Overcoming — Bring It: Chapter 5

Following the painful practice sessions on Saturday and Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were relatively easier. Although conditioning was still important, Coach Friske and I focused on execution and speed. We wrestled for the final hour of each practice. Everything was about improvement, and I could feel the gain in strength and agility.

Tuesday night, very tired, more so than usual, I sat in the kitchen beside the phone. It was Pam’s night to call me. Finally, when the phone rang, as much as I wanted to talk to her, I really felt drained. After only a few minutes, reluctantly had to cut the call short. I felt like I was coming down with something. Having not been ill for quite some time, the contrast was dramatic. Mom made some chicken soup for me, and I took cold medicine before going straight to bed.

When I woke, I was stiff and sore but in a different way from the exercises that I was doing. I drank juice and took my multivitamin, the same as I always did. I also took more medicine and then ate some breakfast.

“It’s no wonder you’re sick. You’re running around all the time,” Mom said. “You only come home to eat and sleep.”

“It’s not like I have a choice.”

“There are always choices,” Mom argued. “You’re just too stubborn to realize it.”

“I wonder who I inherit that from?”

Mom smiled.

“It’s just a cold or something. The first day or two is always the worst.”

“Maybe it’s something you picked up over the weekend.”

“I don’t think so. No one in Pam’s family was sick. Maybe someone at church, but I didn’t notice anyone coughing or sneezing.”

“It just seems strange, because all winter you haven’t been sick.”

“It’s just some aches. I probably have a little bit of a fever, but I’ll be fine.”

“You have a wrestling match tomorrow.”

“Actually, I have two.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’ll do the best I can like I always do. The world can’t beat that. Isn’t that what Dad always tells me?”

I finished getting ready and headed for school. As the day wore on, whatever bug I had grew worse. I made it through the day, but by the time I got to practice I was beat. Coach Friske was in the office. I went inside to ask if I could miss practice to go home and rest.

“You feel that bad?”

“Yeah, I thought it was the cold, but the aches in my joints and muscles are worse, now. My eyes are burning like I’ve been awake for a long time. So, I’m pretty sure I’m running a fever.”

He touched my forehead to confirm. “Yeah, you’re warm.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Go home and rest. And take something for the fever.”

“Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, I’ll feel better.”

“I was planning to give you an easy day, just conditioning and going over all the moves again. I think you’re ready, though — except for being sick.”

“I’ll win both matches, pins in the first period. I need to. If I feel like this tomorrow, I won’t make it through three periods with anyone.”

“If you pin both of them, regardless of what round, I’ll buy you dinner.”

“My choice?”

“As long as it’s burgers and fries. I’m on a teacher’s salary, after all.”

“Fortunately, I like fast food.”

“Me too,” He patted his belly for emphasis. “A little too much.”

When I stood, he corralled my shoulders. “I need you healthy for tomorrow.”

“I’m working on it. I’ll be better. That’s all I’m promising right now.”

Taking medicine and soaking in a tub of hot water were my overriding objectives when I arrived home. It helped ease the pain. While stepping out of the tub to dry off, I heard Mom’s knock on the door.

Hastily, I wrapped the towel around my waist. “Okay, I’m decent.”

She opened the door. “I made a big pot of vegetable soup for you today. It will be good for you.”

“Maybe later. My stomach is a little queasy right now. All I want to do is go to bed. I think that’s what I need more than anything else.”

“You need to eat something.”

“I’m afraid that if I do, it will come right back up.”

“Have you been throwing up?”

“No, just my stomach is upset.”

“Any diarrhea?”

“Not yet. I just don’t want to risk it. I’m not hungry.” I could see the concern in her expression. She always worried about me, unnecessarily most of the time. Mothers tend to do that. Usually strong and healthy, this wasn’t a normal day for me. Like the little boy that was still inside of me, I wanted my mother’s kind hand to comfort me when I didn’t feel well. Even so, the man I was rapidly becoming didn’t want to be a bother.

After donning my pajamas, I went to bed, pulling the covers up under my chin as I tried to shake the chills. There was no need to see a doctor. The diagnosis was easy. Symptoms included a headache, nausea, aching joints and muscles, general weakness, fever, and a loss of appetite. I knew what it was. I needed to drink lots of water. Controlling my temperature was vital. But for the immediate, all I wanted was to sleep.

