Almost immediately she felt all her muscles relax. Her shoulders lowered and her neck loosened and her mind quieted. She did it again. And then once more.
It could have been five seconds or five minutes—Charlie had instantly lost track of time—but she knew that whatever had been in that cigarette had affected her mind. Everything around her had softened and grown quieter. A group of guys were laughing raucously, but their voices barely registered with her. Nearby, Charlie could see Marco calling to her from across the room, but she was more interested in the movements his mouth made than in the words he was speaking. A flash went off, and then another, but it felt like it was happening in slow motion.
“Hey, not cool,” someone said in the general direction of the camera.
Natalya shrugged. Her cheeks were the color of sherbet, and a sheen of perspiration along her collarbone only made her more gorgeous. She was holding aloft a phone with a super-sized screen. “Whatever,” she said, waving her hand.
Charlie hadn’t seen him approach or heard a word he had said, but suddenly she was aware Marco’s hands were around her waist. She turned around and saw him grinning.
“You okay, love?” he asked, crinkling his eyes with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“I feel a little weird,” Charlie managed, not quite sure if she was calibrating her own voice to an appropriate volume.
“You feel a little high is all.” Marco drained half a water bottle and handed the remainder to Charlie. “I didn’t think you’d actually smoke it.”
Charlie meant to take a small sip from the bottle, but the water tasted so delicious that she couldn’t stop herself from finishing it. The instant it was gone, she was thirsty again.
“Smoke what?” she asked, trying to shake the last little droplets into her mouth.
“That was THC oil in there.”
“What?”
“It was weed. We were vaping it. I only ever take one drag, just to take the edges off—is that how you say it?”
“I just smoked weed? The night before a match?”
“One drag is only like a glass of champagne. It will not affect your play.”
“I smoked more than that!” Charlie could hear her own hysteria.
Marco’s brow furrowed and he pulled her in close. “Shh. I’ll take you back to your room, you’re going to be fine.”
“I’m not going to be fine!” Charlie whispered in a voice that must have been loud, because the group sitting nearest them turned to look. “I’m all fucked up, Marco! I need this to stop. I need it to stop right now!” Where there had been waves of relaxation moments before there was now only panic. In her twenty-five years, she had never, ever smoked pot. It seemed almost inconceivable, this lapse in ordinary teenage experimentation, but it was true.
“Charlie, try to relax. There’s nothing to worry about.” Marco had her tightly by the wrist and was leading her to the door. When he pulled her into the hallway, she was shocked at how bright everything looked, and how normal. There was a young father carrying a sleeping child back to their room while the mother followed behind pushing an empty stroller; a waiter balancing a tray with what looked like the most delectable ice cream sundae in all the world; a couple dressed to go out, waiting for the elevator.
“Let’s take the stairs,” Marco said, pulling her along.
The couple turned and stared at them. “They recognize me! They know I’m high! It’s going to be everywhere tomorrow!”
“Shut up!” Marco hissed directly in her ear. Charlie was stunned into silence. It was the first time she had heard him get upset. He was a mental monolith of steady mood and no excessive emotion, both on and off the court. Entire articles had been written on Marco’s mental toughness—and beyond that, his admirable poker face—and Charlie had never, not once, witnessed a chink in the armor. Until now.
As she followed him toward the stairwell, something caught her eye. One of the doors on her left opened just as they were walking past it. It was dark inside the room, and Charlie thought she could see two men standing just inside, whispering. The voices were familiar. She stopped for a closer look, but Marco pulled her along. Was that Jake? It sure sounded like him, but there was no time to investigate. They hiked down two floors to her room, where Marco dug in her back jeans pocket and pulled out her room key. He murmured comforting things the entire time, always reassuring her that the high would wear off soon, that she should just go to bed as planned. After making sure she had water and confirming her alarm was set for six-thirty, he kissed her on the cheek and left. “I’ll order a wake-up call from reception as well,” he said as he walked out. “Good luck tomorrow, you’ll be great.”
“Charlie? Charlie? Can you hear me?” The voice that called out now was male, but it wasn’t Marco. It was Shawn, and she was still standing at the podium, answering questions after her first-round French Open loss.
“Yes, of course I can hear you,” she said.
“Can you clarify this report stating that you failed a drug test?” Shawn asked, once again waving the offending paper.
Charlie’s eyes shot to Jake. He seemed to consider his options before stepping in front of her to take the microphone.
