The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
“She’s been doing it since she was three? How is that even possible?”
That’s what other people, never gym people, always said. Making private judgments, unspoken charges of helicopter parenting, unmet maternal, or paternal, ambitions, Olympic dreams. No one ever believed that Katie and Eric never cared about sports, or even competition. Eric had played high-school baseball, indifferently. Katie had never been athletic at all, devoting her adolescence to art class and boys and sneaking off to see bands, the vestige of which was the Fight Like a Grrrl tattoo snaking around her left thigh.
“My three-year-old just wanted to play,” they’d say smugly. “We just let her play.”
As if it had ever been a choice, or a decision.
“It started as play,” Eric always told people. “It started with the trampoline.”
Then he’d tell them how, one long Sunday, he’d installed it in the yard, leaning over the auger rented from the hardware store, a pile of chicken wire, empty beer bottles at his feet.
The trampoline was the better story, an easier one, but it wasn’t the truth.
Because the trampoline came after the accident, came after the Foot. And the accident was how it truly began. How that force found its fuse.
Three-year-old Devon, barefoot, running across the lawn to Daddy.
Her foot sliding on a grass mound, she stumbled into the rust-eaten lawn mower Eric had left idling, her foot so tiny it slipped behind the blade guard, the steel shearing off two toes and a squeak of soft foot flesh.
A few feet away, face white with panic, Eric slid to his knees beside her and somehow managed to pluck both toes from the grass.
Packed in ice, they looked like pink peas and Katie held them in her hands as Eric drove with careering ferocity the six miles to the hospital where doctors tried (but failed) to reattach them, like stringing beads, Devon’s face blue and wet.
“It could have been worse,” their pediatrician, Dr. Yossarian, told them later. “With the riding mowers, sometimes the whole foot pops off.” And he made an appalling pucker sound with his mouth.
“But what can we do?” Eric asked, even as Dr. Yossarian assured them Devon would be fine. “There must be something.”
So Dr. Yossarian suggested kiddie soccer, or ice-skating, or tumbling.
“It’ll help with balance,” he said.
In years to come, this would feel like a moment of shimmering predestiny, in the same way everything about Devon’s life eventually came to feel mythic within the family. Fate, destiny, retroactivated by a Sears Craftsman.
That fall, Katie drove Devon to the Tumbleangels Gym on Old Taylor Road and signed them both up for Mommy & Me Movers & Shakers.
“At first, she’ll be overly cautious,” Dr. Yossarian warned, “but try to push her.”
Except it was just the opposite. Within a few weeks, Devon was forward- and backward-rolling. Next came chin-ups, handstands, cartwheels as accomplished as those of girls twice her age.
The Human Rubber Band, Katie called her.
Supergirl, Eric called her. Monkey-bar superstar!
And, in some mysterious way, it was as if the foot were helping her.
Frankenfoot, Katie dubbed it. Making it their private joke. Show Mommy how you work that Frankenfoot.
By the end of her first month, Devon had graduated to Tiny Tumblerz, and within a year, Devon was the gym’s VIP, her cubbyhole sprayed silver and festooned with sticker stars.
Watching her on the practice beam, Katie would think, This piece of wood is four inches wide, two feet in the air. Four inches. And I’m going to let my daughter plant her dimpled feet on that and do kicks and dips?
“Do the O,” the other girls would say, cheering as Devon arched her back from a handstand until her tiny bottom touched the top of her head. Every now and then, Eric would lift her up in the air to see if her backbone was really there.
Prodigy, Katie whispered in her most private thoughts but never said aloud. Eric said it. He said it a lot.
And so Eric installed the trampoline.
Hours, days devoted to making the yard ready for her talent, laying thick mats like dominoes. Just as he would eventually do in the basement, hanging a pull-up bar, scraping the concrete bumps off the floor, covering it with panel mats and carpet remnants, wrapping foam around the ceiling posts. For Devon.
And so gymnastics became the center, the mighty spine of everything for them.
