Who Do You Love(101)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“Elizabeth,” said Jay, and held out his hand, before turning to me. “How are you feeling?”

“Just fine.”

“Not too warm? And you’re staying hydrated?”

I rolled my eyes. “Jay thinks I should have checked into the hospital as soon as the test came back positive.”

Bethie pulled out a business card from her beaded clutch. Elizabeth Chamberlain, Rabbinical Student. “Let me know when you have the baby. I want to send you something.”

“Oh, you don’t have to.”

“I want to,” she said, as I took her card, and let Jay take my hand and told myself again how lucky I was, how I’d landed in the middle of a life I didn’t deserve.

Andy

2009

Lori opened the front door of her dream house, a medium-sized and recently renovated cottage in Bryn Mawr that Andy had bought for her with his first big endorsement-deal check. “The Dream House for Mom,” his friend Laurent Dillard, who’d been a first-round draft pick for the ’Sixers, had said. “Gotta get that Dream House for Mom.”

Standing in the entryway, her bare feet on the terra-cotta tiles, she looked at him. “Andy,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“It’s the place they have to take you in, right?”

Lori tried to smile, but he could see concern etched into the lines around her eyes and mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“Oh, honey,” she said . . . and for the first time since the Olympics, his mother pulled him into her arms and held him tight.

•••

He remembered the night back in 2006 that Mitch had shown up at the door of the two-bedroom apartment he’d bought with Maisie, in a new high-rise in Carnegie Hill. Sometimes, riding up in the elevator, he imagined, or thought he could, the white guys in suits staring at him, and he told himself it was because they recognized him from Athens. Not because he was the only nonwhite guy in the building who wasn’t delivering someone’s dinner.

He and Mitch were both spending half the year training at a newly constructed facility in Westchester, with a bunch of new guys, most of them a year or two out of college, fast and strong and getting almost magically faster and stronger. Andy had watched in frustration and fear as his times failed to improve, telling himself that he’d work harder, work smarter, train more efficiently, suffer more than he ever had . . . but even when he did all of those things, he wasn’t able to make any meaningful improvements. In fact, his times had started slipping. The young pups were not only coming up behind him; they’d run right past.

“You know what they’re doing, right?” Mitch asked. He was dressed in street clothes, jeans and a dark-blue pullover, with a backpack over one shoulder, a weariness around his eyes, and an angry scowl on his face. Short and wiry, Mitch was looking almost gaunt these days—he’d been doing some kind of low-carb thing, Andy knew, hoping that if he cut three or four pounds he’d see his times improve.

“Being younger than we are,” Andy said morosely. He’d already made up his mind that the Penn Relays in May would be his test. If things didn’t improve by then—if he got trounced as thoroughly as the times he’d been putting up suggested that he would—then he’d have no hope of making the 2008 Olympic team, and he’d need to think about retiring. He’d be thirty-two by then, old for a runner, and there was no shame in quitting while you were ahead, and a gold medal certainly meant that he’d be going out on top, but he’d hoped for one more season, one more whack at the piñata . . . because he loved it and also because whenever he tried to think of what would come next his mind felt like a big, empty whiteboard that some zealous kid had wiped perfectly clean. What would he do when that voice spoke up, the one that said he was undeserving of everything he had, if he couldn’t run it into submission on his way toward even more prizes, more affirmations that yes, he’d proven his worth, he’d earned his right to be?

He and Rachel had sometimes talked about a post-racing life—maybe he could be a coach or a teacher; maybe he could help boys who needed someone in their lives, the same way Mr. Sills had helped him. “Picture a little love nest,” Rachel would sing, and Andy could see it—a cozy house, a yard that he’d mow, a swimming pool with a hot tub where he could soak. Maisie talked endlessly about her post-modeling plans, but they never discussed his future—because, he knew, it scared her, too. There was also an element of superstition involved. To talk about what came next was to signal to God or the universe or whatever forces were out there that you knew that what you had wouldn’t last . . . which might, of course, invite those forces to sweep down and take it away.