“Thanks,” she said, and then looked at my bare feet. “Are they swelling? Mine got so big when I was pregnant I couldn’t even lace up my sneakers by the end.” She touched her belly with one shapely hand.
“You’ve got a baby?”
“A little boy. Gabriel. He’s six months old. He’s with Grandma for the night, so my husband and I could come.” From the shyly proud way she said my husband I could tell that she, like me, was still getting used to having one.
I stared at her, trying to align the perfectly normal-looking woman with the snot-and-tear-plastered horror show I remembered. I wanted to ask what had happened, how she’d transformed herself, who she was now, but instead, I ended up babbling about random classmates.
“Isn’t this crazy? First I think that everyone looks exactly the same or even better, and then I’ll see, like, Pete Driscoll, who’s entirely bald . . .”
Bethie smiled—a real smile, not the fake, simpering thing she’d worn when I’d known her. It was like seeing an entirely new person, Bethie but not Bethie. Elizabeth now.
“And you!” I said. “You look spectacular!”
“Thanks,” she said. “But let’s be honest. I looked so awful in high school that all I would’ve had to do was comb my hair to look about a thousand times better.”
I looked at her. “You want to know what happened, right?” I nodded, and she said, “Remember when we went to Atlanta and Melissa Nasser’s mom was one of our chaperones?”
“Right.”
“Mrs. Nasser—Diane—she’s a therapist,” Bethie said. “After the trip, she would call me or she’d find me at school or she’d drive to my foster home or she’d corner me at synagogue, and she’d say, ‘Let’s talk.’ I think it was a year before I even spoke to her, and that was just to tell her to go away, until I finally said, ‘Okay, fine,’ to get her to leave me alone.” She twisted her ring. “I didn’t think it would work. You know, how was talking about what happened going to help me get over it? But she had some skills that she taught me. Things I could do to distract myself or reframe a situation or break the pattern when I was thinking about the bad times. So it wasn’t just talking.”
I thought about Dante, Brenda’s little boy, and how, in spite of everything that Amy had told me about professionalism and boundaries and not getting too attached, I would think about him more than the rest of my clients’ kids combined. Bethie must have been Mrs. Nasser’s Dante.
What happened? I wanted to ask. What were the bad times? What happened to you? I didn’t ask, because I already knew the answer . . . or at least a version of it. What happened to Bethie was the same thing that had happened to so many of the women I’d worked with over the years. Different specifics, same story. Probably if I’d made myself think about it back then, if I’d wanted to think about it, I could have figured it out.
Bethie said, “I aged out of my last foster-care placement when I turned eighteen. I lived with the Nassers for a year, and I got a job at a dog-grooming place and started taking classes at St. Petersburg College, and I just, you know . . .” She lifted her eyebrows. “Cleaned up my act. I’m in rabbinical school, if you can believe that. Paying it forward.”
“You’ll be great,” I said, and Bethie smiled.
“So what are you up to besides growing a person?” she asked.
I told her that I’d become a social worker, and we talked about work for a while, about what the recent federal budget cuts meant for schools and for services to women and children, and whether President Bush’s faith-based initiatives would be enough to close the gaps.
“I have to tell you something,” I began. This was the reason I’d finally let Marissa talk me into coming. Bethie was the one person I’d hoped to see. But before I could start, she shook her head.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly.
“I feel so terrible.” My eyes were welling. “The way I behaved.”
Bethie looked down, one finger tracing lines on the tablecloth. “At least you never went out of your way, you know? There were people, it was like I was part of their checklist. Drop off their books, sign in at homeroom, make fun of Bethie.” I turned my head and wiped my eyes. That was another delightful part of being pregnant—in addition to everything hurting, everything made me cry, from the evening news to novels with plots about babies in peril and commercials for dog food for senior dogs. Now that I was closing in on thirty, it looked like the warnings were right, and I was finally going to turn into my mother.
