Climbing Heartbreak Hill Read online

  He had no job, no home, no friends.

  The only fresh start he’d thought he had was with Tara.

  Tara. He groaned. He’d meant her to be a distraction until he got through all this crap and now this crap was never going to end. If his need for distraction wasn’t going to end, what about his need for her? Another question he couldn’t answer.

  He pounded his fist into the ground and struggled to get back on his feet without bending his knee or putting any weight on the bad leg. It was impossible.

  He finally managed to crawl close enough to a mailbox and used the post to pull himself to his feet. Even then, the feat took some awkward contortions and was probably a hilarious show for any neighbor spying on him over her perking coffee. He hopped-stepped toward home on his right foot, stopping to catch his breath every ten steps. Would he ever get back on both his feet?

  His mom scrambled down the driveway, waving his cane as he cleaved to his own mailbox.

  “The neighbor called and said you fell.” Her bathrobe flapped behind her and her slippers flopped on the pavement. There was a day when the sight of his mother in her bathrobe outside the house would have had him around the block in embarrassment, but this morning it was exactly what he needed. “Oh sweetheart,” she gasped when she was close enough to see the road rash. “Are you all right?”

  Ryan shrugged and grabbed his cane. She slipped under his shoulder and supported him to the house.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ryan dug through the boxes of paperwork he had shoved into his mother’s basement. His tax returns had to be in here somewhere. The search was supposed to distract him from the infinite cycle of asking himself what he was going to do now. No answer filled in after the blinking cursor of his brain. He had found endorsement contracts, newspaper clippings, and dog-eared pages of programming code, but not any IRS 1040s or their associated paperwork.

  Tara had said she wouldn’t be able to look over his stuff until after the fifteenth, but dropping off his forms would give him a chance to see her again and get his mind off his prognosis. He pictured her coming out of Charles’s office after the slimeball had tripped her. Her cheeks had been flushed with embarrassment, but she’d managed to hold onto her cool and get on with her job. That was mental toughness whether she saw it in herself or not.

  Mental tenacity was something he seemed to be severely lacking in today. One minute he wallowed in the loss of his gift, the next he pondered moving on. If he could block the news out and forget he had been so close to realizing his dreams about winning the Boston Marathon and going to the Olympics, maybe he could survive. He’d stay in that belief for a few minutes, but the strength to maintain it always failed. He wondered if the doctor was wrong, if there was a surgery that could fix him, or if he’d wake up in a cold sweat having dreamed the horror of the last six months.

  He flipped the lid off the next box and dropped the cover to the floor. It bumped his cane from its resting spot against the tower of boxes. He glanced at it then focused on the box. This one was more organized. Manila envelopes lined the interior, but a heavy, linen one had been abandoned on top. He stared at it, knowing exactly what it contained.

  They’d sent it as soon as his ACL tear was confirmed. They couldn’t carry an athlete who would be out of competition for a year.

  It was the letter terminating his contract with the track club. His fingers still trembled when he reached for it. The biggest dream and goal he’d had for the last decade and one letter ended it. It looked so innocuous in its creamy linen paper and nondescript font. Receiving it had hurt worse than the injury to his knee. He stabbed the letter into the side of the box.

  “Ryan!” his mother called as she clomped down the steps. “Since you’re down here, could you do me a favor?”

  “Sure. What do you need?” Ryan ran his fingers over the edges of the folders until he recognized the one holding his tax returns. He yanked it out of the box and dropped it to the floor. It hit the faded linoleum and spun away.

  “I’d like to clear out some stuff down here, so there’s some open space.” His mother stood in front of the old console television where he’d played video games. When she’d moved to Carterville from Glendale, all the stuff she hadn’t wanted to part with ended up in the basement. “I want to make some room for an exercise bike.”

