Seventy Miles to the Mat

I never said that out loud. But the week after districts, I did something I had been avoiding for three months. I drove over to see my cousin Travis.

Travis is my aunt Deb’s son. He is forty-five, and he keeps the books at the grain cooperative in town, and he has done it from a wheelchair since he was eighteen. When we were kids he and Wade were as close as brothers. Wade was a year behind him, and followed him around like a puppy.

I had always known why Travis was in the chair. Everyone did. In the winter of his senior year, at a district tournament in a school gym two counties over, a boy had taken him down wrong and Travis had landed on his head. A broken neck. He never walked again.

But it was one of those things my family does not discuss. It was in the air, like the smell of a burned supper, and we all walked through it for twenty-seven years and never turned on the light.

Travis’s house was small and tidy, with a ramp up the front steps and a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. He made coffee himself and would not let me help.

“I heard about Maddie,” he said. “Placing at districts. Everyone’s talking.”

“She qualified for state.”

“I heard.” He smiled, and it was a real one. “Good for her.”

“Wade doesn’t think so.”

His smile went away, slowly, the way a light goes out on a dimmer. He turned his chair to face the window and looked at the bird feeder for a long time.

“Wade’s a good man,” he said.

“He turned her away, Trav.”

“I know.”

“He said girls get hurt different.”

“I know what he said.” Travis picked up his coffee and set it down again. “Has anyone told you about that night? The way Wade tells it?”

“No. Nobody tells anything.”

He was quiet. Then he said, “Not my place, Nic. Not yet. But I’ll say this. If your girl goes to state, I want to be there.”

“You?”

“I haven’t been to a wrestling match in twenty-seven years.” He gave a small, dry laugh. “I think it’s time.”

I did not understand. I drove home through the dusk thinking only that Travis had gone strange, and I would not understand for another week.

State was the last weekend in February. We drove east on the interstate in the dark with Maddie’s bag in the back seat and two sandwiches in a cooler and her braid tight as a rope.

She had worn her hair in the same braid all season, a single tight rope down her back that she did herself in the car, with her tongue between her teeth. It was her armor.

Rob took the day off. My mother came, which I had not expected, in her good church coat, with her purse in both hands like a woman at a funeral. She sat down in the bleachers beside me and said nothing at all.

“Mom,” I said. “Are you all right?”