Run

  Kenya shook her head.

  The science teachers took classes there to make lists of plants and birds (marsh grass, nuthatch); their history teacher had taken them there to discuss the political majesty of Massachusetts, and their English teacher had taken them there to stand beside the pile of rocks that had once been Thoreau’s cabin while she read aloud from Walden. How was it possible that any child could go to school in Boston and not get dragged out to Concord for something? “It isn’t far from here,” Tip said. “When the weather gets warmer I’ll take you. You can see where he lived.”

  It was one thing to say to someone that one day you’d take them to the Amazon to poke around in the leaf litter, that was an abstract invitation. But it was something else to offer a trip to a place that was close by in a month that was not so very far away. Would he really want to drive her out to see a pond in the spring? She pictured the two of them in the car, the windows down, the landscape shooting past: apple trees heavy with white blossoms, the daffodils waving yellow flags beneath the boughs. They would hardly notice the scenery because they would be having serious discussions about matters of science. “Thoreau studied fish out there?” she asked. She wanted so much to understand why this was important, why these fish were his favorites when there were over a million to choose from.

  “He studied nature,” Tip said. “All of nature. He had some pretty revolutionary ideas about how men should live. I used to study the fishes in that pond and I used to read Thoreau’s books, so when I found these fish that he had caught—” He stopped. His explanation captured nothing of what was important.

  “That makes sense,” she said, lending him encouragement. “You liked the same things.”

  Tip nodded, but it was more than that. It was Doyle sitting on the shore, cutting up an apple with a pocketknife for the three of them to share, it was Doyle praising Tip for remembering the difference between the sunfish and the crappie. It was the beautiful water, clear and cold even in the summer. Tip watched his own feet stepping carefully between the rocks, and kept an eye on Teddy’s feet because Teddy was dreamy and more likely to fall. All of that, and then the picture of Thoreau turning over his own cuffs and stepping into that selfsame water, living a life of studied isolation and yet still taking these fish, these very fish that he held, back into his cabin for study.

  “I think,” Tip said, putting the jar back in its place, “that we should call the hospital and check on your mother now.”

  And so she rolled him back to the place they had started, unable to shake off the feeling that it had all been a test and that she had failed.

  Kenya stood beside Tip at his desk while he called patient information and inquired about Tennessee Moser. When the woman on the other end asked if he was family he said yes, but he would have said yes if he was calling to check on a friend. It was an easy lie even if it might be the truth.

  There was a pause on the line and then the woman was back again. “She’s still in surgery,” the nurse said. “Everything ran late this morning because of the weather.”

  Tip felt inclined to ask if it had snowed in the hospital but then thought better of it. “Is there any report on how she’s doing?”

  There Kenya stood, the watchful, big-eyed falcon.

  “We won’t have any information until she’s out. She’ll be in there another couple of hours and then it will be awhile after that before she’s back in her room.”

  Tip thanked her and hung up the phone. “It’s all going to be fine,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “The nurse said she was going to be fine.”

  Kenya reached up and pulled on her hair. “I could hear what she said. I’m standing right here.”

  Tip sighed and put his foot gingerly on the floor. Immediately, the blood rushed down into the boot and he knew there was going to be nothing good about standing up again. “Let’s go running,” he said. “We’ve still got plenty of time.”

  Campus security was good for a ride over to the track. They knew Tip well enough, finding him as often as they did asleep in the lab when they were locking up. His wrists didn’t want to take the weight of his body on his crutches anymore. Every nerve and muscle protested his departure from the MCZ. He felt a sense of accomplishment just making it out to the curb.

  “You must do a pretty mean mile in that boot,” the driver said when Tip told him where they wanted to go.

  “Funny,” Tip said. Kenya folded into the backseat behind him, his crutches in the middle, his backpack keeping her angled forward. He had wanted all those books, thinking it was possible that he could get stuck in a hospital waiting room for hours, but now he saw them for what they were—dead weight that Kenya had to lug around on the off chance he might encounter boredom.

  On the other side of the river the driver took them past the parking lot of Blodgett Pool and beside the football stadium where Harvard won its games like gentlemen year after year. “Lots of kids calling to say they need rides this morning because it’s so freaking cold,” the driver said, looking in the rearview mirror at Tip rather than at the icy road ahead of him. “I’m sympathetic, mind you, but this isn’t a taxi service. I tell them if they want a ride I’m going to have to see something broken.”

  “Glad I could deliver,” Tip said.

  Kenya kept her gaze fixed out the window, counting light posts, counting starlings. It was weeks ago, wasn’t it? The police car and the snow and all of them squeezed in there together, her mother taken off in an ambulance and not knowing where to find her, not knowing anything. She had been out of her world for a long time now. She had been groping around in the dark for a month at least, not just since yesterday. She felt herself shiver unnaturally and she pressed herself against the door.

  “This is as close as I can get you,” the driver said.

  It was mercifully close. Kenya bit down hard on her back teeth and came around with the crutches, handing them to Tip like the dutiful scout she was. Inside, Tip took his ID out of his wallet and the girl behind the counter of Gordon Track, a girl who was simply fulfilling the contract of her financial aid package by working twenty hours a week, pointed at Kenya. “They’re getting younger, aren’t they?”

