The Favorites: A Novel(42)
Garrett Lin: People think my mom put all this pressure on us, to win or to be perfect or…but the truth is, she didn’t need to. I pressured myself. I knew it wasn’t normal. But I told myself we weren’t normal. We were Lins. We were supposed to be extraordinary. And with Bella and Zack struggling so much, it was all up to me. I had to win.
Chapter 27
“Our final skaters, from the United States of America: Katarina Shaw and Garrett Lin!”
Hand in hand, Garrett and I glided to the center of the ice. We hadn’t watched Yelena and Nikita’s free dance, but based on the collective gasp the crowd in the Luzhniki Palace of Sports had let out halfway through their Swan Lake program, I knew our rivals had made at least one obvious mistake.
Garrett and I had taken the lead after our flawless Midnight Blues compulsory, and we’d extended it with a season’s best performance of our energetic original dance to selections from the musical 42nd Street. Now all that stood between us and our first world title was the four minutes of the free dance. Skate clean, and we’d be heading into the upcoming Olympic season as reigning world champions.
Our free was set to a Tchaikovsky piece too: his symphony inspired by the Shakespeare play The Tempest. This was Sheila’s idea of subtle psychological warfare: showing up our competition by outskating them to music by the same composer (and a Russian legend, no less).
Garrett’s costume was dyed with a delicate oceanic swirl, while mine had bedazzled lightning cutting across the chest. We were meant to be the sea and the storm, colliding in a passionate clash of raw, natural power. The conceptual elements seemed a bit over the top to me. But in comparison, Volkova and Zolotov’s traditional balletic choreography seemed downright tired. We’d already bested them at the Grand Prix Final in Beijing.
And our other biggest rivals were already out of the running. I hadn’t spoken to Bella since the night before, when she and Zack officially withdrew after a lackluster original dance that left him limping off the ice. They’d already had to simplify their programs significantly to accommodate his worsening knee issues; even if they had been able to finish the competition, they wouldn’t have medaled. He was scheduled for knee surgery after Worlds, and his doctor thought he should be able to return to the ice by the fall. But there was no guarantee.
I assumed my starting position: embracing Garrett, my head tilted to rest on his shoulder. After three seasons of skating together, I still felt as if I barely knew Garrett Lin, but I knew this: he was petrified when we took the ice, every time. From a distance, he came across as serene and confident, but close up I could smell his sweat, feel his quickened pulse against my temple. Somehow his panic made me calmer, as if we were a pendulum swinging into stillness.
I took a deep breath, waiting for the first note of the sedate string and brass melody that underscored our opening choreographic sequence.
That’s when I saw him.
He stood on the steps leading up into the stands, to the left of the judges’ table. He wore a black wool coat, and his dark hair was shaved close to his scalp.
He looked entirely different from the Heath Rocha I’d known and loved. And yet recognition struck my heart like a bell.
“What’s wrong?” Garrett whispered. Without realizing it, I’d lifted my head, drawing my body bowstring-taut in his arms.
But it was too late to explain. Our music started, and we were off—a beat too late, but Garrett skillfully caught us up without missing a step.
Skating with Heath, I always felt right on the edge of control, swept away. With Garrett, everything was precise. Correct. Controlled. All the things that came so naturally with Heath had to be manufactured. I had to remind myself to smile, to gaze into Garrett’s eyes, to reach for him at the right moments, with the right amount of passion and yearning. It became part of the choreography, one more thing to learn along with the steps and spins and lifts.
The artifice had bothered me initially. That day, though, I was grateful for it. By the time we reached our first set of twizzles—coinciding with the shower of woodwind flourishes that signaled the approaching musical storm—muscle memory had taken over, and I was performing impeccably as ever.
As I exited the final spin, though, I couldn’t help sneaking another look at the steps.
He was gone.
I told myself I was imagining things. Letting my nerves get the better of me. I’d stopped searching for Heath years before—after the authorities told me he was an adult who had left of his own volition and so couldn’t be considered a missing person, after the twins’ skating-world contacts turned up zero hints as to his whereabouts, after Sheila gave me a talking to about how I needed to let it go and focus on the present, because my personal preoccupations had no place on the ice with her son.
I’d stopped searching, but I’d never stopped looking. How many times over the past three years had I worked myself up with the worry that Heath would appear in the stands at a competition? How many times had I mistaken a dark-haired stranger for him—walking in city crowds, or waiting in line to board a plane or buy a coffee?
That’s all this was. Another phantom, conjured by my anger and heartbreak and the unspeakable fear that Heath was truly gone for good.
I didn’t have time for fear. I had a title to win. So I threw myself into the dance, picking up speed as Tchaikovsky’s tempest intensified with a thunderous timpani roll. As we reached the climax of the piece, turbulent strings and cymbals crashing like waves against rocks, Garrett swung me up into our most dramatic lift. I balanced with a single skate against his leg and spread my arms wide like a sorceress casting a spell, skirt whipping behind me as we shot across the ice with so much power it was as if we’d created our own gale, until—