Page 29 of Spectacular Things
Wake Up
Four states and four hours away, Mia sits in Sterling Memorial Library, no longer studying the PowerPoint slides on her computer screen because her mother is dead.
“I’m so sorry,” the police officer says a second time, her voice wet but her words continuing to thud into the receiver like falling logs.
They’re too big and heavy and moving too fast for Mia to understand, even as they flatten her.
Hovering outside her own body, Mia notices the sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows and a couple of juniors flirting at the next table.
It isn’t even noon and campus is already abuzz with stories in the process of being created, revised, mussed, and unzipped.
How is this real?
Maybe it isn’t, Mia thinks as the officer reassures her it happened in a flash, too quickly for her mother to experience any pain. Wake up, she tells herself. Wake up. Wake up. Wakeup.
In shock, Mia unplugs her laptop charger, packs up her stuff, walks out of the library to the parking garage at the top of Science Hill, and begins to drive home.
Speeding on 91 North in Connecticut, she worries about skipping her biology test so close to the end of the semester and pulls over to email the professor—“going home for a family emergency”—before asking, blood pumping fast with denial, if she can sit for the exam later in the week.
Wake up Wake up Wakeup.
In Massachusetts, the sports complex is, indeed, complex, with an extensive parking lot that snakes around twelve fields, all in use.
Mia scans each pitch in search of royal blue jerseys and there they are: the Stallions.
Her eyes find Cricket in her neon pink goalkeeper jersey between the posts, standing tall and tense with anticipation, even as the ball moves away from her and up the field.
A truly great keeper, Cricket likes to say, must always be ready for a sudden change in direction.
Over the years, Mia has only exchanged routine hellos with Coach, whom she finds intense to the point of intimidating.
But she walks right up to him now, seventeen minutes into the first half, and doesn’t apologize for interrupting his yelling.
Mia regurgitates the police officer’s words verbatim so that she doesn’t have to synthesize what the words actually mean.
Coach steps back with his hands on his hips.
The wind picks up and sweeps Mia’s hair across her face.
The bright sun of this morning has turned anemic, and the thin residue of light that speckles the field threatens to disappear entirely.
November in New England is a predictable slow dance with winter; one can expect the early frosts, the hours of daylight lost, and the familiar faces that disappear under wool hats, which is what Coach tells himself when he scans the bleachers in search of Liz and can’t find her.
She must be hiding under a new hat or cocooned beyond recognition in a scarf. Because she can’t actually be dead.
Coach stares down at Mia and then out at the Stallions’ goalkeeper, who just returned from a Youth National Team Camp and can’t stop smiling when she talks about it.
His eyes slide from Cricket back to Mia, who seems too collected, too poised.
Her stoicism unnerves him until he realizes it isn’t stoicism at all—it’s the marbled sheen of raw shock.
Mia explains she just drove up from Connecticut because she thought Cricket needed to know.
“But now that I’m here…” Her voice drifts off.
It feels both critical and unthinkable to tell her sister that their mother is gone.
Mia feels her car keys in her pocket and considers driving back to school.
If she leaves now, she can protect Cricket from the thing she won’t be able to undo, unknow, unlive.
“I can be there when you tell her,” Coach says, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his Stallions windbreaker.
“If that’s helpful—or I can—whatever you want.
” Mia looks away, afraid that his tears will elicit her own.
This guy barely even knew her mom and he’s losing it, and his reaction is making the impossible mutate into something otherwise.
Something real. Something permanent. Something so horrific that she can’t feel it yet, even as she senses it speeding toward her like an SUV going too fast.
Coach flags down a ref, who jogs over with lips pursed, head cocked with self-assurance because this guy has a reputation.
But Coach doesn’t yell or throw his arms in the air.
This isn’t about her recent offside call.
Instead, Coach leans into the ref’s shoulder with a hand-covered whisper.
She pulls back, scans his stricken face, and blows her whistle for a time-out.
Mia stands with her back to the field so that Cricket can’t see her, can’t guess that she’s here to ruin her life, even if she can only protect her for a few more moments.
The ball is still in play, still consuming all the players’ attention, so the ref blows her whistle again and sends both teams to their respective benches.
Only Mia sees the ref steal a glance at Cricket, rubbernecking the wreck about to occur.
The Stallions’ assistant coach directs the players to take a knee. Coach calls Cricket by name, beckons for her to join him away from the group. The opposing team looks over with interest as they squirt water into their mouths and catch their breath.
“Mia!” Cricket shouts, recognizing the familiar if inexplicable silhouette off to the side of the bleachers, halfway between the pitch and the parking lot. “Mia!” she calls again, piecing together that Mia has shown up as a surprise, and what a perfect day since she’s playing so well.
Coach nods his release, and as Cricket runs toward Mia, they will both recall this moment in slow motion, the severing of their lives into before and after, mothered and orphaned.
“Mia!” Cricket shouts a third time, and Mia turns toward her sister, grief tattooed across her face like winter’s shadow.
She is the messenger of death. She is the ruiner of lives.
She is familiar but unrecognizable, and so Cricket searches the stands, looking to their missing piece for an explanation, eyes seeking to disprove what her body already knows.