Cross Justice (29 page)

“Jannie was so excited she was up before dawn,” I said.

“No way we weren’t making it,” Bree said.

The coach’s grin disappeared. “Just to follow up. Those blood and urine tests?”

“Haven’t heard yet,” I said. “But again, innocent until …”

“Of course,” she said, and then she handed me another waiver and apologized for my having to fill another one out. “This will be interesting, though.”

“How’s that?” Nana Mama asked.

The coach gestured to three women doing ballistic jumps and skips along the track to warm up. “Alice and Trisha are here at Duke. Dawn’s over at Chapel Hill. All three were second-team all-Americans this past season.”

“Jannie know that?” Bree asked.

“I kind of hope not,” Coach Greene said, and she trotted off. “What’s an all-American?” Ali asked.

“They’re among the best in the whole country,” I said.

“Is Jannie?”

“Course not,” Nana Mama said. “Your sister’s only fifteen, but it will be a good experience for her.”

As I’d seen her do twice before, Coach Greene led the girls through a series of exercises designed to get their quick-twitch muscles warmed up, loose, and firing. When they were ready, she broke them into squads of five and ran them through an Indian drill, where they ran at 40 percent unless they were at the rear of the pack. Then they had to sprint to the front.

They did this twice at four hundred meters. Jannie seemed
to have no problem coming from behind in those long, fluid strides and then taking her place at the lead. After a five-minute break for water and more stretching, Greene made some switches, bringing my daughter over with the all-Americans in their early twenties and another girl who was at least four years older than Jannie.

They were watching my daughter out of the corners of their eyes. As I’d seen again and again since earlier that year, Jannie seemed unfazed by the age and experience differences.

“They gonna race now?” Ali asked, standing on the bleacher next to me.

“It’s just practice,” Bree said. “Not for Jannie,” I said.

“Let’s take it to seventy-five percent, ladies,” Greene said when they were lined up shoulder to shoulder. “Three, two, one, go.”

The older girls took off in short, choppy strides that soon opened into longer bounds and a less frenzied rhythm. Jannie seemed to come up to speed effortlessly but lagged a few feet behind the nineteen-year-old and was two yards behind the all-American trio entering the backstretch.

Jannie stayed right there until she’d rounded the near turn, picked up her pace slightly coming down the stretch, and finished just off the shoulder of the nineteen-year-old. She was four paces off the older girls, who were breathing hard. Two of them looked at Jannie and nodded.

No smile from my daughter, just a nod back.

The second quarter mile, at 85 percent, finished much the same way. Then Greene called for 90 percent effort.

Something about the way Jannie rolled her shoulders back and down let me know that it had become serious now, and
even though there were fewer than fifteen people scattered across the bleachers watching, I couldn’t help but stand.

For the first time, Jannie adopted that same chopping fast gait off the line and stayed right with the elite bunch as they rounded the first turn. The older girls picked up the pace down the backstretch. Jannie stayed just off the shoulders of the all-Americans. The nineteen-year-old faded.

My daughter made her move coming into the second turn. She accelerated right by the three and was leading as they entered the stretch.

Even without binoculars, you could see the disbelief on the faces of the older girls, followed by the grit and determination that had gotten them close to the pinnacle of their sport. They poured it on, and two of them ran Jannie down and passed her before the finish. But my girl was a stride behind them and a stride ahead of one of the national-class athletes coming across the line.

“
THAT WAS A
race!” Ali said.

“Jannie made it a race,” Pinkie said, smiling. “Oh my God, she’s good.”

“Dr. Cross?” a man said, coming across the grandstand toward us. Clad in unmarked gray sweats and a blue hoodie, he was in his fifties, a welterweight redhead with a rooster’s confident manner. “I’m Ted McDonald. To be honest, I came here to watch one of the other girls, but I’d very much like to talk to you about Jannie.”

“What about Jannie?” Nana Mama asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

McDonald glanced at the track where Greene and another, older woman in warm-ups were talking to the girls. “I’m a track coach, and a scout of sorts. I’d like to share something with you and Jannie, but let’s do it after Coach Greene and Coach Fall have had a chance to talk with you. Would that work out?”

