Great, truly spectacular. I’d really screwed it up this time.
Chapter Sixteen
The yellow blur took me by surprise.
“Ow!” I yelled, rubbing my forehead.
“Elin! Focus!” My mother snapped at me from the side-lines, as if it was my fault.
Okay, maybe she had a little bit of a point. At this stage of my career, I really shouldn’t have been getting beaned on the head by the ball machine. Still, she could have told me she had switched it on.
“Sorry, Mamma!”
“Don’t give me sorry, give me your attention. You haven’t had a good show in Melbourne for four years now. Let’s get it together.”
We’d arrived at the warmup tournament in Brisbane two days early, and my mother was intent on working off the last of my vacation-time moping. I’d played an exhibition match for charity just before New Year and, even with the annoyance of playing against Jürgen in doubles, I had been rusty and distracted. And I never played doubles, which really didn’t help matters.
The practice court was good, a similar finish to the hard courts at the arena, much like the one in Melbourne too. I appreciated it when they kept things consistent.
“Alice wants to know if you’re coming to her show, when you get back to LA?”
That was unlike my mother, to bring the personal into training time.
“Oh, does she want me there? Then she can ask me herself. Is Dad coming out for it too?”
“Maybe later in the week. He’s busy with work, so he says. Wrapping up everything so he can start his retirement.”
“He’s retiring?”
Although tennis had become the unofficial family business, my dad had continued to work in his own importing and exporting business, a spin off from his days as a diplomat. He travelled almost as much as I did, and for years we’d tried to coordinate our schedules as far as possible. I hadn’t realised how much I missed him until that moment.
Not that he was the only person I missed, but still.
“Yes, it’s all coming out for the divorce paperwork. He wants to sell his boat and get a bigger one. I never thought he was such a cliché.”
“Mamma, are you okay? This is a big change, especially at your age and—”
“I hear that boy Xavi wants to be your coach.” She was good at catching me off guard. She did it on court to improve my footwork and reactions, and she did it even better in conversation. I considered her then, wondering if all girls really did turn into their mothers. We weren’t so different to look at—she with her tidy blonde hair now cut short, her tracksuit worn like a suit of armour. With my ponytail and tennis dress from the same range, it certainly wasn’t hard to tell we were related.
“And you know I’d go without a coach at all before I’d ever let him coach me. Please, Mamma. I don’t want any other coach unless you’re done with me. We’re so close to finishing this up.”
“Finishing?” Mamma shut the ball machine off, walking back over to me. We’d had most of our conversations at a distance, and it was disconcerting to have her zeroing in on me. “You’re talking about it for real this time, aren’t you?”
“I can’t play forever. When my hip went, I worried… One of these days it’s all going to slip. I don’t want to keep playing when the next generation is knocking me out in the first rounds.”
She sat on the bench on the side of the court and motioned for me to join her. For once we were all alone: no one sitting in to watch practice, no Ezi on hand in case I hurt something else. This week, players were scattered over Brisbane, Sydney, and Hobart depending on their tournament. All funnelling towards the big two weeks in Melbourne.
“First of all, I’d never let you play on that long. You have a reputation to uphold. But we also know you can’t win every tournament every time. You never have. Maybe we start looking at a more targeted schedule. Jürgen is already doing this—focus only on the slams and the big prize money. Sit out everything but the minimum.”
“Sure. Whatever you think.” I couldn’t hold my head up any longer, letting my chin drop to avoid my mother’s gaze.
“Elin, what is it? You’ve never been the shiny happy one, but this is worse, even for you. Are you keeping up on your therapy?”
“Yes,” I said, because it wasn’t technically lying if we just kept rescheduling the same Skype call for weeks on end. I was sort of trying.
“I work you hard, jag?”
I nodded.
“Right, and look what you did. I just kept you on track to do all this. And you’re so close to that record, it makes me crazy. I have dragged you through all of your doubts, and wasn’t I right every time?”
“Yes,” I sighed. I should have known my mother wouldn’t deviate from the programme at this late stage.
“But nothing—nothing, äskling—is more important than you. If your heart has gone, we’ll think of something else.”
That did it. I burst into tears. Mamma pulled me close with one arm and let me sob on her shoulder. I felt like a pressure cooker who’d just blown the top clean off. She muttered something in Swedish that I didn’t need to untangle, it sounded comforting all by itself.
“To be as talented as you are, Elin, it would have been a sin to keep it from the world. Do not think I haven’t noticed what it’s cost you too. I know how the attention and the expectations weigh on you, and I’ve tried to make myself a barrier. Are you really thinking about walking away so soon?”
I wiped the last of my tears and took a deep, shaky breath. Sitting forward again, I wiped my hands on my shorts. I studied the laces on my brand-new tennis shoes, available in stores
