Love All

by Spangler, Rachel;

  “Do you need a trainer?” Heather asked.

  “No,” Jay hissed through gritted teeth, as she looked out at Des, who had not left the court. She continued to hop lightly from one foot to the other and take practice swings like a shadow boxer. That’s about all Jay seemed to be to Des today, a shadow. “It’s not broken.”

  “Ms. Pierce,” Heather said, her voice lower and more personal, “if you need an injury time-out, it’s within your right to take a few minutes.”

  She understood the suggestion. Heather wanted to give her a chance to pull their shit together, but a ten-minute time-out wasn’t nearly enough. Even with an endless number of hours at her disposal, she couldn’t conceive of what she’d say to Destiny right now. And she wasn’t even sure she should talk to Des about the subject anymore. Wasn’t that what had started this whole thing in the first place? She needed to reach Sadie first, but she’d spent all night trying to think of ways to broach the subject with her and hadn’t come to any definitive plan. As far as she was concerned, Sadie would be infinitely easier to approach than her daughter.

  No, there was no use trying to prolong the misery out there. The ship wouldn’t right itself, and Jay was in no position to try to steer. Tired, sad, and now sore, she couldn’t think of any viable solution other than submitting to a quick death of their Wimbledon doubles dream.

  Slipping her shoe back on and tying it much more loosely than its counterpart, she limped back on court and nodded to Des needlessly. Destiny hadn’t made eye contact, and she would have served whether Jay was ready or not. Still, Jay must have been a glutton for punishment, because she couldn’t resist another peek over her shoulder at the players’ box. Hank sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded in front of his mouth as if he intended to pray his way out of this, and next to him sat Tad.

  She did a double take. Tad, in Destiny’s box, but no Sadie.

  She was so surprised she missed Destiny’s serve and only jerked back into focus long enough to see a return whiz down her sideline. She felt only a fleeting flash of chagrin at not making a move toward it, before turning fully around to look at Tad again. He wore an olive-green uniform that didn’t quite mesh with the emerald chairs, and a stony expression not dissimilar to his daughter’s. When had he arrived? And where was Sadie? It felt so wrong that he should be there and Sadie, not. The idea went against all experience and everything she’d come to understand about their parenting roles. Just another confusing twist in a long string of disorienting events.

  To her left, the unmistakable pop of a racket colliding with tightly wrought strings drew her back to the moment, but not quickly enough to fend off a return straight at her chest. Instead of shifting to either side for either a forehand or a backhand, she merely flicked her racket upright in a defensive shield and bounced the ball back into the net.

  “Love-thirty,” Heather called unhelpfully.

  She glanced from Tad back to the scoreboard before glancing back to Des, who had already tossed the next serve high into the air. What the hell. The quick pitch came too fast even by hurry-up standards, and Jay could barely react to the laser that Gabler sent back, threading the needle between them. To be fair, she might have lunged for it under other circumstances, but her foot still throbbed from the last time she’d gotten too close to Destiny.

  She had sort of hoped for a quick end to the misery, but the least she could do was assume the position of an active participant in this beat-down, so she fought the urge to scan the crowd one more time. The person she ached to see clearly wasn’t coming, and it was probably for the best. Making Sadie suffer through this train wreck of a match would only have added insult to injury.

  She limped toward the net and crouched low, head down, back flat, eyes forward. Then in the same second when she registered the pop of racket to ball, she also felt the searing smack of blunt force between her shoulder blades.

  “Son of a bitch,” she shouted, but the collective gasp of several hundred spectators drowned out the profanity. She dropped one knee into the grass and bit her lip as tears sprang to her eyes from the sting, but as she saw several sets of sneakers move toward her, she held up a hand.

  They all stopped, and she drew a shaky breath, then pushed herself shakily to her feet.

  “I’m okay,” she muttered, though she wasn’t sure who she’d intended to convince. Maybe Heather? Or perhaps herself, but she didn’t think anyone believed her. She wasn’t okay, and the drill bit to the back didn’t even rank in the top five reasons why.

  She straightened up and looked around. Hank was on his feet, all the color gone from his face. Tad remained seated, head hung to hide his expression. Sadie wasn’t there. Des hated her, and the longer this went on, the more Jay suspected she had good reason to. At least she had tapped into some righteous anger. Jay couldn’t even summon that.

  She’d broken promises, both spoken and unspoken. She’d risked her entire comeback, put strain on the tightest mother-daughter relationship she’d ever witnessed, and let down the only woman who had ever believed in her enough to make her believe in herself. Worst of all, she didn’t have a damn clue what to do about it. She’d wreaked havoc in an ever-expanding circle and had to watch powerlessly as ripples of consequences from her actions expanded ever outward.

  Anger laced with helplessness ripped at her as the familiar darkness threatened to overtake her again. She had done all this, and she couldn’t even pretend she hadn’t seen it coming this time. She’d known all the risks. She’d been the only one who really understood them, and yet she’d still marched them all straight into the flames. A ninety-mile-an-hour blunt force chiropractic adjustment didn’t seem nearly strong enough punishment.

