Читать книгу Winning Ruby Heart - Jennifer Lohmann - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

“HOW WAS THE ultramarathon?” Micah’s father asked as they left his hotel and headed for the lakeshore. His father still traveled too much on business, though he regularly stopped on his way back home to visit Micah.

Parking his son at the child’s grandmother’s and sending regular checks had been a coward’s way of fathering, but they’d both decided it was better to forgive. After Micah’s accident, when his father had been the only person to look him in the eyes as the doctor told him he would never walk again, Micah had understood that brave men faced their past and letting go of childhood hurts didn’t make him weak.

The other pedestrians gave them a wide berth, like a school of fish parting around a video camera in a nature documentary. The unfamiliar object seen and its foreignness avoided because it couldn’t be ignored.

At the crosswalk, Micah handed over a couple bucks to the StreetWise vendor before answering his father. “It was fine.” He debated elaborating. When they reached the other side of the street and Grant Park, he said, “Ruby Heart was there.”

“With her mother?”

An enveloping hug between mother and daughter had been one of the iconic photographs of Ruby’s stratospheric rise to fame. After Ruby’s cheating had been revealed, Mrs. Heart had vanished and Mr. Heart had appeared as the parent of supreme importance.

“No. She was alone.”

His dad snorted. “Her mother always did look too brittle to survive adversity.”

“Brittle?” The woman had been thin, with a cutting quality to her face that Micah had always associated with wealthy women and crystal champagne glasses, neither of which he would ever identify as brittle.

“Yeah, I got the sense—even in photographs—that if Ruby fell, her mother would break.”

They stopped at another light, the traffic on Columbus speeding past them. Micah looked up at his father, who didn’t appear to be joking. “I always got the sense her parents supported her.” Actually, at the time of her scandal, Micah had found the closeness of her parents in her life—she’d been twenty-four and still living at home for God’s sake—to be a sign of weakness.

His father shrugged before stepping forward to cross the street. “I guess they filled the role of a track team for her once she left college, but all I saw was a mother seeking fame through her daughter. Maybe I’m not being fair to the woman.”

“She isn’t your mother,” Micah replied, directing the conversation away from anything resembling sympathy to Ruby Heart.

“No, but the benefit of my mother is that once you realized she couldn’t be pleased, you could stop trying.”

His father hadn’t reached that point until Micah was nineteen, and it had taken a crippling accident for Micah to get there. From what Micah knew of his own mother, part of the reason she’d run off had been because she hadn’t even wanted to try to live up to his grandmama’s strict standards. Grandmamas love little boys who win football games.

“She’s dead now, so I guess I don’t have to worry about it.”

They crossed the rest of the park in silence. Only when they stood at the crosswalk on Lakeshore Drive, the whoosh of cars and busses nearly drowning out his voice, did his father respond. “I’m sorry, you know.”

“I know.” His father apologized anytime grandmama was brought up in conversation. He had never claimed he didn’t know what he’d left his son to deal with, but he’d also never shied away from any punishment Micah dealt out during his rehabilitation. And the first time his grandmama had said, “Cripples belong at home,” and Micah had been too doped up to do more than grunt, his father had ordered her barred from the hospital.

The light changed and they crossed the wall of revving car engines and exhaust before arriving at the lakeshore.

“Ruby looked good,” Micah said, changing the subject. With her natural plain hair, she’d looked fresh and warm and healthy. A Midwestern milkmaid whose slender figure hid muscles that could bench-press a cow before outrunning all the boys. Weak women were for weak men.

She’d gained some weight in her five years out of the public eye, adding a suggestion of curves to what would otherwise be a stick-straight figure. She looked less of a fantasy and more of a real person one would want to sit across a table from and share a meal with. A crazy dream. She was also a cheater.

“Yeah?” his father said, the question in his voice the only acknowledgment either of them would give to the interest Micah had given Ruby’s career before her doping was revealed.

His father had to slip behind him on the path to make room for some bicyclists. After the bikes passed and he caught up with Micah, he asked, “Are you going to interview her again?”

“She said no, but I’m not giving up.” Not to mention that Micah had determined the anchor spot was his and Ruby was the key. Despite the paucity of current information available online, he didn’t think Ruby was truly forgotten in the public’s mind. After all, the American public loved two stories more than any other: Judas’s downfall and the possibility of his redemption.

His father stopped to look out over the blue of Lake Michigan. “If I were her, I doubt I’d want to be interviewed by a man who couldn’t take no for an answer.”

