was falling through space. There was a white flash of relief, resignation, before his father’s arms caught him and lifted him at once in a great flourish of triumph and strength and pride, and then they were both laughing in delight, and Michael swung his son through a loop of blue infinity before setting his two feet back on the ground again. He kissed him on the nape of his neck, under the wet curl of his hair.
‘That’s my boy. You’ll climb the Cap before you’re twenty, just like your old man. And then some.’
Sam let him tug his ear and pummel his shoulder, after the kiss, but he knew that he wouldn’t do what his father expected. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, whatever the Cap might be.
Twenty years later, he made himself concentrate on the length of his stride and keeping his breathing even. Running was good for that, always. You could go for miles, lost in your thoughts and memories, if that was what you wanted. And if you didn’t want to think you could edit everything else out of your mind, everything except legs and lungs, and the way ahead.
The track brought him to the tip of the lake, then rose steeply through a belt of Douglas firs to meet the blacktop where it followed the crest of the ridge. With his head up and his breathing still steady even after the hill climb, Sam ran easily along the roadside. One pick-up truck came by, travelling in the opposite direction, but there was no other traffic. It was less than two miles to the turning to his father’s house.
The McGrath place lay back from the road, hunched up against the black trees as if it would disappear among them if it could. The white paint on the window frames was faded to grey and it was peeling in places, and the curtains at three of the four windows were drawn tight, with that dead look of never being opened whatever the time of day. Mike McGrath’s old station wagon stood on a patch of scrubby ground, with Sam’s rental car beside it. Sam had slowed to a walk as soon as he reached the mailbox on its splintered post and the cold wind immediately skewered between his ribs. The sleet had started up again. Sam pulled up the hood of his fleece jacket and skirted the two cars on his way to the door.
His mother used to grow flowers just here. Cosmos and marigolds and goldenrod, he remembered. She loved bright colours. In spite of the cold he loitered deliberately where the margin of her garden used to be, thinking of the way she used to come out here on summer evenings to snap off the heads of fading blooms or pull up tufty clumps of grass from between the clods of earth. The house faced west and the sun would still be colouring the front of it when the woods behind had turned dark.
Sam took one deeper breath. He couldn’t linger out here, he told himself. He would have to go in now and tell him.
He pushed open the front door, putting his shoulder to it because damp had warped it and given it a tendency to stick.
Mike was sitting in his chair, watching daytime TV. There was a pot of coffee on the stove and an unwrapped loaf of pre-sliced bread spilling like a soft pack of cards on the counter. Sam pushed back his hood again as his father looked up at him.
‘Good one?’ the old man asked, without much interest.
‘Yeah. I went along past the Bowmans’ place and round the lake.’
‘Quite a way, then.’
‘Not bad. It’s cold out there.’
‘Coffee’s made.’
‘Thanks.’
Sam poured himself a cup and drank a couple of mouthfuls, remembering not to wince at the taste.
‘Do you want to watch this?’ he asked pointedly. The yammering faces of some talk show filled the screen with stories of outrage, attended by resentment and rancour. Although it was appropriate enough, he thought. There was always disappointment here, in this house. A rich deposit of it, seamed with the ore of anger. So why not on the box as well? Maybe it was why Mike liked all these programmes. He felt at home with them.
‘I thought maybe we could talk,’ Sam added.
He moved his father’s stick from beside his chair so that he could pull his own seat closer, partly blocking out the TV screen. The result was that they sat almost knee to knee. Sam could have reached and taken Mike’s hand between his own, but he didn’t. They had never gone in for touching, not since Sam was a little boy.
Mike’s response was to aim the remote and lower the volume by a couple of decibels. Then he turned to look his son in the face.
‘I didn’t qualify,’ Sam said.
There were two, three beats of silence.
Mike rubbed the corner of his mouth with a horny thumb. ‘Huh?’
‘I ran in Pittsburgh last week. It was the 2000 Trials.’
Sam had been training for the City of Pittsburgh Marathon ever since the USA Track & Field international competition committee had announced that the Olympic men’s marathon team would once again be decided, as it had been for more than thirty years, by a single race. And for Sam it had been one of those days when the running machine had kept stalling and finally quit. He didn’t suffer many of them, but when the machinery did let him down it was usually to do with the weight of expectation binding and snagging. His father’s expectations, specifically. Sam was fully aware of the dynamic between them, but awareness didn’t change it or diminish the effects. Even now.
‘I didn’t know.’
The old man’s face didn’t give much away. He just went on looking at Sam, waiting for him to explain himself.
It was so characteristic, Sam thought, that he wouldn’t have known or found out about the run in advance even though his son was a contender for the US Olympic team. Mike lived a life that was defined by his own ever-narrowing interests. He watched TV, he read a little, mostly outdoors magazines, he saw a neighbour once in a while and drank a beer.
But it was equally characteristic, Sam acknowledged, that he hadn’t told his father about Pittsburgh. He had qualified for the Trials by running a time better than two hours twenty in a national championship race and he had called Mike immediately afterwards to tell him so.
‘That’s pretty good,’ had been the entire response.
In adulthood, Sam had trained himself not to resent or rise to his father’s lack of enthusiasm. It’s the way he is, he reasoned. He wanted me to do one thing and I did another.
But even so, this time Mike had seemed particularly grudging. And so he had not told him anything more about the big race beforehand, or called him with the bad news once it was over. Instead, he had waited a week and then come down to visit the old man. He had played various versions of this scene in his head, giving Mike lines to express commiseration, or encouragement for next time, or plain sympathy – but the most cheerless scenario had been closest to reality. Mike was neither surprised nor sympathetic, he was just disappointed. As he had been plenty of times before. The pattern was set now.
‘So what happened?’ Mike asked at last.
Sam caught himself shrugging and tried to stop it. ‘I was fit enough and I felt good on the start. I don’t know. I just couldn’t make it work.’
‘What time did you do?’
‘Not good. Two twenty-eight. I’ve done plenty better than that, beat all the other guys who came in ahead of me
