she stood hands on hips looking at the huge poster-size photo of her I had hanging over my bed. The photo showed her breaking into the lead over Nita and Turgenov in the New York Marathon, and the headline said, “Here Comes America’s Comeback Gal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That picture of me on the wall!”

  “Oh, that! That was the back page of the New York Post. I took it to Kinko’s and had them blow it up big. Gives me something to remember you by.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Crazy about you!”

  “You’re embarrassing me!”

  “I’m promoting you. You don’t need Roman and his minions.”

  “Let’s go, before I return that baseball card.”

  We took off up Dorchester Ave., she running fluidly on the sidewalk, blonde ponytail flapping, me biking along the curb next to her. The street, usually chock-a-block with traffic during the day, was devoid of people at this hour except for the occasional wino. We glided along smoothly through Edward Everett Square and up to the junction where Dorchester Ave leads to Mass. Ave. when suddenly she stopped in front of an all-night Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Can we go in here?”

  “You want a donut?”

  “Pop can’t see what I eat when he’s asleep. Plus I want to talk to you.”

  We sat in a pink booth in a back corner of the neon-lit shop. I opened the conversation as we sipped coffees and ate chocolate donuts with sprinkles.

  “You never told me why you got married,” I said.

  “After I got hurt in the Olympic Trials, I was afraid to stand on my own two feet.”

  “That’s insane. You didn’t fail. You were a kid, not yet twenty. That was just your first sortie into the big time.”

  “You’re very wise.”

  “You should listen to me. I’m the poster child for fucking up young. What was he like?”

  “One day while we were living in Florida, he dropped a phone book in my lap. He said, ‘Turn to any page, you’ll find one of my girlfriends.’”

  “Wow, he tormented you like that?”

  “He was into control. I was no good to him if he couldn’t break me.”

  “And you broke?”

  “I did. But I had enough left to start divorce proceedings before I moved to Oregon. I went out there to try for a comeback with Nike. I enrolled at The University of Oregon in Eugene, but my running wasn’t going well. I had lost my zip, and the other girls kicked my butt. It was very competitive and I stopped going to my classes. My ex dragged his feet on the divorce, and I started piling up ‘F’s’. Soon everything fell in on me. Then the team cut me and I went out for a long run in the middle of the night. I was in the woods, nobody around, when a car hit me and sped off. A group of hunters found me by side of the road in the morning.”

  “How long did you lay there?”

  “Four hours, five, in the rain with the temperature in the 40s.”

  “Jesus!”

  “I had never been lower in my life, and I wanted to give up living until Pop wrote me his note.”

  “The one about sending your ships to sea?”

  “He saved my life, to have that kind of confidence in me. He truly believed I could be good again.”

  “You proved that at New York.”

  “Thank you. Do you think I can do it at Boston?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Should we hit the road again? I want to show you the place where I’m going to banish the demons.”

  We continued up Mass. Ave. until we got to Boylston Street, then she motioned to me to turn right onto Boylston, and we continued along the nearly empty street until we came to the Boston Public Library, a place I recognized from all my trips to the building for research.

  “Stop,” she said, as we pulled up to a spot that had faded letters in the street spelling the word, “Finish.”

  “This is where the media bridge goes,” she said, making a sweeping arc with her arms as I set my bike on the side of the road. “This is the finish line for the Boston Marathon. The bridge with all the cameras creates an arch above this space.”

  “This is home plate for you, isn’t it?”

  “This is where my life will culminate come April. All I need to do is get it done, get across this line. Then all the demons will be gone.”

  “You will.”

  “Running against Nita and Turgenov, it’s always a fight against the part of me that wants to be a coward.”

  “Playing at the top, it’s a pressure cooker, I know.”

  “There are a hundred places you can give up in a marathon, but in every race it comes down to one moment, make or break, where you have to resist the part of you that wants to be a coward. I did that in Oregon, I gave up, but I don’t want to do that anymore, give up.”

  “When Nita and Turgenov pulled ahead of you down the final stretch Sunday you could have broken, but you came back against them. You showed real grit. I don’t care that you got third, in my mind you were the winner.”

  “What do you call it in baseball, ‘Stay back?’ I don’t want to do that anymore, fail to be all I can be.”

  “The thing I loved about baseball is how one moment you can make an error and be a goat, but the next moment make a great play or hit a homer and you’re the hero. It’s a wonderful concept, redemption.”

  “I need to redeem myself after New York.”

  “No, you don’t! You’re worthy all by yourself. That’s why I’m out here in the middle of the night, in the freezing cold, to be with you—because you’re you.”

  “Maybe we should call it ‘Step up.’”

