You Will Know Me(34)

The quote taped to the side of her computer monitor: The only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your feet.

Her first grips looped in a ribbon and hanging on the wall.

The only odd piece: that gaudy LeRoy Neiman tiger poster from their old gym. The day they left Tumbleangels for BelStars, Eric had torn it from the wall and given it to her. Devon had always loved it, its million colors teeming and frothing from its whiskers, shooting from its slanted eyes.

Spraying from door frame to baseboard, the air in the room misted with bleach, she heard a chirp.

There, on the floor, was Devon’s phone in its tidy plaid case.

Leaning down, she picked it up.

She didn’t mean to look, precisely. But she didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t.

Swiping her thumb across the screen, she saw the flare of the Missed Calls icon, the harsh red arrows.

And then the same number, over and over again. Every ten or fifteen minutes for hours.

Hailey Belfour.

Hailey Belfour, Hailey Belfour, Hailey Belfour.

*



She found Eric in the kitchen, halfway through the screen door to the backyard, deep in a phone conversation.

She could tell from the way he spoke—earnest, enunciating, patient—that Gwen was on the other end.

“First, competition fees. That’s eighty dollars per gymnast and forty dollars per level, per team. Then coaching fees at one hundred dollars per session, sixty-four cents per mile for travel times four coaches, plus thirty dollars for coach meals times four coaches—no, the bylaws require us to pay for meals, even for the skill coaches…Well, that’s what we voted on.”

She waited a minute, Devon’s phone like a hot iron in her hand, but it was taking too long.

Hurrying down the nubby carpeted steps into the basement—the chalky smell of the mats, the gust from the laundry room, the churn of the treadmill—she could feel Devon even before she saw her. The energy she held so tightly until she let it thunder forth: a soaring vault, an epic tumbling pass, a delirious aerial on the beam.

At the foot of the stairs, Katie stopped, watching her daughter run, her face bone-white under the gooseneck light looped around one of the posts.

“Mom.” She looked up, surprised, hands reaching for her headphones. “What is it? Did something happen?”

“Has Hailey been trying to call you?”

“Hailey?” she said, eyes scanning the room quickly, the floor beneath her, her book bag.

Looking for her phone, of course. A classic teenager move, but not one Katie was used to from Devon, who barely seemed to notice her phone other than to look at TumbleTally after meets. Who’d never been like the other girls Katie saw at Devon’s school, with their glittered fingernails clawed over their phones, trapped in a constant storm of entanglements and betrayals.

“Yes, Hailey,” she said, waving Devon’s phone. “Several times.”

“What? No.” Slowly, Devon untangled her headphones from ears, the cords caught, her fingers gently pulling them apart. “You have my phone?”

“It was on your bed, flashing.” The lie came easily.

“Oh. And you started looking through it?”

“No,” Katie said, noticing something in Devon’s expression, a sense of the breach. It was unfair, to feel like an invader. She, who sewed cotton gusset into the crotch of Devon’s competition leotards if they were cut too high for underwear. She, who, like every gymnast mom, was so acutely attuned to her daughter’s body, hands on her thighs, massaging a groin pull, that sometimes she felt it was her own.

“I just saw the missed calls. That’s not the point, Devon. Why is she calling you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t answer.”

“You have no idea?” Katie wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t believe her.

“I guess she’s sad and calling a bunch of people. Everyone said she was acting funny at the funeral. I didn’t answer. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

“I’m sure she’d appreciate whatever you had to say,” Katie said. It made sense, her daughter’s life so blessedly untouched by the loss of a grandparent, or even a pet. By the time Katie was Devon’s age, her uncle had died in a fall, her mom had burned through two marriages, she’d moved six times. “But you and she—you aren’t close. Why you?”

“I don’t know. She probably won’t call again. There’s lots of people who know her better than me. Like you.”

“What? I’m not close—Devon, if she calls again, you tell me,” Katie said, but Devon had already slid her headphones back on and started running again.



Katie sat at the kitchen table, waiting for that morning’s tarry coffee to heat. Gwen had finally released Eric, but now he was upstairs checking on Drew.

The vinyl place mat bore the imprint of Eric’s jottings, the ballpoint pressed so hard. Rows and rows of numbers, mysterious hieroglyphics (Eric’s perpetual vault-table doodle), and something that had been crossed out vigorously, over and over again.

She held it up to the light without knowing why. All she could see was a doodle, a pair of slanty eyes, a V between them, like a cartoon owl.

“Poor kid, his throat looked like a slab of raw beef.” Eric’s voice startled her, her hand dropping the place mat quickly, face flushing. “What’re you doing?”