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At sixteen you used to wake up in the dark blue morning, not to Liam crying in his crib, or the screech of rusty springs as Frank clawed open the back door, but to the soft insistent ring of your alarm clock. You would sit up, dress quickly—most mornings, the heat wasn’t on. You shimmied into your workout clothes and laced up your sneakers. They were ten bucks at the Goodwill and the soles were already wearing a little thin, and sometimes when it rained too hard after practice you could feel water leaking in through the rubber. Sometimes you could feel the hard pressure of the concrete against the bone of your heel. They weren’t perfect shoes but they were good enough and what you’ve learned, if nothing else, is sometimes that’s all you can hope for.
When you were sixteen, Monica and Frank and all their drunk friends from The Alibi were still there. You thought of them as fixed features of the living room, not unlike the sagging couch that sagged further under their collective weight, or the lamp that used to stand in the corner until one of Frank’s drug dealers picked it up and threw it at Frank and cracked his head open the year you turned eighteen. They would holler in delight when they saw you, beckoning for you to join them. Once, Monica caught your wrist before you could slip away. Her fingers bit in too hard against your skin as she stroked your hair and told you to be careful. Her eyes were blurry and watery and the smell of whiskey was hot on your face. And then she let you go to stumble back to Frank, and you were gone and out the door.
You always stretch. That’s the main thing your coach has told you—to keep up your routine over the summer and never forget to stretch. You stand on the porch for a few extra minutes, shifting your weight against the rotten floorboards that creak beneath your feet. You stretch your hamstrings and flex your calves and pull your hair back tight. Stretching is critical, your coach told you during your last practice of the season. You got those nobby Gallagher knees after all. If you don’t stretch before and after a run, if you fuck up, get sloppy, and bust up your knee, you can fucking kiss track goodbye.
You always stretch.
The streets are quiet. The neon bar lights flicker out. The street lamps dim, their filmy orange light giving way to the sun. A couple old hookers on the corner at the end of your street giggle and flash you toothless grins. A Pontiac bounces past, shocks rigged and firing, and over the pulse of hip hop you hear someone whistle at you, because you’re sixteen and starting to notice the way your running shorts hug your ass, notice the way that men notice your legs, and you’re starting to like it a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. It feels good to be noticed by somebody once in a while—anybody, really.
It’s shitty jogging here. The sidewalk’s too cracked. You keep your head down, your eyes on the ground, until the neighborhood fades to the edges of your vision. Your record is a mile in six minutes but you’re pretty sure that you can get it to under six before you start school again in the fall. You run until you hear only the passing cars on the road and the shudder of your own breath. Sweat dribbles down the sides of your face, past the collar of your t-shirt, your mind blank.
A little bit faster today, you tell yourself, your legs burning as you pump them harder. A little bit further, every single day, just to see how far you can really go.
When you come home, the sun is up and Frank and Monica are gone. There are beer cans piled everywhere in the living room and a cigarette still aglow, resting dangerously on the arm of the couch. There’s no breakfast and the fridge is grimy and empty. Upstairs, Liam fusses.
You bend in half, your wet forehead pressed against the cold countertop, and shut your eyes to the kitchen. You focus for just a moment longer on the burn of muscle in your calves, the vibrations of the street still ringing in the bottoms of your feet. Afterwards you get the formula out and start making toast and set the table with chipped plates.
A month later Monica disappears for good, and two weeks after that Frank leaves too. You wake up not to your alarm clock but to Debbie huddled in your doorway. “Um, Fiona,” she mumbles, pulling at the sleeves of a nightie she’s already outgrown. “Is there anything for breakfast?”
“Don’t worry about it, Debs,” you say. You stumble around your room, struggling for a pair of sweatpants and a hair tie while Debbie lingers, her brow furrowed in that way that she’s starting to pick up from Ian. You trip over your running shoes and kick them sideways into your closet, along with the rest of your laundry. “Let’s go see what we have downstairs. We’ll figure it out.”
Fall comes back around again. You drop out of high school.
You forget what it feels like, until a morning when you’re pretending to be twenty one and beautiful and carefree, and find yourself running along the shore of Lake Michigan. The brine stings your nose and there’s the toxic sewer smell under the waves, but mostly there’s cold air and the pink sky overhead and your dress hiking up too high on your bare thighs as you run faster, faster.
You were good at this once, you remember, only after your latest fling drops you back at home. You stand outside staring up at your house, caving in on itself a little more with each year. “There was a chance I was gonna make State.” That’s what you told him and the words flew out without you even thinking about it, and it felt a little strange for a second, like you were telling him about someone else, someone you’d grown up with way back. An old friend before she’d died, or gotten married, or moved somewhere far away.
It’s Debbie’s idea for you to start running again in the morning. She steals the stopwatch out of her gym teacher’s desk on the last day of school and after daycare’s closed for the afternoon, she walks the five blocks with you to your high school’s pitted, crumbling track and times you as you sprint.