  “Let’s do that. We’ll relegate ‘Stay back’ to the ash pile of history.”

  “I like your idea of redemption.”

  “I saw you Sunday, gritty girl. I have no doubt you’ll get it done.”

  She smiled. “Can I take you home again?”

  “Only if I get to practice my singing.”

  “What are you talking about, singing?”

  “You get to be Katharine Ross to my Paul Newman.”

  I showed her how to climb up on the handlebars of the bike and as she sat with her back to me, I gave her a ride the way I used to ride Happy Donovan and Jerry Raskopf home from our ball games when we were kids. As we pedaled along heading south—she facing front—I sang the words to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” as we rode.

  “You’re crazy!” she said.

  “Crazy about you,” I said, and I kept singing.

&
nbsp; I pedaled along, all the way down Dorchester Ave. to Fields Corner, singing all the way and she couldn’t put her hands over her ears because she had to hold onto the handlebars.

  The shower in my apartment was a tiny metal surround, very much like a tin can.

  “No more stay back,” I said as I held her and she held me.

  “Step up, step up,” she said, and we took turns undressing each other. Soon we were kissing under the warm spray, holding each other, her with her pink skin and blonde hair, and me savoring the moment, and we took turns soaping each other.

  Clank, clank, clank went the tin can of a shower as we bathed under the spray before moving to the bed.

  It was warm under the covers which flew off the bed at intervals before we pulled them back over us again and wrapped ourselves in them and each other. It went like that for a long time, until the first light of the new day in the window got our attention.

  “I like ‘step up,’” I said, as I pulled the covers over us for another go.

  “Here comes Comeback Gal,” she said, and I gave thumbs up to the big picture of her hanging over my bed as she wrapped her long golden legs around me one more time.

  The next few weeks passed in a blur and all I remember is being happier than I could ever imagine.

  Events transpired in a blur: the election was held and Governor Finn won in a walk. Then Thanksgiving came, which we celebrated with Bridget and Jack—everyone on their best behavior—at Bridget and Jack’s white center-entrance Colonial house on a tree-lined street in Wellesley.

  I even got Bridget to get me a break from work so I could go out to Colorado with Ellen over Christmas where several of her teammates from the Nike team in Oregon had moved to continue their training. She was big news in the running world after her New York City Marathon race and they invited her to train in Boulder with them. She was eager to get altitude training under her belt, and to see her old friends. It was great for both of us to get away. We got some mountain time in the snow, though she didn’t ski—for fear of risking injury—but I did, to test my ankle, and my ankle, like everything else in my life at the moment, felt just fine.

  It was mid-January when I returned to Boston, while Ellen remained in Colorado to step up her training with her friends. I was eager to see Bridget and work with her again. She had calmed down in her pursuit of the Runner in Red, largely, I believe, because she questioned the point of it all now that she had learned Margaret was dead and Delia didn’t want to be found. Delia had quit her cafeteria job with Boston Public Schools after our visit to her school—me with the camera and Bridget on the phone—and she left no forwarding address.

  Bridget didn’t talk about it, but I think another part of the drop off in her enthusiasm for the Runner in Red was the boost in confidence the race in New York had given Ellen.

  Though Bridget didn’t say it explicitly, she had become a fan of the “Pop and Ellen Show” and was as eager as everyone—including the national media and the whole country in the aftermath of the New York City Marathon—to see the “Comeback Gal” get another shot at Nita and Turgenov at the Boston Marathon come April. There was an excitement in the air that was palpable, building for that rematch and the chance Ellen would have to rewrite the script of the New York City Marathon finish.

  I sensed Bridget wanted to support Ellen and everything was going in that direction including at work where Bridget took on mundane stories, and we didn’t talk about the Runner in Red any longer.

  “You have the names of the streets?” Bridget asked me late one afternoon in early February after I’d been back from Colorado a few weeks. I drove along the perimeter of Logan Airport in the van as she sat beside me, and we worked on a story about new traffic patterns at the airport.

  “I do,” I said, and I pulled to the side of the road to start our shoot when the phone rang in the van. It was Stan with a call that was about to change everything.

  “Bridget, you sitting down?” he said, and she put him on the squawk box so I could hear.

  “I’m on a roadway outside Logan Airport for chrissakes, Stan. Where am I going to sit?”

  “Well you better find yourself a seat.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m holding a note for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “From your mother.”

  “What?”

  “She wants to see you.”

  “What are you talking about, Stan?”

  “One of the guys from the maintenance pool in the garage out behind the studio here. He just came in with a note. He said an elderly lady handed it to him this afternoon. She asked him to give the note to you.”