  Thankfully Destiny didn’t seem to agree, or perhaps she just didn’t want to press her luck by testing Jay’s tolerance for pain, and she hit a more moderate second serve right into the net.

  “Game, set, match,” Heather called from the chair.

  It was over.

  ★ ★ ★

  Sadie paced her room, still fuming. She shouldn’t have watched. She’d vowed to make her absence felt today, and yet she couldn’t completely disconnect from the match. She’d watched blow by body blow on the Tennis Channel. She’d nearly turned it off when Des had stepped on Jay, then she’d almost gone to the All England Club when she’d hit Jay in the back. Maybe she would have stormed up there and grounded her if Jay had shown any sign of anger, but it was as if all the fire had gone out of her. She took everything in stride, or at least with a quiet limp. Why didn’t she fight for herself? Had she finally decided she wasn’t worth all this trouble?

  “Damn it,” she said, for about the hundredth time in ten hours. This was exactly why she couldn’t go to the match. She couldn’t trust herself not to cave to her emotions. Things had been so much easier last night when the anger had coursed through her veins like fire. The answers had been clearer then. Jay and Destiny had colluded to try to control her life without even talking to her. It hardly mattered what their intentions were. She didn’t need other people messing with her independence. And if either of them had taken the time to consider her feelings at all, they should have known that nothing made her madder faster than someone else telling her how to live her life. But what Jay and Destiny had done was even worse: They’d taken choices away from her without even having the courtesy to tell her.

  God, how embarrassing. Her lover and her teenage daughter had discussed her love life without her knowledge. The anger flared again.

  It had come and gone so many times she’d lost track. The fire had consumed her through the night, then started to wane as morning broke, but with the sunrise came Tad.

  She snorted at the memory. She couldn’t think of anyone she’d wanted to see less in that moment, and yet there he’d been with boots and buttons polished. It had taken all of ten seconds to figure out where Destiny had gone when Sadie had thrown her out the night before.

  He’d held up two cups of coffee and
a bottle of Irish whiskey before saying, “We’re close enough to Ireland to have this for breakfast, right?”

  The flash of something edgy in his buttoned-up perfection had kept her from throwing him out just long enough for him to continue talking.

  “I sent our daughter to work.”

  “You what?”

  “I told her that she had a job to do, and if young men and women can march into war zones all over the globe with wives and kids and bills and pain on their mind, she can damn well go to a tennis match while she was mad at her mom.”

  She’d narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you going to tell me the same?”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he’d said with a grin. “There’s never been a war zone in the world that scared me as much as you do, Sadie.”

  She’d actually laughed and opened the door to him.

  They hadn’t talked about Jay or the fight he surely knew about. She’d merely taken the bottle from him and poured a single shot of whiskey into each cup of coffee.

  The memory felt almost surreal now, but then again, so many things felt unreal about the last twenty-four hours. At least Tad had stuck mostly to his prescribed role in her life. He didn’t question her as she turned on the Tennis Channel, and he hadn’t said a word as they watched the train begin to slide off its rails via flat-screen TV. They sat in amiable silence as the first set spun out of control, and she found herself almost glad to have him there. Maybe it was the current stress of her relationship with Des or the loss of having Jay to talk to, but she started to wonder what it would have been like to have had someone beside her through all the tense parenting moments over the years. She’d always feared someone taking part of her joy, but she’d never considered what it would have been like to share part of her burdens. And yet, when she’d glanced over at him, she hadn’t been able to stop the pang of regret that he wasn’t someone else.

  She’d turned back to the TV and gasped as Destiny swung for a high forehand, centimeters from the back of Jay’s skull, but before she’d had a chance to process what had just happened, Tad had stood slowly and said, “I think I’m going to stroll on down to the tennis club now.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “You see, I’ve never gotten to be part of a teenage meltdown.” His smile had been slow and wry, causing a twinge of affection to stir in her. “I think it’s about time I crossed that off my parenting bucket list. That is, if you don’t mind letting me give it a go.”

  He’d deferred to her, again. He’d offered her the chance to get out of a sticky situation without feeling like she’d surrendered control at all. She’d met his eyes, and her chest had constricted. “You really are the perfect man, you know.”

  He’d smiled kindly. “I really am, which is why we both should’ve realized years ago it wasn’t a man you were looking for.”

  “I did,” Sadie had said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Actually, I think I did, too. But, just for the record, I don’t have any regrets.” And with that he’d closed the door and walked away, leaving her wishing she could say the same.

  Over an hour later those regrets and doubts still tumbled around inside her brain, along with a myriad of conflicting emotions. For the first time in Destiny’s professional career, Sadie had missed an entire match. For the first time, she’d watched her daughter misbehave without stepping in. For the first time, she’d watched Jay under attack and not rushed to her defense. It wasn’t easy, but since the two of them had been so damn in control of her life lately, shouldn’t they be able to get themselves out of trouble? The problems they faced today were of their own making, and yet her stomach roiled as the Tennis Channel came back from commercial to the announcers gleefully reporting their intent to cut away from live play as soon as Jay and Destiny’s press conference began.