“Before we leave Durham today, you mean?”

“I know a great place for a lunch that will help Jannie nutritionally recover from that workout,” McDonald said. “My treat?”

I glanced at Bree and Nana Mama, shrugged, said, “Sure. Why not.”

“Great, I’ll find you in the parking lot,” he said. He smiled and handed me a card that read
Ted McDonald, Extreme Performance Systems. Austin, Toronto, Palo Alto.

McDonald shook my hand, went back up into the bleachers, and put his hood up. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I started to Google him and his company. Before I could get the names typed in on my phone, up came Coach Greene and the older woman in sweats, Duke’s head coach, Andrea Fall.

After introductions and handshakes, Coach Fall said, “I was skeptical after the invitational and more so after Coach Greene’s descriptions of Jannie’s running in the two-hundred, but now I’m a believer. How are her grades?”

“Outstanding,” Nana Mama said. “She’s a worker.”

“That makes things a lot easier,” Coach Fall said. “I’d like to formally offer your daughter a full-ride scholarship to Duke when she’s ready to attend.”

“What?” I said, dumbfounded.

“Jannie can’t officially answer my offer until February of her senior year, but I wanted it on the table as the first of what I assume will be many offers,” Coach Fall said.

“She’s that good?” Bree asked in wonder.

“I can count on one hand in thirty years of coaching the number of athletes I’ve seen who have Jannie’s potential,” she replied. “Barring injury, the sky is the limit.”

“This is just mind-boggling,” I said.

“I imagine so,” Coach Fall said. “So anytime you or Jannie
are confused or want to talk about her training or how things are going, feel free to call me. Whatever she chooses to do and whatever college she chooses in the long run is beside the point. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and I shook her hand.

“Take care of her,” Coach Fall said. “She’s a thoroughbred.”

“What kind of bread is thor-oh?” Ali asked afterward.

“A thoroughbred is a racehorse,” Nana Mama said.

“Jannie’s a horse?”

“She runs like one,” Bree said, and she squeezed my hand.

I squeezed back, full of pride but also anxiety. I felt like I was in way over my head when it came to making decisions about Jannie’s future.

“You going to tell Jannie?” Nana Mama asked. “About the offer?”

“I have to,” I said. “But I’ll wait for somewhere quieter.”

When Jannie came up into the stands smiling, Ali said, “You got an offer.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and hugged her. “We’re very proud of you.”

She beamed, said, “Who knew?”

“God did,” Nana Mama said. “You’ve got something only God can give.”

We walked out into the parking lot and found Ted McDonald waiting. He shook Jannie’s hand, told her what he’d told me, and led us to a nearby café that offered organic sandwiches and the like.

We ordered, and he asked who would be making decisions about Jannie’s future training. I said I hadn’t even begun to think about that process.

McDonald said, “Then I’m very glad I happened to be here.”

He filled us in on his impressive background, including his PhD in exercise physiology from McGill University and his stints as a top coach with the Canadian and French national track federations. McDonald currently served as an independent training consultant to athletes at a number of U.S. universities, including Rice, Texas, Texas A&M, UCLA, USC, and Georgetown.

He said, “I’m also a scout for—”

Our lunch arrived. McDonald had ordered a salad for Jannie—vegetables, broiled chicken, and hard-boiled eggs—and a smoothie made from Brazilian acai berries that she said was delicious. I tried a sip and ordered my own.

While we ate, McDonald peppered Jannie with questions. How many pull-ups could she do without stopping? How many push-ups? What was her best standing broad jump? Her vertical leap? Flexibility? Endurance? Her mile time? Fastest recorded quarter?

Jannie didn’t know the exact answer to some questions, but others she knew right off the top of her head.

The questions went on. Had she ever long-jumped? High-jumped? Pole-vaulted? Hurdled?

Jannie shook her head.

“No matter,” he said. “Tell me what happens when you run. I mean, what’s the experience like for you?”

Jannie thought about that, said, “I sort of go off in my own world and everything gets kind of slow.”

“Nerves before you race?”

“Not really, no.”

“Not even today?”