  “She’s my sister,” Tip said.

  “She needs to be a student.”

  “She is a student. She goes to grammar school and it’s closed today because of the snow.”

  Kenya stood wide-eyed and silent, praying that this stranger, who had the most enormous assemblage of black curls she had ever seen on a white girl, would look the other way while she slipped beneath the turnstile. She was his sister, he had said so. She was a student. She was minutes away from touching her feet to the track.

  “The rules are,” the girl said, and held her open hand up to a large, printed sign of rules instead of wasting her time repeating them.

  “Look at this,” Tip said, and nodded down towards the boot that he was barely holding up behind him. The girl did him the courtesy of leaning over the counter. “I’m not running today. We will only be taking up one spot on the track. I’m giving her my spot.”

  “They’re nontransferable. I’m the only one who’ll get in trouble,” the girl said.

  “Come in and watch her run. My sister’s a track star. Nobody’s going to ask her to leave.” He used the word “sister” as a novelty. He kept expecting the girl to laugh at the joke.

  But instead she sighed as if she had suddenly grown bored of the whole thing. Her calculus book was open and she rapped her pencil on the page. She had her own studying to do. “Go.”

  Tip continued to look at her, he took his hands off the bars of his crutches and spread them out flat on the desk. “I’m serious,” he said, and for an instant he thought of Sullivan and so he smiled at her. Sullivan would have had the kid on the track five minutes ago. “Come and see her run.”

  She pointed with her pencil and nodded, not to say that she would be watching but to say that the show was over.
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  Kenya darted ahead, too aware that goodwill was a temporary condition. Once she was on the other side of the gate there would be no getting her back.

  He never came here anymore. Sometimes he ran by the river if there was time, but he hadn’t been to the track since freshman year. The light came down in a solid sheet from the high glass wall. It was lovely and quiet when there was nothing going on. Just the occasional squeak of some running shoes. He could come here to study sometime. It smelled warm, like sunlight on pavement. “You better run fast,” Tip said to Kenya when he finally caught up with her. “I’ve put myself on the line for you.”

  Kenya was looking up to the banners hanging from the ceiling, Princeton and Columbia and Yale. She was looking down at the wide sweep of red track, so thick and soft she would spring halfway to the rafters with every strike. “I do.”

  There was a yellow-haired boy doing high-step and lunge in the straight sprint lanes that lay in the center of the track, two girls doing easy laps on the inside lanes, a third girl by herself running fast with a strong kick-back. The rest of the track was empty, and for a minute she wanted to go back to the girl at the desk and tell her, in case she didn’t know, that only four people were actually using the facilities when there was enough space for every kid in her grade and the grade ahead of her plus all the teachers to run full on without bumping into one another. Who did the guardian of the gate think she was saving it for?

  Tip sat down on the front bleacher and put his crutches on the floor.

  “Put your foot up,” Kenya said, taking off her coat and hat and scarf.

  “When did the Girl Scouts get so bossy?” he said and turned sideways to bring up his leg.

  She wasn’t listening to him anymore. She was hopping up and down now, a manic pink spring, ready to spend the ounce of herself that she had been holding on to tight, tight, tight. She put her hands on the ground and tried to make herself stretch but she didn’t think she had the time. She felt certain if she waited another minute she was going to explode. It would all come raining down on her and the last thing she wanted to be was a girl crying on the Gordon Track. That would get her thrown out for sure. She stood and for an instant went up on her toes and then, at the crack of the gun that she kept in her head, she was gone.

  She kept it light at first, swinging past the gently jogging girls who were locked in their own breathless conversation, And so I told him…, past the curve where the high-step lunging boy kept his legs so even and straight he resembled a mechanical doll. If there had been endless time she might have gone over and joined him but the need to run was so strong now she had to fight to hold herself back, keep herself from tearing out chunks of the soft red track with her heels. She needed to take it slow at first, to stretch down through her toes, to pump her elbows out behind her. The cold had settled in her bones, she felt it now. The cold from the high bedroom where she had slept the night before and the cold that had built up in her skin even before that, crouching down in the snow beside her mother, holding her mother’s cold hand. She had absorbed her mother’s cold into her and it had worked a frost along the inside of her veins. It had been cold at the hospital in the little room where they hooked her mother up to monitors while she slept. There hadn’t been time to think about it then, how cold she was, how her hands ached, how her head was splitting from the ice that had built up in her ears. It was cold in the hospital waiting room with Teddy talking about the snow and cold at the piano though she had loved to play. It was cold in the kitchen and cold when she went back to her own apartment. It was every bit as cold there as it was outside. It was unbearably cold without her mother to wrap her in a blanket and fix her a cup of chocolate and talk about how the sun poured over everything in Kenya, the place for which she was the namesake, where they agreed they would go together someday. In Kenya it was hot enough to make you forget that winter even existed.