“Maybe I didn’t do that much,” I said, even as I remembered the things that I had done or said, the way I’d rolled my eyes and laughed behind her back. Sometimes—more often than I liked—I remembered the scene in the dorm room, Marissa ripping Bethie’s bags open, shaking her and calling her names, and the way I’d flicked the eye out of her stuffed elephant. I remembered everything—her unicorn T-shirt, the way her face had looked, the noise the disc of glass had made falling to the floor. “But I didn’t try to stop it. Isn’t that the saying, about how all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing?”
“It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.” She patted my hand. “And I really enjoyed your Walkman.” I exhaled and smiled back at her, feeling like I’d been granted a forgiveness that I didn’t deserve.
“Are you in touch with Andy? Dale—my husband—we were watching the Olympics, and I saw his name, and I said, ‘I knew that guy!’ ”
“I knew him, too.”
“So what happened?” she finally asked. “Did you see that Sports Illustrated story, about how he thought his father was dead for his whole life, and then it turned out his dad was in prison? I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“Awful,” I said. “It must have been awful.” If tormenting Bethie was the great regret of my adolescence, then not being able to be there for Andy when he’d learned about his father was surely the great regret of my adulthood.
Maybe I couldn’t have been his girlfriend, but I could have been a friend. Someone who’d known him a long time, who knew who he was and how he’d gotten that way.
The day that the SI story had come out, I’d been unpacking boxes at the brownstone that Jay and I had closed on the week before. Nana was in the kitchen, hand-washing the dishes that I’d already run through the machine, and my mom was upstairs, having a breakdown on the phone with the owner of the boutique that had sold me my gown, who was now saying that the alterations might not be finished in time for the blessed event. In the midst of all that, I got a call from the fact-checker for the Times, who needed to confirm details of our wedding announcement—where we’d gone to school, whether I was “a daughter” or “the daughter” of Bernard and Helen Blum of Clearview, Florida.
With the phone tucked under my chin, telling the guy that indeed, I had graduated cum laude from Beaumont, I had run down to the mailbox to see if any last-minute RSVPs had arrived, wondering what my mother would do if we needed to change the seating arrangement again. The mailman had left us three bills and Jay’s copy of Sports Illustrated, with Andy Landis on the cover. It wasn’t an action shot or a picture from the Olympics, but a portrait, a tight shot of just his face, his expressive brown eyes and thick, dark brows, the full lips that I’d kissed a thousand times, his teeth just peeking out in a hint of a smile. He looked tentative and guarded and tender underneath, the way he’d look when we’d been talking in bed and he’d finally loosened up enough to use his hands or smile when he got to the funny parts. I wondered who’d taken the picture, and what the photographer had said to Andy to get him to look like that.
“Ma’am?” The fact-checker wanted to know how I spelled my middle name. “Sorry,” I said, and spelled out Nicole, and gave him Amy’s phone number so he could confirm her role in our how-we’d-met tale. I still needed to check in with the florist and ask if the caterer had vegan meals for my soon-to-be sister-in-
law, Robin, and pick up my birth control pills from the pharmacy, but I decided that all of it could wait. I carried the magazine to the park at the end of our block, sat down on a bench in the sun, and started reading.
Running Down a Dream, read the headline, and the first page of the story was a photograph of Andy winning his Olympic race, eyes shut, fists lifted, mouth open, in the instant he crossed the finish line. How Andy Landis Outraced a Rough Start to Win Olympic Gold. The piece had gone over everything I’d known about Andy—his life with Lori, the fights he’d gotten into, and how his mother had told him to channel his rage into running. I read about his paper route, his friend, Mr. Sills, his high school career, and the records he’d set. I skimmed, holding my breath, until I got to the new stuff.