  Anger, fear, and the need to nurture collided in her, and suddenly the room felt unbearably small. Or maybe that was her own skin. She didn’t want to be the woman Jay and Des had painted her as, someone dependent and vulnerable who only mattered in her relation to them, and yet she didn’t want to be nobody. She liked being a tennis mom. She was proud of the relationship she’d built with Jay. And having Tad defer to her on everything still didn’t make her want to share parenting duties with him fully. She could add all those things together and still not work out the sum of what they meant for her.

  The only thing she knew for sure was that she couldn’t stand to stay in a hotel room going around in circles, physically or emotionally, a minute longer.

  She slipped on her tennis shoes and headed for the door, grabbing her purse on the way out. She tried to tell herself she’d need her ID and room key to get back in, but even she couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d picked up her Wimbledon grounds pass as well.

  ★ ★ ★

  “If the match was any indication of their level of communication right now, this will certainly be interesting to watch, Mary,” one of the announcers said, as the feed on the locker room television switched to pressroom coverage.

  “Great, we’re live,” Jay mumbled as she limped through the door and up to the podium. It wasn’t going to be easy to tap dance with the pain still pulsing through her feet and back, but after Destiny’s attitude during the match, she figured she’d have to do all the heavy lifting behind the mic as well. Destiny still hadn’t spoken a word to her, which, given how much she likely had to say, actually showed a lot of restraint. Jay only hoped she had the same sort of reserve with the reporters.

  She crashed into the nearest seat in front of the purple and green backdrop, but Destiny pulled her chair a little farther away before easing into it stiffly. Several reporters adjusted their cameras to get them both in the shot, but they wasted no time in launching the barrage of questions.

  “What happened out there?” someone called without waiting to be recognized.

  “We lost,” Jay said flatly. “Largely due to my lack of focus today.”

  “Did you two speak to each other once the whole match?”

  “No,” Destiny said quickly.

  “Are you two speaking to each other at all?”

  “We’re speaking to you, Chuck,” Jay cut back in, dodging the little lob to Des. “Forgive us for not doing a song and dance, but we just got our butts kicked. If you want us to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ you might have to give us a few minutes.”

  “Did she break your foot?” someone else called, but between the throbbing of her arch and the rapid back and forth, she couldn’t even tell who.

  “No, just a bruise,” Jay said. Then before anyone else could push that line of questioning over to Des, she added, “We got tangled up. Our timing was off. It happens.”

  “What about the time she almost hit you with the racket?”

  “Which time?” Another reporter cut in, to nervous laughter.

  “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. My fault.”

  “Every time?”

  “Yes,” she said, as emphatically as she could manage. No one was buying what she was selling, of course, mainly because it wasn’t true. Even a casual tennis follower would’ve recognized that Des had crossed into Jay’s playing space repeatedly, but at least if she kept talking, Des didn’t have to.

  “Does your breakdown today have anything to do with what happened yesterday?”

  She winced as memories of last night flashed through her mind. Sadie, scared and hurt and angry, her eyes wide, her beautiful face pinched together as realization crowded her features. Jay fought to maintain her composure. The press didn’t know any of that. Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You beat Destiny in singles, and a day later she’s breaking your back with a ninety-mile-an-hour serve.”

  “Oh.” She nearly laughed. The reporters thought Des was mad about the singles match. Twelve hours ago, that was the biggest fear in her life, too. What she wouldn’t give to go back to worries that could be kissed away. Even now the fact that Destiny hit he
r with a serve was a minor concern compared to the ones relating to Sadie. “I’m sure that was just a slip of a sweaty grip,” Jay said, as the door in the back of the room opened and someone slipped inside.

  The lighting was uneven and the crowd thick, but she would have recognized that silhouette anywhere. She’d traced it in the dark and seen it outlined against her own sheets enough times to burn the memory into her mind. All the room faded as her eyes followed the discreet path Sadie took to a seat in the back. All the pain and uncertainty receded. Sadie was there. She was in the room. She might still be mad, she might not trust her fully, but she’d cared enough to show up. Surely everything else could be overcome.

  She glanced over to Destiny, whose jaw had tightened so that every muscle in her neck strained. She’d clearly seen her mother, too.

  “So, you’re really not going to give us any explanation for why the French Open champions tripped over each other all morning on the way to the biggest upset of the tournament so far?” someone asked with clear annoyance in their voice.

  She sighed at the trivial intrusion, then turned her attention reluctantly back to the press conference with the sole intention of ending it quickly. “Look, we’re all human. We had a rough morning, and we both made mistakes. It happens. We’ve had a breakneck pace for the last two months. Normally when one of us is off, the other one can pick up the slack, but today we were both struggling, and it showed.”

  Someone started to shout another question, but Jay held up a hand to cut them off as she continued saying what she needed to say to the only person who mattered. “I’m sure we’d both like to have a chance to do things differently, but we can’t time-travel. We can only move forward, learn from our mistakes, and try to do better next time. Or at least that’s what I want to do.” She flashed a weak smile in Sadie’s general direction, hoping the double meaning of her speech came through before she focused back on the reporters. “I know that doesn’t sell newspapers, but it’s the truth, okay?”