Cross the Line Read online

  The fact that Jannie had been invited at the age of fifteen years and eight months was a shock to us. Initially, she hadn’t been among the athletes offered spots at the meet. But Ted McDonald, a well-regarded track coach who works with my daughter, showed videos of her to the right people, and she got in on discretion.

  We were on the shady side of the stands an hour before she was set to run. Down on the field, the kids were warming up. Except not many of them looked like kids.

  “What are they feeding them?” Bree asked.

  “Human growth hormone cereal with steroid milk,” Nana Mama said, and she cackled.

  “I hope not, for their sake,” Bree said. “Jannie said everyone had to submit urine and blood samples.”

  “Those can be doctored,” Nana Mama said.

  We knew that all too well. Earlier in the summer, a vindictive and jealous girl in North Carolina had tried to frame Jannie for drug use. Since then, we’d always demanded samples from any drug test she had to take.

  A group of athletes glided by at an easy ten miles an hour. I watched them, trying to keep memories of the prior evening at bay. This was a holiday, and I’d read that it was important to take them and enjoy them or you risked burnout.

  “Can I have a Coke?” Ali asked, pulling off his headphones, which were attached to the iPad we’d bought used on eBay.

  “Water would be better,” Nana Mama said.

  “I thought this was a holiday,” Ali grumbled. “Holidays are supposed to be fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”

  My grandmother twisted on the bleacher and fixed him with her evil-eye stare. “Are you sassing your great-grandmother?”

  “No, Nana Mama,” Ali said.

  “I won’t take sass,” she said. “You’ve heard about that, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Bree and I watched in amusement at the mastery with which Nana Mama handled Ali.

  “What are you listening to?” Nana Mama asked, her voice softening.

  Ali brightened. “A podcast about dolphins and how they have echolocation just like bats, only in the water.”

  “What’s the single most surprising thing you’ve heard so far?”

  Without hesitation, he said, “Dolphins have the best hearing in the world.”

  “Is that true?” Bree asked.

  “Humans can hear up to, like, twenty kilo-hearses. Dogs to like forty-five kilo-hearses.”

  “Hertz,” Nana Mama said. “Forty-five kilohertz.”

  “Hertz,” Ali said. “Big cats, like lions, hear up to sixty-five, I think. But a dolphin can hear sounds up to a hundred and twenty kilohertz. And they have, like, an electrical field around them. They say you can feel it if you swim with them. I want to do that, Dad, swim with dolphins.”

  “I thought you had a few questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

  “That too,” Ali said. “Can I have a Coke, Dad?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What?” Nana Mama said.

  I smiled. “The holiday argument gets me every time.”

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found Damon.

  “Hey!” I cried, and I stood to hug him. “Look who snuck up!”

  “Hi, Dad,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and hugging me back.

  There was a round of hugs and kisses. We heard about orientation, and Ali got a Coke and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and life was good and grounded and solid. The pressure of Bree’s new job drained away too. I could see that in the way she laughed at one of Damon’s tales.

  She felt at ease. I did too. A rare thing in those days.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  Chapter

  52

  Jannie was calling to me from the fence, so I got up and started down toward her.

  “Jannie, you got this,” Damon said, following me. “My friends on my hall are coming to see you smoke them all.”

  Jannie laughed, and punched the air before hugging Damon. She has never had stage fright, at least not when it comes to running. In the past year, she’d faced women running for NCAA Division 1 schools, and she’d run well enough to be here.

  “You good?” I asked.

  “Always,” she said, relaxed. “Coach McDonald’s got good meet and race strategies worked out.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You’ll see. Love you both.”

  “Love you too,” I said. “Nana Mama said to run like God gave you a gift and you are grateful for every stride of it.”

  She smiled but with some confusion. “Tell Nana Mama I’ll try, Dad. Coach Mac’s up behind you, by the way.”

  She trotted off. We climbed back up into the stands.

  Clad in his trademark gray warm-ups and a blue hoodie and wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, Ted McDonald was moving nervously from one running-shoed foot to the other as he spoke to Bree and Nana Mama. In his fifties, with a shock of reddish-gray hair that defied gravity, Coach McDonald had a straightforward style that I appreciated.

  “Dr. Cross,” McDonald said, shaking my hand.

  “Dr. McDonald,” I said. He had a doctorate in exercise physiology.

  “Ready to see a little history made today?” McDonald asked.

  Ali had been listening to his podcast, but he tugged out his earbuds and asked, “What history?”

  Jannie’s coach said, “Anything can happen under race conditions, but I’ve been tracking her workout times. They’re impressive. She could do something here that would really make people stand up and take notice.”

  “Like which people?” Nana Mama said.

  McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

  “Does she know this?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

  “What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

  “I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

  Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

  She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

  “Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”

  “But she’s a sophomore,” I said.

