Ultra
Page 15
“What about me?” a voice called out.
I turned around. Mom was coming up the path. She had a bundle of clean clothes tucked under her arm.
“Thanks for your amazing genes, Mom!” I said. I stood up to hug her but — “YOW!” I shouted.
“Oh, my poor baby,” Mom said. “Time to stretch out your quadriceps. You just ran a hundred miles, remember?”
She handed the clothes to Ollie and took my hand. “Come on,” she said. “Try a lunge.”
She lunged forward with one leg and then lowered the other leg down to the ground. “Your father swore by this one,” she said.
“No way can I do that,” I said.
“If you can run a hundred miles, you can do a simple stretch,” said Mom. “Come on, Kneecap, help us out.”
Kneecap jumped up and took my other hand. The three of us did a few lunges together.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” said Mom.
“A lot,” I groaned.
“Good,” said Mom. “Maybe that’ll teach you to not run any more of these crazy races.”
I sat back down in the chair. Mom smiled at me. Kneecap lay down on the log and put her headphones back on.
“I’m sorry I worried you,” I said.
Mom shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said.
“No it’s not,” I said. “There was a tornado.”
Mom dug around in the first-aid kit. The trees around us swayed in the wind and made a fizzing sound like root-beer foam rising up in a glass. Mom cleaned the cut on my forehead with a cotton ball and used her finger to rub ointment into the wound. She didn’t talk.
“You should’ve stopped me,” I told her. “Why didn’t you stop me?”
She counted to ten under her breath. Then she began cleaning another cut — on my neck.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You should have stopped me!”
I was shouting now, I couldn’t help it. It felt like a whale was swimming up my throat.
“It’s okay, Quinn,” said Mom. “Remember to breathe.”
“Why didn’t you stop me?” I yelled. “You heard what Bruce said about the bears. You could have stopped me from running, but you didn’t.”
Mom peeled off my T-shirts, towelled my chest dry and then dropped a clean sweatshirt over my head. “You’re a runner, Quinn,” she said. “It’s what you love to do. And nobody, not even me, should stop you from doing what you love.”
My shoes came off. “Ow!” I shouted. “Take it easy!”
Mom looked at my feet and drew in her breath, but didn’t say anything.
“But I could have been hurt,” I went on, my heart pounding now. “I could have been hurt like Dad!”
The whale in my throat was thrashing its tail. Kneecap got up from the log where she was lying and walked away.
Mom took a pair of scissors from her purse. The duct tape was stuck to my feet pretty good.
“You should have stopped him from leaving,” I cried. “All you had to do was tell him NO.”
Mom sawed away at the tape with the scissors. “Your father was a soldier,” she said. “He went because he needed to help others. That’s who he was, that’s why we loved him. That’s not something I had the power to stop.”
The tape came off, bit by bit. Mom finished one foot and started on the other.
“I miss him,” I mumbled into her hair.
“Me too,” she said. “More than anything.”
When she said that, I felt burning in my eyes and I knew that I was going to cry. When Dad died, I wasn’t the only one who got hurt. Mom lost him too, but I hadn’t really thought too much about that. I suddenly felt ashamed that I’d added to her pain. She’d been worried about this race, and I’d signed up for it anyway. I’d only been thinking about myself.
The whale was swimming out through my eyes, and suddenly I was crying like a baby. My body folded like a sheet of paper, and I cried silently, like a little kid, with my mouth wide open.
“I never said goodbye to him,” I sobbed.
“That’s all right,” said Mom. “You’re doing it now.”
I cried so hard I could barely breathe. Mom wrapped her arms around me and kissed the top of my head.
“I hid one of my songs in his pocket,” I said. “A nasty song, about how much I hated the war.”
“We all hated the war,” Mom said.
“I know,” I said, “but we weren’t supposed to say it.”
I felt like I was falling from a terrible height. Like I was on top of the CN Tower and it was crumbling to the ground.
“We’ll never be happy again,” I snuffled.
“Yes we will,” said Mom. “Some day we will.”
My body clenched and rocked back and forth. This crying business was harder than running.
“You’ll figure this out,” Mom whispered in my ear. “But you can’t keep locking yourself away in your room, Quinn. Ollie and I miss your father too. The three of us need to talk about him together.”
She pulled some tissues out of her purse and wiped a bunch of crud off of my face. I cried until they were all used up. Mom found another packet, and I went through that one too.