“You should start running again,” Debbie tells you on the walk home. “You’re still fast. I bet if you practiced, you could get to seven minute miles again.”
“Six,” you say, instant and automatic.
“You’re good at it, Fiona,” she says, shoving her hands into the pockets of her worn-thin jeans. It’s summer but she hasn’t worn shorts all year because that little Hermiker bitch won’t stop making fun of her thighs. “You should do something you’re good at.”
“Because I don’t spend enough of my time running in circles,” you joke and Debbie gets that stubborn frown again. So you shrug and you tell her maybe, and that you had fun and you’re glad the two of you got to spend the day together.
What you don’t say is: if you were actually any good at this, you could have found a way to get to State after all. You could have gotten a scholarship, the way some athletes do, and maybe it wouldn’t have been to a great school and you wouldn’t have been the smartest kid in the room, but you could have gone. If you’d only pushed yourself a little harder, a bit further. You could have made it work. It could have happened.
Instead, though, you’re here. You’re packing away another vat of spaghetti into the fridge and sniffing the milk to make sure it hasn’t spoiled and praying that the electricity bill doesn’t take an extra day to process. You’re chasing Carl upstairs to do his homework and making sure Debbie’s applied the aloe that V gave you the other day for her rash. You’re the one leaving the back porch light on for Lip because he’s been gone for most of the summer, and saying goodnight to Ian, and you’re getting dressed and going back to work.
The club shuts down at 4 AM. You’re out at 5. Jasmine whines for you to come drinking but you beg off, complain about a headache, because you always have a headache.
You take the El home and watch the sky change. It looks like rain.
Your legs hurt.
Everything usually hurts. Your feet have this dull, flat ache in the arch and in your heels that sometimes leaves you limping even after you’ve pulled off your work pumps. There’s this throbbing in your lower back and in your stomach. Your knees rattle, threatening to give out on you any day now. Your hands are dried and raw, the skin peeling from chemical soap because they never have gloves for you whenever you pick up a shift washing dishes at this guy Freddy’s diner.
V’s mentioned that she completed a semester of massage therapy classes if you ever want her to take a look at you—usually with Kevin laughing from the other room and asking if he can watch. That makes it easy to laugh as well and avoid answering her. You suspect for all the real skill and care of V’s hands, she can’t lessen the pain in any real way. It feels embedded in you. Sewn into your skin.
This morning, though, your legs feel different. They ache with use and a dulled strength. Your knees hurt. But they held up.
The house is quiet for once when you get home. You kick your heels off into the pile of shoes by the door.
Being up this early used to be special. It was the one part of the day that was yours, something that your useless, junkie parents, and your shitty neighborhood, and your crying siblings couldn’t take from you.
Your feet pound with brief flares of pain. Your legs tremble with effort after standing balanced in impractical shoes for seven hours straight. You stand barefoot at the sink and wash the remaining dishes in gray water. You paste together a plate of PBJ sandwiches and leave a box of Tang on the kitchen counter for the kids when they wake up.
You should sleep but your room is filled with stale, hot air because you can’t scrape together the money for air conditioning this year. So you sit outside, on the edge of the pool and submerge your legs knee-deep in the cold murk. You sit until the morning breaks and the first mutter of thunder reaches you. It’s 7 AM and the world around you is waking up as you pull your eye mask down over your face to shut it out.
Monica comes home for the holidays and it makes everything feel like some kind of demented Hallmark special. You don’t want her here but Debbie does, and Carl too, and you are overruled by the simple fact that in spite of everything you are, and everything you’ve done, you are not their mom.
She tries though. Monica. She still brings her drunk friends home, and she still gives a shit about Frank which baffles you. But she also vacuums, and makes breakfast, and teases Ian, and makes Debbie laugh. She catches your arm one morning, gentler than she used to. Her eyes are clearer and a prettier shade of blue than you remember. She tells you to go for a run. You don’t want to do anything your mother tells you. But she tells you that it’s okay. She’s here now. Go have fun for once, Fiona.
Go for a run.
The toes of your old running shoes are pinched, too small for you. With a little duct tape though, the soles stay intact.
It’s hard to get back into it because you haven’t run since summer with Debs, and because you’ve been smoking too much since sophomore year of high school, and it hurts along with the cold air filling your chest as you race along the lakeshore. Michigan is frozen beside you and the sky is dull with recent snowfall, and it hurts, but you’re doing it.
You’ve been calculating what your recent tips will add to the Squirrel Fund, and about how you’re going to fit your new classes into your work schedule, and whether or not Lip’s going to cave first and come home because you can’t be the one to keep begging.
