Loser's Bracket

  “Yeah,” Leah says, “if we were closer in age, she’d be giving me a run, but, that’s not my point. Uh, I don’t know how to say this. . . .”

  “You saw me swim.”

  Her long, graceful fingers tap the steering wheel. “That’s a generous depiction.”

  I laugh. “A better one is ‘not drowning.’”

  “Uh-huh. ‘Not drowning’ is easier on land. Annie, you might look good in a Speedo, but trust me, you’re a sunbather. Your shine is on the court.”

  “I like to try stuff.”

  She glances sideways at me. “I could give you a list of things to try that would give you a longer life-span, but if you’re going to do this, why don’t you let me work with you . . . you know, on your stroke.”

  “You’d do that? Isn’t that, like, the very definition of quixotic?”

  “Call it community service. Run in and get your suit and we’ll shoot over to the pool. I’ve got about an hour and a half before I meet Tim.”

  “That would be so cool, but right now I gotta get in the house and see if Frankie has cut Marvin into small pieces and hidden them like Easter eggs. Could we do it later? Like maybe tomorrow?”

  We make a date and Leah waits for me to haul my bike out of the pickup bed, then speeds off.

  Standing in the hall entryway, I hear voices, tiptoe to the partially open door of the converted playroom Momma has set up for Frankie, and squat against the wall.

  Marvin has squeezed into the tiny rocking chair with his back to me while Frankie lies on his stomach holding a conversation between a plastic bear and a small teddy bear—toys from the stash Momma keeps for those unexpected visits. He uses a high voice for the plastic bear, lower for the teddy.

  Plastic Bear: We don’t need no dads.

  Teddy Bear: How come?

  Plastic Bear: ’Cause they do drugs and go to jail. An’ they hurted our mom.

  Teddy Bear: Moms do drugs, too.

  Plastic Bear: But sometimes moms stop and buy you stuff. And sometimes they take you away from dads. Dads are bad. They go to jail. My dad is in jail. My new dad didn’t go to jail yet.”

  Teddy Bear: Is he goin’, do you think?

  Plastic Bear: Maybe, yeah, a lot of dads go to jail. My old dad wants to kill my mom, but he’s five hundred miles away. My new dad might, too. I just need a mom, not a dad. They always go to jail.

  I creep in and park behind Marvin. Frankie ignores me.

  I whisper. “How long has this been going on?” Marvin glances at his iPhone. “Hour or so.”

  “You’ve been watching this for an hour?”

  “It’s like you can see his world. He calls any guy Sheila brings home ‘Dad,’ and I think she’s brought some bad ones.”

  “Only kind she knows.”

  “Man,” he whispers, “if you just watch, or join in when he wants you to, you learn some crazy stuff.” He watches a minute longer. “This goes round and round. He wants his mom bad, but she won’t protect him; she loves him when she’s not on drugs and bails when she is.”

  Marvin looks up at me. “Why are you crying?”

  “It’s mostly about rhythm,” Leah says. “Two kicks per stroke and you have to move forward. Think like a dolphin.”

  “Dolphins are supposed to be really smart, right?” I say.

  “Even dumb dolphins swim,” she says. “Get the feel of it.”

  “I feel better on land.”

  She laughs. “If I remember right, this was a choice. What did you do to get yourself in all the fly events? That’s the stroke you learn last, if at all.”

  “That’s the stroke that gives you a stroke,” I say, “but there’s less competition. Keeps me in the water.”

  Leah gives me a good half hour of detailed instruction: Get the timing, swim till the stroke starts to deteriorate, then stop; if I swim after my stroke falls apart, my body will learn it wrong.

  “One thing you already know as an athlete,” she says, “never do anything half-assed when you can do it full-assed.”

  Pop and I are at a standoff through the rest of my “swimming season,” such as it is. His silence has amped up his irritation at me for not playing elite basketball; he simply won’t accept that I won’t get with the program and hop on the bus—and the plane—to go up against the top competition in the sport I’m best at.

  “I don’t want to burn out,” I tell him.

