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“Mostly insomnia, at first. I told myself, you always knew it would end sometime. Time to move on, and more time for studying. Find your next challenge. I tried, but I couldn’tsleep.I don’t think I got more than four hours a night for months. I lay there, I meditated, I did breathing exercises, I contracted and released my muscles one by one, and still—my thoughts just whirled and whirled. I’d always been a swimmer. I mean,always.It’s like being a … a ballet dancer, at least from what I’ve heard. Dedication, and more than that. Devotion. Like being a monk. You see that black line at the bottom of the pool in your dreams, because you stare at it for hours on end, every day, twice a day, or even three times. You’re in the pool on your birthday, on Christmas. You’re in there no matter how you feel. You push your body all the way to the edge of what you can take, and then you push it a little more, because that’s how you win, by always having more in the tank and knowing you do, because most of all, you push your mind. You have toknow,when you’re up there on the starting blocks, that you can win. You don’t know it because you’ve got faith. You know it because you’ve gotproof.You’re not counting your strokes. You’re notawareof your strokes. They’re all the way down in your muscles. Embedded in your brain. There’s no need for thinking anymore. You’re a machine, and you’re calibrated all the way. All the way for this.”
He was having a hard time breathing. His eyes were fixed on her face, as animated as he’d ever seen it, as if she were describing a lost love. A great love.
Which she was.
“I loved it,” she said. “And I hated it. I didn’t even know how I felt. It was just who Iwas.But who was I now?”
“A lawyer?” he suggested.
“A lawyer is …” She searched for the word. “It’s nothing. At least itfeltlike nothing, back then. How many lawyers are there? So many. You know how many people win a gold medal in an Olympic event? One every four years.One.Which makes it sound like it’s about ego, but it wasn’t about ego, or not only. It was about …” She trailed off.
“Purpose,” he suggested.
She sighed. “Yeah. Purpose. Focus. Desire. Identity. All of that. So there was the insomnia, and there was the anxiety. I thought I was having a heart attack, one day in class. I asked somebody to call an ambulance. I went to the hospital in anambulance, which I’d never done in my life. Know what it was? It was a panic attack.” She laughed. “I’d never had a panic attack, either. Never even close. I couldn’tbelieveit. I told the doctor, that can’t be right. It’s got to be my heart. That must be why I hadn’t qualified. It had been my heart! He showed me the graph and said, trust me, it’s not your heart. It’s a panic attack. Happens all the time. Panic meant you hadn’t prepared, though, and I’d always prepared. This wasn’t me.Iwasn’t me.On the weekends, I’d lie in bed in the morning and not want to get up. I’d always got up at four-thirty to train, and there it would be, five-thirty, six-thirty, seven-thirty, and I wasn’t getting up. I hadn’t slept well, yeah, but that wasn’t why. I didn’t see the point.”
“So what happened?” he asked. “Did you fail your exams?”
“Who, me?” She laughed. “Of course not. But I was bad all spring, and in the summer, it got worse. I had a job—an internship—and—”
“Of course you did,” he said. “So somebody noticed?”
She frowned at him. “Who’s telling this story?”
“Oh, sorry.” He smiled himself, even though he wanted to do … something else. Something that would show her that he saw that beating, fragile heart. That he recognized the butterfly. “Go ahead.”
“My mom came,” she said. “She’d wanted me to come home, of course, after the Olympics thing. The failure.”
He said, “I don’t think I’d call it—” and she said, “What did I say about interrupting? You realize I’ve never told this story. Not all the way. I don’t know why I’m telling it now.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I want to hear it.”
“It was during the Olympics. She didn’t tell me she was coming. Bam can be sneaky like that. If she had, I’d have had my defenses up. As it was, it was seven-thirty on Friday night, and I was lying on the couchnotwatching the Olympics. I was watching a bad sitcom, because it had been on next and I hadn’t had the energy to find something better, and eating ice cream from the carton and Pepperidge Farm cookies from the bag. I don’t evenlikepackaged cookies. I gained more than twenty pounds, by the way, in about four months. Probably good for you to know, that I’m prone to overindulgence. Especially when I’m not burning an extra six thousand calories a day.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m terrified. I’m guessing you didn’t ask for meds. Sleeping pills. Antidepressants. Like that.”
“Of course not,” she said, as if he wouldn’t have known. “I knew I just had to buck up and figure it out. Put on my big-girl panties. Get back up on the horse. But I just … couldn’t. So that was how Bam found me. In my Stanford sweats, the ones she’d seen me in a thousand times, but they’d never been that tight. Fat, my face breaking out, my hair needing cutting. It would’ve needed washing, but I hadsomepride. Plus that internship. My roommate opened the door, my mom wheeled her suitcase in, saw me, stopped dead, and said, ‘Oh, honey.’ In this really … disappointed voice.”
She stopped, he didn’t say anything, and she went on. “I think that was the low point. When I couldn’t lie to myself about what she was seeing, or tell myself I was fooling anybody. I cried for about an hour, and then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I cried some more. All weekend long. I couldn’t seem to stop. I didn’t know anybody had that many tears. I sure never knewIdid. On Monday, Bam made me an appointment with the doctor, and she found me a therapist, and she drove me there and waited in the car. I’d have fought it, but let me tell you, you donotmess with my mom. Even my dad doesn’t mess with my mom.”
“Maybe,” he said, “you knew you needed help.”
“Well, that, too. I didn’twantit, but I needed it. Somehow, she found a therapist who’d been an elite athlete, but then, the Bay Area’s a big place. Not that I got better right away. I was supposed to ‘find my joy.’ To find ‘ways to move’ that ‘fed my spirit’. Man, was I hostile tothatidea. I said, ‘I don’thavejoy. I have discipline. I need to know what to do to get my discipline back. Why aren’t you telling me that? That’s what I’m paying you for.’ And the therapist just looked at me in that really patient way they have and asked, ‘Why do you think you don’t deserve joy?’ They always ask these questions you can’t answer. I still can’t answer that one, and I actuallyhavejoy now. Sometimes.”
“Doing what?” he asked. Not because it was a partner-thing to ask. Because he wanted to know.
“You must know what,” she said.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “but nobody likes a bloke who’s always puffing himself off.”
She hit him in the chest. “Notsex,you idiot. Well, sex with you, maybe, and afterwards, the way you hold me while I fall asleep. Huh. But it’s mostly the things that don’t have anything competitive at all about them. My swim classes, when somebody like Troy, who could barely dangle his feet before, puts his face underwater and swims his very first strokes. That’s my joy. And when I’m running with my group, pushing hard, feeling my body move so well, breathing deeper than I ever get to anymore, and laughing like crazy at something Martin’s saying. And making …” Another pause.
“Making what?” he asked.
“Making cookies and carving jack o’lanterns with the kids. That night you and I first slept together, too, when we made s’mores in front of the fire and you burned your marshmallows and ate them anyway. Troy’s hugs.” She swallowed. “Nothing competitive,” she said again fast, “though I like my job, too. I like knowing I’m good at it. I like feeling like I’m helping. I like when I overcome my worst impulses and manage to be fair when I want to be vengeful. I want to become a District Judge. I want to start a drug court. We need a drug court so badly. Some people won’t qualify, and maybe most people won’t graduate. But we’ll have given them a chance.”
“You are an incredible woman.” He’d have said more, but he couldn’t think what.
“I just confessed my lowest moment to you.” She was trying to frown, but it wasn’t working. He could sense the shakiness in her, when you’d put so much of yourself out there, you didn’t have enough left to balance you. “And I also told you that moment felt like tonight. That I seem to be cracking up again.”
