Chapter Thirty-Nine

 

Trixie and Veronica stepped forward and eased Abby onto the bed. She was in complete shock. Abby kept looking at the door like she expected Cruz to come running back, and when nothing happened, she would stare down at her hands, as if she somehow brought this on herself.

“What’s Popescu’s girlfriend’s name?” Shaye asked abruptly.

“What?” Abby replied.

“The girlfriend. What’s her name?”

“Fides Funar. What does that—”

“Do you have her number?”

“It’s in my address book, but—”

She stopped speaking when Shaye reached into her knapsack and retrieved the three hundred page spiral notebook filled with notes and commentary on the investigation thus far. She tossed it aside and grabbed the address book.

“I’m calling her. Veronica, can you drive Abby to Deva today?”

“Shaye, what are you doing?” Trixie asked, shaking her head quickly to discourage her from continuing.

“Abby’s right. She’s too close to quit, and the longer she waits, the harder it’s going to be.”

“Maybe now’s not the time,” Trixie said meaningfully, raising her eyebrows.

Shaye rested her hand on the phone but did not lift the receiver. “Cruz will come back. Trust me. He’ll come to his senses.”

“How can you be so sure?” Abby asked.

“Because I know.” Coming from anybody else, it would have sounded vain and meaningless. However, Shaye had the confidence that made people believe what she was saying, and the other three women and one man in the room found themselves nodding.

Satisfied, Shaye picked up the phone and dialed, then put it on speaker. It rang so many times Abby was about to tell her to give up, but someone picked up after the fourteenth ring. “Hello?”

“Can I please speak with Fides Funar?”

“This is Fides. Who is this?”

“This is Shaye Sylvester. I’m a gymnast from—”

“I know who you are,” she interrupted. “What an honor. The girls my boyfriend coaches speak of you often. How can I help you?”

“I’m in Timişoara right now.”

“What are you doing in Romania?” She was beginning to sound nervous.

“I’ve been here since just after Ileana Dalca died. Trixie is my best friend. I came with Abby Vicari. Do you remember her?”

“Yes,” she said, now cautious of what she might reveal.

“We’d like to come to Deva to meet you.”

“Why?”

“Because we know Evgeny Popescu murdered Ileana, and we need your help to prove it.”

Eventually, Fides said, “How can you know for sure? Abby was only guessing the last time I spoke with her.”

“We know. If you let us show you some of the video, you’ll understand. Please, can we meet you this afternoon?”

“Abby knows where my school is. You can meet me there.”

“We’re leaving now.” Shaye hung up the phone and turned to the others. “We’re going to Deva to meet Fides Funar.”

“What?” Trixie asked.

“Once Abby shows her Martina’s interview and tells her what the ICU nurse who took care of Ileana said, she’ll help us with getting Popescu to talk. You know it.”

“Okay, look, it’s a good plan, but you two can’t go,” Abby said, nodding toward Shaye and Trixie.

“Why not?” Shaye asked indignantly.

“Because Cruz wasn’t completely wrong. Evgeny Popescu is a dangerous man. I won’t knowingly put you two in an unsafe situation.”

“Trixie and I are perfectly capable of defending ourselves against a cripple,” she spat.

“We don’t have to meet Popescu,” Trixie interjected. “If we go with you to see Fides, it might help. I can tell her what’s happened to me and my family since my sister died. She’ll want to help.”

“Besides, it’s better than sitting around Timişoara for the next few days, waiting for news from you,” Shaye added. “Let us help.”

Abby shook her head. “I don’t know. I promised to keep you safe.”

“I’m not a child. This is my decision.”

“And my parents don’t care,” Trixie added.

“That’s not true,” Abby said. “It’s simply not true.”

“Maybe things will get better with them if I help bring all this to a close.”

Abby wouldn’t use the same argument against them that Cruz and her father used against her. “All right. If it’s okay with Galya, it’s okay with me. Veronica, are you game?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

Galya spoke for the first time in the long conversation. “Sure, well, obviously none of this is happening.”

“Cruz is worried meeting with Popescu might be dangerous,” Trixie said.