* * *

With eyes closed tightly, one world’s mask withdrew revealing layers parted like curtains drawn back from multiple windows that when closed concealed access to thresholds while still revealing what lay beyond. Whether it was a dream, or some odd diurnal delusion sourced in fever, my arrival meant the same.

Imagined vapor solidified, creating form and structure that facilitated an instant’s understanding conjured of hallucination’s mists. At the junction of many tunnels, I saw the mouth of a cave. In the instant of a thought’s blinking, I was there, physically. Ascending further toward the opening and the glow beyond it, I emerged, stepping up and out onto the lip of a cliff overlooking a vast plain bathed in the glow from three suns. I shielded my eyes against the pain’s intensity and considered crawling back inside the cave. A paradise beneath a dense canopy of tree boughs and branches covered with thick leaves from horizon to horizon spread out before me.

There was a clearing below the cliff. I walked there, but it took time as well as effort to negotiate the distance. Why was it necessary? Why couldn’t I simply think myself there? That magic worked before. By the time I reached the clearing, all three suns had set. No moon had risen into the backdrop sky speckled with pinpricks of light above distant, jagged peaks. It was not the expected sky, unlike any night I’d ever beheld, and yet it felt familiar. Near and intimate, it was as if I could reach toward any glowing, spangled sparkle and pluck it from the deep violet shroud. A fragment from memory framed the place and I knew I could not possibly be there even though I could not place the time I was there before.

Home was the word that came to mind. I redirected my quest, prepared to reach up and touch a shimmering face of a revolving dodecahedron that spun and twisted as it hovered above me. Upon contact, immediately I went inside it, but there was no sense of motion only the stale, lifeless air barely breathable. Lingering only for a moment, I stepped through another shimmering face of the twelve-sided object to stand outside in a different place.

From the myriad of outside possibilities, worlds that connected briefly with each flat pentagonal side, I had chosen this one, the relative flatness of a slightly undulating, black, indefinite landscape, like an infinite plain stretching toward every dark horizon. The land resolved only at the edge with the transition to sky defined by tiny lights that dotted the infinite dome aloft. Two moons partially reflected a distant, unknown source of illumination, defining the slight unevenness of almost undiscernible indentations in the surface.

Behind and from the distance came the whirring, grinding, of mechanical manipulations. Turning to detect a tall, towering structure atop the plain standing silhouetted against the silvery glow of a third rising moon, it was digging into the charcoal-colored sand, excavating a foundation for the faraway fantasies of temporal teasing. Was this the past or the future? Not knowing which, why did it matter?

Still, it meant something, this place. I felt it more as a caress upon one of my manifold senses than a memory that had returned. Sage arrived borne not of experience but insight. I needed to explore; I wanted to discover the truth. But attention was drawn elsewhere, toward distant calling. My vision turned and images evaporated into the silvery slickness surrounding the reflection of a familiar face in the mirror. Standing before it, shivering in skin moist with perspiration from the fever, I recognized the calling. That strangeness was a world that came for me — or was it that I came from it?

Drenched in sweat, I sampled the temperature of my brow, then my cheeks. Warmth, I was alive after all, but my fever had subsided.

The radium dial of my alarm clock glowed, revealing the time in reverse through my mirrored view. Two-forty, I determined. Destination: bathroom — relief sought.

Ambling awkwardly for the few steps along the hallway from my bedroom to the bath, closing the door behind me, I stood for a moment, catching my breath. I reached for the top of the vanity to steady myself.

“Are you better?” Mother’s familiar voice came through the closed door.

“Yeah, just a little dizzy.”

“I’ll warm up the soup. You can eat.”

“Okay.” I supported some of my weight with my hands and wrists as I leaned closer to the mirror. No longer did I avoid contact with my eyes’ reflection. The understanding was incomplete but resumed from when it began long ago. The merging had completed, just as Dawn promised. I knew it with certainty.

“Your soup will get cold, honey,” Mom warned.

Startled, I glanced to the window. How was it morning already?

When I opened the door, I wondered where Mom had gone? Wasn’t she just here?

“Where do you think you’re going?”

My attention drew back toward the voice. I smiled with recognition of the lady who occupied an alabaster bench just beyond the mirror. “Nowhere,” I replied.

“Come sit with me.” She patted her hand on the bench’s vacancy.

“It’s morning,” I complained. “There’s no time.”

“There’s never time. The sky may be lighter, but not enough. They haven’t yet arrived.” Reaching her hand toward me and I grasped it, kissing its back. Stepping through the mirror as I pressed the cool skin of the back of her hand to my chest, my heart fluttered with profound recognition. “Lady Lucerne.”

