* * *
—
The phone rings as I am lying in bed, and I don’t answer it. But I can tell by the way the ringing stops that Bowe has picked it up.
He comes in a few moments later.
“It’s Nicki,” he says. “Chan.”
“I don’t want to talk to her,” I say. But then I take the phone from his hand anyway.
“Hi.”
“I’m so sorry, Carrie,” Nicki says.
“Thank you.”
“Listen, I want to tell you something… If you don’t play the US Open, I will consider bowing out as well.”
I can’t quite process the rest of what she’s saying until she adds, “Just let me know what you’re thinking. I want it to be a clean win. I want a fair fight.”
“Honestly, Nicki,” I say, “it just doesn’t matter very much.”
Nicki laughs, like I am making a joke.
* * *
—
My first moment of clarity is the following day—when I finally get up the guts to go into my father’s house.
I stand in the same spot where I stood when I found him. I look at his things: his remote controls and the half-filled water glasses, his magazines and his books lined up on the shelf, his movies stacked to the side, his leather chairs, his panama hats.
I pick up one of his hats. It smells like English Leather and shampoo, earthy and human.
I wonder if this is how he felt when my mother died: flattened by the impossibility and yet inevitability of tomorrow. I am suddenly so tired, no match for the heaviness of gravity. I look at the floor and it calls to me, as strong as a magnet.
I lie down on the carpet of the home I bought for my father. The gift I gave him. And I do not get up for what feels like hours.
I am so angry at myself for thinking he’d be okay.
Don’t I know better? Didn’t I learn this lesson earlier than most? That the world doesn’t care about you? That it will take the one thing you need, rip it right from your arms?
Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die.
But that is the mirage.
That is grief’s dizzying spell.
The fall isn’t never-ending. It does have a ground floor.
Today, I cry for so long that I finally feel the floor under my feet. I find the bottom. And while I know the hole will be there forever, at least for now, I feel as if I can live inside it. I have learned its boundaries and its edges.
I stand up and feel ready to leave my father’s house. But as I walk toward the door, I notice a notebook on the kitchen counter. It’s the one he started keeping this year, full of all his coaching notes.
I walk into the kitchen, and I pick it up. It is a black leather book, as unassuming as can be. The front says Carrie.
I flip through it and see that every page is devoted to a player in the WTA—with stats and plays, strategies—for how to beat them.
Players like Dvo?áková and Flores and Martin and Carter and Zetov, they take up maybe half a page. Perez and Moretti and Nystrom and Machado each get more. And then there are multiple pages on Antonovich and Cortez.
Nicki Chan takes up the entire back half of the book.
He’s clearly rewatched some of her games, made notes on how she performed against every other player. He’s compared our serves and groundstrokes. Our shots. Our stances. Our forms.
And at the top of the last page, he’s written in all capital letters CARRIE CAN BEAT HER.
His handwriting is a mess, and there are whole sentences I can’t read. He has shown no concern for legibility, or whether any of it would make sense to anyone but him. Which is how I know this isn’t a book he wrote to me. He wrote it for himself. This was his plan for New York.
I hold the book to my chest. I inhale sharply. When my mother died, there was almost nothing of her left. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t summon her. I couldn’t hold on.
But there is still a huge piece of my father here. There is still work for him to do. This is one last tournament with my dad. I am holding it in my hands.
And I am going to fucking win it.
* * *
—
“Gwen,” I say into the phone. I am in my kitchen, getting blueberries out of the refrigerator. “I’m going. Confirm with the USTA.”
“You’re sure about this?” she asks.