Run
You loved running. You loved the wind through your high, blonde ponytail and the way it made your eyes water, even though you weren’t sad. You loved when dad would chase after you, and you loved when you would chase after Jimmy from across the street even more. No one was faster than you, it seemed. Dad would always end up stopping, gasping for air, not even close to catching you as mom stood behind the kitchen window, looking out with an indiscernible expression. Two years later, when they were bringing your dad out of surgery and he looked gray and old and not there, you would recall her expression, knowing now that it might have been worry, or concern, or more likely contempt at his unwillingness to listen. Jimmy would succumb to your attacks, kicking and screaming as you planted wet kisses on any piece of him you could amid his flailing. His elbow, his foot, his ear. Ten years later, the tables would turn and Jimmy would have you in his basement after senior prom, a position where it wouldn’t matter that no one was faster than you. Even though you knew better, a small piece of you would wonder if he was just trying to even the playing field, now that you had grown up in a society where he was given an upper hand that he could easily manipulate, simply due to the appendage between his legs that he was currently trying to force between yours.
Outside of the ability that you discovered early on to outrun the men in your life, the first confirmation of your talents would come during field day in second grade. Being the loud, spunky little kid that you would soon learn not to be, you confidently volunteered yourself for the last, most crucial leg in the 100 meter relay. Although you were appropriately small, you had a clumsy reputation. All the boys in your class would laugh at your stubborn insistence that you were sure you were faster than any of them, except for Jimmy, who would giggle along in a decidedly less assured manner. Your teacher, Ms. Flynn, would calmly subdue the class before writing your name in that coveted spot on the whiteboard, telling you in front of everybody that she admired your “go-getter attitude.” Later, you would learn that Ms. Flynn gave you the leg because she felt sorry for the little girl with the sick dad. At least, that’s what Steve, Jimmy’s friend who you didn’t like but whose mom was friends with your mom, said. Mom would comfort you by saying that Ms. Flynn gave you the leg not out of pity, but to “preserve your courage.” Your young mind wouldn’t exactly know what to make of that. You were just happy that Steve was wrong and that you would be able to run fast, with windy hair and blurry eyes, in front of all your classmates.
You would think of those words four years later, remembering who said them but not the context, when it was just you and your recovering dad. Grandpa would repeat the tired excuse that, “your mother hadn’t been happy for a long time,” over the phone each time you called hoping for a better explanation, or maybe a confession that your mother was just a coward. Your adolescent self would detest the woman for presuming to “preserve your courage” when she hadn’t an ounce to preserve within herself. More deeply, you would detest her for abandoning you during your formative years, leaving you with the shell of a parent that your father would become. When you were sixteen, after your father inevitably succumbed to his third battle with cancer, your mother would come back into your life and you would slowly come to understand that her leaving had nothing to do with you. That your courage was not at all threatened by her apparent inability to hold onto hers any longer. That leaving your father was the hardest thing she ever had to do, and took a tremendous amount of a different kind of courage. A kind of courage to do what’s best for oneself, in the face of immense responsibility to others. She would come back for you, after all. It would be hard to adjust from a life with one not-there parent to a life with another, and you would never be sure if the forgiving came before the understanding, or vice versa. You would know that they were both there though when mom would come to your first college track meet five states away, even though it was only against a school that wasn’t even in your division, and you would see her standing there smiling with her new boyfriend who made her smile in a way you had never seen before, and seeing that made you happy, not jealous or angry or confused.
When it was just you and dad, at first you would still run. In fact, running would take on a new purpose in your life. It would help you cope with your hurt at your mother’s absence, your fear about the unpromising future of dad’s health, and your loneliness in the wake of it all. You loved the wind through your high, blonde ponytail and the way it made your eyes water, especially when you were sad. It would sting your already wet eyes, blurring with your frustrated tears until your emotions would dissipate and all you felt was your body. A couple years into your adjusted life with just dad, you would stop running. The doctor would say you must have been training too hard, and that you had been running on a stress fracture in your foot for weeks before your teacher made you go to the nurse’s because she saw you wincing as you walked down the hall. You hadn’t noticed the pain really, or that you were wincing. It wouldn’t surprise you, though. Whenever you weren’t at school, you would be running. You couldn’t bear to be at home with dad, gray and old and not there, even on the days when he thought to ask you “how’s school,” or “do you see Jimmy around ever? Or Mary from around the corner?” The doctor would tell you that you couldn’t run for sixteen weeks, at least. You wouldn’t end up running again for three years.
The first thing you would do after dad’s funeral was run. Throughout the ceremony, as people would tell stories about dad that made him sound like a different man than you knew him to be, maybe the man he was when he would chase you without catching you before the second tryst with cancer that killed his soul, all you would be able to see was the wooded path at the outskirts of your neighborhood, zooming past as your vision blurred and your ears rang. The ending of your life with just dad would be the beginning of your life with just mom, and your life as Jenna the survivor. Jenna who survived the fight that took her dad. Jenna who survived her mother’s abandonment. Jenna who survived her body’s physical rejection of her one coping mechanism. Jenna who would survive high school in spite of all her tribulations, as the fastest, newest member of the varsity track team, as the scholarship recipient to a highly regarded program on the east coast, and as Jimmy Peter’s date to senior prom. Jenna the rape survivor. During the funeral, something would click. You would realize that you were no longer trapped. Trapped by what or whom would be a realization that would slowly come, during the weeks, months, and years after that first, free run. Your stress fracture wasn’t a punishment for ignoring dad in his time of need, and your dad’s death wasn’t inevitable. He had resigned to it long ago. Mom didn’t resign. Her expression behind the kitchen window wasn’t contempt or worry or concern. It was a click. She acknowledged dad’s resignation before he knew it as so. His spirits had been intact, but his head was not. The cancer was going to get him, and there was no need to not let it take its course. The cancer wasn’t going to get her, and on your own, yet in the shadow of her example, you realized it wasn’t going to get you.
