Training Ground

by Kate Christie

  “Wild,” she agreed, trying not to fidget under their gazes. “Who are all these people?”

  Dani pointed out the family friends, mostly neighbors, hospital staff, and fellow soccer families. Several clusters of teenaged girls and guys dotted the room, Emma and Ty’s friends from school and sports. The people they didn’t know were likely either non-profit connections—Emma’s dad had served on the boards of several area foundations—or the families of former patients.

  “I heard Pam say almost a hundred patients and their families were planning to attend,” Sian said.

  “A hundred?”

  “Yeah, and that’s like only a fraction of the people he treated.”

  Jamie liked Sian. She was the quieter of the two and seemed less judgmental than Dani, who was as filterless as Emma had described. But that wasn’t entirely true. The way Dani looked at her told Jamie that she was holding something back in their interactions. Did she sense Jamie’s crush on her best friend? Was she worried Jamie would try to make a move on Emma now when she was at her most vulnerable? As if.

  But she couldn’t exactly tell Dani that, so instead she asked questions about Emma’s dad that soon had Dani and Sian recalling memories of the elder Blakeley cheering them on from the sidelines, grilling “the best ever” salmon at family get-togethers, and teaching them how to sail during one rare, lazy staycation. He’d been a good dad, they agreed—when he was around. Unfortunately, his work had taken him away more than Emma and her brother—and he?—wanted.

  The receiving line finally slowed, and soon Emma came over to tell them the service was about to start. Her eyes were dark gray, her lips unsmiling. Jamie wondered if she was nervous. Her mother had asked her to say a few words at the service, so she’d spent half the morning in her room polishing her speech while Jamie and Ty threw a football with a couple of the Minnesota cousins on the wide lawn that overlooked the Sound. These cousins were college-aged but not actually in college, and they seemed almost as impressed by the panoramic view as she was. Only Ty appeared not to notice the distant snow-capped mountains gleaming in the spring sunshine.

  As they made their way to the reserved seating area near the stage, the Seattle mayor stepped up to the mic and asked if everyone could take their seats. Jamie would have recognized him even if she hadn’t already known he would be emceeing the event. He’d made national news a few weeks earlier by issuing an executive order that required Seattle city government to recognize the same-sex marriages of municipal employees. With Massachusetts expected to start offering legal same-sex marriages in the next month or so, assuming Governor Romney and the legislature didn’t somehow complete an end around the state’s Supreme Court decision, the Seattle order was more than symbolic.

  At Emma’s direction, Jamie sat between her and Dani, only realizing belatedly that she had scored the “best friend” seat. Emma’s leg pressed against hers, and Jamie started to move away. But then she realized the contact was purposeful and stayed where she was. Emma leaned into her shoulder too, and Jamie suppressed the desire to take Emma’s hand. What happened in Emma’s bedroom at night was one thing, but she doubted Emma would want to hold hands in front of the hundreds of people seated behind them.

  The crowd noise quieted to a low rustle as the service began. It quickly became clear that the theme of the day was Emma’s father’s legacy. There were representatives from the causes he’d championed, from civic engagement and the arts to open spaces for all; patients whose lives he had saved and the families whose lives he had changed; and colleagues and friends who had come to bear witness to the important role he had played in their professional and personal development—interns he had mentored, surgeons he had trained, friends he had alternately entertained and been entertained by. Men and women young and old spoke for more than an hour and a half about the impact David Blakeley had had on them individually and on the world at large.

  At last the best man from Emma’s parents’ wedding stood up to talk about growing up in Northern Virginia with David and heading off to college at Dartmouth together, just a couple of DC boys who had hated the snow but thrived on the intellectual challenge of the Ivy League institution. They had stayed close all of these years, meeting nearly every spring for some type of outdoor adventure. Last year they’d achieved a lifelong dream: rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The best man choked up as he described a conversation about love and death that they’d had beside a campfire under the narrow swath of night sky visible from the floor of the canyon.

  “The thing is, David wasn’t afraid to die,” the best man said. “He was only afraid of not seeing his children grow into the amazing people he knew they would be.”

  He paused and glanced at Emma and Ty, who both stared down at their feet. Jamie felt Emma tense beside her. Without thinking she started to reach for Emma’s hand, but she stopped as Emma shifted away. Idiot, she castigated herself, training her gaze back on stage as the best man read a passage from John Wesley Powell’s journal of the 1869 raft expedition along the Colorado River: “We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things.”

  He paused and looked out at the crowd. “We may conjecture many things about where David Blakeley is now, but what isn’t open for speculation is the kind of man he was. Those of us who loved him know that he was a man of great intellectual capacity, a man of great empathetic powers, a man of great reverence for the natural world, and most importantly, a man of deep and abiding love for his family. Davie, wherever you are, the world has lost one of its stars, and we will never be quite the same without you. Love you, man.”

