At the airport Inez went to the taxi line and Mara went downstairs for the rental car.
They had landed within eleven minutes of the time on the itinerary. Inez had slept through most of the flight, her head tipped toward the window, the muscles in her jaw working once as though she were chewing something hard. Mara had read fifty pages of a book and could remember almost none of them. The paperback was now in the pocket of her coat, a corner bent by the seat belt. She kept touching it while she waited for the rental shuttle.
Inez was going home before she went to the tournament hotel. They would meet on court at four. Mara had offered to take her and the bags, and Inez had said a taxi was easier. It was. The city lay between the airport and the home where Inez would leave her suitcase, and the tournament lay in another direction. Mara had watched her put the bags in a cab without finding another useful offer.
Her car was on the fourth floor. She walked past it once, confused by the reflection of a white pillar in the windshield, then found the right space and sat down. On the passenger seat she put her phone, the book and a folded map of the rental lot. There was no one to hand them back to her when she reached the road.
She had come to Chicago with Tess when Tess was thirteen. A qualifying tournament, a hotel with an indoor pool Tess was not supposed to use before her match. They had used it anyway. Mara could remember the square patches of light on the bottom, the chlorine smell in a towel that had followed them home. She could not remember whom Tess had beaten. Two matches, perhaps three, and a girl in a visor whose mother had shouted the score between points.
The road opened ahead of her. She moved into the right lane and stopped trying to remember.
At the hotel, the desk clerk asked if she needed a second key.
“Just one.”
She took it upstairs, unpacked everything except the shoes she would wear that afternoon and hung the shirts where the bathroom steam might ease the creases. There was a small desk, a window that opened only a few inches and a bed too wide for the room. She moved the extra pillows to the chair. She called Owen while she ate a sandwich from downstairs.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yes. At the hotel. The flight was fine.”
He was in his car, the turn signal going for a long time before he spoke again. He had arranged leave for the weekend. He would fly in Friday morning, see what there was to see. Neither of them named the possible draw. It had been available since the day before.
“Tess is coming today,” he said.
“I know. I spoke to her yesterday.”
“Right.”
There was a pleasure in being able to say it without asking him anything. Yesterday Tess had called to find out where Mara had bought the picture hooks. The frame had stayed up. Something lighter in the hallway had fallen, taking a little paint with it. Mara had given the name of the store and Tess had gone on talking while she looked for a pen. Ten minutes about nothing urgent. Mara had been standing in the grocery aisle holding a bag of onions against her chest.
“How's work?” Mara asked. She almost asked about Tess's car again, though Owen had fixed it himself and already told her so.
He told her. There was a scheduling problem she had heard about before, two people assuming the other would cover the same afternoon. She understood most of the names now. She ate the last part of the sandwich while he described a meeting that had resolved nothing, then put the wrapper in the bag before it could crackle into the phone.
At three she went to the courts.
The grounds were full of people who had just arrived and people who looked as though they had lived there for weeks. A worker was changing a sponsor panel outside the entrance, kneeling on the hot pavement with a cordless drill. The old panel lay beside him, its smiling photograph folded into a white crease. Beyond it the practice courts rang with impacts, some clean, some muffled by distance. Mara could pick out the heavy sound of a high forehand without looking.
She checked the court booking, collected the credentials that had been left for her and found the small room set aside for coaches. There were four chairs and no available outlet. She charged the phone in the hall instead and watched a left-handed player she didn't know practice a serve toss without hitting a ball. Each toss rose almost to the same patch of sky. The last one drifted; the player caught it and began again.
Inez came through the door carrying only her rackets and a rolled towel. She had changed since the flight. There was a pale mark on her wrist where she had taken off a bracelet.
“Everything okay?” Mara asked.
“Yes. Celia's at the theater. They had a problem with the floor.”
“The piece you helped with?”
“Under it. It shifts when they move it. They think they know where.”
She was looking past Mara at the courts, trying to find the player they had arranged to hit with. Mara put the credential lanyard in her bag. The woman was already at the gate.
They had forty-five minutes. Inez wanted the speed of the court first, then a few returns. The balls were livelier than they had been in Richmond; once the sun moved from behind the stand, the surface gave them an extra jump. Mara stood by the gate for the first few minutes. Inez's forehand reached the other baseline too easily. She shortened the swing herself, sent three balls into the same half of the court and called across to ask her partner for more height.
Mara walked to the side. On the nearest public court somebody was shouting with pleasure after a long rally, a hoarse, surprised noise that made Inez look around and smile. She went back to the next ball before Mara could ask what had happened.
They spent the last ten minutes on serve and return. Inez kept one return position and changed the size of the swing. A high second serve made her back up. A flat serve down the middle caught the outside edge and went almost straight up. The hitting partner waited while a ball rolled across from the adjoining court, then served again.
Inez asked for two more at the body. Mara moved nearer the baseline to see them, then stepped aside while Inez took the balls for her own service turn.