Shaye caught on. “You said you’d take care of her. You don’t want to send her there by herself, do you?”

“Well played,” he said, bowing dramatically.

“We’re wasting time arguing,” Abby said on a tired sigh. “The drive isn’t bad. We can be there before noon.”

Abby left a note with the front desk in case Cruz or her father returned, telling them where they were and what hotel they’d be staying at. They rented a small van so they’d have room to breathe and wouldn’t have to find storage for their belongings and hit the road.

Abby decided to take the opportunity to interview Shaye for a final time before she left for Norway. She was curious about some of the things Galya said concerning her career and wanted to get her take on the details, plus it would take the focus away from the assault.

In the back of the van, with as much privacy as was reasonable, Abby said, “It’s strange, but I don’t think I ever asked when you started doing gymnastics.”

“As long as I can remember,” she replied. “For a couple years after my mom died, I went to daycare during the day, and Simone looked after me at night. I went to kindergarten, she got busy with high school, and my sister told me I had way too much energy and was too prone to daredevil stunts for regular after school care. I got kicked out of six preschools.”

Abby laughed but did not interrupt. She could picture Shaye as kinetic ball of electricity, a toddler who could not be contained by normal walls and education.

“Turned out three hours of gymnastics training every night was actually cheaper than day care. Even if it weren’t, Simone told me I was so exhausted by the end of the day, sometimes I fell asleep at dinner. My father and sister were still struggling with my mother’s death, and not having to deal with my antics was a blessing.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s okay,” Shaye said with a dismissive shrug. “I understand. And I loved doing gymnastics. I remember there was this huge trampoline. I’d spend hours just bouncing and bouncing. A woman and her son ran the place, and you’d have to ask Simone, but I think they kept me there for a lot longer than Dad paid for. I remember them calling me their mascot.”

“How long were you with that club?”

“Until I was about eight. The lady who owned it, Becky Ling, set me up at a more exclusive gym. She said she taught me everything she could, but she thought I could take it to the next level. Those were her words. The next level. I spent two years at Dolgoff’s, and the Tudorans found me at a meet in New Jersey. So when I was ten, I went to Houston.”

“What was that like for you?”

“I won’t lie. I learned a lot there, more in the first couple of months than Becky Ling and Steve Dolgoff ever taught me. I had the fundamentals, but in Texas, I learned exactly how hard I was going to have to work if I wanted to make it to the Olympics. And believe me, I worked.”

“I thought you didn’t like Houston.”

“That’s true, but not at first. Like I said, I learned a lot. I felt like I was part of something.”

“So what happened?”

“About ten months in, I won a couple junior competitions. That’s when Olek and Daryna started really noticing me. They thought I had potential when I first arrived, but after a little bit of success, they decided I was the future of women’s gymnastics.”

“Shaye, you are the future of women’s gymnastics.”

“Maybe, and at this point, I can handle it. But I was only eleven-years-old then. I didn’t have a family to speak of, and I was afraid that if I weren’t successful, I would lose what little I did have. It wasn’t fair, and for the first time, gymnastics wasn’t fun for me. Before all the pressure, coaches used to point to me as an example of how to do a skill. Later, they berated me whenever I messed up a tiny bit. It was terrible.”

“Why? I’ve seen Galya on your case, that doesn’t seem to bother you.”

“He coaches me, he doesn’t put me down,” Shaye answered. “No one is more afraid of me failing than I am. I started worrying a lot more about my weight, about my skin color, about everything. When I talked on the phone to Simone during that time, I remember she asked me over and over, ‘Are you okay? Are you sure you’re okay?’ It was strange hearing the worry in her voice. She seemed to know the problem before I did.”

“You stuck it out for over two years after it became completely miserable. What made you stay?”

“Simone was just starting her career in advertising, and my dad didn’t want me. I had nowhere else to go.”

The raw truth of that statement cut Abby to the bone. She couldn’t imagine growing up with that kind of instability. There were times as a child when she felt smothered by her father’s overprotection and incessant, arbitrary rules, but she never felt alone. She never wondered whether or not she had a place in the world.

