Winning Ruby Heart

She walked to the kitchen and got herself a banana and a glass of chocolate milk. When she turned to head down to the weight room for some stretching, she found her mother floating in the doorway, the light linens she wore given a weightless quality with the slight breeze of the fan. Her mom looked thin, which wasn’t unusual, but the black circles were back under her eyes and her cheeks had a sunken quality Ruby didn’t remember having been there this morning.

“You promised.” Her mom’s fingers fluttered together with the same airy quality of her clothes, giving the impression that her mom had so little substance the air from a fan could blow her away.

Her mom’s voice was also several octaves above normal, a sign her mother was more wounded than hurt, so Ruby only asked, “What did I promise?” before taking a gulp of her milk. In another lifetime, she would have rushed to her mother to apologize and beg forgiveness, even before knowing her crime. Also in another lifetime, she would fear finishing a race without knowing her mother would be at the finish line.

In this lifetime, her mom didn’t even know there was a finish line.

“Running.” Her mother’s voice cracked between the two n’s. “You’ve been running.”

“Mom, I’ve been volunteering at the shelter for three years. Why are you complaining about it now?” Ruby’s running used to be a source of pride for her mother. At track meets, in church, and at the grocery store, her mother had always been the first person to exclaim over her daughter’s athleticism and how her daughter was going to be an Olympic champion. Ruby had won her first big race by running right into her mother’s open arms.

Now every time Ruby returned from her shift at the shelter, her mother eyed the running shoes left by the door with the same disgust she gave an errant cuticle. One of the many hard things Ruby had learned five years ago was that her mother’s love was conditional on Ruby’s success.

Ruby didn’t even know what success looked like anymore. Three measly minutes. If she’d run each kilometer only four seconds faster she’d have been looking at her goal from over her shoulder rather than staring at its butt.

“Where were you last weekend?”

“I was visiting Haley.” Her cousin had been pushing Ruby to move on with her life for years and had been more than willing to provide an alibi.

“Shopping for wedding dresses, you said.” Her mother’s voice lost its tremble, becoming sharp and pointed. “I called Marguerite and she didn’t see either of you.”

Ruby nearly choked on her banana. Both Haley and Ruby had been certain her mother wouldn’t do more than call Haley to confirm. Since Ruby had started to express interest in a life outside of this house, her mother had become more concerned with her whereabouts, but she’d never gone this far. Chewing and swallowing her food gave Ruby time to come up with an answer. “We weren’t looking for her real wedding dress. We went to the big bridal outlet to get a sense for what Haley might like.”

“I don’t see how that took all weekend.” The quiver was back.

Something specific had sparked her mother’s paranoia, but Ruby would play along with this game as far as she could. She took another bite of her banana and waited.

“Mike Danforth called.” Ah. Well, if anyone was going to call from the agency she’d destroyed, Mike was the best option. “Micah Blackwell—” the name hissed out of her mother’s mouth as if it were a name that should never be spoken “—wants an interview with you. Why?” The fear on her mother’s face didn’t surprise Ruby—the year after the scandal had been scary for everyone—but the concern did.

“Who can say?” She shrugged. “March Madness is over. Maybe NSN needs to fill airtime.”

“You know what your, your...”

Mistake? Scandal? Embarrassment? Failure? Sin? Crime?

“...incident cost the family. You wouldn’t want to put us through that again.”

“I remember. And I don’t.” Her father knew—to the penny—how much the legal bills would have been, if my firm hadn’t taken care of it for you. The pill bottles left scattered around the house were a reminder of the emotional cost to her mother. Ruby’s sister, Roxanne, was still miffed that her research had been overshadowed by questions from even the crustiest academic about her infamous sister. And Josh was kind enough to regularly mention how much experience his sister’s problems had given him as a young associate. Josh also said those words while giving Ruby a hug, so she knew her brother’s sarcasm wasn’t mean-spirited.

Ruby rinsed out her glass and put it in the dishwasher, then threw out her banana peel. “Mom, I really need to stretch. Did you want anything else?”

“Don’t forget how important it is to all of us that you stay out of the spotlight.”

