Chapter Three

The day of the regional championship, the track stopped being theirs.

There was bunting on the leaning stand and drums down by the first bend and more people on the rail than she had ever seen in one place. The blankets were out on the slope with the food already going. Somebody had painted the finish post.

The junior races ran first. Dara warmed up on the grass behind the stand, and the morning came to her in pieces, the way mornings did before a race. The drums. The smell of frying. A whistle. At some point a boy fell in one of the junior heats and her father went over the rail to set him on his feet, and the boy ran on crying and finished last, and people cheered him the whole way. She was retying her left spike. When she looked up again her father was back at the rail with his eyes on the stopwatch.

Before her final, he came to the edge of her lane, crouched, and laid his palm flat on the dirt. He always did that. She had stopped wondering about it years ago, the way you stop wondering about anything a person does every day.

Then he walked the line of athletes and passed behind her without stopping.

“Where are you?”

“At the finish,” she said, without looking up.

“Good.”

She had been there since breakfast.

The gun went, and the race was short the way her races were short. She came off the last bend alone, the drums lost somewhere behind her heartbeat, and broke the tape with the field still turning in.

The announcer was saying something about a record. Twenty-two years, he was saying. Older than she was.

She found her father at the finish post. He had the watch up.

“Your start was late. Two tenths.” He turned the watch so she could see it, though she couldn’t read it from there. “And you ran the bend wide. That’s three meters you gave them for nothing.”

The crowd was still loud around them. People kept touching her shoulders as they went past.

She stood there a moment longer, in case there was more.

There wasn’t.

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At dinner she sat with a bag of ice on each shin and ran the bend over in her head, the wide line, the three meters, where exactly the lane had gotten away from her.

“She broke a record today,” her mother said.

“The record was soft,” said her father, not looking up.

Her mother looked at her then, for a while.

“When will you stop running?”

It was such a strange question that Dara didn’t answer it. Nobody stops running.

She finished her rice and took the ice off when it started to burn.

In the morning there were hills.