“After the second year, I didn’t win much of anything. I thought about quitting, but Simone told me I could come back to Manhattan and live with her if I trained with Galya.”

“If you really were so unaccomplished, why did Galya want to coach you?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

“I did. He didn’t know the answer, either.”

“Galya got me from the very beginning.”

“What did he get about you?”

“That it doesn’t help me to get beat up when I make a mistake because I’m already doing it in my head. I was allowed to try crazy stunts. Gymnastics was fun again. I owe Galya everything.”

He heard what she was saying, and he turned around and gave her a wink then squeezed her hand, quick but tight.

“Anyway, I came home, and that year I got second at Worlds. When I was fourteen, I won. Then a couple weeks later, I tore my Achilles.”

“What was that like?”

“At first, I was optimistic. It was a bad injury with a long recovery, but I usually bounce back from injuries pretty quickly. I had the surgery, and I actually felt great. I had good circulation, good movement, it didn’t even feel tight. But then I got the infection.”

“Staph infection?” Abby clarified.

“MRSA. It was so painful. I was sick all over. I spent three days delirious in the Critical Care Unit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“MRSA is antibiotic resistant. There are only a couple of drugs remotely successful at treating it. I had an allergic reaction to the first one they gave me. I was on a ventilator for a little over thirty-three hours. The doctors asked my sister and dad and Galya if they knew anything about my end-of-life wishes. They told them to prepare for the worst.”

“Why?”

“Because even if they cleared my lungs, apparently I was allergic to the type of drugs they use to treat MRSA. And if they couldn’t treat the staph infection because of the more serious side effects of the drugs—”

“The infection would kill you eventually,” Abby finished. “I had no idea it was so serious.”

“I won Worlds, but gymnasts don’t usually get much attention in the wide world of sports. We managed to keep it pretty quiet.”

“How long were you in the hospital?”

“Twenty days. Eight of them in the CCU.”

“Holy cow,” Abby said with a whistle. “That’s an absurdly long stay, especially when you consider the pressure placed on doctors by insurance companies to get people out as quickly as possible.”

“The whole thing kind of freaked my sister out. The last time someone she loved went into the hospital, she slipped into a coma and died. I don’t remember the breathing tube, but Simone told me they weaned me off the sedatives every once in a while to see how my lungs were recovering.”

“To get you to breathe on your own?”

“Yes. She said when that happened, I would sit up and try to pull the tube out of my throat. They had to put my arms in restraints to keep me from doing it. I guess I was a real pain in the ass.”

Abby smiled. “Sometimes when you’re delirious and sedated and in anaphylactic shock, you get a pass.”

“After the crisis ended, they gave me antibiotics that aren’t usually successful in treating MRSA, but it was the only thing they could do. It took me a long time to fight off the infection. The doctors told me I was able to do it because I was in such good shape. My body was about as strong as it could be, and prior to the injury, I was the healthiest I’d ever been. Eventually, the staph cleared. I went home, but for a long time, I only had energy to sleep, watch TV, and take the occasional shower. Simone had to take a couple months off work to help me rehab and take care of me.”

“How long were you out of commission?”

“I was back in the gym working out after five months. After eight months, I was able to start doing tricks again, and at about ten months, I was back up to speed.”

“Didn’t you win the World Championships that year?”

“Yeah. It was last year.”

“That’s unbelievable. Do you have any idea how unbelievable that is?”

“I had to do it. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The drugs they gave me to treat the staph infection, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t, were wildly expensive. You add on a hospital stay, plus the three months of work Simone had to miss to take care of me, my little adventure ended up setting us back about a hundred grand.”

“What about insurance?”

“That was with insurance. We were already stretched to the max paying for training.”

“So you felt like you had to win Worlds?”

“Not to prove it was all worth it. To set up my Olympic run. Because if I win the Olympics, I can get some lucrative endorsements, pay my sister back.”

Shaye paused, and Abby didn’t know what to say. She had no idea this little girl was carrying around such an immense weight of guilt. Especially considering it was because of something she had no control over.

Abby turned off the camera. “Thanks for telling me your story, Shaye.”

“How far is it to Deva?”

“We’re getting close, now. We’re getting very close.”