“I will state unequivocally that Charlotte’s so-called ‘failure’ on the drug test is in no way relevant to her performance this morning. It was a technicality, nothing more.”
“And this video that was posted to YouTube late last night? Can you comment on this?”
The room had quieted enough that now Shawn’s phone was sufficiently loud for everyone to hear. Charlie couldn’t see what was happening on the small screen, but she could hear a woman’s voice—undeniably her own—shouting, “I’m all fucked up, Marco! I need this to stop. I need it to stop right now!”
Jake cleared his throat and leaned toward the microphone. “Charlotte has no comment right now. Thank you for understanding.” And while the voices came in all directions, Jake gripped Charlie’s arm in the exact same way Marco had the night before, and pulled her out of the room.
18
the lindsay lohan of tennis
TOPANGA CANYON
JUNE 2016
“I’m so humiliated,” Charlie moaned. “Do you even know what they’re calling me now?”
“The Delinquent Princess? So what? It’s not that bad.” Charlie could hear a spoon scraping against a bowl and then Piper, through a full mouth, said, “It actually sounds kind of chic. Pot is legal in a whole bunch of states. I don’t know how many, but it’s a lot.”
Charlie snorted. “Jake is annoyed, but at least he sort of understands how it all went down. Todd is irate. Listen to this.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled to find the text.
“ ‘I never even thought it possible for you to do something so epically, indescribably, undeniably DUMB.’ He capitalized ‘dumb.’ Just in case I missed it.”
“That’s just Todd being Todd.”
“Don’t kid yourself. That’s not the last he’ll have to say on the topic—there’s going to be hell to pay with him. And that’s if he doesn’t fire me first.”
“You pay him, Charlie, not the other way around.”
“Details.”
“You’ll apologize and tell him how much you’ve learned from the experience, and he’ll get over it. Just like everyone else.”
“Maybe. But there’s my father, too. He’s so disappointed he won’t even speak to me.”
“Your father misses the sweet little girl in braids who always said please and thank you, even as people walked all over her. He’ll get over it.”
Charlie lowered her voice. “Sometimes I catch him looking at me with this expression like, who is this person in front of me? It’s awful, it truly is.”
The walls in her father’s new cottage were wafer-thin, and he was reading right outside her door. His door, actually. He had insisted
on taking the living room pullout and leaving Charlie the bedroom, an argument that had grown heated quickly. It brought together so many different issues, none of which either of them seemed ready to address: his new accommodations and what they implied about his financial situation; her fall from grace; Todd’s involvement; the great distance they both felt now that they weren’t discussing anything substantive. When she had instinctively bought a nonstop ticket from Paris to Los Angles after her humiliating first-round loss, she hadn’t thought about anything other than getting home. Home. It never made sense for her to have her own place when she was on the road forty-eight weeks out of every fifty-two. She thought about it every now and then, how it could be nice to have her own apartment somewhere, but whenever she got serious enough to consider it, she changed her mind. Why pay rent and utilities and furnish something for a few weeks a year? Especially when she had enough frequent flier miles saved up to fly or stay anywhere on earth, at any time, virtually free of charge? And for those times when she needed a day or two to decompress, to rest and relax and have someone take care of her, she had her family home. Until now. She felt guilty admitting it, but had Charlie even remembered her father had already moved into this depressing, on-property guest cottage, one deemed to have fallen too deep into disrepair to house the club’s actual guests, well, she probably would have stayed in a hotel. Or not come home at all. Which of course made her feel even worse.
“You’ll deal with it, and so will he. You didn’t get arrested for prostitution, did you? Because that would be hard to recover from. Heroin would be a big problem. And as far as I know, you didn’t kill anyone. So all things considered, I think the world can get over you smoking a joint.”
“I didn’t smoke a joint!”
“You think I give a rat’s ass whether you vaped it or smoked it or snorted it? Charlie, you’ve got to relax. No one cares.”
“No one cares? Did you happen to notice that the video of me proclaiming how epically fucked up I am was posted to YouTube and currently has a hundred thousand hits?”
“I admit, the video was a bit of a setback. But those who love you know what happened.”
Charlie muted ESPN, on which she’d spent the few days since she’d gotten home watching endless, torturous coverage of the French Open. Once it ended—and Natalya inevitably won it—there would be a mere three weeks before Wimbledon began.
