The low ache rose another degree under the sternum and settled there, patient as a tenant who had paid for the room.
I waited her out.
“I’ve watched the clip, Maria.”
She said it gently. That was the worst part.
“Everyone in this rink has watched the clip. The kids haven’t, because the kids are four. But every parent in that lobby has, Maria, every single one of them, and most of the ones in the lobby on Tuesday and the ones in the lobby on Thursday, and Marcus has, and the woman who runs the snack bar has, and so has the man who fixes the Zamboni. We’ve all watched it. You don’t get to live in Spokane and coach at Glacier Edge and pretend that you don’t have a past that we can all look up on YouTube in three seconds.”
“Kate —“
“You were the best in the world.” She said it flat, like a fact she was setting down on the bench between us so that I could not pretend she hadn’t said it. “You werethe best in the world, Maria. In 2015 you were the best in the world, and in 2016 you fell, and that was nine years ago, and whatever it is that happened in Tokyo—whatever the ice did to you, whatever the press did to you, whatever you’ve been doing to yourself ever since—you still know things. You still know things that Marcus does not know and never will. You can keep that to yourself if you want. You’re allowed to. But I’m asking. As a mother and as someone who used to do this. I’m asking. Just one demonstration. One. For Nova. Just so she can see.”
She had not raised her voice. Kate Linden did not raise her voice. That was, in fact, the entire problem.
I looked at my hands. The right one under the left. I kept them there.
“No, Kate.”
I said it quietly.
“I’m sorry. I really am. I know what you’re asking and I know why you’re asking and I know that you’re not wrong about any of it. But the answer’s no. Marcus on Tuesday. Six o’clock. I’ll talk to him Monday morning. He’ll be ready for her.”
Kate held my gaze a beat longer than was comfortable. Then another beat. The chiller hummed. The playlist had moved on. Somewhere in the corner, the vending machine made the small electronicboopof Nova pressing the coin return for the fourth time without putting in any coins.
Kate exhaled. It was a small sound. It was not unkind.
“Okay.” She stood. The camel coat went over her arm in one fluid practiced motion. “Tuesday. Six o’clock. Thank you, Maria.”
“Thankyou, Kate. Truly. I—I see what you see, in her. I want her to have all of it. I want her to havemorethan all of it.”
“I know you do.” She didn’t look at me when she said it. She looked at her daughter, in the corner, in the pink puffer with the unicorn patch on the shoulder, who was now pressing the buttons on the vending machine in what I was pretty sure was a Beethoven motif. “I know you do, Maria. That’s what makes this so—“
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. I was, on balance, grateful.
She walked across the rubber matting toward the lobby, toward the rack where Nova’s jacket was hung on the kid hook, and I stayed on the bench with my hands in my lap and the playlist onReflection, still, because the playlist had loops and the playlist did not know.
Nova came over.
She came over in her ice walkers, the orange plastic guards over her blades, with the small careful clack-clack of a six-year-old walking off the mat. She did not look at her mother. She looked at me. She had the unblinking forensic attention that small children have for the conversations they have been pointedly excluded from, and she stopped about two feet in front of the bench with the strap of her skate bag held in both hands, and she looked at my face the way I had once, twenty-three years ago, looked at the face of an adult who I had decided was lying about something important.
“Coach Maria.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“If you used to skate . . .”
Her voice was small and clear and entirely without malice. That was the part that did it. She wasn’t accusing. She was six. She wasasking.
“Why don’t you anymore.”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
I had, in nine years, prepared answers for this question. Whole paragraphs.
I had an injury, sweetheart, and my knee doesn’t bend like it used to. I just decided I liked teaching better. I had my time and now it’s your turn. Grown-ups change, honey, sometimes they change a lot.