Andrew Landis Senior was an athlete, too. A standout basketball player, good-looking, graceful, and fast, with a killer three-point shot, Landis Senior wasn’t quite talented enough to attract the attention of college scouts, or strong enough to resist the lure of the streets. Arrested for the first time at seventeen for selling marijuana on a corner of his Philadelphia neighborhood, Landis got in trouble for everything from petty theft and larceny to bar brawls and grand theft auto. When a judge let him choose between jail and the army, Landis enlisted and was posted to Germany. When he came home on a furlough, trouble found him again. Landis was arrested as an accessory to murder after a friend, DeVaughn Sills, shot a twenty-one-year-old former high school classmate and alleged rival drug dealer to death. Landis Senior, who’d been driving the car, was caught trying to dispose of the gun.
DeVaughn Sills. Was that Mr. Sills’s son? Had to be, I thought. How had Andy felt about that? I read the rest of it, wincing, sometimes gasping in sympathy. The reporter had found Andy’s father living in an SRO in Philadelphia. Landis Senior had watched his son’s success from afar, seeing him win his gold medal on a twelve-inch screen in his room. He had papered his walls with pictures and clippings of his son, but hadn’t tried to get in touch. “I don’t want Andy to think I’m after his money, or that I deserve any credit for his success,” he’d said. And if he could send a message to his Olympic-winning son? the story continued. Landis Senior doesn’t even have to think about it. “I know I wasn’t his father, but I’d tell him I was proud.”
Reached by telephone at the Manhattan apartment that he shares with his girlfriend, model Maisie Guthrie, Landis Junior had no comment, I’d read.
Andy. Oh, Andy. I’d rocked back and forth on the bench with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, aching for him. Aching even as I read the rest of the piece, about the endorsement deals, the friendships with the Hollywood stars and the NBA players, and the description of “the ethereally beautiful Guthrie, who has walked the runway for Victoria’s Secret and posed in some barely there bikinis for this publication.”
How had the ethereally lovely Guthrie handled the revelations? Had Andy gone to Philadelphia to find his father? My phone started buzzing in my lap. “Honey?” said my mother, on the verge of tears again, as always. “They’re saying your dress will be there first thing tomorrow, but isn’t that when you’re getting your nails done?”
Oh, right, I’d thought, getting to my feet. I’m getting married on Saturday. There is that. Send him love, I told myself, which was what my yoga instructor always said she did when someone barged in front of her on the stairs to the subway or grabbed the last quart of orange juice at the market. Send him love. He had Maisie, but I had Jay. The universe balanced. Let it be enough.
“It sounds like everything worked out,” Bethie said.
“I love living in New York. And Jay is great.” I hoped she didn’t hear what I was hearing, which was the sound of a woman who’d spent too much on an item of clothing that didn’t quite fit and was trying to tell herself that it looked fine. Jay was great. He was calm, he was kind, he was patient, solicitous, devoted . . . and if he was a little dictatorial, the tiniest bit patronizing about the stay-at-home thing, wasn’t that understandable? Didn’t it mean he would be a wonderful dad; didn’t it show that he cared?
“Jay is great,” I said again, just as he came into view, carrying two cups of punch.
“I thought you ladies might like some refreshments,” he said, and when he smiled, I decided that I couldn’t have gotten a better husband, that I couldn’t love him more.
“Jay, this is Beth—Elizabeth. Elizabeth Botts . . . Did you change your name?”
“Please. Wouldn’t you?” Bethie asked. I heard the faintest hint of the kind of sharp-edged nastiness she’d once used to deliver all of her remarks. There you are, Bethie, I thought. “It’s Chamberlain now. Elizabeth Chamberlain.”
“Elizabeth,” said Jay, and held out his hand, before turning to me. “How are you feeling?”
“Just fine.”
“Not too warm? And you’re staying hydrated?”
I rolled my eyes. “Jay thinks I should have checked into the hospital as soon as the test came back positive.”
Bethie pulled out a business card from her beaded clutch. Elizabeth Chamberlain, Rabbinical Student. “Let me know when you have the baby. I want to send you something.”
“Oh, you don’t have to.”
“I want to,” she said, as I took her card, and let Jay take my hand and told myself again how lucky I was, how I’d landed in the middle of a life I didn’t deserve.
