She’d lost sight of Sandy in the crowd of spectators waiting for the race to begin. She was near the middle of the pack. That was best. She wouldn’t be left behind and she wouldn’t be knocked over. She jumped up and down to keep the blood flowing.
Twenty-six miles in three and a half hours if she wanted to qualify for Boston. Last night, lying with Sandy in their Somerville motel room, she’d been optimistic. But now she felt weighed down. The article in that morning’s paper filled her thoughts. Blair Loses Ground in Fight for Program, the headline read. In smaller letters beneath it: Physician Sued.
Sandy had tried to keep it from her. He knew it was the last thing she needed to see before the race. But she’d grown suspicious at the way he kept that section of the paper to himself, and she finally snuck it away from him.
The article itself said very little. The damage was done in the headline. She called Cole. He’d seen the paper already and he sounded resigned.
“Orrin said the reporters will start calling any minute and I should tell them I have no comment,” he said. “It makes me furious. I haven’t done a damn thing wrong. It’s just the fact that someone sued me, no matter how out of line it is, that can ruin my credibility.”
“I know, Cole,” she’d said. “Look, ‘no comment’ sounds like you’re guilty. Speak from your heart. What do you have to lose?”
Stupid question, she thought now. He had everything to lose.
The cloth pinned to her shirt read 517. She repeated the numbers over and over in her mind, like a mantra. She looked down at her shoes for what had to be the hundredth time to be certain she’d tied double knots in the laces.
She heard the sound of the gun and suddenly they were moving like one massive animal. She couldn’t see the road in front of her or the people cheering along the sidewalk. Just the bodies surrounding her. She studied their fluid, graceful movements until she felt hypnotized by the rhythm.
This was fun. She moved easily, not too fast. Not yet. The air was crisp and cool, clean in her lungs. The trees were beginning to turn, but she let them blur by without taking time to notice their colors. She had to focus on the race, on the way each step felt to her feet and legs. She pushed the Fetal Surgery Program to some back corner of her mind and vowed to keep it there for the rest of the day.
She passed the eight-mile marker at noon. Terrific. Better than she’d hoped for.
She knew there were plenty of hills in the middle stretch. The first loomed in front of her. She heard the breathing of the runners around her as they started the climb. Her legs felt strong. She felt every contraction of the muscles, the way they grabbed and let go. She sailed over the crest and stayed in careful control downhill. No sense giving it your all when you didn’t need to. You were born to run over hills. She was a little giddy. For about five miles she felt as if she were flying instead of running.
At mile fifteen, though, she came to a narrow hill that curved and dipped, and it took all her concentration to get over and around it. She suddenly felt very tired. Eleven miles left.
Okay, you’re tired, she told herself. Keep moving, one step after the other. What hurts? Nothing much. Really, nothing too much. Calves would like a good stretch, they feel pretty tight. Breathing’s good. Very smooth. Weren’t you that fat little asthmatic kid? She was passing people. That amazed her. Of course some passed her too, but that didn’t really matter.
She spotted the twenty-mile marker at one-thirty. She wasn’t sure if she should trust her watch or not. It was too good. She had a full hour left to run the six miles that would qualify her for Boston. She felt like smiling but couldn’t. Everything hurt now. Her eyes burned and teared and a wide band of pain ran across her chest. She had trouble separating one pain from another in her legs and feet. She would spend two miles doing exactly that, she thought. There was a tight pain in her calves, a tighter pain in her hamstrings, threatening to cramp. She wouldn’t let herself think about that possibility. The pain in her right hamstring was worse than the pain in her left. Quite a bit worse; it bit into her leg with every step. She’d never be able to make love tonight. Poor Sandy. No. Don’t think about Sandy. Back to running. Keep up the pace. The marker for mile twenty-two was just ahead.
The crowd was thick now, roaring in her ears. She kept her eyes straight ahead. For the next mile she’d focus on the sound of her footsteps, the rhythm they made with the footsteps of the other runners. How had it taken her twenty-two miles to notice that pattering sound? Like rain on a tin roof.
At mile twenty-three she began to cry. God, she hurt. The runners in front of her were wavy streaks of color. She must look foolish to the people lining the street. Don’t think about it. You’re probably not the only person crying. Get back to the pain. Think about it objectively. Pick it apart. The right knee, she thought. That was new. And it felt like her feet were bleeding. She didn’t look down for fear her shoes had turned red with her blood.
Mile twenty-five. The home stretch. Oh God. There were TV cameras. People on the shoulders of other people. She saw it all through the edges of her vision. She loved the people running near her now. She didn’t look at them, didn’t know if they were men or women. She thought of how they were sharing something extraordinary. Her right calf was cramping, tight as a fist. She thanked it out loud for waiting until she was nearly done.
The finish line was ahead of her. People she didn’t know were jumping up and down and screaming. She ran as fast and as hard as she could across the line and people grabbed her, pulled her to a grassy spot on the side of the road. She let them sit her down. They poured water on her head, made her drink. She must have been holding her calf because someone started rubbing it. And someone else yelled in her ear. “Five-seventeen . . . three hours, sixteen minutes.”
She sat across from Sandy in a pancake house the next morning, working her way through a stack of pecan pancakes, high and wide. She hadn’t been able to eat a thing the night before.
Sandy had bought a paper from the machine outside, and now he handed it to her across the table. She had no trouble finding the article: Blair Doctor Speaks out on Lawsuit was the headline. Her heart thumped against her ribs. It was a short article, and she skimmed it quickly. She smiled as she read Cole’s quote out loud to Sandy.
“’There can be no winners in a suit like this. By the time the court makes a decision it will be too late to perform surgery on this baby. The parents will be left with no options, and I’ll be left with the knowledge that I could have helped if Blair had had the funds to provide the necessary equipment. It’s a situation without blame, and we are all losers.’”
She looked up at Sandy. “A whole lot better than no comment, I’d say.”