But here’s the funny thing. The more I cried, the better I was, until I felt as though I was floating up into the air. I looked at Mom and she was crying with me, and then suddenly, for no reason, we both started to laugh.
For a while, we laughed so hard we couldn’t stop. Ollie came running over. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Mom gasped. She looked at me. “Do you?”
I shrugged.
Ollie looked confused. “Are you guys laughing or crying?” he asked. “You sound like you’re laughing, but you look like you’re crying.”
Mom looked at me, and we broke into laughter again.
“Just tell me if you’re happy or sad,” Ollie said. “You should be able to answer that, at least.”
Another runner was crossing the finish line. He was old and hunched over. It was the bandit — Kern!
Mom wiped the tears away from her eyes. She said, “We’re happy, I think. Aren’t we, Quinn?”
The sun was rising over the hills, and the trees were sparkling, as if ginger ale had been poured all over them. Ollie’s question seemed impossible to answer — I was both happy and sad, which sounds weird, I know. The bandit’s crazy laugh echoed through the valley. I looked at the finish line and saw him toss his wineskin in the air.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: And then you came home?
QUINN: Not quite yet. First I inhaled two plates of spaghetti and meatballs and then we stuck around to watch the other runners finish. Most people crossed the finish line on their own steam, but a few people were brought out on horseback. We whooped and hollered for all of them.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: What about Kara? What became of her?
QUINN: She spent an hour in the medical tent and then she came out and cheered along with everyone else. She’d showered and changed into dry sweats and a hoodie, and I barely recognized her, she looked so hot.
She cheered with us for a couple of hours, eating bacon-and-egg sandwiches and drinking hot chocolate. Finally she had to go.
“My kids will be waiting for me to fix some breakfast,” she said. “But don’t forget to Friend me. We could do some training runs together!”
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: And then?
QUINN: Have you ever tried squeezing into a hatchback after you’ve run a hundred miles? It’s not fun.
My legs felt twitchy, as if electricity was running through them, and I kept crossing and uncrossing them to get them to calm down.
Mom drove us down the long gravel road back to the highway. “Don’t Stop Believin’” was playing on the radio. Kneecap grinned at me in the mirror and sang along in the back seat. Ollie rested his head against the window and closed his eyes.
I sat in the front seat and watched the trees blur past my window. We drove farther in 15 minutes than I could’ve run in 3 hours.
I saw a sign for a railroad crossing.
“Better slow down here,” I warned Mom.
“These tracks haven’t been used in years,” she said.
“Better safe than sorry,” I said.
She slowed the car down. No trains were coming.
“Okay,” I said. “Now let’s make some time.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’ve run a bunch of races like the one described in this book. After the first, my nieces and nephews asked me what I’d seen while jogging through the forest all night long.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Just a whole bunch of trees.”
The kids were disappointed by this answer. And so, after my next race, I made a point of telling better stories. I described the hidden valley wriggling with hoop snakes, the bears I’d seen playing shinny hockey, and the shrine where lost runners bury their secrets.
The farther I ran, the more the stories grew … until they eventually became the novel in your hands.
So, a huge shout-out to my nieces and nephews — who inspired this story, lent their names to some of the characters, helped me with the jokes and dialogue, and even shared early versions of the book with their classmates. You all deserve a finisher’s medal:
Aaron, Alex, Ali, Ben, Benjamin, Brody, Caelan, Caitlin, Caleb, Christopher, Daniel, Darcie, Grace S., Grace W., Jackson, Julia, Julian, Kara, Kelsey, Kiernan, Leonardo, Lucy-Claire, Luke, Monty, Madelaine, Maggie, Mateos, Nate, Oliver, Olivia, Parisinia, Quinn, Ray, Riley, River, Rowan, Rylee, Sacha, Skyler, Sofia, Sydney, Tahnee, Tobias, Zoe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Carroll has successfully competed in five 100-mile races, including the Haliburton Forest Trail Run and the Sulphur Springs 100. He’s run the Boston Marathon twice, and many other marathons and half-marathons. His favourite running fuel is PB&J sandwiches.
Ultra is his first novel.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Carroll, David, 1966-
Ultra [electronic resource] / by David Carroll.
Electronic monograph in HTML format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN: 978-1-4431-2855-1
I. Title.
PS8605.A77724U57 2013 jC813’.6 C2013-901816-6
Text copyright © 2013 by David Carroll.
Cover photograph © Tim Clayton/Corbis.
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First eBook edition: September 2013