“She’ll come to me.” Micah let the fact that he’d had Mike call her stay buried under the surface of the rippling water.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY Micah was sitting in his office when the phone rang and he knew, without recognizing the number on the caller ID, what voice he would hear on the other end.

“What part of no didn’t you understand?” The words were tight—angry—and Micah imagined the clench of her jaw as the words punched their way past her teeth. Well, she couldn’t fake doe-eyed innocence anymore. Indignation was probably as close as she could get.

“The part where you call me.”

“Yeah, to tell you to leave my mother alone. To tell you to tell Mike to leave my mother alone. I have no interest in helping NSN pay their satellite bills. Did that once, don’t plan to do it again.”

“Not even to show the world how you’ve reformed?” He threaded the carrot on the rope and dangled it in front of her. “A new person with new hope and new dreams and no needles sticking out of your arm. The TV-viewing public will eat that up.”

“Lance Armstrong might be free. Or a baseball player, any baseball player.”

“But none of them ever graced the cover of People with the headline Meet America’s Darling.”

“You have me mistaken with someone who wants to return to their past. Find another redemption story. I’m not biting.”

The phone clicked and Micah stared into the silence of the receiver. What did she think running a race was if not an attempt to return to her past? When he set the phone back down in the cradle, he knew he had her. He simply needed the right bait.

* * *

“YOU CAN’T PLAY that trick a second time,” Ruby’s cousin Haley said, the exasperation in her voice loud and clear, even over an echoing cell connection. “You know Aunt Julie called my mom, right?”

“There has to be something else you need to do for the wedding that your favorite cousin and best friend is essential for.”

“Aunt. Julie. Called. My. Mom.” Haley huffed. “Like I was a teenager sneaking out to a college party.”

“And the dress shop.”

“What! Really?”

“I should have foreseen that, honestly. Mom has always been thorough.” Only as Ruby realized that neither her brother nor her sister had managed to sneak out of the house as teenagers did she wonder if her mother had been as ignorant of the doping as she’d claimed.

“I can barely stand this sneaking around, and you live it every day, Ruby.”

“I rarely have to sneak.” Like the crazed wife in the attic, unless she threatened to make the papers, her parents simply pretended she wasn’t there.

“You really should move out.”

“I know.” Haley had been telling Ruby to get out on her own for years now, since that first sponsorship offer had come in. Ruby was more tempted now than she had ever been. She could make friends other than her cousin. Maybe even invite a man over, if she could find one who wasn’t constantly trying to one-up her, or one who didn’t lord her past over her.

Micah? No, he failed the second criteria. And he could probably fake liking her enough to interview her, but not beyond the cameras rolling. She wasn’t sure she’d trust him even if he were nice to her.

Who was she kidding? It wasn’t as though she could afford to move out on her own. Her only skill was winning middle-distance races. And all the money she had from sponsorship was frozen while the two lawsuits against her by a shoe company and a sports-drink company moved through courts at their glacial pace. She’d question the credentials of any school that wanted her for a coach, and any private athlete who hired her would be tested for drugs so often their veins would collapse. Her college major and the degree it was printed on would be worth money only if she put it on eBay and accepted bids.

None of which she would say out loud, even to her cousin, who already knew it all. “My parents were there for me when I needed them. And they still want me here.” A close-enough interpretation of the look of panic her mom got whenever Ruby mentioned looking for an apartment.

“Your dad went all lawyer-happy when you needed him. And your mom fell apart. And they want you at the house because they fear the gossip, not because they like your company.”

In this, her cousin was both right and wrong. Both her parents had been available and supportive—or at least available—when Ruby had needed them. But the last time their support had come in the form of a hug was five years ago. All of which only made Ruby more determined to run another race. No matter what her parents thought, running had always been for her.

“Plus,” Haley continued, “before you run another race, how do you know that reporter isn’t looking for you?” Was her cousin trying to convince her to move out or to hide in a bunker?

“According to NSN’s website, he’ll be at a Brewers game that weekend because they’re honoring some ex-player he’s going to interview. In fact—” Ruby’s excitement grew with every word she spoke, both at the thought of another race and beating Haley in this argument “—because the Brewers are in Milwaukee and I’ll be in Indiana, I’ll be farther away from Micah than I have knowingly been in five years.”

Haley let out a big puff of air. “Fine. But I think you’re overplaying your hand. Move out of that house. Get a job. Live a normal life.”

“Just one more race.”

“Said the addict to the heroin needle.”