  Emma’s turn came next. She rose from her seat and walked to the stage, and if Jamie hadn’t known better, she would have believed the calm, stoic facade Emma projected. But even from a distance, she could feel the restless energy radiating off of the older girl.

  Up on stage, the best man kissed Emma’s cheek and retreated as she unfolded a piece of printer paper and set it on the podium. She looked up at the crowd, and for a moment her mask slipped and Jamie’s heart leapt in matching panic. But then Emma’s gaze fell on her. Jamie nodded at her—You can do this—and Emma nodded back almost imperceptibly.

  “My father was not a perfect man,” she started, her voice shaking a little, and the crowd rumbled uneasily. This was not the opening they had expected from the good doctor’s good daughter. On the other side of Ty, Jamie saw Emma’s mom’s gaze sharpen as she stared intently at her eldest child.

  “He was a study in contradiction. He loved his family, and yet he spent half of each year on the road. He loved what he called the ‘beautiful precision’ of surgery, and yet he spent what would be the last years of his life teaching others how to operate more efficiently. He loved forests and mountains, but he spent more time in airplanes and sterile operating rooms than he did outdoors. For a long time, I believed these inconsistencies signaled a failing on his part. I believed he wasn’t living an authentic life. But in the past week, as I’ve thought about his legacy, I’ve come to realize that he was actually one of the most selfless people I know. He set aside everything he loved best because he understood that he had a different purpose. And that purpose was to bring health and a chance at happiness to the people who needed him the most.

  “My father was not a perfect man, and yet he was a great man. But his greatness doesn’t lie in all the lives he saved or the surgical techniques he invented. His greatness lies in the example he set. His greatness lies in his willingness to give his time and energy to people he didn’t know and, in many cases, would never meet. As one of his heroes, Robert Ingersoll, once wrote, ‘Character is made of duty and love and sympathy, and, above all, of living and working for others.’”

  Emma paused and looked down, blinking rapidly, and now Jamie’s heart ached for her. She stayed that way for twenty o
r thirty seconds while the audience shifted again. Jamie glared out across the crowd. What the hell? Why couldn’t they sit still and be present for Emma’s pain? It was a memorial service, for Christ’s sake. What had they expected?

  When Emma spoke again, her voice was only a little shaky. “As you’ve heard, my father loved the outdoors. One of his favorite books was John Muir’s The Mountains of California. I thought I’d share with you one of his favorite passages. Muir has just reached the glacier beneath the summit of Mt. Ritter, and even though he knows he doesn’t have the right equipment and that it isn’t the right time of the year, still, as he says, ‘We little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgment forbid as it may.’

  “Against the odds, Muir makes it across the glacier to the peak where he starts free-climbing the rock face. But soon he finds himself stuck, unable to move up or down, certain that he’s about to fall to his death. As he later wrote,

  When this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the first time since setting foot on the mountain, and my mind seemed to fill with a stifling smoke. But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self, bygone experiences, instinct, or guardian angel—call it what you will—came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete… [T]he strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag in the blessed light.

  “My father studied this passage before almost every surgery to remind himself that even when he felt stuck, there was always a way through. This, I believe, may be his greatest legacy: the conviction that if you are faced with a seemingly insurmountable cliff, you have only to open yourself to experience or instinct, to your other self, and you will find your way to what Muir called ‘the noble summit.’ That is the lesson I will take from my father’s life, the legacy I will try to carry forward in my own.”

  She looked at the large color photo of her dad on an easel to the right of the podium. “We miss you, Dad. Love you.”

  Jamie blinked back tears. God, Emma was incredible. She really was.

  The crowd seemed to exhale in unison as she collected her speech and stepped down from the stage. Her mom was waiting for her in the aisle, and they hugged for longer than a beat. Then Emma continued back to her seat while her mom made her way onto the stage.

  “Good job,” Dani whispered, reaching across Jamie to grasp and squeeze Emma’s hand. Jamie watched the gesture enviously. How much easier everything would be if only she looked like Dani.

  “Thanks,” Emma said, and glanced at Jamie, her eyes a little glassy, a little lost.

  “You were amazing,” she murmured. “Doing okay?”

  Emma shook her head no and leaned into Jamie again, and this time when Jamie reached for her hand she didn’t pull away. As she let Jamie weave their fingers together, she placed her other hand over her brother’s. Ty glanced over at them, his eyes red, and Jamie gave him a sympathetic nod. He nodded back, trying to look tough, and the three of them sat together, hands linked as Emma and Ty’s mother spoke about their father—the type of man he had been, the people and things he had loved, the massive hole his passing had left in her heart and in the hearts of so many others.

