Mary and O'Neil Page 0,18

do well, a feeling so intense he would step out of his body if he could. He hears his voice, and Miriam’s, the two of them yelling:

“Go, go, go!”

For the final moments of the race everything seems to slow. As the runners take the last turn around the field, O’Neil makes his move; he has kept something for the kick and in a burst he uses it, passing one runner and then another, his arms and legs moving in perfect headlong syncopation. Even so far away Arthur believes he can see his son’s face, and the pain that is etched across it.

“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine . . .”

The first runner crosses the line, the pack just steps behind. Arthur can hear his voice, yelling his son’s name, and he is yelling still when O’Neil crosses the finish, a split second off third place. He expects his boy to collapse on the ground, utterly spent, but this doesn’t happen. O’Neil slows to a stop, grinning, his chest heaving, his hands riding his slender hips, and then looks upward toward the bleachers, his eyes narrowed in a squint. Arthur, at the finish line, is about to call out O’Neil’s name to show him where they are, but then O’Neil finds who he is looking for—not Arthur and Miriam, but a girl whom Arthur knows is Sandra. Somehow he has missed her; or perhaps she has arrived late, after Arthur had stopped looking. She bounds down the aluminum bleachers and at once is beside him.

Arthur hears Miriam whisper, “God.”

“Steady,” Arthur says, and takes her elbow. “Let’s go see.”

O’Neil is almost too euphoric to notice them. “Can you believe it? Fourth place.” He shakes his head in utter amazement. “I’ve never done that well. Not even close. It was the last turn when I knew I could do it. I saw myself passing those guys, and then I just did.”

He introduces Sandra, who shakes first Miriam’s hand and then Arthur’s, meeting his grip with a firmness that is at once surprising and completely natural. The last runners are crossing the line, and in the confusion Arthur has the chance to look at his son’s new girlfriend—to examine her without seeming to. She is prettier, even, than in the photograph—her eyes are somehow brighter, bluer, her hair a truer shade of gold—but her beauty, Arthur decides, is not the kind that everyone would necessarily notice, nor something she herself is aware of, as some pretty girls are. She is wearing jeans and a wool cap, like a beret, and a puffy nylon ski jacket, navy blue and zipped to the collar against the cold; Arthur can see, peeking through the neckline, a pink oxford shirt with a threadbare collar that he recognizes as his son’s—a shirt, in fact, that used to be Arthur’s. He can tell she is as surprised as Arthur is that O’Neil has done so well, and that her surprise is part of his son’s happiness; it is an unexpected gift he has given both of them.

When the last runners have crossed, the coach steps up and claps O’Neil on the back. “See what I’m saying? About the kick?” He puts his bearded face close to O’Neil’s and thumps the middle of his chest with the butt of his fist. “You have to go in.” He turns to Arthur and Miriam and shakes their hands again, as if meeting them for the first time.

“Your son ran quite a race,” he says. “I don’t know what you fed him last night, but do it again sometime.”

Despite O’Neil’s surprising finish the team as a whole hasn’t done that well. Most have finished in the second pack, well behind the leaders. Their strongest runner, whom they were counting on to place in the top three, twisted an ankle out on the course and was forced to drop out. O’Neil points him out, an ordinary-looking boy hobbling around the infield with a sack of ice in his hand.

“I guess he didn’t go in,” O’Neil says. “To tell the truth, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a good runner, but that’s not everything.”

Arthur looks away from the boy and returns his gaze to O’Neil, who is putting his sweats back on and sucking a wedge of orange that someone has handed him. The pleasure he feels in his son, he knows, is something new. He is watching his son step into himself, into life. Suddenly Arthur knows that, from this day, the love that he feels for O’Neil