CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Vinnie was the first to speak.

“Wow, that’s gotta be a heartbreaker. They all finished in the same time, but it’s gonna be hard for the girl who got third to live with that. I better go check on the dining room.”

Bridget sat stiller than stone, staring into space, and I sat beside her without saying anything, letting the impact of Ellen’s loss sink in.

“You folks ready for brunch?” Vinnie said when he returned from the dining room. “Things have thinned out nicely in there.”

“What time is it?” Bridget said.

“Not yet 2,” said Vinnie. “Wow, what a finish. You guys ever seen anything like that?”

Bridget didn’t answer, instead she said to the open air, “Jesus, I’m polluted!”

“You know when our car will be ready?” I asked Vinnie.

“Dexter says tomorrow about noon. But there’s a bus to Manhattan that leaves out front at eight tonight if you need to get back to a city that bad.”

“You got a room?” Bridget said, as she stood, doing an imitation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

“Actually, we do. One just opened up next to the couple from Brooklyn. With foliage, we’ve been so slammed.”

“I gotta lie down,” Bridget said. “You got a nightgown?”

“We have Weathervane t-shirts. Some people use them that way. If you take a large size and stretch it.”

“Gimme,” said Bridget, swaying. “Where’s the room?”

Vinnie grabbed a key and a t-shirt and showed us the way up the stairs. “Wow, what a race,” he said again. “But oh, that poor girl who got third!”

“I’m hurting Colin,” Bridget said, as I held her arm and we followed Vinnie up the stairs.

“You’ll be OK,” I told her.

“I lost my mother and now I’ve lost my daughter.”

“She’ll understand.”

“She’ll throw a hip-shits that I wasn’t there.”

Vinnie looked at me for an interpretation.

“She means a shit fit.”

“Oh,” he said, and he kept climbing, but Bridget paused to catch her breath and we all stopped.

“She’ll never forgive me for missing that, Colin.”

“She already did a hip shits on you, at the news station—you’ll be fine.”

We arrived at the door to our room and Vinnie opened it. He gave me the key and Bridget made a beeline for the bathroom after Vinnie gave her a Weathervane t-shirt.

I waited for her, half expecting to hear heaving, but the woman was an iron lady, and all was quiet. Until she came out, dressed in her Weathervane t-shirt, her gorgeous legs on full display. She went right for the closest of the two beds and lay down. Crashed is more like it. She cut a still figure, but hardly a serene one, with her legs curled up under her in a fetal position. I sat down on the bed beside her, but she was gone, passed out, and I engineered the covers deftly to get them out from under her legs and slide her in between the sheets.

“Colin?” she said, waking up as I pulled the covers over her shoulders. “Will she always hate me?”

“She doesn’t hate you.”

I tried soothing words, but it was like throwing seed on rock as she shook her head, resisting my attempts to comfort her, then she passed out again, and I took her hand as she slept.

It was about half an hour before the knocking on the wall began, and I wondered if it was pipes, until I realized the couple from Brooklyn had shifted into high gear.

For several hours I sat beside Bridget, watching as the wall next to us vibrated and the sky turned darker out the window in stages, waiting for 8 pm and the bus. I used the time to think back over all my experiences with Bridget, from the Runner’s World she had brought to the office in Philly, to her parking her car across from me on the street in Dorchester the night she told me she wanted me to work with her on Runner in Red, to “run with her,” as she had called it.

But my favorite Bridgetism? Hip-shits!

How could it not be!

Soon the clock on the desk showed five to eight, so I tucked her in one more time, tight as I could, and I ran for my bus to New York and hopped on as it pulled to the curb outside the Weathervane.

It was after midnight by the time the milk-wagon of a bus made all its stops and arrived in Manhattan, and another half hour by the time I made it from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the Sheraton on Seventh Ave. where Jack had reserved a suite for Ellen, Pop, and himself. Since the hotel was near Central Park, I took a detour and checked out the marathon finish line. A few bikers and kids on roller blades breezed by over the big word, “Finish” painted in the street. All was dark at that hour, but the energy of what had happened in this spot earlier that day and the thousands upon thousands who had streamed over the spot following the dramatic finish in the women’s race remained, and I soaked in the majesty of that energy and Ellen’s gutsy achievement before going to the hotel.

Jack let me in. I had called from the bus and left him a voice message that I was coming, and he greeted me at the door with a big Irish hug.

“Ellen and Pop are sleeping,” he said, as he invited me into the dark room. “But I set the couch for you.”

As I lay on the couch, curled inside a thick comforter from the closet, I lay awake listening to the quiet, punctuated by muted car horns on Seventh Avenue far below and I wondered why Bridget and I were so alike. Why did we both hold life at arm’s length? It was not a thought that came immediately, but one that crept into my brain as I floated suspended between consciousness and sleep, the hum of the heater droning on, and after a while I was dreaming, or thought I was, when I sensed a warm figure kneel on the carpeted floor beside me.

“Colin?”

“Huh?”

“Can I come in?”

“Uh huh,” I said, and I moved over on the couch.

“Thank you for coming,” Ellen said.

“Oh, hey, yeah. By the way, you did great.”

“I’m still not ready, you understand, don’t you?” she said, whispering, as she slid in under the covers beside me and touched my cheek. “Not yet, OK?”

“Uh, huh,” I said, still half asleep. “Stay back, stay back.”

She chuckled, then she said, “Sorry I was such a bitch the other day.”

“You were fine.”

“Hold me?”

“Yes,” I said, and I pressed back against the couch to make a bigger space for her in my arms. She wore a t-shirt, one of Jack’s white t-shirts with nothing under it, and I could feel how warm she was. “Your mother watched you today.”

“She did?”

“Every second of it, glued to the TV.”

“Thank you for doing that.”

“No, it was her, Ellen. All her.”

“Will you wait for me?”

“I’ve got a question. Do you like me for me, or because I can be helpful to you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That day on the river, you said I could be helpful to you with your mom. Do you like me because I can be helpful, or because I’m me?”

“I carry your baseball card in my wallet, does that answer your question?”

“I’ll wait for you, long as you want.”

“Thanks for coming tonight,” she said, and she kissed me squarely on the lips, moist. I held her tightly one more time, then she slipped away out of my grasp, and a moment later her bedroom door closed. I lay in that spot a long time, pressed against the back of the couch, the impression of her breasts against my chest a warm sweet memory.

And I convinced myself, as the car horns played softly on Seventh Avenue below, that her visit had not been a dream and Bridget had been right: She was falling in love with me.