Devon turning five, six, seven, thousands of hours driving to and from the gym, to and from the meets, a half a dozen emergency-room visits for the broken toe, knee sprain, elbow popping on the mat, seven stitches after Devon fell from the bars and bit through her tongue.
And the money. Gym tuition, meet fees, equipment, travel, booster fees. She and Eric had stopped counting, gradually becoming used to swelling credit-card debt.
Then, when Drew came along, their delicate, thoughtful son, nothing changed. Quiet, easy, he fit so perfectly—in temperament, in disposition—with everything that was already happening. Devon was happening.
After one meet, Devon medaling in three of four events, in the car on the way home, their fingers stiff from cold, Eric asked Devon, age nine, how it was, how it felt.
“I beat everybody,” she said, solemnly. “I was better than everybody.”
Her eyelashes blinking slowly, like she was surprised.
And Katie and Eric had laughed and laughed, even though Katie felt sorry, always did, for all those other girls who just weren’t as good, didn’t have that magical something that made Devon Devon.
“You gotta get her out of there,” a competition judge confided to Eric the following day. “Ditch that strip-mall gym. Get her to BelStars. Get her to Coach T.
“You keep her here, it’ll all go to waste.”
And that very night Eric began researching second mortgages.
It was, Katie had to admit, exciting.
Coach Teddy Belfour watched Devon’s tryout, rapt.
“Let me offer you a big, mouth-filling oath,” he told Katie and Eric, never taking his eyes from her. “Bring her to BelStars and she’ll find the extent of her power. We’ll find it together.”
That was how he talked, how he was.
The next day, Devon was on the BelStars beam, under the tutelage of the exalted Coach T., the most decorated coach in the state, the silver-maned lion, the gymnast whisperer, the salto Svengali, molder and shaper of fourteen national champions at the Junior Olympic and Elite levels.
That night, Eric told Katie how he and Devon had walked past the long rows of beams and bars, the fearsome BelStars girls whippeting around with faces grim as Soviets’.
He thought she would be terrified by the time they finished the gauntlet. But instead she’d looked up at him, her eyes dark and blazing, and said, “I’m ready.”
And overnight BelStars became their whole world.
Twelve thousand square feet, a virtual bunker, it had everything that jolly Tumbleangels, run by two sweet women both named Emily, didn’t. The color-coordinated foam wedges and cartwheel mats were replaced by mammoth spring floors, a forty-foot tumbling track, a parent lounge with vending machines. All of it gray, severe, powerful.
And BelStars had Coach T., nearly all his energies devoted to Devon, beneath her on the beam, the bars, spotting her at the vault. Barking orders at everyone but Devon. (“She doesn’t need it,” he said. “She just needs our faith.”)
This was the place Devon began spending twenty-five hours a week, before school, after school, weekends. And, because it was thirty minutes from their house and Eric’s work schedule was unreliable, it was often the place Katie and thus little Drew spent four, five, seven hours a day, Katie’s default office, her laptop open, trying to do her freelance design jobs.
But it was impossible not to watch Devon. Everyone watched her.
Katie and Eric tried never to say the word Olympics. But it w
as hard not to think about. Because it was all anyone at BelStars thought about.
“Once in a generation,” one of the other parents said, watching Devon.
You never think you’ll hear a phrase that big in real life, much less find yourself believing it.
You never think your life will be that big.
Just after Devon’s tenth birthday, Coach T. pulled Katie aside.
“Let’s meet tonight. You and Eric and me,” he whispered so no other parent could hear. “To talk about our girl’s future. Because I see things bright and bountiful.”
And so it was, that night, sitting at the grand dining-room table of his grand home, Coach T. pulled out a large easel pad and showed Katie and Eric the flow chart, punctuated by fluorescent arrows, Sharpied hieroglyphics. It was titled “The Track.”
“My friends, this is a decision point,” he said, perpetually bloodshot eyes staring over at them. “Are you ready?”
