Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“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 binoculars. “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 home-stretch, 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.

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-grand-mother, 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.