“And? ”
“And,” she said, sighing, “he said he totally understood, we had another drink, and I said yes to dinner anyway.”
“What about the vitamins?”
“I don’t know.” She flipped her hand at me. “These things happen.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking over at Reggie again. He’d been so patient, and eventually he, too, got what he wanted. Or at least a chance at it. “Don’t I know it.”
By the time I went to the bank, ran a couple of errands, and then doubled back around to the greenway, the Vista 5K was pretty much over. A few runners were still milling around, sipping paper cups of Gatorade, but the assembled crowd had thinned considerably, which was why I immediately spotted Olivia. She was leaning forward on the curb, looking down the mall at the few runners left that were slowly approaching the finish line.
“No Laney yet?” I asked.
She shook her head, not even turning to look at me. “I figure she’s dropped out, but she has her phone. She should have called me.”
“Thanks to everyone who came out for the Vista Five-K! ” a man with a microphone bellowed from the grandstand. “Join us next year, when we’ll run for our lives again!”
“She’s probably collapsed somewhere,” Olivia said. “God, I knew this was going to happen. I’ll see you, okay?”
She was about halfway across the street when I looked down the mall again and saw something. Just a tiny figure at first, way off in the distance.
“Olivia,” I called out, pointing. “Look.”
She turned, her eyes following my finger. It was still hard to be sure, so for a moment we just stood there, watching together, as Laney came into sight. She was going so slowly, before finally coming to a complete stop, bending over with her hands on her knees. “Oh, man,” Olivia said finally. “It’s her.”
I turned around, looking at the man on the stage, who had put down his microphone and was talking to some woman with a clipboard. Nearby, another woman in a Vista 5K T-shirt was climbing a stepladder to the clock, reaching up behind it.
“Wait,” I called out to her. “Someone’s still coming.”
The woman looked down at me, then squinted into the distance. “Sorry,” she said. “The race is over.”
Olivia, ignoring this, stepped forward, raising her hands to her mouth. “Laney!” she yelled. “You’re almost done. Don’t quit now!”
Her voice was raw, strained. I thought of that first day I’d found her here with her stopwatch, and all the complaining about the race since. Olivia was a lot of things. But I should have known a sucker wasn’t one of them.
“Come on!” she yelled. She started clapping her hands, hard, the sound sharp and single in the quiet. “Let’s go, Laney!” she yelled, her voice rising up over all of us. “Come on!”
Everyone was staring as she jumped up and down in the middle of the road, her claps echoing off the building behind us. Watching her, I thought of Harriet, doubtfully eyeing those vitamins as Reggie dropped them into the bag, one by one, and then of me with Nate on the bench by the pond the last time we’d been together. And if I don’t? he’d asked, and I’d thought there could be only one answer, in that one moment. But now, I was beginning to wonder if you didn’t always have to choose between turning away for good or rushing in deeper. In the moments that it really counts, maybe it’s enough—more than enough, even—just to be there. Laney must have thought so. Because right then, she started running again.
When she finally finished a few minutes later, it was hard to tell if she was even aware that the crowds had thinned, the clock was off, and the announcer didn’t even call her time. But I do know that it was Olivia she turned to look for first, Olivia she threw her arms around and hugged tight, as that banner flapped overhead. Watching them, I thought again of how we can’t expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it’s a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.
Back home, I sat down with my calculus notes, determined to study, but within moments my mind wandered past the numbers and figures and across the room to the picture of Jamie’s family, still up on the wall over my desk. It was the weirdest thing—I’d studied it a thousand times, in this same place, the same way. But suddenly, all at once, it just made sense.
What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn’t just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right—we had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn’t expect them to be. You couldn’t make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.
So my true family was not just my mom, lost or found; my dad, gone from the start; and Cora, the only one who had really been there all along. It was Jamie, who took me in without question and gave me a future I once couldn’t even imagine; Olivia, who did question, but also gave me answers; Harriet, who, like me, believed she needed no one and discovered otherwise. And then there was Nate.
Nate, who was a friend to me before I even knew what a friend was. Who picked me up, literally, over and over again, and never asked for anything in return except for my word and my understanding. I’d given him one but not the other, because at the time I thought I couldn’t, and then proved myself right by doing exactly as my mother had, hurting to prevent from being hurt myself. Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete—like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.