Page 86 of Ice Dance

I smiled, finishing my laces, and stood. Navarro saw me then and waved me over. He clapped, and raised his voice. “Kids, get back here a second. I want you to meet someone very special.”

I’d have lied if I’d said his words hadn’t warmed me. I was used to being admired, but there was something humbling and genuine about this setting. These people, the children, their parents, didn’t know who I was. They probably didn’t care. There wasn’t a lifetime of expectations on my shoulders. They just saw someone in nice skates who could probably skate fairly well. The lack of pressure was freeing.

Navarro crouched down to the kids’ level at the side of the rink, while the children collected at the gate in their skates. “Kids, this is Mr. Hasegawa. He’s a very famous figure skater who now does ice dancing. Do you know what ice dancing is?

Hands shot up. “Dancing to music!”

“Correct. It’s also where all the fun people from figure skating go to enjoy themselves.”

He talked them through what ice dance actually was, technically, but keeping it light so they didn’t get bored. Then he suggested I should do a routine for them. Obviously, I’d expected it. The rink already played generic pop songs in the background. I picked up the beat and did a simple, quick routine. Certainly nothing that was going to have my crowd of moms and pops bursting into applause. Although, there was some polite applause coming from somewhere when I was done.

As I returned to the gate, the children erupted with questions.

Navarro managed to get them under control. “Let’s not all talk at once.” He singled out Lucy, who was making a valiant effort to raise her arm the highest. “Lucy, you there, you go first.”

I answered their questions for ten minutes, while the parents looked bored by the benches. It was all very mundane and surprisingly wholesome.

With my piece over, I left the ice, removed my skates, and joined Navarro at the vending machines.

“See, that wasn’t difficult. You liked it. Admit it.”

“I did,” I admitted.

“It’s great, seeing them take to the ice, you know?” He grabbed a protein bar from the machine, then we both went back to the benches to watch the class through the fogged plexiglass.

“When I forget why I’m skating, I come back here,” he said. “Just get on the ice and be normal about it.”

“Why do you skate?” I asked.

He thought for a second. “To prove everyone wrong.” He saw me watching him and shrugged. “Until I found skating, I crashed out of everything. It wasn’t deliberate, it just turned out like that. I’d try, but it was never enough, so I gave up trying. Gave up on a lot of things. Almost didn’t come back from that.”

That didn’t sound like the man I knew. “You don’t give up now.”

He snorted. “After that early video of my half-baked routine went viral, I realized I might actually be good at something.”

He’d had a difficult time. I didn’t know the details, just the headlines I’d scrolled past online and anything mentioned during our media sessions. The ice-skating world had not been kind to him. Too old to begin professionally, not refined enough, the wrong background, alcohol and substance abuse, tattoos, risky dances. He’d appeared to thrive on it, but I suspected behind the scenes, every jagged headline hurt him.

“Why do you dance, Hasegawa?” he asked, half smiling. “What picks you back up after you’ve fallen for the fiftieth time that day?”

“My father.”

His smile faltered. “Really?”

“He’s a driven man, and nothing I do is ever enough. But when it came to the ice, he’d notice me. It was all we talked about, all we knew. Without skating, I don’t think I’d know him at all.”

He hesitated again, then sent his gaze back onto the ice. “Clearly, he was a good teacher.”

“Not particularly.”

“What happened between you two?” Navarro asked. “You don’t have to tell me, I just . . . you’ve mentioned him a few times and it seems like he’s a big influence on your life.”

“He is . . . was . . . I mistook his attention for caring, and told him some things I shouldn’t have. We didn’t speak after that. He stopped teaching me. Stopped answering my calls too.”

Navarro’s mouth fell open. His eyes narrowed. “Holy shit, that’s horrible.”

“I don’t think it’s his fault.”

“You’d better not be thinking it’s your fault. My pop was difficult, but nothing like that.”