Kirk Lockwood:I’ve seen some shocking upsets in my time, but that was something else.
Ellis Dean:I thought Josie and I were going to leave with the pewter medal at best. All of a sudden, we’re going to the goddamnOlympics?
On the final day of the 2006 U.S. National Championships, the Olympic figure skating team for the Torino Games is announced. Fischer and Chan and Hayworth and Dean are selected to represent the United States in the ice dance competition, while Gaskell and Kovalenko are named as alternates.
Francesca Gaskell:Of course, I was excited to be on the Olympic team.
The skaters all look a bit shellshocked and uncomfortable—except for Frannie, who waves enthusiastically and grins at the spectators.
Francesca Gaskell:But I couldn’t really celebrate, you know? ThereasonI was on the team was too awful.
Jane Currer:Sheila did enter a petition for Isabella and Heath to be named to the team. However, because of Mr. Rocha’s lack of international competition experience—not to mention the fact that he’d abandoned his partner in the midst of the National Championships final—the committee was unmoved.
As the Lins climb into a car outside the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis, reporters jostle around them, shouting questions. The vehicle’s windows are tinted, but one photographer still manages to get a close-up of Bella’s tear-swollen face through the darkened glass before they drive away.
Garrett Lin:All that anticipation, all that work. And then it was just…over.
Chapter 41
We waited all night for the hospital to release me. Heath climbed into the narrow bed, and it felt like we were sixteen again, holding each other in my childhood room.
The doctors told me not to go to sleep, but I couldn’t have anyway. Everything hurt too much. I had a concussion—from the first fall or the second, they couldn’t be sure. The gash on my palm took ten stitches to close, the wound on my leg even more. I would have scars.
Finally, sometime around daybreak, they told me I could go.
I had to leave in a wheelchair. As Heath pushed me through the lobby, there was a flash like lightning. Then another. Then a whole storm.
Reporters, gathered outside the hospital entrance. Pressed up against the glass like tourists at the zoo. It took me a second to realize they were there for us.
Heath swore under his breath and steered back the way we’d come. “There has to be another exit we can use,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He left me sitting by the elevator bank, staring at my distorted reflection in the dented stainless-steel doors. My hair was a wreck, a nest of curls standing out on one side of my skull, the other side flattened from being pillowed against Heath’s chest for hours. My eyeshadow and mascara had blurred into a gray murk around my eyes. My posture was slumped and careless, shoulders bowed under my wrinkled warm-up jacket.
I looked like a mess. But I also looked like myself, for the first timein a long time—raw and wild instead of pretty and refined. I looked like the fearless girl who used to ramble all over the lakefront with Heath, skinned knees and windblown hair and dirt under my nails.
I’d tried so hard to become the perfect skater, the perfect partner for Garrett. The next Sheila Lin. And where were the Lins now? As far as I knew, they hadn’t come to the hospital to check on me. Hadn’t even sent flowers. They weren’t there for me when I truly needed them. They weren’t my family.
Heath was.
He came hurrying back, like he’d promised. “They’re going to let us leave through the ambulance bay in the back,” he told me. “A taxi can meet us over there.”
“I want to go home,” I said.
“Of course.” He pivoted the wheelchair toward our escape route. “When we stop off at the hotel to get our luggage, I’ll call the airline, and—”
“No.” I twisted to look up at him. “Home.”
Chapter 42
A soft haze of rain fell as Heath drove us out of St. Louis, turning to shards of sleet the farther north we traveled.
I still don’t know how he got the car—a gray Kia with a dented fender and crumbs left on the seat cushions by the last occupants. We were old enough to represent our country at the Olympic Games, but too young to legally rent a vehicle.
We didn’t play music. We barely spoke. But we held hands over the gearshift, like we’d done on that trip to Cleveland when we were teenagers. Heath kept squeezing my fingers to make sure I didn’t drift off in the passenger seat.
Only during the final hour of our approach did it occur to my concussion-addled brain that returning to my childhood home meant dealing with my brother. The house was as much mine as his, though. I had every right to be there.
When we pulled up, the place looked unoccupied: windows dark, gutters choked with dead leaves. Lee’s truck wasn’t parked in its usual spot, and ours were the first tire tracks through the dusting of snow on the driveway.