* * *

AS MICAH REWATCHED some of the film Amir had taken of Ruby, an itch developed between his shoulder blades. There was something off about her stride and a look of pain on her face that couldn’t be the fifty-kilometer run, because she was only five kilometers into the race, which had been her best distance as an Olympian. He looked at her finishing time, which he’d written on a sticky note and stuck on a printout of the photo of her with the American flag high over her head. The itch paced in a circle between his scapulae, nearly wearing a line in his skin.

Ruby had been slow. Even assuming she was trying to get her ultra legs under her, she had still run a slow race. And if she was only running one race—as she claimed—he thought she would have put everything she had into getting the best time possible. Four hours and forty-three minutes was someone’s best time for a fifty-kilometer race, but it sure as hell wasn’t Ruby Heart’s best time.

Micah shifted his shoulders around but couldn’t get the itch out of his back. He drummed his fingers against his desk, then pressed Play on the film again. Ruby had tossed her hat in an attempt to hide from him and Amir, which meant the camera had much better shots of her face, even through the drizzle that had plagued the race. He slowed the film, reassessing what he saw. The look on Ruby’s face wasn’t pain—it was restraint.

Even if she was consciously holding herself back, he knew top athletes as well as he knew his own grandmama, and she couldn’t have been happy with that time. The four hours and forty-three minutes would needle at her brain and pride until she had to see if she could finish better. And even if she was curtailing her normal power for a very good reason, her natural competitiveness would win out. A woman who cared enough about an Olympic gold medal to stick a needle in her arm wasn’t going to let such a poor time stand as the only record of her ultra career.

He stopped the video and opened a browser. She had run one 50K race and he would guess she would run another. Micah navigated to an ultramarathon website and started searching. He stopped when he came to the trail run in Indiana in three weeks. A 50K, with at least a few spots still open. Easy driving distance from Chicago. The arrow of the mouse twitched on the screen as he considered the chances she wouldn’t be there.

If he was wrong, well, he and Amir would have more footage for NSN’s series, so the entire trip wouldn’t be completely wasted. But he wasn’t wrong. He would see Ruby’s tight ass and sleek thighs encased in running shorts as certain as the yuppies at Wrigley Field would spend more time on their cell phones than watching the Cubs play. Micah picked up his phone and called his boss.

* * *

THREE WEEKS LATER, Amir slid into the driver’s seat of the production van with a huff that Micah ignored. His photographer was a baseball fan and had found the last trip out to an ultramarathon—this one in Idaho to film Currito—to be “about as fun as watching a slug climb a rock.”

Despite Micah being a sports guy, Amir’s slug description sounded more interesting than a baseball game to Micah, a secret he would take to his grave. Watching the ultramarathoners push their bodies to the limit of possibility fascinated Micah, and he felt a certain kinship with a sport based on the idea of giving the middle finger to the world’s perception of what was possible for one body to achieve.

What had possessed Ruby to even try an ultramarathon?

They were on I-94 when Amir asked the question that must have been gnawing at his brain since he’d learned about the change of plans. “If this Ruby Heart really is an—how did you say it?—embarrassment to everything sports stands for, why are we skipping out on what should be a great baseball game, not to mention the festivities afterward, to drive to Indiana and watch people run on dirt for eight hours?”

“We don’t have to stay for the whole race. Just until Ruby finishes.”

“Five hours, then.”

This race was hillier than the one in Iowa had been, but Ruby would be trying to run faster. “No more than four and half.” Micah had also looked at the race times for the top runners for this race. Ruby wouldn’t be at that level yet, but she would be gunning for it, even if she didn’t realize it, and those runners did this race in four hours.

“Still, there’s nothing interesting anywhere near this race.” Amir braked to avoid hitting the car in front of them, then moved to the left lane and passed a long line of cars while muttering under his breath about stupid drivers and stupid Indiana. He had made the same complaint in Iowa and Idaho and would probably repeat it again if they watched the ultramarathon in Chicago. “Why lower your standards to follow this fraud?”

“You never complain when I interview baseball players. And you didn’t complain about the Tour de France, either.”

“Sure.” Amir shrugged. “I like baseball and I’m not foolish enough to complain about a trip to France.” Amir had been his photog for almost three years and remembered those interviews as well as Micah did, though through a different lens. “But while the baseball players and the cyclists both wear tight pants, none of them have pigtails.”

Micah didn’t say anything. The pigtails probably spoke to some disturbing fetish hidden deep within, but he thought they were hot.