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Red caught Clementine’s eye. “What’s going down? Did you see it?”
“Hyponatremia. By the looks of it.”
“Oh, wow.” Red shielded her eyes from the sun and watched as the medics made it to the medical tent. “They’ll probably give her an IV right away and then get her to the hospital.”
“What is hyponatremia?” Tabitha reached down and stroked Trinity’s head. The dog had silently followed them and was pressing into Tabitha’s legs. “Is she dehydrated?”
“Basically the opposite,” Clementine said. “She took in too much fluid. Probably didn’t even know she was doing it. She probably drank at each water station, like she’s been told or read somewhere. And over time she just took in too much, and her sodium got dangerously low.”
Tabitha sank to the grass, rested her elbows on her knees and let her face fall into her palms. Trinity flopped down against her. Clementine exchanged a look with Red.I got this, Clementine mouthed.
“I’m going to go start at the opposite end of the tables as the professor and help check on all the runners,” Red said. She patted Tabitha’s shoulder. “This isn’t your fault, Tabitha.”
After Red left, Clementine sat down next to Tabitha and leaned in, just enough to brace her from the opposite side. Clementine sat in silence awhile, watching Joy and Red move quickly and professionally from one table to the next, offering suggestions and speaking to each runner before moving on. An ambulance arrived and loaded up the woman in pink shorts from the medical tent.
“Do you think that woman’s going to die?” Tabitha picked nervously at the grass.
“If she does, it won’t be your fault.”
Tabitha flashed a horrified look.
“No, I doubt she’ll die.” Clementine had no idea, really. “The saline works pretty fast if they do it right.”
“You know all this from running for so long?”
“From years of running. Owning a shop. Doing a lot of races. Reading about running. Other than my daughter, my life is running. You get the picture.”
“This was something I should’ve known.” Tabitha’s voice was light and a little raspy. “Sensing trouble is kind of my thing. I don’t know what happened.”
“You know now.” Clementine glanced over and saw tears rolling down Tabitha’s cheeks. “Hey.” She put her hand on Tabitha’s knee and shook it a little. “How can you know what you don’t know? Until you know that you’re supposed to know it?” She tried a smile. “This isn’t like being in a combat zone. This is something entirely different. You’re learning.”
Tabitha sucked in her bottom lip and swiped at her tears with a knuckle. She leaned back in the grass and patted her chest. Trinity climbed on top of her, resting her paws across Tabitha’s shoulder. “I suck at everything,” she whispered.
Clementine lay back in the grass, too, which had warmed in the sun but was slick. They were going to be muddy when they got up, but what the hell? The first thing Clementine would do when she got home was sink into that hot bubble bath she’d been dreaming about and stay there for a long time. “You’ve had a rough run lately,” she agreed. “But sometimes you gotta hit a few miles of hard pavement before you get back to the forest.” She hoped that didn’t sound trite. She didn’t know Tabitha’s whole story. Clementine knew about the IED that exploded in Afghanistan and took out Tabitha’s convoy. She knew that the chaplain who Tabitha was protecting had been badly hurt at the time and had died a couple of years ago, which had sent Tabitha into a spiral of PTSD and panic attacks. They’d talked about these things after gym sessions, including Clementine’s loss of Tyler in Afghanistan. But Clementine had always thought there was more to Tabitha’s story than she let on. There was some serious stuff buried there, ghosts that had invisible, icy fingers keeping her chained to fear.
Tabitha was silent as Clementine stared at the sky, which was bright and blue and beautiful. The air was warm enough at the core to make the chilly edge bearable. It was the kind of weather that made people smile, craving thoughts of spring, even though winter hadn’t even technically yet begun. The day she’d learned Tyler was never coming home again was a lot like this day. Clementine preferred the rain.
She wondered what Tabitha saw when she looked at this sky, from beneath the comfort of her dog’s weight. Did she like this kind of sky, or did she crave the rain, too?
She didn’t ask. She just lay there, next to her friend, and her dog, listened to all her spent muscles throb a sad song and let the world go on around them.
There are two mistakes one can make along the way to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
~Buddha
This morning’s quote from her Journal of Invincibility ran through Tabitha’s mind on her drive home from the marathon. She’d lain in the grass for a while, eyes closed and Trinity’s comforting weight across her chest, Clementine in silence by her side. She hadn’t done any more massages, just lay there until she got chilled from the stillness and the damp ground, then got up, went over to her table and packed everything away. She hadn’t asked for permission to leave early and she didn’t care what anyone thought. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d get the extra credit, in part or in full, for showing up and putting in a solid two hours of postrace massages before the woman who needed medics made Tabitha doubt her entire existence again. And she didn’t care.
She just had to get out of there.
Clementine had helped Tabitha pack up without a word, and once they’d loaded her table into the trunk of her car, her friend had smiled at her, given her a hug and said, “I won’t be at the gym for a few days. Recovery.” She swept an arm over her bedraggled body.
Tabitha had known that there was a lot of invisible pain going on there. Clementine’s body had to be seriously beat up from running twenty-six point two miles, but the damage would be invisible to an onlooker who didn’t know the story. Tabitha had felt a sort of kinship and comfort in that knowledge.
“But I’ll see you there by the end of the week, probably,” Clementine added. “Text me if you need to.”
Tabitha had nodded, way more appreciative of the only person in her life who didn’t have anopinionon things than she could express. She wondered if Clementine knew how much of a gift her silence was, neither forcing Tabitha to condemn nor defend herself, and leaving her room to process what had happened without judgment, good or bad.
So far, Tabitha’s processing wasn’t going well. That quote from this morning kept pushing its way into her thoughts, the ones telling her that massage school was not the place for her. Neither was the motorcycle shop. Neither was the gym. Neither was Auntie El’s church. Problem with all that was, Tabitha was left with nowhere to go.
