Page 62 of Spectacular Things
“Here we go,” Oliver says, punching the air as he matches her pace. “Full Terminator.”
“What?” Cricket asks, pretty sure it’s the wind that’s making her eyes water.
“We believe in you,” Oliver says. “You can make the National Team, and we’re going to help you as much as we can, especially while you’re home.”
“But Mia’s pregnant,” Cricket says, stating the obvious. “You’re going to be a dad. There are cribs to compare and baby showers to endure.”
Oliver laughs what Cricket knows to be his genuine laugh, which is more like a seal bark, and Cricket sees the silver fillings in the back of his mouth.
“Plenty of time for that in the months to come,” he chuckles.
They turn onto Spruce Street, thereby silently agreeing to do the big loop.
“I thought we could train at USM,” he offers.
“I have twenty-four/seven access to the weight room, and the field house is great for our purposes—I know you’re a professional now, but I’ve developed some strength-and-agility circuits that might be useful. ”
Cricket nods just as the wind dies down and the sky lightens from black to gray.
She knows that by the time they hit the last mile of the big loop, which runs along the beach where Liz held her morning sessions, the sun will crest the horizon, hot pink and orange and beaming back at them as if to say the same thing the U.S.
Women’s National Team likes to yell in the locker room, and on the field, and wherever the game takes them: LFG! Let’s FuckingGo!
“That sounds awesome,” Cricket says, lifting her legs a little higher. “Thank you.”
Over the next two weeks, Oliver’s training is even more grueling than Cricket imagined: He brings in collegiate runners and has Cricket participate in their workouts—sets of 200-, 400-, and 800-meter sprints.
On the track, Cricket gets routinely destroyed and deeply humbled, but she doesn’t quit.
Six days a week, Cricket performs agility drills in the field house until she can’t see through the sweat stinging her eyes and throws so many medicine balls against the wall that she hears the rubbery thwack thwack thwack in her sleep.
Cricket leaps and dives for shots she knows she won’t get to, because the whole point is to extend her length, grow what she can do, and minimize what she can’t.
She devotes every waking hour that she’s not training to active recoveries that require the same miserable discomfort as any speed workout.
She ignores the voices that tell her she’s not good enough.
She listens to her body complain and says, Okay, yes, but one more .
“Again!” Oliver yells in the field house during an afternoon session. “Let’s see some urgency in the distribution this time.”
Tired and testy, Cricket wipes her face with the hem of her shirt and says, “I thought the P in your MAP stood for ‘patience’?”
“Actually, it’s for ‘piss off.’?” Oliver grins, jogging toward her. “Nah, in all seriousness, though, I’ve abandoned my MAP,” he tells her. “It’s too limiting; I realized it’s better to ask questions than try to give directions.”
“Questions?”
Oliver nods. “Are you making the most of this moment?” he asks. “What did you have to give up to get here? How do you want to leave the field after the game?”
“You’ve thought about this,” Cricket says.
“It’s my full-time job to think about this,” Oliver agrees. “Opportunity, Monomyth, Legacy,” he says, counting them out on his fingers. “On the first and last day of the season, I ask my players to reflect on all three.”
“What’s a monomyth?” Cricket asks.
“A hero’s journey,” Coach explains, casually balancing a ball on his laces. “What adversity have you overcome—or maybe you’re still grappling with—on your quest to become a better player?”
“That’s intense,” Cricket says, jogging toward the closest ball. “I guess this is the opportunity right here, so let’s go again.” Only half mocking him she shouts, “This time with urgency in the distribution!”
Although she would never admit it to Oliver, Cricket can’t stop thinking about his three questions revolving around her opportunity, monomyth, and legacy.
Over winter break, she finds they’re all in constant conversation with one another as she digs deep during training.
After a week, Cricket actually befriends the physical suffering and embraces the moments of doubt.
It’s all part of getting stronger and smarter.
“Yes, Cricket, yes!” Mia cheers inside USM’s field house. A few days before Christmas, Mia cups her hands around her mouth as she watches her sister struggle for power against a black resistance cable. Mia then turns to Oliver. “What’s she doing?”
“Working on her deceleration,” Oliver says. “She has to explode from one position to another in midair.”
“Like a cat landing on her feet,” Mia observes.
“Yes.” Oliver agrees. “But also with the ball in her hands if she wants to make a world-class save.”
“What about a world-class dinner?” Mia asks, tapping her watch.
She stopped at the field house on her way home from work not only to show her support but also to keep them running on time.
While Coach leads Cricket in agility, strength, speed, and technical training, Mia is in charge of scheduling and fuel.
Left to their own devices, Oliver and Cricket would forget to eat and would forgo sleep to fit in an extra set of dead lifts.
Before, after, and even during her days at Oceanside Animal Hospital, Mia researches performance-optimizing foods with the same obsessive, academic mindset that earned her straight A’s through high school and admission to Yale.
Each meal and snack—every single calorie that Cricket consumes—should enhance her abilities on the field.
This morning, Mia made egg-white veggie omelets with a side of fruit.
For each of their lunches, Mia packed a grilled chicken breast, sautéed spinach, a banana, orange slices, almonds, and a slow-roasted sweet potato.
