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“Did you see that?” Miriam says. She is pointing across the field. “That kid tripped him. He almost went down.”
“Where? What kid?”
Her tone is sharp; she lifts her eyebrows with impatience, and all at once he returns to her. Miriam. The race. A bright cold day in fall.
“The tall one, Art. At the starting line.” She frowns incredulously. “How could you have missed it?”
He smiles; she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about. “Well, no harm done. Or was there?”
“Sometimes, it’s like your head is a big empty dance-hall, Art.” She squeezes his arm. “No. No harm done.”
As O’Neil predicted, for the next twenty-five minutes, until the ru
Impossibly-so little time seems to have passed-the first ru
“Where is he?” Miriam is saying. She bounces on her toes, looking over the heads of the crowd. “Where is he?”
“There.” Arthur points, and then it happens, as it always does: all the memories he carries inside him of track meets and soccer games and piano recitals and class plays-twenty years of watching his son from the sidelines of playing fields and the back of dark auditoriums-suddenly organize themselves, like the plot of a novel or movie, leading to this moment. Excitement wells up inside him, a huge and desperate desire to see his son do well, a feeling so intense he would step out of his body if he could. He hears his voice, and Miriam’s, the two of them yelling:
“Go, go, go!”
For the final moments of the race everything seems to slow. As the ru
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”
The first ru
Arthur hears Miriam whisper, “God.”
“Steady,” Arthur says, and takes her elbow. “Let’s go see.”
O’Neil is almost too euphoric to notice them. “Can you believe it? Fourth place.” He shakes his head in utter amazement. “I’ve never done that well. Not even close. It was the last turn when I knew I could do it. I saw myself passing those guys, and then I just did.”
He introduces Sandra, who shakes first Miriam’s hand and then Arthur’s, meeting his grip with a firmness that is at once surprising and completely natural. The last ru
When the last ru
“Your son ran quite a race,” he says. “I don’t know what you fed him last night, but do it again sometime.”
Despite O’Neil’s surprising finish the team as a whole hasn’t done that well. Most have finished in the second pack, well behind the leaders. Their strongest ru
“I guess he didn’t go in,” O’Neil says. “To tell the truth, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a good ru
Arthur looks away from the boy and returns his gaze to O’Neil, who is putting his sweats back on and sucking a wedge of orange that someone has handed him. The pleasure he feels in his son, he knows, is something new. He is watching his son step into himself, into life. Suddenly Arthur knows that, from this day, the love that he feels for O’Neil will be a different kind of love. His son’s transformation ca
“Let’s celebrate,” Arthur says. He turns to Miriam, realizing suddenly that he has almost forgotten she is there; he has forgotten Sandra, too, walking beside his son with their arms wrapped around one another’s waists, like any couple.
At the edge of the field O’Neil stops. “Great,” he says. “Well, actually, I should go back for a while.” He tips his head over his shoulder toward the bleachers, where the two teams are still gathered. “It’s the last meet of the season. Sandra has a game to get ready for too.”
“That’s right.” Arthur gives her his best smile, though he is disappointed; he would like to have O’Neil to himself for a while. “Field hockey, right?”
She shrugs modestly. “It’s just JV.”
“JV nothing,” Arthur says. “I hear you girls really kick some ass.”
Sandra laughs at this, knowing, as she must, that she is hearing O’Neil’s words played back by his father. They agree to meet instead for di
“Did you notice the shirt?” Arthur asks later. They have returned to their room to change for lunch; they are pla