“Why so formal?”

“It’s appropriate.”

She laughed. “Okay, Lord Carlos!”

I gazed into her sparkling eyes, reestablishing the deeper connection between us.

“Are you ready yet?” she asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Are you happy?”

“There is nowhere else to be.”

“Let’s dance.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“You question my ability or my desire?”

“You promised you would. It’s our last chance.”

“For now.”

“Come then,” she said. “We’ll make the attempt while there is yet enough comfort among the shadows.”

Into my firm embrace she fell, where she belonged, always and forever mine, and I was perpetually hers.

* * *

Startled from a firm but gentle rapping on the door, I sat up in bed with sheets twisted, wrapped in crazy braids around and beneath me. Sweat soaked, cool against my skin, pajamas were drenched and wreaked of sweat. I needed a shower.

“Open the door, honey. You didn’t eat your soup.”

I focused on the knob, tilted my head to one side and it turned, but it hadn’t been locked. Odd. Usually, I locked my door. It was a habit from when I lived in the apartment, and ever since moving back home, I continued the practice.

I was still stepping out of the tangled mess as Mom carried a tray into my room and set it on my desk. “I’ll call the school and tell them you’re too sick — ”

“No, I have to go to school. There’s a wrestling meet tonight.”

“You’re too sick, honey.”

“I’m fine,” I took her hand and touched it to my forehead. “See, no more fever.”

“Eat your soup. I’ll bring the medicine.”

“I’m fine, Mom, really.” I scooped one spoonful after another into my mouth, chewed when necessary, and swallowed. Pausing, I looked up. “See.”

“When you were burning up with fever last night, you were talking in your sleep.”

“You unlocked my door and came in?”

“I was uneasy about you.”

It didn’t matter. Privacy at home was always marginal at best.

“Did I say anything interesting?”

“It sounded like people speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal church.” Although I’d never been to one of those services, I understood what she meant.

“You haven’t been sick like this since you were little,” she continued. “I sat here with you for most of the night, putting cold compresses to your forehead and neck until your fever broke.”

“Was I speaking Spanish, maybe?”

“No, I’ve heard enough of that between you and Jean learning it. Sometimes you just growled.”

“I must have been dreaming.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember getting up in the night. It was between two and three.” I didn’t know how to tell her about anything else, but I recalled it all.

“I heated the soup for you around then ’cause you told me you were hungry. But you never ate it.”

“It’s good soup.”

“It tasted better when it was fresh. Finish eating.”

“What time is it?”

“Around seven.”

“I didn’t call Pam last night.”

“She called. I told her you were sick and came home early. She said to tell you to feel better.”

I smiled. “I have to get up. I’ll take a shower and get dressed.”

“Honey, I don’t think you should go to school.”

“It’s not an option, Mom. The extra practices and all the personal training with the coach have mostly been for tonight. A lot of people are counting on me. If I’m not in school today, I can’t wrestle.”

“I’ll be uneasy about you all day.”

“I’ll be fine, really. I’ll call you from school when I get there.”

Not wanting to worry Mom, I told her what she wanted to hear. I was feeling better, just not back to my usual self. For all I knew, I might never be the same as before — before last night. Figuring that throughout the day I would get better, by the time I needed to wrestle, I should be ready. Other than having a slight headache and still feeling a little dizzy, I felt like I usually did first thing in the morning, sore and grumpy. I didn’t want to go to school, but I had to.

When I arrived, I parked in the main lot, along with other students’ cars. There was no point in using my customary spot close to the fieldhouse. Right before the wrestling meet, I expected some major parking problems, like a traffic jam.

Coach Friske’s car was already parked. He too had chosen to park with everyone else. Only Coach Ellis’s car was parked near the fieldhouse. I figured one of the first things I should do once inside was let them know I was feeling better and had made it to school.

When I entered the school, I saw signs of the impending event. Banners and posters adorned the walls, wishing the wrestling team luck. It was an outpouring of school spirit and pride the likes of which I’d never seen prior to any previous home meet. Honestly, there were times I wondered if the average student realized we had a wrestling team. Things had changed. The show of support was touching, although it tasted artificial and came far too late in the season to feel sincere. We had acquired fair-weather fans, as my Mom would say. Everyone was jumping on the bandwagon of our success.

As promised, I went directly to the payphone and called Mom.