  “Which is why you’ll never reach your potential,” he says. “You kids. All you want is to have fun. Get a little bored with something and you’re ‘burned out,’ off trying something else. The true elite players in any sport know repetition.”

  The only repetition I’m sure of is Pop saying the same thing over and over and over, but I keep that to myself. He’ll have me doing push-ups until my arms melt if I challenge his expertise as a motivator.

  “Do you know how Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan?” he asks.

  “Because his parents named him that?”

  “Because he never took his eye off his goal. Everything he played, he played all out. He’d fight and scratch every second of a meaningless one-on-one game, whether he was a point ahead or ten. When Michael got you down, he put his foot square on your neck.” He takes a deep breath. “Annie, what you don’t realize is, now is the time when you get hardwired for athletics. So many talented athletes think they can coast when the years are easy, when they’re twice as talented as their peers. But with every level you move up, dozens more mediocre athletes fall away, and the competition becomes that much tougher. Kids who were fabulous athletes in high school walk into a university with a whole team of kids who were fabulous athletes in high school. The ones with fire in their belly make it. Is that so hard to understand?”

  It isn’t. He doesn’t understand that I’m not Michael Jordan, or more specifically, Kelsey Plum. I have fire in my belly, but it’s not burning to make me a top high school recruit for some university. I don’t think that far ahead. On the court during the season, fire is all I’ve got. I never let my teammates or my coach down—if you don’t count Hoopfest losers bracket, but that’s different—and I can’t start to tell you how I hate to embarrass myself. Way too often that fire is anger, I get that; Pop is right about my temper putting my game in jeopardy. Half the time I can’t even put my finger on what I’m mad at. He and I wouldn’t come to these loggerheads if he helped me understand what motivates me instead of deciding what should motivate me.

  No matter. School will start in less than a month, which means volleyball and basketball in earnest, at which point all of the above will come into play. Pop gets highly supportive and highly critical, and I get highly motivated and highly manipulative. In book club, Seth said some things can only exist in a state of great tension. He was talking about science, but it’s sure true about Pop and me.

  So the end of summer is the end of my “frivolous” athletic endeavors for the year, but I swear I’m coming to enjoy being anonymous in my sport. Leah’s work on my stroke has given me a whole different feel for my body in the water, and even though I’m no Dara Torres—a name I wouldn’t even know to drop if it weren’t for Leah—I am no longer disqualifying myself by walking the last five yards and have actually picked up some points for our team. I’ve also dazzled Janine—the architect of my butterfly torture—with my tenacity and my improvement.

  And there’s something about the way this butterfly stroke feels when done right. It requires a kind of physical congruence that almost works on its own. What’s really cool is, for the last meet of the season I’m going to have supporters who 1) I really want to impress and 2) will actually show up. See, once Leah started working with me, she recommended Swimming to Antarctica as a book club read.

  It wasn’t an easy sell.

  “The woman who wrote this book is tough,” Leah said when she introduced it. “This is some seriously grueling shit. Forget Diana Nyad, this Lynne Cox chick swam the Bering Strait. She actually swam over a mile in Antarctica. In a Speedo!
”

  “And why, pray tell,” Oscar said, “would we read a book with seriously grueling shit?”

  “Because we’re going full female aqua,” Leah said, “to celebrate Annie on the front end of her swimming career, me in the middle, and Lynne Cox when she was at her apex, got it?” She withdrew a full-sized Swiss Army knife from her purse, pulled out the corkscrew, narrowed her eyes, and said, “And because I know your ride.”

  I said, “Uh, Leah, I’m with Lynne Cox. This is my swimming apex, believe me.”

  Seth’s arm flew up. “Ms. Sharon, do we or do we not have a rule about weapons?”

  “Actually, Seth,” Sharon said, “that’s not exactly a weapon. . . .” She looked sideways at Leah. “Right, Leah?”

  Leah smiled. “I was using it as punctuation.”

  Seth said, “So Oscar doesn’t really have to worry about you setting free the stuffing in his upholstery? Or creating an unsightly scratch the length of his car?”

