Jennifer Lohmann - Winning Ruby Heart

“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.