  Ryan was thankful he’d been leaning against the pile of boxes or he would have landed on his can. His mother and an exercise bike? Something weird was going on here. She’d even given up her nightly bowl of ice cream and replaced it with a dainty scoop of frozen yogurt. Whatever the reason for this fitness kick, she was definitely looking better. She’d lost a few pounds and she seemed to have more energy.

  “It’s being delivered tomorrow, and I want to put my yoga mat over here too.”

  An exercise bike and a yoga mat? Perhaps his mother was preparing for the zombie apocalypse. He laughed to himself. It was as reasonable as any other explanation she could come up with.

  Ryan surveyed the basement. The boxes he’d brought from his apartment and his stuff from high school barely took up a few feet of the cramped floor space. The rest was random furniture that didn’t fit with the decor upstairs and the remnants of his mother’s various jump-started hobbies. When she discovered something new, she went in head-first and got every tool or whatever related to it. As she lost steam, the accoutrements ended up in the basement, waiting for someone to revive them.

  “As long as I don’t have to go up and down the stairs.” The thought of descending the seventeen steps to the basement made him wince. Funny how going down stairs was actually worse than going up.

  “We can stack it up by the slider. Then I can drive my car around back and load it up.”

  “Why don’t we load it in the back of my SUV? You won’t be able to fit these boxes in your little car.”

  Neither of them was in good enough shape to carry any of the furniture, but they wedged and kicked the console TV across the room, scarring the linoleum.

  “Oh well, here you are. This must be all your school stuff.” His mother led him around the stacks of boxes and paraphernalia they had collected over the years to a pile of boxes labeled ‘Ryan.’ “Put what you don’t want in the pile over there. I don’t know how we collected so much stuff.”

  Ryan tugged apart the interlocked top of the cardboard box. A wave of dust floated into his face. He coughed. How long had his mom been keeping this around? He bent the top pieces down along the sides. His kindergarten finger-paintings covered the top of the box. No need for these. He doubted anyone at the thrift store would want them either.

  He reached farther into the box and discovered a ring of finisher ribbons. He fingered the faded silk from the Old Fashioned Days Midget Mile, chuckling to himself. They should have called it a dash. A rambunctious crowd of eight, nine, and ten-year-olds with no notion of how far a mile was. They leapt from the starting line expecting to run as fast as they could the whole way. They were gasping and stumbling less than halfway through the course. He among them — but the running bug had bitten him. A mile had been an unfathomable distance to travel on foot back then. Who could run so far?

  He set the ribbons aside and next found his varsity letter from high school. He’d lettered in both cross country and track, but he’d never purchased the leather jacket. It seemed like a football or baseball player thing because they had the muscles to fill out the rigid fabric. He’d tried one on, but the heavy leather felt wrong on his frame — like wearing the lead shield for an X-ray. He hadn’t considered himself an athlete back then. Running was something he had to do. It wasn’t a sport as others might describe. Then he was running miles each day, some easy, some full out.

  Miles had become a measure of the day’s run rather than a single goal. When had he lost the appreciation for something so simple – the basic integer of his passion?

  Now he longed to run a mile, a lap around the track, even a hundred meter dash. And barring a medical miracle,
he’d never do it again.

  He placed the letter aside. That was something he’d keep. He dug further in the box. An old pair of running spikes, a baseball cap, and a stack of newspapers. He’d run his first 5K in those spikes. The leather on the shoes crumbled in his hands. Not worth preserving. He dropped them in the garbage pile. The baseball cap went into the sale pile. The newspapers. He didn’t remember saving them. He paged through the first one and found nothing worth saving. There was a coupon for the local shoe store, but it was fifteen years old. He chucked the papers and moved on to the next box.

