Chapter Ten

 

Like her American counterpart, Beatrix Dalca awoke early in the morning to run and complete strength and flexibility training. She actually adopted the same schedule as Shaye Sylvester because she believed her main challenger was the best conditioned and most athletic gymnast in the world. Because they were friends, Shaye was happy to share her physical fitness tips, but Trixie got the feeling she would reveal her secrets to anyone who bothered to ask. That’s how confident she was that her tremendous skills, undeniable grace, and composure under pressure would be enough to win any competition. Trixie admired that confidence. Her friend craved competition, yet no matter how good Trixie got, meets still scared her.

Then again, the hopes of an entire country were pinned on her. If Shaye succeeded, it would be news for a week, tops. If she failed, they’d talk about it for a day and then move on to the hundred other sports important to Americans.

Before Ileana died, their mother normally woke around the same time as Trixie and had breakfast prepared when she returned from her morning run. She may or may not have left for the restaurant by the time she jogged back into the house, but most mornings she got a kiss on the cheek from her mother before they parted ways for the day.

Magda was catatonic for the first month and a half after her youngest daughter died, but in the past week, she’d made an incredible turnaround. She began speaking again, and though the smiles were few and far between, she was resuming her duties in the family business with more vivacity than ever.

For the last five days, Trixie’s mother once again began waking up with her, though this morning she was still sleeping. Trixie was glad; she needed to rest.

Though her counterpart in the states complained that she hated the morning runs, Trixie thoroughly enjoyed them. It was rare for her to get time for herself, and alone with her iPod and the morning haze, she felt peaceful. Constanţa, the oldest city in Romania and fourth-largest port in Europe, was filled with the sounds of ships coming into the harbor, men yelling, their voices carrying in the cool morning as they began loading and moving containers.

Trixie couldn’t go shopping outside Constanţa without little girls asking for her autograph, and she couldn’t go out to lunch without photographers following her. She didn’t mind her obligations. In a few years, the monetary rewards of being the country’s best gymnast would pay dividends and set her and her family up for life. Sometimes, she had to remind herself of the endgame in order to keep going. Fortunately, in her hometown, the residents were used to seeing the former World Champion zooming by their ships and shops and homes. No one cared. Just another professional beginning her day. She wished she could carry that bubble with her everywhere.

Trixie loved the way her feet slapped against the pavement, the way the heat rose from her knees and moved up her torso until she felt powerful enough to run through a brick wall. Maybe when she was done with gymnastics, she’d become a marathoner.

If she had her way, she would have run for a couple of hours, but per the training schedule, she cut it short at an hour and warmed down in the five blocks before reaching her house.

She expected to find her mother up and about, but when she returned, everything was quiet. As she dumped her headphones on the dresser in her bedroom, she thought about calling out for her mother but didn’t want to wake her father. She’d gone to bed long before he got home from the restaurant, and he needed more than a few hours of sleep.

Trixie crept into her parents’ room and tiptoed around the side of the bed to where her mother was sleeping.

When she left for her run, her mother was on her side, one arm dangling over the edge of the bed. She hadn’t moved.

Bending over the bed, Trixie saw Magda’s eyes were not fully closed, but open slightly, and milky. Her lips had a bluish tinge, her skin translucent and pale.

“Mom,” Trixie said urgently, immediately panicking. She gave the woman three quick slaps on the cheek with no response. “Mom. Mom!” Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at the bedside table. The small bottle of sleeping pills her coach had given her was lying on its side.

Empty.

Trixie wasn’t sure how many she’d used, but there had to be between fifteen and twenty remaining when she went to bed the night before.

The terror was taking over, as severe and crippling as it had been when she first received the news of Ileana’s injury. “Mom!” she screamed even as she picked up the telephone.

Hands shaking, she dialed nine-six-one for an ambulance. Into the receiver, she shouted the address twice, said her mother wasn’t breathing, and left the phone off the hook as she hovered over Magda.

By this point, Tavian was awake and alert. “What happened?” he shouted.

“She took my sleeping pills,” Trixie said grimly.

“How many?”

“All of them!” she screamed.

Though Trixie herself was not bulimic, as a gymnast, it would be strange if she had not tried it once or twice, particularly before weigh-ins when she thought she might want to train in Bucharest. She knew how to make a person retch.