“No. Why?”

“The girls you finished with in that last run were all-Americans.”

“Really?” Jannie said, surprised.

“Really.”

She grinned. “I think I could have beat them.”

“I bet you could have,” he said, then he grabbed a napkin, pulled out a pen, and scribbled for a minute or two.

He pushed the napkin across the table to me and Jannie. It read:

WHPT:

2018—USNC

2020—OGT5

2021—WCPOD

2022—WC

2024—OGGM

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

He told me, and it felt like everything in our lives changed.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON,
I was still struggling with what Ted McDonald had written on the napkin at lunch.

Was that possible? Should you even begin with that end in mind?

“He said we didn’t have to give him an answer right away,” Bree said from the driver’s seat of a rental car we’d picked up in Winston-Salem.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s just a lot to take in.”

“You don’t think she should try?”

“She’s only fifteen,” I said. “Is this when they start thinking like that?”

“Other kids in other sports sure do,” she said as we drove past the Welcome to Starksville sign.

I stared again at the napkin and wrestled with its meaning.

Women’s Heptathlon

2018—U.S. National Champion

2020—Olympic Games Top Five

2021—World Championships Podium 2022—World Champion

2024—Olympic Games Gold Medalist

Was any of this possible? McDonald said it was. He said Jannie might win any of the titles he’d listed as a pure runner, but he’d seen such athleticism in my daughter that he thought she’d be better suited to the grueling multi-skill heptathlon event.

“The heptathlon decides the best female athlete in the world,” McDonald said. “You interested in being that athlete, Jannie? The one who can do anything? Superwoman?”

You could see it in my daughter’s face, how in the very instant he’d thrown out that spark, Jannie had caught fire.

“What would it take?” she asked.

“Your heart, your soul, and years of hard work,” he said. “You up to that?”

She’d glanced at me and then back at him, and nodded. I got chills.

McDonald said that if Jannie consented, he’d visit her regularly in Washington, DC, during the year to teach her the various events within the heptathlon. She’d compete as a runner until he was satisfied with her skills. If we were all happy after the first year, he’d arrange a scholarship at a private school in Austin, where she could work with him on a more consistent basis.

“The school’s excellent. They’ll challenge her academically so she’s ready for wherever she decides to go to college,” he said.

Bree said, “How much is this going to cost us?”

“Zero,” the coach said.

“What?” I said. “How’s that possible?”

McDonald said he was funded by several athletic-shoe and-apparel companies and charged with finding and nurturing track talent. If Jannie became the kind of athlete he thought she was, she’d be in line for endorsements that would make her life easier in the long run.

Free education. A career as a professional athlete. Olympic—

“They’re heading home, Alex,” Bree said, breaking into my thoughts.

Nana Mama, Ali, and Jannie were in Pinkie’s pickup in front of us. Pinkie reached his massive four-finger hand out the window crossing the railroad tracks and waved to us.

I waved back as Bree put on the blinker and pulled into the old Piggly Wiggly parking lot. I folded the napkin, put it in my shirt pocket.

“Think she can do it?” Bree asked as we headed toward that line of trees on that short bluff above the tracks.

“I’m beginning to think she’s like you,” I said. “Capable of anything and everything.”

She smiled, poked me in the ribs, said, “When’d you get so sweet?”

“Day I met you.”

“Good answer.”

“I have my moments.”

When we reached the trees, Bree led me to a big beech tree that overlooked the tracks. There were steel steps screwed into the tree. She said bow hunters used them, and she’d bought them at the local army-navy.

She climbed up around ten feet to another recent purchase.
The Bushnell night-vision trail camera was designed to take pictures of whatever came by. Hunters used them to pattern deer. There seemed to be a commercial for them every eight minutes on the Outdoor Channel.

“Even Jim Shockey uses them,” Bree said. “So I thought, Why not? We’ll take pictures of every train that comes through Starksville.”

Bree had put up this camera and another one three hundred yards west. She’d checked the memory cards once after twenty-four hours and found pictures of riders heading north on the train late Thursday afternoon, just about the time we’d seen riders the previous Thursday as we drove into town.