What about me and my life? Ruby knew saying those words would prompt her mother to talk about the sacrifices the family had made for Ruby’s sport, the energy and money they’d thrown away and how her brother and sister had had to fend for themselves. Ruby knew the resources her family had put into her running, but in hindsight she wondered if it had all been for her.

Down in the weight room, Ruby laid out her mat and began her regular series of stretches. The room had been built for her when she was in high school and college coaches had started showing up at her meets. And after college she’d gotten new weight benches and a private coach. The room was the temple to her success and the dumbbell racks her altar.

She’d stayed away from her weight room for an entire year after the Olympics. It had taken another year after that for her to feel comfortable being surrounded by herself in all the mirrors. Now, checking the alignment of her spine as she reached forward and grabbed her toes, Ruby wondered if the room was more a cloister than a temple, designed to keep her in and obedient. She’d only started coming into this room regularly when her father had reminded her how much it had cost the family. “Your brother always wanted a game room,” her dad had said, as if her brother hadn’t already been off at college and done living at home when the weight room had been put in.

Regardless of everything, she loved this room. She loved the smooth wood under her feet and the way the light bounced off the mirrors. She loved how the mats gave gently under the pressure of her feet when she pushed a loaded bar over her head, and the sharp smell of iron against iron when she pushed another weight plate onto the metal bars. She loved how the speakers drowned out her anxieties when she plugged in her iPod. The room was a sanctuary and also one of the reasons she hadn’t moved out of her parents’ house yet.

But why should she feel trapped here? She wasn’t just a runner, she was the runner. The runner who’d made Americans care about middle-distance running again. The runner who’d graced the covers of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and People.

Someone else’s blood in her veins hadn’t been the only reason for her success. Ruby’s best skill when running had always been her ability to escape from the crowd, no matter how tightly others tried to box her in. She’d been the story of her first Olympics because in her first heat, she’d slipped through gaps no one else could see to beat the favorite.

Intrusive Micah, her anxious mother, stupid Mike Danforth, this beloved room—she realized now that they were all trying to box her into the role she’d accepted. Disgraced Olympian. Someone who should hide from her past. Someone who should be ashamed for the rest of her life because there were no second chances and there was no forgiveness.

Ruby could stay in this room, in this house, for the rest of her life. Or she could duck out of the trap and find something new.

Ruby cut her stretch session short, rolled up her yoga mat and headed to her room.

CHAPTER FIVE

“HOW WAS THE ultramarathon?” Micah’s father asked as they left his hotel and headed for the lakeshore. His father still traveled too much on business, though he regularly stopped on his way back home to visit Micah.

Parking his son at the child’s grandmother’s and sending regular checks had been a coward’s way of fathering, but they’d both decided it was better to forgive. After Micah’s accident, when his father had been the only person to look him in the eyes as the doctor told him he would never walk again, Micah had understood that brave men faced their past and letting go of childhood hurts didn’t make him weak.

The other pedestrians gave them a wide berth, like a school of fish parting around a video camera in a nature documentary. The unfamiliar object seen and its foreignness avoided because it couldn’t be ignored.

At the crosswalk, Micah handed over a couple bucks to the StreetWise vendor before answering his father. “It was fine.” He debated elaborating. When they reached the other side of the street and Grant Park, he said, “Ruby Heart was there.”

“With her mother?”

An enveloping hug between mother and daughter had been one of the iconic photographs of Ruby’s stratospheric rise to fame. After Ruby’s cheating had been revealed, Mrs. Heart had vanished and Mr. Heart had appeared as the parent of supreme importance.

“No. She was alone.”

His dad snorted. “Her mother always did look too brittle to survive adversity.”

“Brittle?” The woman had been thin, with a cutting quality to her face that Micah had always associated with wealthy women and crystal champagne glasses, neither of which he would ever identify as brittle.

“Yeah, I got the sense—even in photographs—that if Ruby fell, her mother would break.”

