You Will Know Me(18)

First canceled practice since February’s snowstorm, and qualifiers six weeks away, Devon wasn’t going to let her body go soft.

“I wish she’d just take it easy,” Katie said.

“She needs to work off some of these feelings,” Eric said, reaching out to knead her shoulder.

Neither of them was saying the thing they were both thinking: the rotten, rotten timing. Right before qualifiers.

“Becca said Ryan just bought Hailey a ring,” Katie said, remembering. “He was going to propose.”

Eric looked at her.

“Oh Jesus,” he said. Then, after a pause: “He was so young.”



Katie drew a bath for Devon, even lit her favorite Island Nectar candles.

“It’s okay to feel bad,” Katie said. “We all liked Ryan.”

“Thanks, Mom,” she said, but she wouldn’t meet Katie’s eyes, just like after a bad meet, when she’d hide in the concessions-area restroom, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. As if everyone had seen her with her clothes off, or read her diary.

The bathroom door closed behind Katie.

They were never home this early, and for a few minutes, Katie didn’t know what to do with herself.

“Mom,” Drew said from across the kitchen. “You said you’d take me to Petorium for more shrimp eggs.”

“More? What happened to all the ones we did last night?”

“The container spilled in the garage.” He pointed to the recycling bin, a squashed two-liter bottle, its sides veined with crusting salt. “I have to do it all again.”

“Tonight?” she said.

But he looked so anxious, she couldn’t say no.



On the drive, Drew seemed unmoored by everything, asking a hundred questions about Ryan (But how do you know he died right away? How does breaking your neck mean you die?).

But once they returned home, the science project focused him.

He looked so serious, measuring the rock salt, studying the dried shrimp eggs under the light, and taking notes, pencil tight in his careful fingers.

And he never said anything about what happened, seemed to have forgotten it deep in the marrow of his effort. Of the winning project he was creating.

He was like Devon that way.



Nearly midnight, Eric clapped his laptop shut, lifting his handsome head and watching as she turned off all the downstairs lights, one by one.

She couldn’t remember the last night they’d gone to bed at the same time. Eric working fifty hours a week, Katie working twenty-five from home, creating commercial logos, designing annual reports on her overloaded computer between carpooling, car repairs, more errands. They had such a meticulously coordinated schedule, calendars synced, pop-up reminders, both of them always needed somewhere and then always coming home to the rest of it. All their duties hung like heavy raiment over them all the time, only the sight of Devon spearing into the air lifting them up.

So it was nice to walk up the stairs together, the only balm on a gloomy day.

“I sent out a mass e-mail,” he said, “to try to settle everyone down.”

Walking past him earlier, she’d seen his in-box filled with breast-beating messages from parents, the gym’s Facebook wall cluttered with concern and prayers. What shocking news! Has anyone talked to Hailey? God bless him and keep him. He was loved by all.

“The Connors told me they already saw a wreath on Ash Road,” he said. “They said it’s that spot with that dangerous turn. The hairpin.”



Lying in bed with the cruel clarity that can come in late-night thinking, Katie foresaw how hard this would be for the gym, a tear in the seam of everything.

Ryan had been such a welcome and constant presence since that very first day he’d arrived at BelStars to help build the landing pit. That dark ruff of hair and easy smile, he was always around, waiting for Hailey in the parking lot, at competitions. Who could forget him selling raffle tickets out of the Weaver’s Wagon or wielding the power hose at the booster car wash, his T-shirt soaked through? The younger girls had squealed, whispering behind hands. The older ones, Devon’s age, twitched and fidgeted helplessly, their faces red.

For the BelStars girls, he was that perfect crush age, the older-than-high-school-boy-but-not-yet-dad guy. So many of them homeschooled or marginally schooled, he was the only young man in their lives. Part of it was an infatuation with Hailey too, unerotic (probably) enchantments with Hailey’s sun-bleached hair and swimmer’s shoulders and womanly body, so different from their own straight lines (whenever anyone asked her why she hadn’t been a serious gymnast herself, she’d laugh and say, “Not with these,” finger guns aimed at her apple-round breasts).

The girls marveled over Ryan’s gallantry, the way he carried her gym bag, opened doors for her, bought her perfume and chocolate-covered raspberries on Valentine’s Day. The flush of their love, his devotion. Even their lovers’ quarrels, like the epic one at the Ramada Inn that night almost two years ago, were part of their allure. Their fights were exciting, and always ended with a flashy clinch.

And now he was gone. For all of them.

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.



The next day, Monday, they arrived to find no Coach T. again, his absence like a new scar.