Magda was not breathing. Gagging her could be dangerous, but traffic was picking up on the streets, and she had to take what action she could before the ambulance arrived. Without contemplating the disastrous consequences, she stuck three fingers down her mother’s throat. She planted them so deep, her arm disappeared past her wrist.

“What are you doing?” Tavian screamed.

“Trust me.” Trixie didn’t know why, but she was fairly certain her alarm was what awoke her mother. If she had been in this condition when Tavian got into bed, he would’ve noticed, and if she hadn’t been breathing when she left for her run, Trixie would have. This was not a decision to be made lightly, so she had to believe Magda did this recently, at least recently enough to be saved.

“You’re killing her!” Tavian exclaimed, and he was about to pull her away when Magda made a low gurgling noise and her abdomen convulsed.

Trixie dug her fingers a quarter-inch deeper, and Magda finally vomited. Trixie was so grateful she barely noticed the watery puke that sprayed from her chin to below her breasts. There was no food, but pebbles of pills sprinkled her entire upper body.

Ignoring the stench and the possibility Magda could continue heaving, Trixie pressed her lips to her mother’s, plugged her nose, and forced air into her lungs. With her father leaning frenziedly over her shoulders, Trixie repeated this thirteen times, when her mother finally coughed and took a breath on her own.

Both Trixie and Tavian crouched down and put their faces close to Magda’s. For a few seconds she glanced around the room, confused, and then she began to sob.

“Just let me die,” she wailed. “Dear God, just let me die.”

The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics stabilized Magda and loaded her into the van. Thanks to Trixie, their work was fairly simple, and they left the woman’s daughter on the front step of their house, crouched on her knees, her arms bent over her head, hyperventilating.

Tavian went into the house and returned with a brown paper sandwich bag. “Here,” he said, holding it up to her mouth. “Breathe.” He put his hand on the back of her head and murmured in her ear, “Calm down, Bea. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

It took nearly two full minutes for Trixie to get her breathing and heart rate under control, and when she did, the arm holding the bag to her mouth dropped like a rock, and she collapsed onto her back, saved from bouncing her skull against the ground by her father’s sturdy forearm. With fisted hands, she covered her eyes and tried to keep her body from shaking.

“Why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Why did she do this?”

Tavian wrapped her in his arms like she was an infant, holding her tight against his chest, and she gripped the back of his shirt like it was the last handgrip on a sheer cliff. She wasn’t crying, but she was quaking as if she’d ducked beneath a semi-truck to avoid getting run down.

“You saved her life,” he whispered. “You did so good. I’m so proud of you.”

She barely heard him. Instead of acknowledging the truth of what he said, she repeated, “Why? Why did she do this?”

Tavian knew there was nothing he could say at the moment that would register with his daughter, so he simply held her tightly until her respirations matched his, their heartbeats in sync.

Eventually, they made their way to Spitalul Clinic Judetean, the city’s Emergency Clinic Hospital. Within twenty minutes, doctors confirmed what they already knew. Magda overdosed on sleeping pills. She was stable now and being evaluated by a psychiatrist. She would most likely be admitted to the mental health ward for the next few days.

Five hours after Magda was admitted, her husband and daughter were allowed into her room. It was an entirely different experience from seeing Ileana for the first time. The only equipment Magda had was a clip on her finger measuring her pulse and oxygen flowing into her nose. She was clean and beautiful, nothing like the swollen, unrecognizable mess that had been their precious Ileana. It should have been less distressing, but somehow, knowing Magda did this to herself, it was even more confusing.

Trixie bolstered herself enough to give her mother a smile and walk to her bedside. She sat down in one of the two chairs and took Magda’s hand. Instead of welcoming her, as expected, her mother shriveled away as if Trixie pressed a snake to her skin and rolled over to face the opposite wall. She turned to her father and put her hands in the air, indicating she had no idea what to do.

Tavian moved around to the other side of the bed and gently ran his fingers through his wife’s hair. “How are you feeling?”

In a low growl, she replied, “What’s she doing here?”

“Who?” he asked, perplexed.

“Beatrix. Why is she here?”

“She’s—”

“Get her out,” Magda suddenly exclaimed angrily, shoving her husband away from her bedside.

“Mom!” Trixie couldn’t stop herself from shouting. “What’s going on?”

With more energy and vigor than she’d displayed in the last six weeks, Magda shot out of bed and launched to her feet, cornering her daughter. “This is your fault. Ileana would still be alive if it weren’t for you.”

