Two Good Girls

Steve's room was three doors down from hers, at the far end of the walkway where the ice machine rattled and hummed, and when she knocked he opened the door already mid-sentence — the counter, the ride down, the way the building had come apart — still in the shirt he'd worn to dinner with the collar pulled open, his face loose and lit in the way of a man who had just watched the finest thing he had ever seen. She had catalogued that face her whole life the way she catalogued opponents: the angle of his pride, the weight behind it, who it got pointed at. Tonight it was pointed at a girl in a room near her own, and Lisa stood in the fluorescent spill of the walkway with her hands in her coat pockets and understood she was about to take it away from him, and that she would never get it back for him, and she knocked anyway.

"Dad. Can I come in?"

He waved her in, already turning back to the room, and the door sighed shut behind her. The room smelled of his aftershave and the steakhouse and the cold he'd carried in off the lot; his jacket lay across the far bed like a shed skin, his keys on the little table under the television, the ice bucket sweating on the dresser. He dropped onto the edge of the near bed, bounced once, and started again on the takedown, and she took the chair by the window and sat in it the way she had sat in every passenger seat of his life — watching him drive, waiting for him to notice the road had changed.

She let him have the match. It cost her to let him have it, knowing what was coming behind it, but she owed him that much — the last clean hour before she took the whole building out from under him. He ran the counter again, the one she had built, the midnight drill, and he kept saying Jade's name, and Lisa watched his mouth shape it and felt the old familiar absence where her own name should have sat.

When he wound down, scraping a hand over his jaw, she said, "I need to tell you something. And I need you to let me finish before you say anything, because if you stop me I won't be able to start again."

He looked at her then, properly, for the first time since she'd come through the door, and something in his face shifted — the easy pride giving way to the wary attention he gave a close score in the third period. "All right," he said.

"Do you remember telling Mom you'd wanted a boy?"

The wary attention went still. "That was —" he started, and stopped, and the room went quiet except for the ice machine through the wall. "That was a long time ago. Before you were born. That's not —"

"I was nine," she said. "Summer. I was in the hall with the lemonade glasses. You said it like you'd ordered something and gotten the wrong thing in the mail." She watched his face try to find a way out and find none. "You don't have to apologize for it. I stopped trying to be your son when I was old enough to understand I couldn't. I just switched to trying to be your wrestler instead."

"Lisa—"

"I won everything they put in front of me. I won it so you'd look at me the way you look at a girl who can take the champion. And you know the worst part? It almost worked." Her voice stayed level; she had practiced this for a year, in the car, in the shower, in the dark of her apartment with the leather warm against her throat. "You came to the meets. You sat in the stands. You just never looked at me. You looked at the scoreboard, and I was the scoreboard, and that was the only way you ever knew how to love me — from the cheap seats, through the numbers."

"That's not fair." His jaw had set, the old heavyweight's jaw. "I'm here, aren't I? I drove four hours to—"

"To watch her." She said it gently, which made it worse. "You drove four hours to watch Jade. You've driven a lot of hours to watch other people's girls do what I taught them. Forty years you've watched this sport, and you hand the word out like candy to every girl who steps off a mat — strangers, girls I coach, a freshman you'd met twice. You gave it to Jade the first time you ever saw her wrestle. You gave it to her again tonight, in front of the whole building, and you meant it." A pause. "You have never once said it to me."

"The word?" He almost laughed, baffled, the way a man laughs at a rule he didn't know existed. "It's just a word. It's a noise I make—"

"It's the only noise I ever wanted from you." Her voice cracked on the last word and she let it, didn't reach to catch it. "So I built a whole person to get it. I built her out of drill hours and film and everything I never got, and you loved her on sight, and I stood at the corner and watched you do it, and I thought —" She stopped, breathed. "I thought, that's the closest I'll ever get. She's the closest I'll ever get to being seen by you."

Steve had gone very still on the edge of the bed, his hands hanging between his knees. "Why are you telling me this now? Tonight? We had a good night. She won—"

"She's not mine to take credit for." The words came out flat. "She never was. That's the part you don't know. She's not my student, Dad. She's not my protégée. She's my owner."

The word sat in the room like a dropped weight. Steve's face went through three things in quick succession — disbelief, then the reflex to laugh it off, then something underneath that stopped the laugh before it came. "Your what?"