They stopped at another light, the traffic on Columbus speeding past them. Micah looked up at his father, who didn’t appear to be joking. “I always got the sense her parents supported her.” Actually, at the time of her scandal, Micah had found the closeness of her parents in her life—she’d been twenty-four and still living at home for God’s sake—to be a sign of weakness.

His father shrugged before stepping forward to cross the street. “I guess they filled the role of a track team for her once she left college, but all I saw was a mother seeking fame through her daughter. Maybe I’m not being fair to the woman.”

“She isn’t your mother,” Micah replied, directing the conversation away from anything resembling sympathy to Ruby Heart.

“No, but the benefit of my mother is that once you realized she couldn’t be pleased, you could stop trying.”

His father hadn’t reached that point until Micah was nineteen, and it had taken a crippling accident for Micah to get there. From what Micah knew of his own mother, part of the reason she’d run off had been because she hadn’t even wanted to try to live up to his grandmama’s strict standards. Grandmamas love little boys who win football games.

“She’s dead now, so I guess I don’t have to worry about it.”

They crossed the rest of the park in silence. Only when they stood at the crosswalk on Lakeshore Drive, the whoosh of cars and busses nearly drowning out his voice, did his father respond. “I’m sorry, you know.”

“I know.” His father apologized anytime grandmama was brought up in conversation. He had never claimed he didn’t know what he’d left his son to deal with, but he’d also never shied away from any punishment Micah dealt out during his rehabilitation. And the first time his grandmama had said, “Cripples belong at home,” and Micah had been too doped up to do more than grunt, his father had ordered her barred from the hospital.

The light changed and they crossed the wall of revving car engines and exhaust before arriving at the lakeshore.

“Ruby looked good,” Micah said, changing the subject. With her natural plain hair, she’d looked fresh and warm and healthy. A Midwestern milkmaid whose slender figure hid muscles that could bench-press a cow before outrunning all the boys. Weak women were for weak men.

She’d gained some weight in her five years out of the public eye, adding a suggestion of curves to what would otherwise be a stick-straight figure. She looked less of a fantasy and more of a real person one would want to sit across a table from and share a meal with. A crazy dream. She was also a cheater.

“Yeah?” his father said, the question in his voice the only acknowledgment either of them would give to the interest Micah had given Ruby’s career before her doping was revealed.

His father had to slip behind him on the path to make room for some bicyclists. After the bikes passed and he caught up with Micah, he asked, “Are you going to interview her again?”

“She said no, but I’m not giving up.” Not to mention that Micah had determined the anchor spot was his and Ruby was the key. Despite the paucity of current information available online, he didn’t think Ruby was truly forgotten in the public’s mind. After all, the American public loved two stories more than any other: Judas’s downfall and the possibility of his redemption.

His father stopped to look out over the blue of Lake Michigan. “If I were her, I doubt I’d want to be interviewed by a man who couldn’t take no for an answer.”

“She’ll come to me.” Micah let the fact that he’d had Mike call her stay buried under the surface of the rippling water.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY Micah was sitting in his office when the phone rang and he knew, without recognizing the number on the caller ID, what voice he would hear on the other end.

“What part of no didn’t you understand?” The words were tight—angry—and Micah imagined the clench of her jaw as the words punched their way past her teeth. Well, she couldn’t fake doe-eyed innocence anymore. Indignation was probably as close as she could get.

“The part where you call me.”

“Yeah, to tell you to leave my mother alone. To tell you to tell Mike to leave my mother alone. I have no interest in helping NSN pay their satellite bills. Did that once, don’t plan to do it again.”

“Not even to show the world how you’ve reformed?” He threaded the carrot on the rope and dangled it in front of her. “A new person with new hope and new dreams and no needles sticking out of your arm. The TV-viewing public will eat that up.”

“Lance Armstrong might be free. Or a baseball player, any baseball player.”

“But none of them ever graced the cover of People with the headline Meet America’s Darling.”

“You have me mistaken with someone who wants to return to their past. Find another redemption story. I’m not biting.”

The phone clicked and Micah stared into the silence of the receiver. What did she think running a race was if not an attempt to return to her past? When he set the phone back down in the cradle, he knew he had her. He simply needed the right bait.