When their time ended, the next pair were waiting outside the gate. Inez helped collect the balls, checked the soles of her shoes and asked Mara to confirm tomorrow's booking. Then she left for the locker room. Mara carried the remaining balls to the office and checked that the practice partner had the details for Wednesday.
There were still two hours of daylight. She could have sat and watched the next practice, but one of the players had a coach already following her with an expression Mara recognized in her own face: the small private hope that this hour would show something the opponent hadn't seen. She left them to it.
On the path beyond the courts Tess was coming toward her with Hana.
Tess had a cap pulled low and a white mark of sunscreen at the side of her nose. Her bag was on one shoulder. She was talking with her hands, the free hand making a little rising movement, then falling flat. Mara watched the movement stop when Tess saw her.
“Hi,” Tess said.
“Hello.” Mara stopped beside the low wall. “You got in all right?”
“An hour ago. We thought we'd see if we could hit.”
Hana said hello and lifted the printed booking sheet. “Someone gave us twenty minutes.”
“Court four's running late,” Mara said. “If that's the one.”
“Five.”
“You should be all right.”
Tess moved the strap higher on her shoulder. Her other hand was empty; no phone, no towel, nothing Mara could take for her. A damp strand of hair clung to her neck.
“The frame's still up,” Tess said.
“Excellent installation.”
“You should see the other one.”
“Your father said he could fix the wall.”
“I haven't told him.”
“Then forget I said that.”
Tess laughed, a quick breath, and Mara felt the warmth of it all the way into her hands. Hana was looking toward court five, checking whether the gate had opened. Tess looked too, then back.
“I'll call you,” she said.
“Whenever.”
She wanted to amend that, to offer a time that would not require Tess to guess whether she was with Inez. But Tess was already moving, Hana beside her. Mara watched them pass the court-four gate and turn toward five. At the far end the players were still rallying. Tess set her bag down outside and took a racket out while she waited.
Mara went on to the parking lot. She had reached the car before she remembered she had left the phone charging in the hall.
*
By Thursday the hotel room had acquired the disorder she always made when she spent too much time trying to keep it clean. A stack of printed schedules lay under the paperback. Two shirts hung from the backs of chairs. She had put the spare pillows back on the bed, one at a time, because they were in her way everywhere else.
Inez had won her first two matches, one quickly and one against a player who returned everything high until Inez made her run. Mara's own days were full: an early court, a match, the necessary food and laundry, the slow journey out of the parking lot when everyone left at once. In the evenings she could hear the elevator through the wall, its little chime followed by wheels on carpet.
On Thursday there was no match. They practiced in the morning. Inez wanted to leave afterward for the theater, where Celia had agreed to meet her during the afternoon break. Opening was Friday night. Mara had suggested they watch a portion of the quarterfinal opponent's match together that afternoon; Inez asked her to send the useful times instead.
“I can look tonight,” she said. “Or tomorrow morning.”
“Morning's fine.”
Mara went alone. The opponent was Ingrid Dahl, a tall woman whose serve had taken whole games out of the match before the other player seemed to have entered them. Mara sat high in the small stand and wrote very little for the first set. She wanted to see what happened when Dahl had to hit a second shot. Her opponent made that difficult to find out. The returns that came back were floating, the balls Dahl could step into and drive.
In the second set the returner moved back. More balls came into play. Dahl's forehand stayed heavy; her backhand was less comfortable when the ball came straight at her. The useful sequence was only three points long. Mara marked the time, then kept watching. The next service game did not repeat it.
Outside, she sent Inez the short clips with a sentence about the return through the middle. She watched the message leave. Then she put the phone in her bag and walked toward the road instead of the parking lot.
There was a narrow strip of park beside the water, farther from the tournament entrance than it looked. She walked until she could no longer hear the courts. Boats stood almost motionless in the pale distance. A boy was trying to skim a stone that was too round, getting an abrupt splash every time. Mara watched him choose another with exactly the same shape.
She called Tess. No answer. She left no message and went on walking.
Half an hour later Tess called back. She had been asleep. Her voice was still thick, some of the words running together. Tomorrow she played her quarterfinal in the early session. No, she didn't need anything. Hana had gone to meet someone she knew for coffee, and Tess was deciding whether to get up or surrender the day.
“Get up,” Mara said.
“I knew you'd say that.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“I didn't ask.”
Mara smiled at the water. Tess yawned into the phone.
“I had the rest of that bread on Sunday,” Tess said. “I'd put it in the freezer.”
“Was it still good?”
“Really good.”
Mara listened to Tess moving around the room. A drawer opened. Water began running, stopped, began again. The call could have ended at any of those sounds. Tess stayed.
They spoke until Mara reached the place where she had entered the park. She had no new information to write down afterward. At the hotel, Inez had sent a picture of Celia sitting on the edge of the empty stage, one leg stretched straight, the other bent to hold a paper plate. Behind her the finished branch rose into a light that made its painted edges disappear. There was no message beneath it.
Mara enlarged the photograph. She could see a handprint on Celia's pant leg, five pale fingers. On the plate was half a sandwich.
She wrote, Looks beautiful, and sent it before she could add a question.