  T-shirts. Every silk-screened shirt for every race he’d entered. The shirts had attracted the musty smell of the basement and the delicate texture of worn-to-death fabric. They were almost transparent and yellowed from age and sweat. The first ones he’d won he wore until the back and shoulders had giant holes. Later, he’d done so many races, he barely wore the shirts more than a couple times before he outgrew them. He unfolded one. When had he ever been this small? He checked the date on the shirt. He’d been in high school, so not middle school as he’d hoped. No wonder everyone picked on him. He looked like a fifth grader until his senior year when he’d hit a growth spurt and grew almost five inches in one year. The added height wasn’t much better. Long, wiry limbs, dangling from a ribcage. Not an ounce of fat softened his frame and his face was all sharp angles. No one Tara would give a second glance.

  The other Tara he’d met at that bonfire hadn’t. He scratched his nose and set the shirt down. She’d shoved him aside and dashed off with the head of the football team. Story of his high school career.

  Luckily he’d started to fill out in college when he added weight lifting to his training. A light breeze wouldn’t knock him over anymore. He had a thicker body to match his sinewy legs and arms.

  He put the shirt back in the box. These couldn’t go to a thrift store. They were little more than rags to anyone who didn’t care.

  “What’s all that?” His mom eyed the growing pile of cotton rags at his feet. She came closer. “All your running stuff. You’ve had quite a career, Ryan.”

  “It feels like I was just getting started.” He slid the last T-shirt to the side and saw the wrinkled ribbons and tarnished silver of the trophies and medals he had won over the years.

  “It stinks it had to end this way, but you did things so many people only dream about.” She took the top shirt off the pile on the floor and smoothed the crumpled printing. “Now you can start a new dream.”

  He’d known it would come someday. Like when he was forty and he stopped competing for the top places in the race and focused on the medals in his age group. He’d run then for the joy of being with other runners. Enjoying the sun on his skin, or the splatter of rain against his face and the splash of a puddle as he stomped through. He’d braved all types of weather, in every time of year. In Michigan it was possible to run in shorts on Christmas and gloves and pants on the Fourth of July.

  He wadded up the rest of the shirts and shoved them into a box, then slid the box of medals off the stack. He jabbed it over to the slider, alternating with his good leg and his cane. “I don’t know who I am without running.”

  “You are the same person you’ve always been.” She patted him on the shoulder, then gave him a gentle squeeze. “Big changes aren’t ever easy. When I moved here from Glendale after your father died, I didn’t think life would ever be as good. I still miss him every day, but I’ve found new adventures to fill it. You need to find a different pursuit to be passionate about.”

  Tara’s laugh flashed through his mind. While he was passionate about her, loving her wouldn’t pay the bills. He needed a career, something to show her he wasn’t a crippled failure.

  The next box was filled with Matchbox cars and the burned-out leftovers of a model rocket. That could go. He shoved the box to the side. The last box was crammed full of DOS code manuals, and green and white printouts of software programs he’d dabbled with in high school. In college, he’d tackled HTML and Java, then played with Flash during his downtime over the last few years. These manuals weren’t worth the paper they were printed on anymore. Did new computer programmers even know what DOS was?

  His mom had only one more box to go to the thrift store. It didn’t help her clear out the space for the aerobics troupe or whatever crazy plan she was attempting.

  He maneuvered the box of cars onto the handcart his mother had discovered in the piles of junk over to the sliding door. He wandered over to the pile of records his mom had been sorting.

  “I wish my phonograph still worked. There’s some good stuff here. What are all these papers?” She kicked the stack of manila envelopes by Ryan’s feet.

  “Old tax returns. Tara wanted to go over them. She said I might be able to deduct some more things.”

  “Tara’s such a hard worker. How’s she holding up without Leslie in the office?”

  “She’d probably be doing fine if Charles wasn’t there.”

  His mother gave him a contemplative look, then opened another box. She pushed some balled up newspaper to the side. “Who is Charles?”

  Ryan bent over a box of vintage vinyl and skeptically studied the bands he didn’t recognize. He straightened and rolled his shoulders back. His muscles and bones snapped and popped into new positions. “Some guy who is supposed to be doing the complicated returns, but I think he’s a waste of time. He’s got Tara running all over town on errands when he’s not trying to look down her blouse.”