* * *

“YOU CAN’T PLAY that trick a second time,” Ruby’s cousin Haley said, the exasperation in her voice loud and clear, even over an echoing cell connection. “You know Aunt Julie called my mom, right?”

“There has to be something else you need to do for the wedding that your favorite cousin and best friend is essential for.”

“Aunt. Julie. Called. My. Mom.” Haley huffed. “Like I was a teenager sneaking out to a college party.”

“And the dress shop.”

“What! Really?”

“I should have foreseen that, honestly. Mom has always been thorough.” Only as Ruby realized that neither her brother nor her sister had managed to sneak out of the house as teenagers did she wonder if her mother had been as ignorant of the doping as she’d claimed.

“I can barely stand this sneaking around, and you live it every day, Ruby.”

“I rarely have to sneak.” Like the crazed wife in the attic, unless she threatened to make the papers, her parents simply pretended she wasn’t there.

“You really should move out.”

“I know.” Haley had been telling Ruby to get out on her own for years now, since that first sponsorship offer had come in. Ruby was more tempted now than she had ever been. She could make friends other than her cousin. Maybe even invite a man over, if she could find one who wasn’t constantly trying to one-up her, or one who didn’t lord her past over her.

Micah? No, he failed the second criteria. And he could probably fake liking her enough to interview her, but not beyond the cameras rolling. She wasn’t sure she’d trust him even if he were nice to her.

Who was she kidding? It wasn’t as though she could afford to move out on her own. Her only skill was winning middle-distance races. And all the money she had from sponsorship was frozen while the two lawsuits against her by a shoe company and a sports-drink company moved through courts at their glacial pace. She’d question the credentials of any school that wanted her for a coach, and any private athlete who hired her would be tested for drugs so often their veins would collapse. Her college major and the degree it was printed on would be worth money only if she put it on eBay and accepted bids.

None of which she would say out loud, even to her cousin, who already knew it all. “My parents were there for me when I needed them. And they still want me here.” A close-enough interpretation of the look of panic her mom got whenever Ruby mentioned looking for an apartment.

“Your dad went all lawyer-happy when you needed him. And your mom fell apart. And they want you at the house because they fear the gossip, not because they like your company.”

In this, her cousin was both right and wrong. Both her parents had been available and supportive—or at least available—when Ruby had needed them. But the last time their support had come in the form of a hug was five years ago. All of which only made Ruby more determined to run another race. No matter what her parents thought, running had always been for her.

“Plus,” Haley continued, “before you run another race, how do you know that reporter isn’t looking for you?” Was her cousin trying to convince her to move out or to hide in a bunker?

“According to NSN’s website, he’ll be at a Brewers game that weekend because they’re honoring some ex-player he’s going to interview. In fact—” Ruby’s excitement grew with every word she spoke, both at the thought of another race and beating Haley in this argument “—because the Brewers are in Milwaukee and I’ll be in Indiana, I’ll be farther away from Micah than I have knowingly been in five years.”

Haley let out a big puff of air. “Fine. But I think you’re overplaying your hand. Move out of that house. Get a job. Live a normal life.”

“Just one more race.”

“Said the addict to the heroin needle.”

* * *

AS MICAH REWATCHED some of the film Amir had taken of Ruby, an itch developed between his shoulder blades. There was something off about her stride and a look of pain on her face that couldn’t be the fifty-kilometer run, because she was only five kilometers into the race, which had been her best distance as an Olympian. He looked at her finishing time, which he’d written on a sticky note and stuck on a printout of the photo of her with the American flag high over her head. The itch paced in a circle between his scapulae, nearly wearing a line in his skin.

Ruby had been slow. Even assuming she was trying to get her ultra legs under her, she had still run a slow race. And if she was only running one race—as she claimed—he thought she would have put everything she had into getting the best time possible. Four hours and forty-three minutes was someone’s best time for a fifty-kilometer race, but it sure as hell wasn’t Ruby Heart’s best time.

