Page 6 of Spectacular Things
Maine Return
It is six long days before Cricket finally lands at Portland International Jetport. She has eighty-two unanswered messages when she takes her phone off airplane mode, and she ignores them all as she texts her sister a photo of the taxidermied moose at baggage claim. Her phone rings immediately.
“You’re home!” Mia chirps, and Cricket smiles at the sound of her sister’s voice—it’s been too long since she’s heard it.
The last six days have been nonstop press events, parties, and networking opportunities.
So much champagne. So many boat rides. So much Advil.
“We’re actually at the hospital,” Mia says.
Cricket stops so abruptly that a fellow traveler rams into her from behind. “Is that normal?” she asks. “Is the baby okay?”
“Yup, just meet us here,” Mia says cheerfully. “Did you bring the gold?”
Cricket laughs as she compulsively pats her carry-on bag and feels the circular outline of the medal.
Her two goals for this visit are to take a picture of her newborn niece wearing her hard-earned hardware and to thank Oliver and Mia for their unwavering support.
Without a doubt, it was a decades-long family push that propelled Cricket to the National Team.
Oliver and Mia’s encouragement—and Mia’s steady string of sacrifices—paved the way for Cricket’s achievement.
The gold, Cricket will tell them, imagining Mia’s tears of joy, belongs to all ofus .
Entering the hospital, Cricket puts her phone on silent and pops into the gift shop on the first floor.
She purchases a bouquet of expensive pink roses and a gigantic stuffed giraffe that costs more than a week’s worth of groceries.
But as her manager, Paula, keeps reminding her, Cricket is in a different financial place now than she was a month ago.
The Olympics changed her life. Those seven minutes in goal turned everything on its head, and for the past six days Cricket has been drinking from a firehose of publicity offers, sponsorship deals, and creative-driven collaborations.
The numbers Paula throws around in contract negotiations aren’t just surreal; they’re silly.
Cricket tracks down Mia’s room and knocks on the closed door.
“Yo!” Oliver says, swinging it open and enveloping Cricket in a hug so tight that the giraffe’s stiff hooves dig into her leg.
“You’re here!” Mia shouts from the hospital bed.
Cricket launches off Oliver and runs toward her sister, taking in her familiar face and the baby on her chest. “I brought you—oh wow, she’s beautiful.
” Cricket squeezes herself onto Mia’s bed and demands the sleeping baby in her arms. “She’s perfect,” Cricket says.
“I know people always say that, but she really is.”
“And her game stats are fantastic,” Oliver boasts.
“Ninetieth percentile for height, eighty-fifth for weight, ninety-ninth for head size because apparently that’s a thing, and she’s also managed to pee on each doctor who’s held her, so I’d say that’s one hundred percent goals scored for shots taken. ”
“Amazing.” Cricket grins. “But what’s her—”
“Elizabeth,” Mia answers, scrutinizing Cricket’s face as she delivers the syllables. “Sorry for ignoring your texts; I just really wanted to tell you in person.”
“Oh,” Cricket manages to say. The baby’s face begins to blur as Cricket takes in the moment. “Oh wow.”
History folds in on itself like an accordion and Cricket blinks back tears while trying to comprehend this brand-new North Star for their lives going forward.
Her body floods with a grief-stricken joy only Mia could understand: their mother’s name upcycled into this itty-bitty human, their blood running through her little limbs under her translucent skin.
Admiring the baby’s pink rosebud of a mouth as it tries to nurse the air, Cricket tells her sister the truth: “She’d be so happy. ”
Squished side by side in the hospital bed, Mia rests her head on Cricket’s shoulder and asks, “You think she’d be okay with the nickname Betty? That’s what we’ve been calling her.”
“She’d love that,” Cricket confirms. It’s only when she reaches over to pat Mia’s hand and sees the ID bracelet around her sister’s wrist that Cricket processes the facts of the scene: that Mia is lying in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown, with an IV attached to her arm, six days after Betty’s birth. “Why are you—”
Mia’s dramatic exhale sounds more like an exorcism and puts Cricket on high alert.
“What’s going on?” she asks, looking at Oliver, who keeps his focus on Mia, who stares at their infant daughter, curled up in Cricket’s arms.
“We’ve had very different weeks,” Mia finally says, forcing a meek smile as she faces Cricket. She gestures for Oliver to take the baby, and he does. Father and daughter walk the five steps to the window and examine the puffy clouds that seem to be moving at a clip across the sky.
