Page 74 of Spectacular Things
Return to the Rose Bowl
“You have everything?” Oliver asks Mia for the fifth time since landing.
Mia pats her bag as they walk up the aisle of the plane. “All good,” she says.
This cross-country trip revolves around Mia’s dialysis schedule, which means it is only thirty-six hours long and both flights are red-eyes.
Dialysis, as her doctors are quick to remind Mia, is the only thing keeping her in stable condition.
The process is critical for Mia to experience any semblance of a normal life.
It’s a relative term—“normal life”—especially since officially giving up her job at Oceanside.
Dr. Wilkins had floated different ideas about how Mia might do her job remotely after maternity leave and around her treatments, but Mia bowed out.
Between Betty and dialysis, Mia’s dance card is filled with diapers and needles, milk-encrusted pump parts and infuriating phone calls with the insurance company.
Giving up Oceanside was imperative from a logistical standpoint, but Mia misses her furry patients, and her sense of utility, and the security her paycheck afforded her family.
It had been Mia’s decision to leave; however, it had hardly been her choice.
“I’m glad we’re here,” she says, holding out her finger for Betty, who bounces in the carrier strapped to Oliver’s chest. “It feels—I don’t know, hopeful.”
“Maybe it’s your mom’s influence,” Oliver suggests. “Be positive.”
Mia’s nephrologist had urged them to stay home, deeming the cross-country flight “unnecessarily dangerous and, in no uncertain terms, inadvisable.” Oliver had been in the room to hear the doctor say this, and afterward he’d held Mia’s hand in the elevator and out to the parking lot.
On the drive home, Oliver said he would support whatever she chose todo.
Now, as the family navigates LAX for the first time, the rising sun chases them from one window to the next.
The airport in Los Angeles is full of people wearing black baseball caps and smooth expressions of cultivated chill.
It is a well-hydrated, trim, and wrinkle-free group.
“Everyone is so good-looking,” Mia says, rubbing her eyes. “Even at sixa.m.”
“They’re just tan,” Oliver counters, unimpressed. “You’re the prettiest one here—or at least in TerminalB.”
Their hotel room is conveniently located near the Rose Bowl and contains two queen beds with plush down comforters, crisp white sheets, and, best of all, a Pack ’n Play already set up.
Oliver successfully transitions a sleeping Betty from the carrier to the portable crib and looks at Mia with wide, can-you-believe-it eyes.
She mouths back, “Is this a dream?” because absent are the baskets of dirty laundry and stacks of sticky dishes and the general sense that the walls are closing in around them.
The peace of a luxurious hotel room and slumbering baby lures Oliver and Mia into bed and they crash hard as the sun continues its daily climb.
When Betty acts as an alarm clock a few hours later, Mia ties a red ribbon in her daughter’s tiny blond pouf of hair and pulls on her own lucky jersey—the one Oliver wore during the Olympics after she puked down the front of his.
At 11:11, Mia kisses her watch three times.
She is here to somehow move past her own disappointment and make peace with Cricket’s decision, which means Mia needs all the luck she can get.
When purchasing the game tickets, Oliver intentionally did not go through the National Team’s front office.
He didn’t want to raise any false white flags or faulty olive branches in case Mia changed her mind, or if her kidney function dropped enough percentage points to make it impossible for them to travel.
As a result, they are not sitting in the designated Friends and Family section, and Cricket has no idea they will be at the match against Mexico.
Instead, Oliver and Mia agreed to reach out to Cricket only after the game.
It gives Mia the freedom to watch Cricket play without feeling like she, too, must perform.
Before they leave the hotel for the Rose Bowl, Mia grabs a tube of hydration tablets from her suitcase and shoves them into the clear bag she’s bringing to the game.
In the mirrored elevator, surrounded by somber versions of herself, Mia takes a small sip of water and holds it in her mouth to make it last. As thirsty as she is after the cross-country flight, she can’t put herself at risk of hypervolemia, especially when she is so far from her treatment center.
Oliver examines the art on the side of their daughter’s face and compliments Mia.
“It’s some of your finest work,” he says, kissing the tip of her nose.
In the mirror, a family of three in matching U.S.
jerseys smiles back at them, a lucky red heart drawn in ruby red lipstick on each of their cheeks.