  “I know,” McDonald said. “But later on, if she runs the way she did the other day in training, you could have every coach over there camped out in your front yard.”

  I didn’t ask him for more. No particulars. The entire conversation had me nervous in a sour-gut sort of way, and proud, and nervous all over again.

  We used the two-hour break to have lunch with Damon and two of his new friends, his roommate, William, and fellow basketball player Justin Hahn, from Boston. Both were good guys, both were very funny, and both were capable of eating a staggering amount of food. Damon too. They ate so much, we almost missed the finals.

  Jannie and seven other girls were heading into the blocks when we hurried to our seats. She drew lane three of eight. The girls took their marks. The gun went off.

  Jannie came up in short choppy strides, tripped, stumbled, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.

  “No!” we all groaned before she sprang up and started running again.

  “Oh, that sucks,” Damon said.

  “There goes the scholarship,” his roommate said, which annoyed me but not enough to make me lower my binoculars.

  Ali said, “What happened?”

  “She got off balance,” said Coach McDonald, who was also watching through binocu
lars. “Kicked her heel and…she’s maybe twenty yards in back of Bethany Kellogg, the LA girl in lane one. Odds-on favorite.”

  The runners in the outer lanes were almost halfway down the back straight when Jannie finally came out of the curve in dead last. But she didn’t look upset. She was up to speed now, running fluidly, efficiently.

  “That’s not going to do it, missy,” McDonald said, and it was almost like Jannie could hear him because her stride began to lengthen and her footfalls turned from springy to explosive. She didn’t run so much as bound down the track, looking long-legged, loose-jointed, and strong as hell.

  Through the binoculars, I was able to get a good look at her face; she was straining but not breaking with the effort.

  “She just picked off the girl from Kentucky in lane four,” McDonald said as the runners entered the far turn. “She’s not going to be last. C’mon, young lady, show us what you’ve got now.”

  The stagger was still on, but the gaps between the athletes were narrowing fast as they drove on through the turn. Jannie was moving up with every stride. Coming onto the homestretch, she passed a Florida girl in lane two.

  Damon’s roommate yelled, “She’s freaking flying!”

  We were all on our feet now, watching Jannie dig deep into her reservoir of grit and determination. Thirty yards down the stretch, she surged past the Texas girl in lane six. She went by an Oregon racer in lane eight at the halfway mark.

  “She’s in fourth!” Ali shouted.

  The top three girls were neck and neck, with Bethany Kellogg barely leading and ten feet between Jannie and the girl from Alabama in third.

  With thirty yards to go, she closed that to six feet. With fifteen yards left, she’d pinched it to three.

  Eight inches separated the two girls when they crossed the finish line.

  Coach McDonald lowered his binoculars, shaking his head in wonder. “She just ran out of track, that’s all that happened there.”

  My binoculars were still glued on Jannie, who was limping away from the finish line in pain. A television cameraman was moving toward her across the track when she bent over and started to sob.

  Chapter

  53

  Four hours later we had the surreal experience of seeing Jannie’s race on ESPN. We watched the clip on a flat-screen at Ned Mahoney’s beach house on the Delaware shore.

  The edited video showed the start of the race, Jannie’s fall, and Jannie coming into the backstretch in dead last, then the tape jump-cut to the far turn and her go-for-broke sprint down the stretch.

  A second camera caught her limping away from the finish line and doubling over, and then the screen cut to the anchor desk at ESPN’s SportsCenter.

  Carter Hayes, the Saturday coanchor, looked at his partner, Sheila Martel, and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she broke her foot crossing the finish line!”

  Martel stabbed her finger at her coanchor and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she missed third by eight one-hundredths of a second, and first by four-tenths of a second.”

  Hayes jabbed his own finger Martel’s way and said, “That girl ran so hard that if you subtract the conservative two seconds she lost in the fall, she would have won by one point six seconds and she would have been in the record books with the seventh-fastest time for the four-hundred among high school women. An amazing performance. Highlight of the day, no question.”

  Sheila Martel pointed at the camera and said, “Heal up, young Jannie Cross. We have a feeling we’ll be hearing from you again.”

  The screen cut away to the next story. We all cheered and clapped.

  “Seeing her run in person, I swear my heart almost stopped,” Nana Mama said. “But when they called out Jannie just then, it almost stopped again.”

  “Dad?” Ali said. “Is Jannie famous?”

  “Tonight, she is,” I said.

  ESPN? Highlight of the day? Jannie?

  “How the hell did ESPN know about the race?” Mahoney asked.

  Bree said, “Some freelance cameramen who sell to ESPN were there. They caught the whole thing.”

  My phone rang. It was Jannie, calling from somewhere with a lot of background noise.

  “Did you see it?” she shouted.

  “Of course we saw it. Where are you?”

  “At a party with Damon and his friends and some people I met at the meet. Everyone cheered for me, Dad.”

