Now at the first meeting of the track team, Helen hoped that this girl might be a reasonable friend prospect. But these hopes were dimmed when she responded to Helen’s offer with “Ugh, look at that line. Don’t wait for me, it’ll be years.”
“Oh, okay,” said Helen, trying not to act like she cared. “I’ll catch you next time.”
“For sure!”
Helen took off at an easy lope after the others, across the field and onto one of the side streets that rambled along near the river. As her body warmed to its very favorite pastime (no matter what the coach implied about other pleasurable activities), there was a little part of her that was glad she wasn’t running with anyone else. She could glide at her own pace, undistracted by the off-tempo gait of others. The road was wide with almost no traffic, and she was soon passing people—not on purpose, but only because her body could move to its own internal percussion section, which happened to favor a vivace beat.
“Show-off,” huffed Marybeth as Helen passed her.
“She’s faster than us,” wheezed Wendy.
“She doesn’t have to act like it.”
I’m not acting like it, thought Helen. I just am.
The captains in front turned down another road that curved away from the river and up Stanley Hill Road. She’d heard about Stanley Hill. The kids called it Heartbreak Hill after the six-mile incline in the Boston Marathon. This uphill wasn’t nearly as long, but it was a challenge, and she’d been excited to try it. Everyone’s pace slowed, including Helen’s, but one by one she continued to pass other runners until she came up behind Cal Crosby, battling madly, arms pumping in random arcs out from his body. From the back, with all that red hair flying, he seemed like he might actually be on fire.
“Hey,” he panted as she came up beside him.
“Hi,” she said.
“This is hard.”
“Stanley Hill,” she said, the incline getting steeper, her own pace downshifting slightly.
“It’s beating . . . the crap . . . out of me,” he rasped.
She laughed and that slowed her even further. Cal was a couple of inches shorter than she, and hunched forward as he was, his head came up to about her chin. He was more or less flinging himself up the hill.
“I’m just . . . giving it a try,” he insisted.
“You’re not bad.”
“I suck.”
“You run like a lit match.” She had no idea where that came from. Probably just an image conjured by his stick figure body and flaming red hair.
He looked over at her. His eyes were baby boy blue. “Yeah?”
“Uh-huh.”
He smiled. “I’m going to take that . . . in a good way.”
The slope of the hill flattened slightly for a couple of blocks, and it was easier to talk.
“I meant it in a good way,” she said. “Why would I say it to your face if I was being mean?”
“People do that all the time. Shit-talk to your face.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You just do it behind their backs.”
“Not really,” said Helen. “I mean only if they really deserve it, and people need to be, like, warned or something.”
Stanley Hill was not quite done with them; it got steeper just before the top. She thought he might be having a mild asthma attack, but then he wheezed out, “What’s your name?”
“Helen.”
“Helen what?”
“Iannucci.”
“Helen Iannucci . . . you are not . . . a bad . . . person.”
“I’ll take that . . . in a good way.”
“Do,” he said. And for all his poor form, he was keeping up with her.
“Tuck your elbows in,” she said, her own breath getting ragged now, too. “And don’t . . . hunch your shoulders.”
“Like this?” His flapping subsided a little, and his torso lengthened, but he still looked like he was actively in pain.
“Just enjoy it,” said Helen.
He let out an incredulous snort. “Enjoy it?”
And just like that she went from being the kind, encouraging girl to the weird girl who liked running uphill. Why was she bothering to help this strange, skinny pelican, anyway?
“Or don’t.” She pulled away from him.
He just ran harder.
As they crested the hilltop together, spent and panting, slowing to suck in oxygen, he grinned and choked out, “I enjoyed it!”
She smiled. He really was a funny little thing.
Chapter 5
2021
Helen’s strides get longer as she approaches her daughter’s small house. She can feel baby Lana waking and shifting in the backpack. The little girl is not a wailer. She is strangely patient with the flaws of her caretakers. This only serves to make Helen feel worse about failing to bring a sippy cup or snack.
She feels bad about everything these days, even choices that are decades old and have no bearing on anything anymore. Moving to North Carolina to be near Jim’s work, instead of back to Upstate New York to be near her parents. Jim’s golf course design and maintenance firm was based in Raleigh, and it seemed silly to make him commute. Except that Jim’s work took him all over the country and he had a study over the garage for when he wasn’t strolling around some former tobacco field with an eager investor or crunching numbers with a general manager above the pro shop somewhere. As it turned out, Jim could have based himself anywhere. And Annabella could have been a full-time grandmother instead of a three-times-a-year visitor.
Lana’s beautiful face is puckering with unhappiness as Helen races to pour milk into a sippy. They learned during the adoption process that the name Lana means “calm as still waters” in Hawaiian. Barb and Cormac had no idea how apt it was when they met her six months ago.
Helen hands her the sippy, and the little girl’s face smooths into a beatific smile as she lifts it to her lips. Fourteen months old now. How lucky they were to get her. Helen scoops her up and they sit together at the kitchen table. Helen gazes down into Lana’s face and Lana stops sucking long enough to give her nonna a wide smile.
This, thinks Helen. She feels her galloping pulse slow to a trot.
Later that afternoon, when Lana is down for her second nap (God bless her, none of Helen’s children napped at all), Helen goes to Barb’s desktop computer and googles Francine Hydecker. And there she is.
Fran Hydecker, Seven Meadows Farm, Plymouth, Vermont.
Helen clicks the link and finds that it’s not just a horse farm. It has equine therapy for kids with special needs and an art studio with a gallery and shop. The pictures are rich with color and bucolic serenity.
“Good for her,” Helen murmurs, clicking through the descriptions of textile classes and the next kiln firing. But deep in her solar plexus she feels brittle, as she remembers the last time she saw Francie.
In 2018, at the age of ninety-five, Annabella Iannucci finally admitted that it was no longer easy to haul grocery bags up the flagstone path from the single-car driveway into the house. She also had to confess she had no clue what to do when her new laptop gave her error messages. “You come live with me,” she told Helen. “The kids are gone. Jim does his Jim stuff.” But Helen did not want to go back to Hestia, New York. The whole point had been to leave.