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As the other nurse, a short woman named Florence Cooper, helped Nana eat, Shirley told me that a speech pathologist named Betsy Jackson had come in earlier and spent two hours doing a preliminary exam. She recommended therapy twice a week and would return in the morning. Jackson believed that, due to either the fall or the stroke, Nana was suffering from Broca’s aphasia. According to the report the speech pathologist left for us, this meant that much of her language had been reduced to telegraphic speech—short sentence fragments—and she had frequent episodes of being unable to retrieve the right words.
“Getting to be time, Alex,” Sampson called.
“Got it already teed up,” Damon said, coming in with his laptop. He turned on our big television on the wall. “And that should mirror—”
The screen jumped to show NCAA.com and the streaming feed from the northeast regional track finals, live from Rutgers University in New Jersey. The focus was on the men’s javelin at first. Then the camera jumped to athletes taking their places in the stagger for the women’s four-hundred-meter finals.
“Jannie,” my grandmother said. “Lane. Good?”
“Very,” I said. “She likes to be in two, three, or four, and she has three.”
Bree nodded. “She says it helps motivate her to chase the girls in the outer lanes.”
“She hates being in lane eight,” I said.
“No one to chase?” Sampson said, coming into the room with a plate.
“I used to run track,” Shirley Mason said. “Your girl looks loose. Confident. And she’s a record holder, you said?”
Damon said, “She set the national high-school record as a freshman.” He was always ready to brag on his sister.
“Is that right?”
“Right,” my grandmother said, nodding.
“She’s at Howard?” Florence Cooper set aside her files and turned to watch as well. “I went to Howard. She got a chance to win this?”
“If she wants to go to the NCAA finals, she has to be in the top four,” I said.
Damon said, “Jannie says the favorites are a girl from Penn State, a senior who was fourth at nationals last year, and a junior from UConn, who was sixth. They’re in lanes five and six.”
The camera pulled back as the athletes settled into their blocks. “On your marks. Set.”
We all watched the screen, transfixed, as Jannie coiled up, put her fingertips on the track, raised her head, lowered it, and listened, eyes on the ground. At the crack of the gun, she exploded forward, head still down, driving with her legs and chopping the air with her open hands.
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“STAY WITH IT, JANNIE! Stay down!” I shouted, feeling tense and then relieved when Jannie didn’t succumb to one of her few bad habits: bringing her head up and trying to find top speed too soon.
Instead, Jannie came erect almost as if she were a bird swooping upward on a wind thermal. At the eighty-meter mark, the loping started.
That’d always been the unusual thing about my daughter when she raced the four hundred. At a certain point, she was no longer sprinting or even running. She loped through the next section of the race, her long legs chewing up ground, her stride widening, her turnover quickening between one hundred twenty and one hundred eighty meters.
Somewhere in that backstretch, Jannie left loping behind and began to bound in pursuit of the leaders.
The UConn and Penn State runners were just ahead of my daughter, no more than a meter, when Jannie started to put more spring into every foot strike. Her head, shoulders, and torso seemed to lift and hover quite still above the track while her legs blurred below her.
As they came down the last of the backstretch and entered the turn, the speed of Jannie’s turnover picked up. She and the young woman from UConn left the Penn State athlete behind. Jannie stayed right off the UConn runner’s left shoulder coming out of the curve.
“C’mon!” Aunt Connie cried.
“Do it, Jannie!” Damon yelled.
The UConn athlete dug deep and held off my daughter’s attempt to get past her. I thought Jannie was done.
But with thirty yards to go, she surged again.
“She’s got this!” Bree shouted.