You run faster. The pain that’s settled itself so comfortably in your body for the last two years fades, and you feel only the sting of the wind on your face and the heat in your stomach and the echo of the road in your legs. Your brain clicks off like it used to. You had forgotten what it felt like not to have to think and scam and calculate and scrape along for every next inch of your life.
You are alone, with only the ragged burn of your own breath and the cracking of the ice along the surface of Lake Michigan.
After Monica slits her wrists on Thanksgiving, Jimmy moves back in with you. “I won’t leave you,” he says. You’re sitting together after Debbie and Carl and Ian have gone back to bed. Your hands smell like Pine-Sol and bleach, and they’ll still smell tomorrow because there are bloodstains that won’t come out of the cabinets no matter how hard you scrub. Jimmy kisses your head. “I won’t leave you,” he murmurs into your hair and you let him pull you backwards into bed.
You don’t sleep though. There’s no school, but there will be hospital bills to check and breakfast to make and cleaning to do. Being in bed feels claustrophobic, pinned by the weight of another person sleeping next to you. You’ve gotten used to sleeping alone.
The room is so stuffy. The cheap cotton of your sheets rubs your skin raw until you want to claw it off. You can hear the wind stealing in through all the cracks in the house that you can’t patch, even though you’ve been trying to fix it for years. You’ve applied plaster and bribed the one Mexican work crew that comes through every summer to fix the places where the house continues to break, and yet the walls keep getting busted, and the mold creeps in, and it all just keeps on crumbling.
You get out of bed, moving quietly enough that Jimmy doesn’t wake up. Down the hall, down the stairs, past Estefania and Lip on the couch together—you’ll think about that later, your brain promises it—but right now you’re going. You’re finding your crappy shoes where they’re buried under everyone else’s and getting your coat. You’re not wearing the proper gear for this sort of thing.
There’s two feet of snow and none of the neighborhood plow guys have been out yet. There’s a Frank-shaped dent in the yard where he was earlier. You should wonder where he is, when he’s coming back. You will, later.
You don’t stretch. You just run.
The snow’s thick, and you struggle along through blankets of it. Your coat is too heavy. You start to sweat after a block and it turns to ice immediately and you’re shivering. There’s snow in your crummy old track shoes because the duct tape is fraying and the hole in the heel is beginning to widen and the rubber’s burst, and you were thinking that you could buy yourself a new pair soon, but how, when Carl needs braces, when Debbie needs new school clothes, when you spent what spare cash you had on that pointless GED test.
For what? your brain screams. For what?
You run and wait for your mind to go blank and it doesn’t. The neighborhood stretches ahead of you, unending. The abandoned, rotting houses rise dark on either side of you, walling you in.
“Remember when you use to run?” Monica asked you, in her little-girl voice, with all the bright childlike enthusiasm you never got to have. “You were so good at it.”
You run and your whole body screams, streams sweat. You run like you stole something, and your ears prick up for the sound of sirens, for a squad car to pull you over, for somebody, anybody, to ask you where you’ve been.
Your toe catches on a rift in the sidewalk. You stumble, and for a moment you keep your balance, and then you stumble again and hit the snow chin first. White numbing cold sprays everywhere and your face cracks against buried concrete and you taste blood in the back of your mouth.
Everything hurts.
When you come home again, you shower with the water too hot because it sends your whole body into a prickly, numbing shock. You scrub at yourself and even after all of that, you can’t completely rid your hands of the smell of bleach. Because it’s not what you’re good at, but it’s all that you’re good for: cleaning up. Hiding. Putting things back into place the very best that you can, over and over again.
Your knee twinges. You know you’ve strained it. You’re glad.
Jimmy’s half-awake when you come back to bed. He shifts to make room for you and pulls the filmy sheets over the both of you.
“You’re all wet.”
“One track mind you got there.” He huffs warm laughter into your ear. Your chest tightens. “I was in the shower. Went for a run.”
“A run? I didn’t know you ran.”
Your back is to him, his arm around your waist. You close your eyes. “I don’t, really. I just…needed to get out of the house for a while.”
“Yeah,” he mumbles. His knuckles stroke soothingly along your lower stomach. “Maybe I’ll come with the next time you go.”
Your mouth twitches with bitten-off laughter. “You wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.”
“That’s true. I usually can’t.” He kisses your ear and smells like your cheap laundry detergent and his knockoff leather jacket. He loves you because he thinks he can save you, and the worst part is how nice that thought is to the both of you.
He pushes closer, grinding against your ass. His mouth’s on the crook of your neck. His knee bangs into yours and you flinch before you can stop yourself.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Just my knee. Hurts.”
His mouth moves down along the slope of your shoulder, your arm, lower still. “I’ll kiss it better.”
“You can try,” you snort, and he turns you on to your back. He tells you how beautiful your body is, even though it feels broken. He tells you how smooth your skin is, even though it feels bruised everywhere. He kisses the inside of your knee and the flare of pain there is persistent and muted.