Beyond the Point(115)

They were selling razors, for God’s sake.

She put the phone on the table in front of her and rubbed her eyes. The thought of getting on a plane to go back to London, only to ride the train to the office every day while Hannah stayed at Fort Bragg, made Dani want to hit her phone with a sledgehammer.

“Can we join you?”

Dani looked up to see Wendy Bennett standing next to her, followed by her husband, dressed in a gray suit. That was all it took for the tears to start flowing. The welcome scent of Wendy’s perfume. The embrace of her arms around Dani’s neck. Wendy wore a classic black crepe dress with white pearl earrings. After they’d all hugged and sat down, Wendy looked at the receiving line and shook her head.

“I’ve never seen so many people,” she said. “This is going to go for a while.”

Dani nodded, and watched as Wendy’s eyes landed on Locke’s new wife, who’d joined the end of the line.

“I just met Amanda,” Wendy said, looking back on the little sandwiches on her plate. “She seems nice.”

“Yep,” Dani said. “She is.”

“Hannah is going through something unimaginable,” Wendy explained, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t grieve the ways your dreams have shattered, too.”

It was difficult to swallow those words. Your dreams. What dreams did she even have anymore?

“I know your life hasn’t exactly gone the way you’d expected,” Wendy continued. “But Hannah is going to be experiencing a lot of loneliness now. A lot of loss. And you understand that pain, more than most people in this room. You know what it feels like for the future to implode. You know what it means to start over.”

“That’s true,” Dani said, wiping her eyes. “I just . . . I don’t know how to help her. She’s so strong, Wendy. And I . . . I don’t know. Everything just feels wrong.”

“Of course it feels wrong. That’s called life.”

“I’m earning all this money. And what for? I’m making all these connections, in a field I never wanted to be in in the first place.”

“Your job in London afforded you the chance to be here now, for Hannah. Who else could drop everything for two weeks and set up camp for a friend? And you have to remember. God hasn’t forgotten you. He hasn’t forgotten Hannah, either. None of this makes sense. But the story isn’t over.”

A deep sigh came from the depths of Dani’s lungs. Tim had touched so many people in his short twenty-four years. It was painfully clear to Dani now that if she died, far fewer people than this would attend her funeral. You only get one chance at life. And Dani was certain now that she couldn’t live it behind a computer screen. Not anymore.

“You know what surprises me?” Wendy asked. She looked around the room, then back at Dani. “I don’t see her here.”

“Who?”

“Her,” Wendy said, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Dani said, then sighed. “It doesn’t surprise me at all. She never really knew us.”

“I should have done more. I think about it so often. I should have tried to have her fired. But I thought if she found out that I was trying to get her fired she wouldn’t let you girls come to our house anymore. I just . . . I didn’t want to make things worse than they already were.”

“You did plenty,” Dani assured her.

After a pause, Wendy leaned across the table. “What happened? I mean, really?”

Dani took a sip of her water and smirked. She knew what Wendy was talking about, even if she hadn’t said it outright. In the summer of 2004, just a few months after their graduation ceremony, West Point’s athletic director had asked for Coach Jankovich’s resignation. It made national news. But true to form, Coach Jankovich played it off like she’d received another coaching job and had chosen to leave. West Point didn’t correct the error, but Wendy knew better.

“The cult happened,” said Dani.

In April 2004, two months before their graduation, Avery, Hannah, and Dani were eating sub sandwiches in Grant Hall when their coach walked through the room, holding her head high like a crane. She’d passed them without saying a single word. Not a hello, not a goodbye. And after she’d gone, the girls had groaned and recounted all the ways she’d failed them over the years.

“Like I said,” Avery had said, “if we’d all quit, they would have fired her. A player strike would have made a statement.”

“Too bad it’s too late for that,” Hannah had added.

Dani had set her sandwich down. “What if it’s not?”

That night, they’d gone back to Dani’s room and written three separate letters, outlining every NCAA infraction, racial slur, personal attack, and poor coaching decision that woman had made. Dani had e-mailed upperclassmen who’d already graduated, requesting that they do the same, and by midnight, she’d received six more letters. It was disloyal, for sure. It even amounted to mutiny—but even Hannah had agreed to participate. They couldn’t leave that woman behind to ruin the experience of any more athletes. Female cadets at West Point had it hard enough.

That night, Dani had slipped all nine letters into the mailbox of the commandant’s house. Then she’d walked away.

“We didn’t know what he’d do with the letters,” said Dani, after recounting the tale to Wendy. “But when we heard they fired her over the summer, we knew that he’d listened. She’d always accused me of leading a cult to get her fired. And it turned out, I did.”