“We are,” Eric said.
“Yes,” Katie said. “Ready for what?”
Teddy laughed buoyantly, and then they all did. Then, turning the easel paper toward her, he waved his pen, magician-like, and explained.
“Devon’s on the brink of becoming a Level Ten gymnast,” he said. “The highest level.”
THE TRACK
“And she can top out at Ten,” he said, shrugging a little. “And be proud of herself. Compete in big events across the country. Attract recruiters for a college scholarship.”
He looked at them, that forever-ruddy face, the dampness of his bloodhound eyes.
“Or she can take the other path, the narrow one. The challenging one. The one for the very few indeed. The Elite path.”
E-lite. It was all anyone talked about in the gym. Elite-Elite-Elite. A constant purr under their tongues. The trip of the l, the cut of the t.
“Going Elite means going from competing nationally to competing internationally,” Teddy said. “If this is the desired track, she needs to qualify as an Elite gymnast. First, Junior Elite, and she’s not even close to ready yet. I’m shooting for her thirteenth birthday. Then Senior Elite, the year she turns sixteen.”
All three were silent for a moment. Eric looked at Katie, who looked back at him, trying not to smile.
“An Elite career lasts five or six years, max. But each year, the hundred, hundred and twenty Elites compete to land spots on the national team. From the national team, you are only one step away from…”
Teddy paused, briefly, watching Katie and Eric, letting the moment sit with them.
Then, with his thickest Sharpie, he underlined the words Olympic Team and circled it, and starred it.
The words themselves like magic, an incantation.
Katie felt for Eric’s arm and then began to pull back, embarrassed.
But Eric grabbed for her, clutched her hand. And Katie could feel it, an energy vibrating off him, like sometimes when they watched the meets together, their bodies humming beside each other, so alive.
“Then, God willing, Devon makes the world championship team. And, every four years,” he said (and the way Katie remembered it, they all held their breath), “the torch.”
Eric exhaled, looking down at the rug. “So,” he said, “you see it?”
Teddy nodded once, slowly.
“But you need to commit. Both of you.” He paused. “It takes a family to make this happen. And it takes action. Devon needs to be here at least thirty hours a week, maybe more. We need to get her before she changes.”
“Changes?” Katie asked.
“Changes,” he said, nodding again, grimly this time. Then, in a flash, turning a smile on. “They all change. Become women. Glorious women.”
“Well, you can’t stop that,” Katie said, smiling too.
“No,” Teddy said, laughing with sudden loudness. “Of course not.”
And it happened, just like he said it would. Just as the Track foretold.
First came constant, vein-pulsing work, more five-hour practices, more out-of-town meets, countless jammed fingers and torn palms and two weather-beaten cars with blistered tires and dent-pocked doors, Eric’s in the shop half the time, and the debt ticking up, and a gym that cost almost as much as one of their two mortgage payments.
But it happened. That spring, Devon reached Level 10. One of only ninety-six in the state.
“There’s no telling how far we can go now,” said Coach T., watching Devon dive, flip, stick.
A few months later, after placing sixth on beam and bars in the Level 10 Junior Nationals in sunstruck Orlando, she was ranked first among all Level 10s in their home state.
“The greatest day of our life,” Devon said, and everyone laughed at the our, except it was true, wasn’t it?
“A star is born,” announced Coach T., rocking back on his heels, beaming, holding up that dazzling photo of Devon in the local paper—stoic and grand in her snow-white leotard, her dark eyes, Eric’s eyes. Alongside, there was that crackling interview with Coach T., and the next day, BelStars was flooded with new recruits, its coffers swelling.
“Nothing can stop her now,” Coach T. assured Katie and Eric over a celebratory dinner for Devon at Shell Shuckers, the best restaurant in town.
They took up the largest table: all four Knoxes, kindergartner Drew, the shrimp cocktail bigger than his little head, alongside Coach T. and his wife, Tina, and a young woman whom Katie had never met, with hair like Rapunzel’s—that’s what Drew would say later.
