“We’ll talk about your season Monday night,” Aaron’s mother said, as if they hadn’t just been interrupted by the myth of the place they were all from and Aaron always felt guilty to leave.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND arrived, and with it the rush of tourists that would swarm over the island all summer. That first day especially Ari was quiet, almost sullen; she never liked when outsiders came to the islands, and the beginning of the season was always hardest on her. So she took the kitchen shift, and Aaron took the front of house duties. The day wore on in endless hours, throbbing feet, and his first sunburn of the season.
Yet as tiring as the work was, he couldn’t stop thinking about the Twin Cities and training. All he wanted was to be back on the ice. At the same time, he dreaded having to leave. What was summer, if not spent on the islands? He wondered what Brendan had told Katie of their conversation, and what Katie’s reaction had been.
Late that night, once they’d returned to Whisker Island, he took a walk down to the edge of the lake and called Katie. Maybe that was too much, but he needed to talk to someone about this. She had always understood him, when it came to skating, in a way that no one else did.
Only after the phone started ringing did he realize that it was a weeknight, late for civilians, and later still for Katie, who kept skaters’ hours during the season and farmers’ hours otherwise.
She did, however, pick up the phone after only a few rings. “Hi Aaron, what’s up?”
Her tone wasn’t exactly brusque, but it did make Aaron ask, “Is this a good time?”
“Depends why you’re calling. Please tell me you haven’t also had a season-ending injury out there on your island.”
Your island would have made Aaron bristle from anyone else, but Katie had been a farm girl before she became a skater, and still was with twenty head of dairy cows ten miles outside Saint Paul. Why anyone would want two professions so hard on the heart, body, and wallet, Aaron didn’t know. But he didn’t need to. They were cut from some of the same stuff.
“Ah, no,” he stammered. “But it’s kind of about that.”
“Brendan told me you texted him. Have you been able to talk things through with your parents yet?”
“Not yet,” Aaron admitted. “With the holiday weekend, everything’s busy. They want to wait ’til Monday.”
“That’s certainly fair. So why are you calling me?”
Aaron forced himself not to shrink at the question; he wanted Katie’s approval, but was getting a challenge instead. “Because I don’t know what’s possible and I can’t stop thinking about it. And I can’t wait ’til Monday night to make any kind of decision. I need to know what my options are, as far as you’re concerned, so I can make plans. For every eventuality.”
Katie seemed to consider that. “You already know Brendan and I will be here for whatever you need from us. Same as we are for all our skaters.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We’re not your limiting factor. And you don’t know what your parents are going to say yet. In some ways, the only limiting factor is you. Now what do you want?”
Aaron took a breath. What he wanted—a shot at the Olympics—was no more and no less than what any athlete at his level dreamed of. Expressing that, especially to one of his coaches, shouldn’t have been difficult. But Aaron had always kept part of himself carefully tucked away from the rest of his life—the part that reveled in the lake’s winter storms and calm summer dawns, the part that was happiest here by the water and wondered if maybe, just maybe, there was truth to the old stories about the seals. It was that part now that was making it hard for him to articulate the things he so badly wanted.
“If I leave early, I might make the team. Might. If I manage to, I won’t medal.”
“The team isn’t the only thing at stake in the season,” Katie said kindly, but Aaron would not be deterred.
“Not in an Olympic year.”
Katie hummed down the phone line. “You coming back early may not be the thing that makes or breaks your shot at that or anything else.”
“I know that,” Aaron said. “But don’t I have to at least try?”
“But you’re uncertain,” Katie led.
“Of course I’m uncertain,” Aaron said. He was also exasperated, with himself as much as anything. “If I leave now, I leave my parents without my help for the entire summer. It’s about money, but not just that. I spend maybe four months here a year. I’ve only been here a month so far. It’s not fair to them. And it’s not enough time for me.”
“I see.” Katie’s voice was calm, nearly cold. Apparently, she was going to force him to figure this out on his own.
“You grew up on your family’s farm. You know what it’s like.” Aaron took another deep breath to steady himself for the plunge, the way he always did before a performance began. There was one thing he had to know. “If you hadn’t won a medal, and you’d gone into the Olympics knowing you wouldn’t win a medal, would it still be worth everything you had to do in order to get there?”
There was a corresponding breath on the other side of the line. Aaron smiled; skaters were all the same in some ways.
“Everything has always felt like life and death for me,” Katie said. “And there was a lot going on for me that year.”
Brendan, Aaron interpreted.
“I might have given you a different answer in the middle of it,” she said, “but I never would have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t made it.” She paused for a long moment. “Honestly, sometimes the fact