“Magda,” Tavian said sternly, pulling her back. “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

“Romanian gymnastics didn’t want a thing to do with you. A Jewish Gypsy, nothing but a mongrel in the eyes of the same people who deny the Holocaust. But you didn’t stop. You just kept going, and you told your sister she could do it, and she moved to Deva.”

“Ileana wanted to move to Deva,” Trixie said defensively.

“No,” Magda responded with an understated fury that scared the hell out of both her daughter and her husband. “She wanted to be exactly like you. All you had to do was wake up in the morning, and she would’ve worshipped you. Instead, you had to put these ideas in her head about gymnastics and Olympic glory, and she didn’t think she could do it here. So she moved to Deva, she followed your dream, and it killed her.”

Her mother might as well have stabbed her through the heart. She literally stumbled backwards due to the newfound weakness in her legs and the pain in her chest. Her mother blamed her for her sister’s death. Her sister. Ileana. Whom Trixie had loved more than gymnastics, more than any medals or accolades, more than her parents. More than anything.

For the past month and a half, she struggled with the guilt she felt for getting Ileana involved in gymnastics in the first place. She made her peace by convincing herself that a person was destined to die when they were going to die, and if she hadn’t suffered a training accident, she would’ve drowned or gotten into a car accident or been killed in a more gruesome manner. Destiny was destiny, God was God, and if He wanted Ileana, He was going to have her.

No longer could she comfort herself with these thoughts. Because her mother confirmed her worst fears.

Ileana was dead, and it was her fault.

Though her knees felt like jelly, she managed to run out of the room. Instead of stopping in the waiting room, she went straight outside to a meditation garden, where tulips, bushes, and a small flowing fountain obscured the surrounding concrete. She sat down on a bench and stared up at the blue sky, the sun rapidly heating the surrounding landscape. She was too stunned to cry. There was nothing left inside, she was wrung completely dry.

A few minutes later, Tavian joined her on the bench. He tried to put his arm around her, but she pulled away, scooting to the railing, out of the reach of her father.

He didn’t press. Instead, he turned to her and said as convincingly as possible, “Bea, none of this is your fault. None.”

“They didn’t want me at first. Because I’m Jewish, because I’m Gypsy, for whatever reason. Ileana went to Deva because she felt bad for me, because she wanted to prove something. I don’t know. If she didn’t want to retaliate against the people who shunned me to begin with, to show them they were wrong, maybe she’d still be here.”

“It was God’s will, nothing else, that took Ileana,” Tavian said firmly.

“God’s will wouldn’t have been for her to hit her head on a balance beam if she weren’t a gymnast, and she wouldn’t have been a gymnast if it weren’t for me.”

Tavian stood up, put his hands on his head, and paced silently, brooding, for nearly five minutes. Finally, he crouched to a squat in front of his only remaining daughter and placed both palms on her knees. “Beatrix, you were born to be a gymnast, and God did not give you that gift simply to lead to your sister’s death. There is a bigger picture here.”

Trixie was terrified to ask the question, but she had to. She couldn’t live with the doubt. “Dad? Do you think it’s my fault?”

Tavian did not stutter, and he did not pause. He grabbed her face on both sides, their eyes only inches apart, and he gripped her so tightly, with such conviction, it stunned her. “No. No. Absolutely not. None of this is your fault. None of it. Ileana is dead, and that is tragic. Nothing could make any of us more miserable. But it’s not your fault. If you could have saved her, you would have. I know that. You know that. Your mother knows that. Bea, your sister, she knows that. And she’s in a place where she can’t be hurt anymore. Wherever she is, you can bet she’s spending every second trying to save you.”

Softly, Trixie said, “I wish I could believe that.”

He smiled, then pressed his lips against her forehead. “You don’t have to. I believe it enough for the both of us.”

Her voice was barely audible when she said, “I miss her. I miss her so much it physically hurts.”

“I know,” Tavian said. “Me, too.”

Trixie lifted her arms and put them around her father, grateful for the first true reassurance she’d felt in weeks. Shaye did her best, but she was so far away. Until this moment, no one could persuade her that her parents didn’t hate her. The facts were in. Her mother hated her, Tavian didn’t.

For the moment, that was going to have to be enough. Because she didn’t anticipate forgiveness from her mother anytime soon.

Not when there was no way she could ever forgive herself.