Tonight, they’ll grill fish and asparagus—so long as the grill isn’t frozen shut after yesterday’s ice storm.
Teaching herself food science is an unexpected but welcome distraction from everything else Mia is learning these days—specifically, how this baby growing inside her is already changing her outlook.
Mia’s pants barely fit and she’s forced to sleep on her side, but most importantly, she misses her own mother in a brand-new kind of way.
She aches for Liz’s insistent optimism and longs to ask Liz how she raised them all by herself, and which lullabies she sang, and if her feet grew a lot—because Mia’s already jumped up half a size—and was she scared? Because Mia is so scared.
The enormity of motherhood—it’s infinite, all-encompassing responsibility—terrifies Mia in her bizarre pregnancy dreams, and at work, and when she’s brushing her teeth, and while she’s swallowing her prenatal vitamin.
It scares her everywhere and all the time except when she is standing at the two-hundred-meter line at USM’s indoor track, stopwatch in hand, helping Oliver record Cricket in her sprint workout, or preparing the week’s meal plan.
The idea of being someone’s mother seems too big a job except when Mia writes out notes of encouragement to hide inside her sister’s running shoes, or her winter gloves, or her gym bag.
It’s in these moments of clear-eyed devotion to Cricket that Mia remembers the greatest lesson her own mother demonstrated on a daily basis was how to give with her whole heart.
On Christmas, Cricket and Mia nestle next to each other on the pink floral couch while Oliver cleans up from dinner, a mountain of dishes stacked high in the sink.
The tree is decorated in their mother’s hodgepodge collection of ornaments from Goodwill and, as always, Mia recites the words to It’s a Wonderful Life .
Traditionally, the Lowes have enjoyed eggnog while watching Liz’s favorite Christmas movie, but this year, out of respect for Mia’s baby and Cricket’s ambitions, they have swapped out rum and heavy cream for honey and chamomile.
“Oliver!” Cricket shouts so he can hear her over the running kitchen faucet. “I love you!”
“Glad you like them,” Oliver calls back. He and Mia splurged to give Cricket Normatec compression boots—an updated version of the ones Sloane and her dad had when Cricket stayed with them in Florida.
“Thank you,” Cricket says, nudging Mia as she stares down at her booted legs with appreciation. “These are such game changers.”
“So are those,” Mia answers dryly, nodding toward the tree, at Cricket’s Christmas presents to her: a foam roller and a fancy blender, two items Cricket complained about not having at home.
“And I can’t thank you enough for my gifts,” Oliver deadpans. “Nipple cream and hemorrhoid cream? You spoil me.”
They were meant for Mia, of course, after the baby came, but Cricket had wrapped the gifts while watching a recent interview of Teague. In her distracted state, she’d mislabeled the presents.
“You all set for tomorrow?” Oliver asks Mia as he dries his hands and walks over to join them on the couch.
“What’s tomorrow?” Cricket asks.
“Ultrasound,” Mia says, touching her stomach.
They’ve barely spoken about the baby, focused as they’ve been on Cricket.
When she leaves in two weeks, Mia and Oliver are both anxious and eager to resume their new-parent freakout.
Until then, and compared to the great unknown beating toward them, obsessing over Cricket’s physical, emotional, and gastrointestinal well-being feels like a nice little staycation, a sense of control amid the chaos.
“You’re not going?” Cricket asks Oliver with lifted eyebrows.
“He’s been to all of them,” Mia says. “They get boring after a while.”
“Baby is moving, there’s her hand, blah, blah, blah,” Oliver says before taking a sip of his tea.
In reality, he and Mia live for ultrasound days—the first time he saw his daughter’s foot, he’d been so moved that he’d leaned down and cried into Mia’s neck.
Those are her toes, he’d wept. Her perfect little toes .
But the ultrasound is scheduled for ten a.m., which is right in the middle of Oliver and Cricket’s first training session of the day.
As much as Oliver would like to go, and as much as Mia wishes he could be there with her, they promised to prioritize Cricket’s dream over winter break.
It seems only right to help Cricket achieve her life goal now that they are well on their way to getting exactly what they want.
The next morning, Cricket texts Mia during a water break to see how the ultrasound went, and her phone immediately buzzes with a new message: Got a minute?
Before Cricket can process anything, her phone starts to ring. “Hello?” she answers, as if she doesn’t have the caller’s name saved in capital letters.
“Cricket, it’s Teague.” She sounds uncharacteristically ruffled. “Is now a good time?”
Cricket freezes in the field house, Oliver just a few feet away, looking over with concern. She gives him a reassuring wave so he knows it isn’t Mia and then turns her back, trying not to hyperventilate.
“Here’s where we’re at,” Teague continues. “Des is sitting out January Camp and I know it’s not a ton of notice, but I’m hoping you’ll come in her place.”
Teague talks through logistics and expectations, but Cricket barely hears her.
She is going to camp. She is being invited, right now, to January Camp, in an Olympics year, and she is ready.
She is fit and fired up, and this is her chance.
This is her time. And somehow, she already knows, before she even hangs up the phone, that this is the beginning of her highlight reel.