  Like Emma, she ended with a passage from Muir:

  The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—‘home-going.’ So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own Heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share Heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. Our lives are rounded with a sleep.

  “Our lives are rounded with a sleep,” she repeated. Then, like her daughter had done, she glanced at the photo on the easel. “Sleep well, my love. Until we meet again.”

  Jamie couldn’t stop the tears from spilling over as Emma’s mom found her way back to her seat. Beside her, Emma and Ty were crying, too, and she was pretty sure most of the crowd was as well. All alike pass on and away under the law of death and love—that phrase, along with the image of a flower that lived for a single hour, was burned into her mind. The entire passage had evoked a sensation of insignificance that reminded her of flying home from France, when she’d looked down on the vast ocean and even vaster planet and realized how small in the scheme of things her life was. Except instead of feeling even more alone as she had on the plane, Muir’s words made her feel like part of something beautiful, something immense and, ultimately, immensely outside her control.

  Emma held tight to her hand as a video montage began to play across the screen at the back of the stage, photos of her dad from every stage of his life accompanied by some of his favorite music, starting with “Blackbird” by the Beatles and ending with “No Expectations” by the Rolling Stones. She held on as the last chords of music faded away and the final family photo they’d taken at the top of the Space Needle that winter—on Jamie’s birthday, Emma had told her—remained on the screen. She didn’t let go during the mayor’s closing remarks or even when her mother asked her and Ty to go back to their position by the door. She simply pulled Jamie along with her as she walked arm in arm with her mother toward the wall of windows at the opposite side of the pavilion.

  They were almost there when Emma faltered. Jamie glanced at her, noting the way her eyes narrowed at a dark-haired woman who was slipping out ahead of their arrival. The woman hurried away, and Jamie watched Emma look at her mom. She was talking to Ty, her eyes trained on his face, and didn’t appear to notice the woman who melted quickly into the crowd outside the pavilion.

  “She has some nerve,” Emma whispered to Jamie.

  “Wait. Was that…?”

  Emma nodded. And then they were reaching the entrance where, already, a group of people waited to say their farewells. Jamie let go of Emma’s hand and backed away, leaving her to do the family thing. Emma looked at her quickly, brow creased, but Jamie only shook her head and turned away. Emma may think she wanted her there, but her presence would only raise more questions. Besides, she didn’t want to take advantage of Emma’s grief to push her into something she might later regret.

  As Jamie returned to the same pillar she’d leaned against earlier, she noticed a group of guys their age in suits lingering near the stage with Dani and Sian. One of the guys said something and nodded at Jamie, and the entire group shifted to stare at her. Dani replied, but the guy who’d asked the question kept his gaze trained on Jamie. She stared back, realizing why he looked so familiar as he started across the room toward her, his face hard. Justin Tate, Emma’s ex.

  What was his deal? She and Emma had been friends long before he convinced Emma to go out with him. If anyone should be pissed it should be her since apparently he’d been a dick to someone she cared about. She folded her arms and watched
him approach, feigning casual indifference. Despite the coiled tightness of his approach, she couldn’t believe he would actually cause a scene at a funeral.

  Justin stopped in front of her, his eyes narrowed. But before he could say anything, she felt an arm at her waist. Startled, she glanced over as Emma slipped in against her side. While part of her melted at the feeling of Emma’s arm around her, another part flinched. For whatever reason, Justin was already pissed off. Did Emma not realize she was basically waving a red flag in his face?

  “Everything okay over here?” Emma asked, her eyes as cold as her voice.

  “I was about to introduce myself to your ‘friend,’” Justin said, emphasizing the last word. “I’m sorry about your dad, by the way.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for coming.” Her tone held a note of finality that was difficult to miss.

  “That’s it?” Justin asked, staring at her. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

  “I told you before, Justin, I’m done. Why are you even here?”

  “Come on, Emma. Don’t be like that.” He stepped closer and reached for her arm, but right before he made contact, Jamie’s hands on his chest pushed him back.

  “She said she’s done,” Jamie growled, her voice nearly unrecognizable even to herself. “Maybe you should try listening for a change.”

  His face darkened, and for a second Jamie thought he might shove her back—or worse. But then he laughed, the sound low and harsh. “You know, it must suck to be born into a chick’s body when all you really want is to be a dude.”

  Despite the rage bubbling beneath her skin, Jamie forced a matching smirk. “It must suck even more to realize a ‘chick’ is more secure in her masculinity than you are in yours.” She couldn’t resist adding under her breath, “Asshole.”