  The urge to break something surprised him. Ryan imagined Charles did that to a lot of people. But Ryan’s reaction was different. He wanted to protect Tara because she was the only one who understood what he was going through. The frustration he felt at not being able to do something he loved.

  The question bubbled to the surface again. Tara? His brain continued to waffle. She was hot. He was a mess. She was amazing. Beautiful, confident, encouraging, intelligent. Every time he saw her, something about her blew him away. What would she see in him? She’d been a cheerleader with her pick of the football team. He was nothing but a scrawny has-been who could barely walk. He couldn’t keep himself in one frame of mind for more than a few minutes. Was it fair or even right to involve someone else in his carnival of emotions?

  “Mom.” He was probably going to shoot himself for asking her for help, but his mother knew Tara. He could use all the advice he could get. Crazy or not.

  “When did you start your aerobics classes?” He rolled the box on its corners to the hand truck and wheeled it over to the slider. That wasn’t the question he planned to ask, but maybe the conversation would swing in his direction and he wouldn’t have to bring it up directly.

  “We’ve been meeting for a couple months now, but The Ladies want to go back to our normal Friday meetings after the library charity auction.”

  “Are they going to stop exercising?”

  “No, just change the location.”

  “What’s wrong with the library meeting room? It has a great open space.”

  “Son, it has windows.” She lifted another album and tilted it toward the light, then stuffed it back in the box. “Some of us have parts that shake too much for spectators.”

  Ryan dismissed that image before it had a chance to etch into his brain.

  “What spurred the exercise kick?” He flipped through the albums in the box his mom had abandoned. Nothing piqued his interest.

  His mother didn’t answer right away.

  “Have you been to see a doctor lately? Is there something you aren’t telling me?” he asked. Could her sudden venture into athletic fitness be caused by an underlying health problem?

  “Oh no, sweetie, nothing like that. I’m as right as rain. It’s an idea we had to help the library.”

  “Help the library? How does aerobics help the library?” Was his mother in the early stages of dementia? He wasn’t following this train of thought at all. It was even more bizarre than the ideas usually generated by her friends.
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br />   His mother waved her hand, dismissing his question. “I meant we got the idea at the library while we were talking about fundraising.”

  Ryan still didn’t get the connection between the library, fundraising, and his mother’s new-found interest in aerobics and cycling. But she was nodding so emphatically, he felt himself nodding too. Maybe it was better to pretend he had a clue what she was talking about rather than risk more confusion.

  He hand-trucked a couple more boxes over to the slider, then slumped on the threadbare sofa. He had been standing for too long. His leg would scream at him for the rest of the day.

  His mother ambled over and plopped down next to him. “I thought this exercise stuff was supposed to give you more energy, but I’m beat. How do you do it?”

  “It takes a while to build up endurance.”

  “More than a couple weeks, eh?” His mom elbowed his shoulder.

  “Yep. But it’s a whole lot easier to lose what you’ve gained.” His thoughts drifted to the shrinking muscles in his left leg. It didn’t take long at all.

  “Well, I need a boost. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Don’t make it just for me.” Ryan already had his usual cup today, but he no longer had to worry about what the extra caffeine would do to his training.

  “Oh I always have a cup this time of the afternoon. Cookies, too.” She moved another box of discarded albums to the floor beside the back doorway and headed up the stairs to the kitchen. “Probably should skip those though.”

  Ryan grabbed his cane and pushed himself to his feet, mentally preparing himself to tackle the stairs. “So your friends have branched out from matchmaking then?” he called as he gritted his teeth through each step. There, good question. It should lead him around to discussing what he should do about Tara.

  “Not entirely.” She filled the carafe with water, then poured it into the coffeemaker.

  “Can I ask if I’ve been discussed at any of these meetings?” Maybe they already had some ideas for him. One way or the other.