“I started hemorrhaging,” Mia says to Cricket. “Right after Betty was born.” Her voice wavers as she remembers how scared she was and—if she’s being honest—how scared she still is, in this moment. “I lost enough blood that it caused—everyone calls it an AKI, but it stands for acute kidney injury.”
“Okay,” Cricket says slowly, because she is intimately familiar with injuries, and although they always hurt, they always heal. “Are you better now?”
Mia looks past her sister at Oliver, so Cricket does, too. If she weren’t so well versed in her brother-in-law’s body language, she wouldn’t know that the vein near his jaw twitches when he’s biting his tongue.
“What?” Cricket asks him. They developed a shorthand long ago to cut through all the niceties and get to the point. Mia shifts in her hospital bed, visibly wishing they could talk about the weather.
“The AKI nearly killed her,” Oliver says, his voice low and garbled, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a riverbed. He has never been this afraid or felt this helpless.
“It’s super rare,” Mia says, just before Betty lets out one long cry.
Cricket turns to face Mia. Still lying next to each other in the hospital bed, their noses are just a couple of inches apart.
“So you never went home?”
Mia shakes her head. “Apparently it happens to, like, one percent of women.”
Cricket’s mouth flaps open. Oliver and Mia look at each other like they’re trying to synchronize their alibis.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Mia volunteers.
“That’s true,” Oliver acknowledges, weighed down by sarcasm. “Because it’s actually much worse.” He shifts his gaze from his wife to Cricket and explains, “The AKI damaged Mia’s kidneys so badly that she’s had to have dialysis every day.”
“What is that?” Cricket asks. “I don’t even know what that is.”
Oliver looks down at his sneakers. “She’s treading water,” he says, instinctively running a hand through his dark blond hair.
Cricket sees that his fingernails are chewed down to nubs.
“A machine does the job of her kidneys,” Oliver explains.
“It takes three hours of dialysis every day to clean her blood, just to keep her stable.” He gives Mia a look, and she holds his stare. They are bracing for something.
“What are you not telling me?” Cricket asks.
“It’s important to remember that I’m stable now,” Mia says.
“And her numbers are good,” Oliver adds.
The effort to assuage her concern only makes Cricket more nervous. Laying out all this verbal cushioning before delivering devastating news—they’ve done it to her before.
“Just tell me,” Cricket says, feeling her heart rate quicken. “Please.”
“She needs a kidney,” Oliver says, reaching for Mia’s hand. “To have any semblance of a normal life, Mia needs a kidney, and my diabetes takes me out of the running and—”
“Wait, what?” Cricket looks at Mia. “But I thought it was just an injury?”
Mia nods. “It was,” she acknowledges. “But it was so violent that it developed into CKD—chronic kidney disease.”
“So you need a kidney,” Cricket murmurs. “And we have the same blood type.”
“Yes,” Oliver says. A ragged knot of silence pulls between them—avague but undeniable tension that Cricket can’t discern.
“Is that it?” she asks. “Do they need to run tests? Can I just give it to you now? And don’t—I mean, is this a permanent thing? Don’t laugh, but do I, like—do I get it back at some point?”
“You don’t borrow a kidney,” Oliver says, shaking his head.
“Okay, so you need it forever,” Cricket concludes. “That’s fine, let’s do it.”
“Cricket,” Mia says, shaking her head, a faint wisp of a smile wiped clean from her face. “I love you, and I wish it were that simple.”
“If you need a kidney, I’m giving you a kidney,” Cricket insists, rolling off Mia’s hospital bed and standing up, only to bend over and stretch her calves.
Her muscles have been so tight from all the flying, and practice on Monday is going to come way too soon.
“How is this even a conversation?” Cricket asks, her fingers grazing the hospital floor.
“How did you go six entire days without—”
“You’d have to give up soccer,” Mia interrupts. “You can’t play with one kidney.”
The room reverberates from the aftershocks of such an impossible statement. Cricket stands up straight. She faces Mia before looking at Oliver, who stares back at her with eyes sunken from exhaustion but alive with fear.
“Oh,” Cricket says in disbelief. She opens her mouth but can’t think of anything to add.
“We’re not pretending it isn’t—we understand it’s a very difficult decision,” Oliver says, swaying in place with Betty asleep on his shoulder. “It’s a huge ask, especially right now, given where your career is going.”