When I hung up, I turned to see Annie’s smiling face, decked out in her cheerleading uniform. “Hey,” I said, starting to walk past her, only to feel her tug on my varsity jacket’s sleeve.

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a little run down and sore. I’ve got a headache, too. Thanks for asking.”

“Everyone’s worried.”

“Well, I’m here. So, everyone can relax.”

“I’m glad.” She hugged me.

“Thanks.” I pulled away. “Don’t catch what I got.” I started toward my locker.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“No, I don’t mind?”

“I just didn’t want you to worry about people talking. You know, like we are back together or anything.”

“Why would I worry? People always talk. I couldn’t care less what they say about me — or about you for that matter. Lately, most of what they say about me is hyperbole, the rest is a combination of exaggeration, half-truths, and outright lies. I know you, Annie, maybe better than I know myself. You’re never who you pretend to be. So, I’m not sure of the accuracy of anything the rumor mill generates about you.”

She smiled. “I’m pretty good at playing my role, I guess.”

I shrugged.

“John has threatened a couple of people, now.”

“John, the gearhead, you mean?”

“Yeah, my most recent ex.”

“This isn’t a setup or anything, is it?”

“What kind of setup?”

“Nothing. I just had to ask.”

“You’re not worried about him, right?”

“Your ex is the least of my concerns, especially since all we are doing is walking together and talking. We’ve known each other for over a couple of years, now. We’re probably going to talk sometimes.”

“So, how are things with the Tipp City girl?”

“She has a name — you know? Pam’s fine. Worried about me being sick. Apparently, worry is more contagious than whatever I came down with.”

“You’re really a couple, then.”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping you weren’t. Like there was still a chance.”

“Annie.” I stopped and stood squarely in front of her. “You’re beautiful, extremely smart, and popular. Your greatest flaw is that, for whatever reason, you have low self-esteem, and you keep settling on turds and losers.”

She lowered her eyes.

“You can do better. You deserve it.” I continued toward my locker.

Annie followed. “I’ve been thinking a lot, since I talked to your dad and all, about how we broke up, but sort of really didn’t break up.”

“We broke up, Annie,” I said over my shoulder. “Trust me. That was the real deal. Maybe not from your perspective, but from mine it was.”

“It was silly.” She caught up to me. “I was silly, I mean.”

“You wanted to explore the possibilities of your newfound status and popularity.” I arrived at my locker and opened it.

“And in the process, I hurt you.”

“You aren’t the first or even the most recent. We still talk. I’m okay with that because I really and truly like you. And I give a crap about what happens to you. It’s just that I’m not on the market. I’m not going to fall for it again. I’m in love with someone. Do you understand that?”

“That can change.”

“Not likely.”

“Is Pam that good?”

“She’s amazing in ways I can’t describe. When I’m not with her, I miss her so much it hurts.”

Annie nodded. “I’m jealous.”

“Why?”

“It could have been us?”

“I doubt that. I was your learning experience, like the training wheels on your first bike. And to be fair and honest, in a lot of ways, you were mine. I’m grateful, I guess, but I don’t want… I don’t want that pain again.”

“It could be different… this time.”

“You’ll find a guy who feels the same way about you as I feel about Pam. Just quit trying so hard. Stop looking for the right guy. Let him find you for once.”

“How do I do that?”

“Say ‘no’ a lot. Even when you want to say yes, say no. Get used to doing that. Guys don’t like hearing no, but it tests our persistence. That’s how you can tell if he is really interested. You don’t need to understand how it works. It just does.”

She smiled.

I took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Believe in Annie, okay? You’re too good to be digging in the trash and settling for guys who are beneath you.”

“I found you.”

“Uh, actually, I found you,” I corrected. “Just for the record.”

“I thought I found the right guy, Brent.”

“You think that about everyone you date, even a guy who hauls dead people around for his dad.”

Annie laughed.

“Look, none of us were Mr. Right. But he’ll find you, so stop looking so hard. And, you don’t have to limit yourself to locals. Take your pick — nothing but the best. Okay?”

“You’re the best.”

“Shoot for the second-best, then. I’m already taken.”

She kissed me. It was spontaneous, perhaps. Or designed as some sort of ploy before she remembered that wasn’t allowed — not in school — and quickly looked around to make sure no one saw us.

“I hope you don’t come down with what I got, now.”

“I sort of forgot. Sorry.”

“You gotta get to your homeroom.” I closed my locker.

“Yeah, you too.”