“And seems like some people are gonna see this one, huh?” Jack said. “Though maybe it’s not the best movie to start our lessons on. Maybe I’ll email you sometime when we’re home and we can discuss something better.”
“Why me, when she’s got the real keys to the kingdom?” Whitney said. “Remember, I’m not anybody when it comes to this stuff. I’m just getting my feet wet.”
“Well, that’s obviously not true, or else you wouldn’t have your job. She’s probably never gonna talk to me again, anyway. But I like you—I hope that’s not the case with you…”
She stared back at him. She couldn’t decide whether to respond to what he was saying or stay stuck in the mud, piecing together the puzzle of Jenna Silverstein.
“And come this time two days from now,” he said, his eyes still glassy, buzzed, “I’m gonna be a little shaky about the end of all this. Summers at home always used to restore me, but this year—”
“What do you mean restore?”
“I dunno, it’s related to this other thing, it’s not important, it’s just…The first few seasons, I’d think about home at all times. It would be December or January in Norway or Germany, and there wouldn’t be any sun, or any way to go outside, it was so cold.”
Whitney lifted an exaggerated eyebrow.
“No, I realize where I’m from, but it’s somehow worse. It’s hard. It’s bad. Plus, practice all day for a coach who didn’t speak English. The only other American on the team resenting me because of stuff from college, because of the tournament run and the magazine covers, because they thought that supposedly meant I was given more opportunities than they were. I had a good thing on those teams, but I had stretches of terrible weeks. You start getting run-down in practice. You catch the flu, can’t eat anything. Entire months like that those first few seasons.”
He paused and closed his eyes and shook his head.
“And I can fall back into that place pretty easily. It’s scary. I’ve done what I can about it. I saw doctors, I saw shrinks, and, you know, they never put me on drugs, but I was there. I know that place. I mean, you said you had something like it, right? It sounds like maybe you know…”
She listened to see if he was going to continue, and then she spoke slowly. “I do. You’re right. It was bad. It was really really bad.”
“But then it went away?”
“It was…everything changed for me after that.”
He nodded and looked at her and she felt a compulsion to explain herself.
“I don’t want it to sound like it was just over a bad breakup,” she said. “That’s what started it. But then that summer at home, I fought constantly with my parents. I really think I hated them for those months, and they hated me. And, like I said, I got…I was working, but I was going out a lot. With these people from this restaurant I was waitressing at. There was this bartender. I didn’t even know it until it had happened, but…I somehow got pregnant and miscarried.”
His face didn’t move. She had his attention.
“I didn’t know what was happening. I just had the worst cramps of my life. I was in the bathroom one night. And— It was terrifying. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell anyone. My brother—he’s four years younger, we’d been at each other’s throats all my life. I don’t think I’d had a single serious conversation with him up to that point. My dad was away, there was just no way to…over the phone. And my mom, I just couldn’t imagine facing her. Just having to live the rest of my life with that look on her face. That flinch of shame…I…I couldn’t do that. So I handled it by myself. I just refused to give them that piece of me—I didn’t want that ordeal to suck me back down into some sort of indebtedness to them. I don’t know—I’m sure it wasn’t the right thing to do.…Then I quit my job. I didn’t leave my room for two weeks. My mom was on me the rest of the summer for being lazy. But gradually it got better. I stopped drinking. I started running again in the evenings. And that’s when I started calling the study-abroad office every day. I couldn’t stay at home and I couldn’t go back to campus, but all of a sudden I had this escape. And that was everything for me. When I was gone, when I was in Paris, I was finally able to start figuring out what the hell I was meant to be doing. It worked, I guess. That pivot. That fresh start. That was the beginning of something important. And I haven’t been back to that place since…”
She’d pushed him into silence. She hadn’t intended to give so much, but she hadn’t been this open with a stranger about any of it in seven years, and it felt good.
“What happened to you, then?” she said.
“It was nothing like that,” he said, sheepishly. “It was nothing real.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He looked at her squarely, searching for some stoplight, and when he couldn’t find it, he must’ve felt free to proceed. “Those winters, I’d just walk around scared sometimes for what could trigger it. People called it homesickness—that’s just not what it was. Or it was that times one hundred. I’d hear a song in a restaurant, and it’d remind me of being in a car cruising around in high school, and I’d practically start crying, I just felt so fucking alone. They said it would screw up my game if I took something to help with it. I didn’t know better, I just knew I was struggling. They gave me this lamp. They gave me a subscription to a juice service, to up my fruits and vegetables. But it only does so much. There was just
