Part Three · The Line
Chapter Eighteen
Covered Earth
The stadium came up between two buildings and was gone, and then the road turned and there was nothing else to look at.
It was the biggest thing she had ever seen that wasn’t a mountain.
Inside, the track was the color of rust and gave back exactly what you put into it. Nothing kept, nothing lost. She ran a stride-out down the back straight on the first evening and looked behind her once.
No prints.
She looked at the finish line before she looked at anything. He was there. The watch up. She had never in her life looked at a finish line and found it empty, and this one was the loudest he had ever been, because this was the line all the others had been practice for.
She won her heat and her semi the way you take stairs.
The call room before the final was eight plastic chairs and seven other women and the sound of everyone managing themselves. The woman in lane two held a string of beads she wasn’t praying with so much as holding. Somebody’s headphones leaked something, a sermon or a song. The woman in lane six had a photograph she kept in her shoe and took out and put back.
Dara unzipped the side pocket of the kit bag and looked at the stopwatch lying on its cord among the medals.
She zipped it again.
They walked out into a wall of noise. The light towers had turned the night white, and the stands went up and up on every side, and everything in them was moving.
Except one thing.
High up, on the back straight side, in a crowd that was all motion, one person was sitting still.
Her mother did not come to races. She never had. Not the regionals, not anywhere, not once in nineteen years of finish lines.
She was here.
Dara looked back down at the track, because the race was in four minutes and there was nowhere to put it.
At the blocks she did what she did. She found the line, far down the covered earth. He was waiting at it, the watch raised, where she was taught to look, where he always was.
And then, with the stadium roaring somewhere above her, her hand went down and lay flat against the track.
She had never done that in her life. Her hand had.
She settled into the blocks.