Andy
2009
Lori opened the front door of her dream house, a medium-sized and recently renovated cottage in Bryn Mawr that Andy had bought for her with his first big endorsement-deal check. “The Dream House for Mom,” his friend Laurent Dillard, who’d been a first-round draft pick for the ’Sixers, had said. “Gotta get that Dream House for Mom.”
Standing in the entryway, her bare feet on the terra-cotta tiles, she looked at him. “Andy,” she said. “Welcome home.”
“It’s the place they have to take you in, right?”
Lori tried to smile, but he could see concern etched into the lines around her eyes and mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“Oh, honey,” she said . . . and for the first time since the Olympics, his mother pulled him into her arms and held him tight.
•••
He remembered the night back in 2006 that Mitch had shown up at the door of the two-bedroom apartment he’d bought with Maisie, in a new high-rise in Carnegie Hill. Sometimes, riding up in the elevator, he imagined, or thought he could, the white guys in suits staring at him, and he told himself it was because they recognized him from Athens. Not because he was the only nonwhite guy in the building who wasn’t delivering someone’s dinner.
He and Mitch were both spending half the year training at a newly constructed facility in Westchester, with a bunch of new guys, most of them a year or two out of college, fast and strong and getting almost magically faster and stronger. Andy had watched in frustration and fear as his times failed to improve, telling himself that he’d work harder, work smarter, train more efficiently, suffer more than he ever had . . . but even when he did all of those things, he wasn’t able to make any meaningful improvements. In fact, his times had started slipping. The young pups were not only coming up behind him; they’d run right past.
“You know what they’re doing, right?” Mitch asked. He was dressed in street clothes, jeans and a dark-blue pullover, with a backpack over one shoulder, a weariness around his eyes, and an angry scowl on his face. Short and wiry, Mitch was looking almost gaunt these days—he’d been doing some kind of low-carb thing, Andy knew, hoping that if he cut three or four pounds he’d see his times improve.
“Being younger than we are,” Andy said morosely. He’d already made up his mind that the Penn Relays in May would be his test. If things didn’t improve by then—if he got trounced as thoroughly as the times he’d been putting up suggested that he would—then he’d have no
hope of making the 2008 Olympic team, and he’d need to think about retiring. He’d be thirty-two by then, old for a runner, and there was no shame in quitting while you were ahead, and a gold medal certainly meant that he’d be going out on top, but he’d hoped for one more season, one more whack at the piñata . . . because he loved it and also because whenever he tried to think of what would come next his mind felt like a big, empty whiteboard that some zealous kid had wiped perfectly clean. What would he do when that voice spoke up, the one that said he was undeserving of everything he had, if he couldn’t run it into submission on his way toward even more prizes, more affirmations that yes, he’d proven his worth, he’d earned his right to be?
He and Rachel had sometimes talked about a post-racing life—maybe he could be a coach or a teacher; maybe he could help boys who needed someone in their lives, the same way Mr. Sills had helped him. “Picture a little love nest,” Rachel would sing, and Andy could see it—a cozy house, a yard that he’d mow, a swimming pool with a hot tub where he could soak. Maisie talked endlessly about her post-modeling plans, but they never discussed his future—because, he knew, it scared her, too. There was also an element of superstition involved. To talk about what came next was to signal to God or the universe or whatever forces were out there that you knew that what you had wouldn’t last . . . which might, of course, invite those forces to sweep down and take it away.
“We’re just getting older,” Andy said. “All that training can’t make us twenty-seven again.”
“It’s not that. How about Matt Parker?”
Andy sighed. Parker was a year older than he was. He ran the mile, and unlike Andy, his times had gotten faster in the past year, improving at an almost unheard-of rate.
Mitch reached into his backpack and pulled out a stainless-steel tube, the kind they sold toothpaste and hand cream in . . . except this tube had no label, no writing. It was perfectly blank.
“What is it?” Andy asked.
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