  And this morning? She had been freezing every minute of it. Her coat wasn’t half as warm as Tip’s and even though she’d brought a sweater from home she hadn’t been able to wear it under her coat because then the coat was too tight to get her arms through the sleeves. Tip was on crutches, she didn’t blame him, but he moved as slowly as the hands on a clock and she was having to practically nail her feet to the sidewalk to keep from running over him every step. She was picking up her pace now on the track, but not to where she would take it. She could have run this fast in the snow. She let herself float forward, every step a leap, her legs stretching out like scissors opened wide. She was a swimmer, a gymnastics star, she was a superhuman force that sat outside the fundamental law of nature. Gravity did not apply to her. “Meditation in motion,” her coach would say. She heard his voice in her head as she lapped the talking girls, as she swept past the one who was there to run. From the corner of her vision she could see the step-lunge boy stand up straight and watch her pass. She dried off his forehead with the breeze she made. She wasn’t even trying. She wasn’t racing anything but the sight of her mother being hit by the car. That, and she raced the Doyles at their breakfast table saying she lived too close, and the girl at the front desk intimating that Kenya was not a person to be on this track any more than she should have a house on Dartmouth Street. She was racing Thoreau and his jar of fish because he continued to hound her. How was she supposed to know him? It was her plan to outrun all of that, and somewhere in that running she had started to fly. She no longer felt like touching all the dirt and the muck she had so patiently submitted herself to so that people would think she was a very nice girl. She was not such a very nice girl. Nobody who was very, very nice would ever work this hard to take something they wanted only for themselves. Nice girls did not demand that everyone stop what they were doing and look at them but that was exactly what she asked for and what she got. All the other runners on the track had stopped now, the way dancers will stop when the soloist steps forward to dominate the floor. The girl from the front desk was there, too. Kenya caught sight of her extraordinary hair as she blew past. Tip was there, his leg off the bench now and straight out in front as if he thought at any moment he might have to throw a rope around her and pull her back. Anger and sadness and a sense of injustice that was bigger than any one thing that had happened stoked an enormous fire in her chest and that fire kept her heart vibrant and hot and alive, a beautiful, infallible machine. They were no longer waiting to see how fast she could go, they knew how fast she could go. Now they wanted to see how long it would be before she crashed, and if that was what they were waiting for they might as well sit down and get comfortable.

  Tip had never seen anything like it. Not just the speed but the utter effortlessness of it all, the way the toes of her shoes barely touched down before she set off again. She was a sprinter, clearly she was a sprinter, and yet she just kept going until he started to change his mind and wonder if she wasn’t going to knock out a half marathon on the track while he sat there waiting.

  “You weren’t kidding about her,” said the girl from the front desk.

  Tip didn’t know how long she had been sitting on the bleachers beside him and even now he couldn’t turn his face towards her. “No,” he said.

  “Are you a runner, too? Did you hurt your foot running?”

  “I don’t run,” he said.

  “Something like that”—she shook her head—“you’d think it would have to be genetic.”

  “Maybe it is,” he said, watching her shoot past them again. Kenya’s hands were open. Her face was easy and relaxed. She made none of those huffing sounds that would indicate the seriousness of her endeavor. “Maybe I should give it another try.”

  They were silent through the next lap and then the next. “I’m going to call the coach so he can come over and see this,” the dark-haired girl said, because the runner had still not flagged. If anything she seemed to be getting stronger.

  “Not today,” Tip said. He kept his eyes on Kenya every second. He felt like he was seeing greatness, like he was in the roo
m watching Watson and Crick put the final touches on their model of DNA, or maybe he was seeing Rosalind Franklin with her magnificent X-rays. Wasn’t it the girl, after all, who had actually found the key to life? Kenya was a flame, a thin pink wick. “We’ve got someplace we have to be in a little while.”

  “Well, somebody needs to see this,” she said.

  “She’s only eleven.”

  “She won’t stay eleven.”

  There was a part of Tip that wanted to engage this girl, to flirt with her, but he couldn’t turn his head. What would it be like to know at eleven the great thing you could do? This was what Doyle had always wanted from them, what Father Sullivan had wanted: a mission, a calling. Tip thought that he had found one in the fishes but it was nothing like this. Kenya running was pure ability: strength, grace, concentration, and the odd thing was that Tip believed her skill must be transferable. It wasn’t just that he was watching her run: he was watching who she was. It seemed perfectly reasonable to think that she could take this energy and pour it into anything.

  It was not too long after that the little bird started to land, her leaps coming back to a trot, her trot smoothing out into a jog. The black-haired girl began to whistle and clap, and the other runners who had been pressed to the side wall by Kenya’s centrifugal force clapped as well. Tip clapped for her and she waved her hand while keeping her eyes straight ahead. The blond boy came up and started walking beside her and they talked back and forth, something Tip couldn’t hear. This little girl from Cathedral and the Harvard boy were talking about—what, training techniques? She said something that made him laugh and he patted her on the shoulder and ran off at a modest pace while Kenya rounded her last turn. The three girls all came up and shook her hand, and then she headed back towards the bench.

  “You’re something, kid,” the front desk girl said to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, and took a giant inhale, “for letting me in.”

  Tip shook his head. “Secretariat.”