  “I’m sitting down now, Stan, I’m back in the truck. Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  “The guy was working under one of the vehicles, changing the oil, when the elderly lady walked into the garage and slipped the note under the truck for him. She said, “Give this to Bridget Maloney. Tell Bridget her mother wants to see her.”

  “Oh, my God, really? You think it was Delia Delaney?”

  “No, the maintenance guy said her name was Margaret. Your mother’s alive, kiddo!”

  We turned to each other simultaneously, both of us wearing OMG faces!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Here’s what the note said:

  Dearest Bridget,

  I have longed to see you for so many years. I was overjoyed to have had this time in Boston these past few months to watch you on TV and watch Ellen with her marvelous running, including trips I took to Hyde Park to sit in the stands and watch her practice. I was doing my best to work up the courage to contact you, so I could see you in person, but something has come up and I don’t know how much longer I will be able to stay in Boston. They believe I’m in danger. I don’t give a hoot about that, but I have been successful to this point buying time. I am trying to work out details with the law enforcement man and I have urged him to let me stay until the Boston Marathon so I can watch Ellen run. But I don’t know if I will be successful with my pleas. That is why I have taken this chance to reach out to you now. I want to see you before they take me away, I want a chance to hold you in my arms, and I will be in contact again to see if that can be arranged.

  Love, Margaret

  “Wow!” we all said in unison, as Stan, Bridget and I sat around a table in Stan’s office and read the note a hundred thousand times.

  Junior walked in and asked what we were doing.

  Bridget slipped the note between her knees, pinching her knees together, and we all said, “Nothing,” in unison.

  But Junior knew something was up. “I hear there was some kind of commotion with the guys in the maintenance pool. Do you know anything about what’s going on?”

  “Not that we heard,” said Stan.

  Junior left and I turned to Bridget, “What do you think?”

  “Tim Finn,” she said, and I knew what that meant.

  Time to get back in the car.

  We found Tim Finn at the Governor’s Dorchester office on Gallivan Blvd. across from the Erie Pub. Bridget showed him the note from Margaret and he was as shocked as we were.

  “What do you make of it, Tim, her point about the ‘law enforcement man?’ What’s that all about?”

  “I have no idea, really.”

  “No more obfuscating, Tim, talk to me! Does this law enforcement thing have anything to do with the trouble you were in in the old days?” He shook his head, but she kept pressing. “Talk to me, Tim. Were the Delaney sisters wrapped up in that legal mess with you in any way?”

  He looked her in the eye and his response was clear: yes.

  “Tell me,” she said. “No more holding back.”

  “I was at the City then, as you know, at the Child Services Office. It was a simple process and we had a system, Delia and Josephine collected n
ames of worthy families in Boston that could not have children and your mother supplied the babies. I did the approvals for the adoptions.”

  “Supplied? What do you mean supplied?”

  “Margaret ran a mission in El Salvador, during one of those civil wars they were having down there. She was the Mother Superior.”

  “When was this?”

  “She was in El Salvador the whole time she was in the religious life, but this would have been the late 70s. That was her passion, helping babies. Delia and Josephine were nuns in Boston. You know that because Josephine was your teacher.”

  “Right,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “It was selfless work they were doing, saving babies. The three of them, three good sisters, asked me to help. Margaret, your mother, needed homes for the orphans who would have starved otherwise. The army was killing the parents of the children, and sometimes even the babies got caught in the crossfire. It was a bad scene, but Margaret put herself in the middle of it, to find an escape for the babies. Delia and Josephine came to me at the City to ask me to help Margaret, and how could I say no?”

  She stared at him.

  “Each time Margaret had a baby to save, Josephine and Delia would find a family in Boston. I did the paperwork for the adoption, and your mother would send the child. They needed to move the babies quickly, sometimes very fast, and I would do the paperwork outside protocol to expedite things. That’s what happened when I assigned a baby to a bad guy. You know all about the bad guy from the news stories, right, and the time I did in prison?”

  Bridget nodded, prompting him to continue.

  “The operation shut down after that, and both Josephine and Delia left their orders. Josephine moved away, California. I don’t know where Delia went after she left her order.”

  “The baby that got abused by the bad guy, as you say, was that one of Margaret’s babies?”

  “Yes, Delia and Josephine were the conduit from Margaret to me and I made the adoptions official. But the one with the bad guy I rushed too fast. The sisters didn’t do anything wrong. The man was evil, they couldn’t know that. They were only trying to save babies, the three of them. The babies would have starved without their attempts to intervene, but I made sure the paperwork for the bad guy who hurt the baby showed up as my error.”