  Leah held up the knife. “Maybe you can help me out, Seth. I want him to worry about those things, but I’m not going to act on either. What should I do?”

  Seth’s head shook no like a small tightly wound bobblehead. “You’ve blown it by stating your intent.” He took a deep breath and almost established eye contact with her. “I was led to believe you were one of our more intelligent members.”

  “Even geniuses slip up.”

  “True,” Seth said, “but you have to admit, showing your hand that way was a pretty basic slipup. Crass, even.”

  Leah nodded. “I think I can save this,” she said. “Oscar has been known, on semi-frequent occasion, to ingest substances that alter his perception. What do you think would happen if I wait a week or so and recommend the book as if for the first time, in hopes he doesn’t even remember it happened?”

  Seth frowned, glanced at Oscar, who smiled and shrugged. “I suppose there’s a possibility. We’ve certainly heard him repeat himself often enough. However, I’d be surprised if your chances are fifty-fifty.”

  “In which case, I just won’t mess up his car,” Leah said. “In fact we can avoid all of this, and all other threats, by giving me a big yes vote on this book.”

  It was unanimous. We’re reading Swimming to Antarctica.

  Flash forward two weeks to the last meet of the season; I’m on the deck with the rest of my teammates who I probably wouldn’t recognize on the street, out of their Speedos, but I’m moving around encouraging everyone because my book club friends have read the book and filled the bleachers, and are chanting our name—the Anchors—while Coach Rick goes over who’ll be swimming which events and calling out personal bests from memory. He says, “Remember, it’s good to take down the competition, but it’s even better to beat your old self.”

  Whispers into my ear, “Is that your entourage?”

  I look over my shoulder at Janine. “Kind of. My book club.”

  “Who’s the woman with them?”

  “That would be Sharon the Liberrian; she’s our unchallenged leader.

  “This is the biggest crowd you guys have had all summer.”

  “And we will not disappoint,” I say, nodding toward my anonymous teammates.

  “Um-hmm,” she says. “Well, it should be interesting.” She starts to walk away.

  I say, “Hey, Janine?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For kicking my butt this summer,” I say. “For keeping me swimming this god-awful butterfly until I got it.”

  She gives me the look that says we both know why.

  “Listen,” I say. “I was a bitch for messing with you.”

  She smiles. “Go be ruthless.”

  I live a compartmentalized life; that’s what Mr. Novotny used to call it. He said it was a life skill, made necessary by the differences in my worlds. If I acted around my bio family the way I act with my friends, or vice versa, I’d have a lot of ’splainin’ to do, as they say, but it works because there’s so little chance of my worlds colliding.

  Today my worlds collide.

  The book club is in the bleachers chanting the names of as many of my teammates as they could collect, when something happens that never happens. Nearly the entire Boots clan troops across the park and onto the bleachers: Nancy, Rance—the Boo Radley of the Inland Northwest—the lovely Sheila trailed by Yvonne and Frankie.

  I don’t see firsthand what happens next because I’m hyperventilating on the blocks when it starts and in the water for the blastoff.

  As I learn later, Sheila, who must be high, is convinced these people are actually here to taunt me, that no one could be here to root for the kind of swimmer I am, and they’re calling us “Anchors” which has to be a rip, and what a bunch of nerds anyway. She relays that shiny nugget to Nancy, who walks up to Seth of all people and says, “Who you all here makin’ fun of?” Seth only partially hears her because of the chanting and assumes she just wants the name of their champion. He says, “That would be the girl in the maroon racing suit,” and Nancy says, “They’re all in maroon racing suits, you idiot,” and Seth points again and says, “Her name’s Annie, and it’s impolite to call me that. Judging from appearances, it’s likely a more apt description of you.”