Micah shifted his shoulders around but couldn’t get the itch out of his back. He drummed his fingers against his desk, then pressed Play on the film again. Ruby had tossed her hat in an attempt to hide from him and Amir, which meant the camera had much better shots of her face, even through the drizzle that had plagued the race. He slowed the film, reassessing what he saw. The look on Ruby’s face wasn’t pain—it was restraint.

Even if she was consciously holding herself back, he knew top athletes as well as he knew his own grandmama, and she couldn’t have been happy with that time. The four hours and forty-three minutes would needle at her brain and pride until she had to see if she could finish better. And even if she was curtailing her normal power for a very good reason, her natural competitiveness would win out. A woman who cared enough about an Olympic gold medal to stick a needle in her arm wasn’t going to let such a poor time stand as the only record of her ultra career.

He stopped the video and opened a browser. She had run one 50K race and he would guess she would run another. Micah navigated to an ultramarathon website and started searching. He stopped when he came to the trail run in Indiana in three weeks. A 50K, with at least a few spots still open. Easy driving distance from Chicago. The arrow of the mouse twitched on the screen as he considered the chances she wouldn’t be there.

If he was wrong, well, he and Amir would have more footage for NSN’s series, so the entire trip wouldn’t be completely wasted. But he wasn’t wrong. He would see Ruby’s tight ass and sleek thighs encased in running shorts as certain as the yuppies at Wrigley Field would spend more time on their cell phones than watching the Cubs play. Micah picked up his phone and called his boss.

* * *

THREE WEEKS LATER, Amir slid into the driver’s seat of the production van with a huff that Micah ignored. His photographer was a baseball fan and had found the last trip out to an ultramarathon—this one in Idaho to film Currito—to be “about as fun as watching a slug climb a rock.”

Despite Micah being a sports guy, Amir’s slug description sounded more interesting than a baseball game to Micah, a secret he would take to his grave. Watching the ultramarathoners push their bodies to the limit of possibility fascinated Micah, and he felt a certain kinship with a sport based on the idea of giving the middle finger to the world’s perception of what was possible for one body to achieve.

What had possessed Ruby to even try an ultramarathon?

They were on I-94 when Amir asked the question that must have been gnawing at his brain since he’d learned about the change of plans. “If this Ruby Heart really is an—how did you say it?—embarrassment to everything sports stands for, why are we skipping out on what should be a great baseball game, not to mention the festivities afterward, to drive to Indiana and watch people run on dirt for eight hours?”

“We don’t have to stay for the whole race. Just until Ruby finishes.”

“Five hours, then.”

This race was hillier than the one in Iowa had been, but Ruby would be trying to run faster. “No more than four and half.” Micah had also looked at the race times for the top runners for this race. Ruby wouldn’t be at that level yet, but she would be gunning for it, even if she didn’t realize it, and those runners did this race in four hours.

“Still, there’s nothing interesting anywhere near this race.” Amir braked to avoid hitting the car in front of them, then moved to the left lane and passed a long line of cars while muttering under his breath about stupid drivers and stupid Indiana. He had made the same complaint in Iowa and Idaho and would probably repeat it again if they watched the ultramarathon in Chicago. “Why lower your standards to follow this fraud?”

“You never complain when I interview baseball players. And you didn’t complain about the Tour de France, either.”

“Sure.” Amir shrugged. “I like baseball and I’m not foolish enough to complain about a trip to France.” Amir had been his photog for almost three years and remembered those interviews as well as Micah did, though through a different lens. “But while the baseball players and the cyclists both wear tight pants, none of them have pigtails.”

Micah didn’t say anything. The pigtails probably spoke to some disturbing fetish hidden deep within, but he thought they were hot.

CHAPTER SIX

RUBY STOOD AMONG the other racers at the starting line, tapping at the dirt with the toe of her running shoe. The weather was perfect. Most of the race would be spent in the trees, so the bright overhead sun would be welcome, rather than a hindrance. The temperature was cool enough that she shouldn’t overheat at kilometer twenty and there was—thankfully—no rain in the forecast. Her main concern was that the loop crossed two streams and she’d not had much practice running with wet feet.