  “Everyone cheered here too,” I said, tearing up. “You deserved it.”

  “Yeah, but now Damon’s introducing me to girls he’s trying to pick up.”

  “Too much information,” I said. “We’ll be back for you tomorrow afternoon. Keep that foot elevated. No weight.”

  “I heard the doctor,” she said. “I’m glad you were there.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Now go have fun.”

  Bree and Ali went out to the beach beyond the dunes. Nana Mama and I shucked corn on the back deck of Mahoney’s cottage. He’d inherited the place from his aunt, a devout Catholic who’d attended mass daily.

  “I’m convinced it’s why it survived Hurricane Sandy,” Mahoney said as he loaded charcoal into a Weber kettle grill. “Bunch of places just to the north of here were leveled, pretty much splintered.”

  “So it’s got good karma,” I said.

  “If I agreed with you on that, my aunt would probably throw a lightning bolt down at me,” he said. “But yes. This place calms me.”

  “How couldn’t it?” my grandmother said. “Cool ocean breeze. The sound of the waves. It’s very tranquil.”

  “Glad you could come, Nana Mama,” Mahoney said. “When was the last time you were at the beach?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said, finishing the last ear of corn. “That happens a lot lately. I’ll start the water on the stove.”

  I knew better than to argue as she got up. She was heading for the kitchen, her favorite place in any house.

  “How bad is Jannie’s break?” Mahoney asked, lighting the charcoal.

  “Hairline fracture of one of the metatarsal bones,” I said. “Crutches for two weeks, and a hard walking boot for another three. She can run in two months.”

  “Too bad she couldn’t come out.”

  “Go to the beach with her stepmom, dad, great-grandmother, and little brother, or hang out with her new friends in the track world and her big brother at college for a night…”

  “Enough said.”

  We saw Bree and Ali walking back along the path from the dunes. He had a towel around his shoulders and a grin that made me glad to be alive.

  “He’s like a dolphin himself,” Bree said, coming up onto the deck. “You should have seen him in the waves out there.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”

  Ali started toward the sliding doors, but Mahoney caught him. “Around the corner, there’s an outdoor shower. Get the sand off and dry off before you go in or my lady friend will not be happy.”

  “I’ve never been in an outdoor shower,” Ali said.

  “It’s life-changing,” Mahoney said and he returned to his grill.

  “I’m next,” Bree called to Ali as he rounded the corner.

  I went to the cooler and fished us out bottles of cold Old Dominion beer, a Delaware favorite, and opened them.

  “I needed this,” Bree said, taking her beer. “A break from everything.”

  “I think we all needed this,” Mahoney said.

  “We going to meet the mysterious lady friend?” Bree asked.

  “Right here!” said a pretty brunette in white pedal pushers, sandals, and a gauzy blue top as she came around the corner with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.

  She set down the plate, beamed at us, and said, “I’m Camille.”

  “Not lady-friend Camille?” I said.

  Camille laughed. “Indeed. Lady-friend Camille.”

  “You’re spicing up the party,” Mahoney said.

  “I try,” she said, and she shook our hands.
“Ned’s told me so much about you both, I feel like I already know you.”

  Camille was a real estate agent in the area, a widow, and as bubbly as they come. She and Ned had met at a local seafood restaurant after they’d both noticed each other eating alone on two consecutive Saturday nights. On the third Saturday, Mahoney went over and showed her his badge.

  “He said he was conducting an FBI investigation and needed to ask me a few questions,” Camille said. “First question after my name was why I always eat alone. It was my question for him too.”

  They were good together and we laughed and ate and probably drank a little too much. The moon rose. Nana Mama turned in. Ali fell asleep on the couch. Mahoney and Camille took a walk north on the beach, and Bree and I walked south and admired the moon tracking on the ocean and the waves.

  “It’s good to be with you,” I said, wrapping a blanket around both of us.

  “Hard to imagine the job right now,” Bree said.

  “Means you’re tuning out, giving your brain a needed rest.”

  “Parks came through surgery fine,” she said. “Lincoln too.”

  “Good,” I said, and I whispered a suggestion.

  “What?” She laughed softly. “Here?”

  “Back in the dunes somewhere. We’ve got a blanket. Be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

  She kissed me and said, “Sounds like the perfect end to a perfect day.”

  Chapter

  54

  Five days later, on the Thursday after Labor Day, Sampson and I climbed out of an unmarked car in the parking lot of Bayhealth Kent General Hospital in Dover, Delaware.

  “Let’s hope she’s alert enough to help,” I said.

  “We knew we were taking a chance,” Sampson said. “If she’s not, we’ll just come back.”

  The day before, we’d received two reports that had brought us to the Bayhealth hospital. The first report, filed the week before by a Maryland state trooper, described a Ford Taurus found flipped in Maryland just south of Millersville.