“I wish you’d go back to swimming,” she said. “There was very little equipment to buy.”
“There was also very little sleep,” I reminded her.
She rolled her eyes. “This again. My son the athlete—will do anything at all to get to the Olympics. As long as he doesn’t have to get out of bed.”
“I’m just saying, the Olympics are on TV all day—there must be a sport that competes in the afternoon.”
“It’s a question of dedication,” she declared. “You must be willing to get up at four in the morning for your sport, whether you need to or not. Nobody ever got to the Olympics by sleeping in.” And then, from out of nowhere, “Ask your cousin Marcel.”
“I have a cousin Marcel?”
“Mmm,” she affirmed, a lazy French yes. “Your auntie Francine’s oldest, from her first marriage.”
“Francine had a ‘first marriage’?”
“Mmm.” Again.
“And what would cher Cousin Marcel know about setting your alarm for the Olympics?” I asked, missing the connection.
“He’s been to the Olympics,” she said, leaving her duh! unsaid but well understood.
“What, you mean like as a spectator?”
“No.”
“You mean he’s been to the Olympics?”
She nodded. “A few times. He went to Atlanta. And Sydney, I think.”
I sat bolt upright on the couch. “I have a cousin who’s been to the Olympics, and you’re just telling me this now?” I cried.
“Have I never told you this before?”
“You never even told me about Marcel before!”
“Well, that’s pretty much Marcel in a nutshell: he went to the Olympics. He was Luxembourg’s first medal in like fifty years.”
“He medaled?”
“Mmm. Bronze medal,” she said. “He might actually have two of them.”
“In what sport?”
“He’s a shooter.”
“What is that, like a position in field hockey or something?”
“No, a shooter.” She pointed her finger at me and cocked her thumb. “Pow, pow,” she said.
“Shooting’s a sport?” I asked.
She shrugged. “In Luxembourg it is.”
And just like that, my plan fell into my lap from the sky, fully formed and only an e-mail away. I felt like a jackass; I had never even considered the Luxembourg angle. It had been made clear to all observers that I had neither the drive nor the talent to rise to the top of the highest-funded Olympic program in the world, but I had a Luxembourgish passport—somewhere—and I was immediately and fully confident that I could be a star in what had to be a tiny program. I hadn’t been to my mother’s speck of a country in ten years, and I had never lived there, but I whipped out an e-mail to my long-lost bosom cousin professing a love for shooting that would not be denied, and when his gracious invitation to come and train with him appeared in my inbox, my bags were already packed. I was still on my ice dancing crutches when I hobbled onto what was literally the very next flight to Luxembourg.
* * * *
Findel Airport in Luxembourg is not exactly the beating heart of European air travel. As befits a tiny country, it is a tiny airport, its tarmac scattered with tiny airplanes from nearby European capitals, alongside which my connecting flight from Amsterdam pulled up at around seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening. I hobbled into the tiny arrivals hall, where Marcel was easy enough to spot in the mob of like, eleven people, the other ten of whom huddled together in thawbs and abayas, anxious to greet someone who was not me.
My mother and I had spent much of the drive to LAX trying to determine if I had ever met Marcel. When we were kids, my mom had taken us to Luxembourg every summer, but as my older sisters got into high school, their interest in spending summers away from their friends waned sharply, and by the time I was a teenager, we’d quit going altogether.
“He came to California, I remember once, when he was a teenager,” my mom told me. “But he’s much older than you are, I doubt you’d remember.”
“Much older” stuck in my head for some reason, and on the flight over I had decided to keep my eyes peeled for a rotund grey-haired man in a beret and a windbreaker, probably carrying a small dog. He was actually wearing a sporty windbreaker, but that was the beginning and end of any similarities Marcel bore to my vision of him; suffice it to say that if I had ever met this cousin of mine, I would not have forgotten it.
“Much older” made him about thirty-five, and time had handled Marcel with exquisite kid gloves. Impossibly insouciant, he was the kind of accidental handsome that takes art directors and make-up artists hours to replicate in magazine ads. A light scarf hung from his neck like maybe he didn’t know it was there; his sunglasses raked his chestnut bangs away from his angular face so that his overgrown hair framed it like a shimmering mane; his hips were just this side of wide, seemingly designed to fill this particular pair of charcoal jeans, and his tummy was unselfconsciously flat under a snug, muted sweater. Long story short, he was breathtaking, and he seemed neither to know nor to care.
He stepped up, one long leg before the other, and offered me a long, strong hand. “You must be Bolton.”
I grimaced. “Unfortunately, yes,” I said, slipping my hand into his, a stone wrapped in silk.
“Unfortunately?”
“Please call me Bo.”
He grinned. “I understand,” he said. “Beau.” His mouth emphasized the similarity to the French word for “handsome,” so when he said with a wink, “It suits you,” like that would be our little secret, my stomach flopped. I was at once ecstatic at the proposition of living in the same house as this man for the foreseeable future, and deeply distraught that he was a blood relative.
“Where’s your stuff?” he asked me, casting a glance at my luggage.
“This is it here,” I said, shouldering my backpack and preparing to wheel my little blue suitcase into my new life.
“I mean your shooting stuff.”
My what? “Oh, like