  Nancy asks Seth how he’d like a fist in his pimply face, to which Seth, who hears no question as rhetorical, says he wouldn’t like that very much and why doesn’t she pick on somebody her own enormous size. That brings quick escalation, and Sharon bails out of her seat to see if she can calm the waters outside the pool. Frankie begins running around the bleachers with his fingers in his ears shrieking like a referee’s whistle, while Marvin hollers, “Mrs. Boots! Mrs. Boots! Everything’s cool, we’re rooting for Annie, just like you!” but Nancy has grabbed the Annie Boots enthusiast nearest her, which is Leah, by the shirt, ready to push her off the side of the bleachers which would be a really bad idea unless Leah lands on her head and is totally paralyzed because, well, if you want to injure Leah you better make sure Leah is injured; and if she is, you really better watch out for Tim.

  For the first time I finish first in the fifty fly—all the girls who have gotten good have moved up to the B team—and I come up out of the water jubilant, turn to give my entourage a raised fist, only to see bedlam.

  This is my fourth grade classroom experience on hallucinogenics. When something gets into Nancy’s head, even the truth won’t knock it out. She is certain her daughter has been publicly disparaged on a day when she not only made it on time, but brought the entire Boots crew, and somebody has to pay, and on this day if you’re yelling your head off for the Anchors, it’s you. To amp it up, this is the first day in the history of all Bootses everywhere that Sheila sides with Nancy.

  I pull myself out of the water and race through the gate, hoping to stop this ahead of any arrests and before Leah hears the N-word, a staple in Sheila’s verbal arsenal. I reach Nancy just as Leah is ready to punch her lights out—this wouldn’t be happening if I had kept my two worlds completely apart—immobilize Nancy into a bear hug, and whirl her at the same moment Leah unleashes a roundhouse that catches me on the back of the head. Nancy and I tumble onto the grass, me landing on top which is very lucky for me. This could go on forever if Yvonne, who has kept herself completely out of the mayhem, doesn’t scream, “WHERE’S FRANKIE?”

  The Boots clan freezes, because they know who Frankie is, and the Annie Boots faithful freeze because the Boots do.

  No Frankie.

  In what has to be record time Sharon and Marvin, of all people, have everyone organized and we pour through the park calling Frankie’s name.

  To no response.

  Mission Park is a sprawling city park. The pool sits adjacent to Mission Street, a busy two-way four-lane, with a playground to the south and family picnic grounds to the east. It’s midweek so the place isn’t packed, but Washington Water Power employees are eating lunch along with picnicking families, so someone had to see a five
-year-old, screaming like a one-man merry-go-round off its hinges, going poof! But no one did. Suddenly we’re all frantically searching the bushes and behind the outbuildings and the backseats of cars in the parking lot.

  Sirens blast toward us while Sheila screams “No cops! No cops!” which ends her alliance with Nancy. Rance stands in the middle of it all like the ghost he is.

  And Frankie is gone.

  Chapter

  Nine

  He was there and then he wasn’t. With as many people running around hurtling accusations and howling epithets, as much attention as was directed at us and as many smart phones as had to be there, it’s almost impossible to imagine no one saw where he went.

  But no one saw where he went.

  Leah’s first thought is the river. She sprints across the park and over an eleven-foot chain-link fence; jogs up and down the river’s edge, but sees only calm waters. Thank God.

  The responding cops and EMTs reorganize the search, block off the parking lot, and check all exiting cars.

  Sheila has become less than no help, alternately screaming, threatening, then breaking down in rapid circular succession while Yvonne tries to calm her by offering weed, which makes Nancy nervous, but this is Washington, and it’s legal, maybe not smart, but legal.

  I think I read, or saw on TV, that after the first hour or two of a child’s disappearance, chances of finding him or her plummet. By four o’clock my sinking feeling has sunk. I called Momma first chance I got, and she called Pop, who shot over from work. There will be a long discussion about contact with the devil clan, and as much as I hate anticipating that, I’m worried that somehow this is my fault. It’s crazy to want something so much that you forget who might get trampled if you get it.

  The search at the park turned up nothing; Sheila has gone to the police station to file a report that I’m sure won’t include her inattention, and as the sun lowers in the sky Leah and I are driving through neighborhoods adjacent to the park with Tim, who came running in response to Leah’s text, at the wheel, on the off chance that Frankie got so rattled at the chaos that he just took off. I can barely breathe.