“I’d like you all to meet my niece,” Teddy said. “Well, she’s like a daughter to me.”
And that was how they came to know Hailey, whom Coach had taken care of since she was thirteen and going down what Tina euphemistically called “the wrong path.”
“I couldn’t deal with my mom,” Hailey confided, leaning close to Katie. “And she couldn’t deal with me. We were both being brats.”
With Teddy’s help, Hailey had thrived, starting gymnastics, joining the swim team, winning a scholarship, and now soon to graduate from State. Which just showed the kind of man Teddy was, why Devon was in such able, loving hands.
“I was always good on the beam, but I wasn’t anything like Devon,” Hailey added. “And my mom was nothing like you.”
And Katie, maybe a little tipsy, found herself tearing up.
“One more toast to our Devon—the Invincible!” Teddy hurrahed, and Tina hear-heared, jumping in, “So long as she doesn’t grow three inches or get hips,” with a wink.
And everyone laughed, and all eyes turned to Devon, taking her first sip of champagne, a pinched nose, a sly blush, ponytail bobbing, just like before a routine. She drew her index finger across her front teeth, as if it were too sweet.
“Why are you all looking at Devon?” little Drew asked, head darting from one to the next.
And Coach T. laughed.
They all did.
Later that night, their minds racing, their hearts thumping too wildly to sleep, she and Eric sat at the kitchen table and drank dusty bourbon from juice glasses and tried to calm themselves.
It felt as it did after big competitions, when together they’d break it all down, everything that had happened, tell it and retell it until the kitchen table hummed with warmth and achievement.
But this time it took a turn, and here was Eric, his eyes bleary, pained, talking about something a judge had said, and about Devon’s “cross to bear.”
“I’m telling you, he was talking about her foot. That she’d never get that balance perfect, not without two fewer toes on her left foot to even it out.”
Despite countless conversations about Devon’s body, her development, her strength, her preternatural calm and focus, she and Eric almost never talked about her foot. About the accident.
“Oh, Eric,” Katie said, wrapping her hands around his forearms. “Like Coach T. says, she figured out long ago how to compensate and—”
“I think about it sometimes, Katie,” he said, nudging closer toward her.
&nbs
p; For a second, Katie thought he might say something, an admission. I can’t believe I didn’t see her. I can’t believe I was so careless—
In all marriages, there are questions you never ask. Instead, Katie could only wonder, less and less as the years went by, how Eric could have left unattended, even for a moment, that relic of a mower, hustled from a garage sale, when he knew it didn’t shut off like it was supposed to. Why he’d taken that chance in spite of the way Devon followed him everywhere, all the time, scurrying after him like an eager, pink-tongued puppy.
“I think about what we did,” he continued.
His words landing fully.
“What we did,” she began, head tilting. “We—”
“She was different before,” Eric said. “Devon was. Before the accident.”
And the we drifted away, forgotten. Bourbon-obscured.
She knew he meant different in ways that went beyond the peculiar maceration at the top of her foot, the places two angel-ear toes had once wiggled.
She wished she weren’t so drunk, could stop a million tiny, pushed-away thoughts from scurrying across her brain. About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter’s life, about—
So she spoke instead, to stop the thoughts.
“She was only three when it happened,” she insisted. “There was no Devon before.”
Feeling the bourbon whirl inside her, a heat under her eyes, she said it once, then said it again.
“There was no Devon before.”
In bed that night, her throat scraped dry from drinking, her head muddied and hot, Katie remembered something that had happened not that long ago. She’d walked into the TV room, laden with trophies and the tilting ribbon rack, and saw Devon, her feet propped up on the sofa, her shins aching, rubbing Zim’s Crack Creme on those ragged gymnast feet, the white of the lotion making her foot bright, conspicuous, a white worm wriggling.
Walking by, Katie had plucked at her daughter’s greased toes, saying, cooing even, “Take care of my girl’s magical Frankenfoot.”