"A year ago, on spring break, a girl I'd never met challenged me to a fight in the sand. I'd been drinking — not much. Enough." She could feel the beach under her again, the give of it, the crowd's heat, the phones raised like a crop. "She beat me. She beat me in front of my sister and my friends and a beach full of strangers, and when it was over she told me I belonged to her for the rest of the week, and I did. I belonged to her." Steve had gone the color of paper. "She put a collar on me. She made me kneel. She made me thank her for every lesson, out loud, in front of people, and she made my body do things I will never be able to unsay, and she did it in front of Amanda —" his head came up at that, "— and at the end of the week she told me the collar didn't come off when the sand did. She told me she knew where I went home to. And she was right. She came anyway."

"Stop." His voice was rough. "I don't — you're telling me that girl — that girl who said sir to me, who shook my hand—"

"She said sir because I taught her to. Because you like it. Because the whole year —" Lisa's throat closed and she forced it open. "The whole year, every time you looked at her and saw the finest thing you'd ever seen, I was wearing her collar under my clothes and she was wearing mine. You gave her the word in November and I was standing at the corner with her ring under my shirt, and I thought — he's giving it to her. The one thing I built my whole life to earn, and he's giving it to the girl who owns me." A breath that shook. "And she's the one who told me you would. She knew you better than I did. She knew you'd love her and not me, and she used it, and I let her, because at least someone was finally looking at the thing I made."

Silence. Steve stood up — slow, like a man getting to his feet after a fall — and went to the window. The lot lights made a sodium-orange world of the parked cars, frost beginning to silver the roofs. "Why didn't you tell me?" he said to the glass. "A year. A whole year. Why didn't you come to me?"

"Because you'd never once made me believe you'd come." She said it to his back, quietly, without heat, and watched it land the way a shot lands on a wrestler who thought he was out of range. "I'd been starving my whole life for one word from you, and a stranger on a beach offered me a whole language, and I was so empty I learned it in a week." A pause. "And because when it mattered — when she finally asked me, not the beach, not the game, not the collar — when she asked me if I wanted to be hers, I said yes. In my own kitchen. With my own hand. Nobody was holding a gun to my head, Dad. I walked to my own mirror and I put it on, and I've worn it every day for a year, and I'd do it again." She stood, and reached up, and undid the top button of the sweater, and pulled the wool down off her throat so the collar lay bare in the light — black leather, thin, the brass ring catching the fluorescence. "I'm wearing it now. I told you tonight so that for once in your life you'd actually see me. This is what I look like."

Steve turned from the window. He looked at the collar a long time, and his face did something she had never seen it do — it didn't harden, didn't close; it just came apart at the edges, the way a dam comes apart at the top, slowly, before the water decides. "Amanda," he said. "Was Amanda—"

"She tried to save me." The words came fast, to head him off, to build the wall she had built a hundred times. "She fought them. She fought so hard, and every time she fought, I paid for it, and Jade used me to break her and her to break me, and by the end of the week she'd taken Amanda too, and none of it was Amanda's fault. None of it. If you're going to be angry, don't you dare point it at her."

"I could kill her." He said it flatly, without heat, which made it real. "That girl. I could put my hands on her and—"

"You could try." Lisa heard her own voice come out steady and strange, a voice she didn't recognize. "She'd probably let you, and then she'd own you too, because that's what she does. She collects people who think they can break her." She crossed to the door and stopped with her hand on the knob. "She's not the monster you're making tonight. She's a girl who never learned any other way to be wanted, and I taught her there was another way, and I'm still teaching her, and she's the only person in my life who ever chose me." She looked back at him and let him see all of it — the missed meets, the cheap seats, the word that was never hers, laid out flat and patient and done. "So if you need someone to blame for the fact that I was standing on that beach starving, that person is closer than you think."

She opened the door. The cold hit her face. Behind her, Steve's voice came rough and small, the voice of the man who had driven her to her first tournament and hadn't known what to say then either. "The things you said. The beach. Did they — is there any of it out there?"

She stood in the doorway with the cold walking up her arms. "Parts of it. People filmed it. I've never looked. I don't need to — I was there." She didn't turn around. "I'd advise you not to go looking either. Some things a father shouldn't see." She stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her, and the latch clicked, and she walked the three doors down with the ice machine rattling and the sodium light buzzing overhead, and she had her key in the lock when she heard it — from his room, through the cheap wall, the sound of something heavy hitting drywall, once, and then nothing.

She stood in the cold with the key in her hand. The light under his door stayed on. She went into her own room and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and put her fingers on the leather at her throat and waited for the morning to tell her which man her father was going to be.