Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 6

MISCHA

California smelled different than Wisconsin. I hadn't been expecting that; the rich, earthy aroma of sea and desert flowers greeting me every morning when I left the corporate hotel where Amanda and I were staying to travel to the gym. Leaving Wisconsin had made me hyper-aware of my own ignorance of a lot of things, like the geographic location of Long Beach.  Ever since the Wisconsin Pan Am Gymnastics Finals two months ago, I'd been imagining how sweet it would be to walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard and go star-spotting at Whole Foods in Santa Monica. It turns out Long Beach is pretty far away from Los Angeles and a lot less glamorous. It also turns out that there's not really any reliable form of public transportation connecting the two cities. Since Amanda had received a car for her sixteenth birthday that we'd been sharing since I'd gotten my own license, for the first time we were both feeling like kids at school who had to walk home up the hill. Totally helpless. Not having wheels sucked.

Despite the experience being nothing like how I imagined it, I was pretty psyched to be in Long Beach. The palm trees and balmy weather were a relief from the bleak harshness of Wisconsin winter. Patches of snow still holding fast in their positions on the ground and heavy gray skies had made the trip home for my father's funeral even more devastating, especially because it was April already and the rest of the country was enjoying an early spring. Amanda and I had only been in California getting accustomed to our rigorous new practice schedule for two weeks when Mom called us with the bad news. Hearing Mom say that Dad had experienced a heart attack at the dealership in Ortonville was the hardest thing I'd ever endured, partially because I wasn't surprised. At the very center of my beating heart I'd known for weeks that the call was coming and I'd been dreading it; believing that if I just didn't think about it, perhaps it wouldn't happen.

I lay in my bed watching the dark sky through my window, trying to enjoy the fifteen minutes I had to myself before my alarm went off at 4:45. Although I'd brought a lot of stuff with me from home to cheer the place up a little, my room still felt kind of like a hospital room. On the mirror along the wall over my small desk, I'd stuck photos of me and Matt from Homecoming, pictures of me with my friends Olivia and Candace at Six Flags' Great America, and my family's Christmas photo card from last year. A pile of my stuffed animals from home topped my bed and I'm sure they annoyed the maids who came in to clean up every morning after Amanda and I left for practice. The cinnamon stick-scented plug-in air freshener did little to mask the antiseptic stench. More than once I'd considered pinning a purple sheet up over one of the nasty beige walls to make it look more like my purple bedroom at home, but that would have required me to find someone willing to drive me to Target to buy a purple sheet and thumbtacks, which was, like, basically never gonna happen.

I yawned deeply, the ache in my muscles that tormented me persistently reminding me of its presence. Amanda and I had always worked our bodies hard, but these last three weeks since we'd started training with Coach Armoudian, I felt like I'd aged fifty years. When I fell into bed at night, the full impact of the abuse I'd put my muscles through bloomed like a giant bruise covering every part of me. In the mornings, even standing up for the first time hurt so much I could barely stand it. So instead of getting up, I lingered just a little longer, allowing my mind to venture into territory I didn't explore once the sun was up.

The memory of hugging my mom tightly at the airport yesterday came back to me so strongly that my throat swelled with the urge to cry. It didn't feel good to have left her alone in Wisconsin. When we'd gotten back from the cemetery two days ago after Dad's funeral, I had ignored all of the guests who'd followed us to the house for a luncheon served by the church board of St. Monica's... even my own boyfriend, Matt, who'd come with his parents. Instead of thanking everyone for paying their respects to my dad and serving sparkling apple cider like a good little hostess, I'd marched up to my room. I'd changed out of my black dress and into pajamas and had crawled into bed and pulled my purple comforter over my head. Not an hour had passed before Amanda crept up the stairs and crawled into bed next to me.  "I don't think we should leave Mom," she had said, and I knew she was right. Our parents, unlike almost all of my friends' parents, were still happily married. My mom was too young and pretty to refer to herself as a widow. She'd joked when she and Dad had dropped us off at the airport to leave for California two weeks earlier that she wasn't ready for Empty Nest Syndrome, and now she didn't even have Dad to keep her company around the house.