She watched the final point of Marco silently and methodically destroy a young American opponent in three easy sets before she said, “I blew a shot at a Grand Slam for some stupid hotel room party with a bunch of people I don’t even really know. What does that say about my commitment?”
More bowl scraping. “I’m not one to talk about commitment. I bailed on tennis the first chance I had. But you’re different, Charlie. This is your life. For better or worse—and sometimes it’s both—this is what you do. And you do it really freaking well. But maybe you can cut yourself a little slack for living a little? Enjoying yourself just a tiny bit? Is it the worst thing on earth if you’re not number one? If you don’t win a Slam? Is all of that really too horrible even to fathom?”
Charlie stared at the framed picture her father kept on his nightstand. It was from before her mother’s diagnosis, maybe a couple of years earlier, when they’d tried to go camping for a night. The Silvers had driven hours into the Redlands and set up camp in the most beautiful clearing near a river. Jake had patiently showed Charlie how to construct the fire using kindling and then thicker logs while their parents tried to fix the finicky camp stove. She remembered so clearly the four of them balancing the camera on a boulder and running around front to pose for the family shot, and how they never managed to fix the stove but the fire-cooked hot dogs were the best she’d ever tasted. Even the terror Charlie felt that night as the hyenas began their frightening screams now made her smile: she had scampered out of the tent she shared with Jake and into her parents’ tent, where she’d wedged herself between their warm bodies and spent the entire night cuddled between them.
“They just sacrificed a lot to get me here.” Her voice was a whisper. Charlie could feel a knot forming in the back of her throat.
“I know they did, sweetie. But so did you. This isn’t your father’s dream, and from everything you told me, it wasn’t your mother’s either. This is all you. So the way I see it is, you need to decide if this is what you still want. It’s okay to change course, you know. At the risk of sounding like some armchair psychologist—which, now that I think about it, might actually appeal to your new, crunchy, pot-smoking self—you only get one shot at it. At any of it. And if being the best in the world is what you want, then fucking own it. I know you can! And we’ll all support you. But if you’ve hit a point where you’re ready to give the finger to this lifestyle and all it entails, well you know what? That might be okay, too. We’ll all just put on our big-girl underwear and deal with it. Only you can make the call, Charlie.”
“Why is everyone always pushing me to quit?” Charlie didn’t even try to hide her irritation. “The slightest obstacle and the whole world is suggesting I retire. I love tennis, Piper. I know you didn’t, but I love this sport. And I’ve worked really freaking hard to be the best. So, yes, I want that to happen.”
“Well, you’re not acting like it. There, I said it. Hate me for it. But someone needs to say it.”
There was a moment of silence before Charlie said, “Way to talk to the Lindsay Lohan of tennis. Show a little respect, please!”
Piper’s laugh came in a staccato burst. “Yeah, I read that, too. Amazing. You have to know how fun this is for me, don’t you?”
There was a knock at the door. “Charlie? Can you come out for a moment?” Her father sounded tired.
“Sure, Dad, I’ll be right there,” she called. And then quietly into the phone, “What time tomorrow?”
“Festivities commence at the Stockton residence at noon. I’m warning you: it’s mostly my mother’s friends and their daughters. You will hear a great deal about the newest Range Rovers, the benefits of SoulCycle, and how damn impossible it is finding decent cleaning help these days. Don’t judge me.”
It was Charlie’s turn to laugh. “I’ll be there! Nothing like a WASPy, day-drinking, racist crew of lunching ladies to make me feel better. Thanks, love. See you at noon.”
“Screw you. And thanks for coming. I’m really glad you blew the French Open so you can now be at my wedding shower.”
“You’re welcome.” Charlie put her phone down and climbed off the bed. Her father had removed his sheets and replaced them with the new, high-thread-count ones she’d purchased for her room, but it still felt strange beyond description to be sleeping in his bed. For the first time she noticed how worn his old wooden dresser was, how threadbare the bath towels looked. She hadn’t ever noticed as a kid.
“Hey, are you going out?” Charlie asked, flopping down on the ugly plaid couch that had come with the cottage. When she had asked after their overstuffed velvet sectional, Mr. Silver said he had sold it. Nearly none of their things from home fit in the new place.
Her father had changed from his usual coaching uniform into a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved polo. His hair was wet and combed neatly and he was wearing obviously new Docksides. “Yes, I’m meeting . . . a friend. For dinner.”
Charlie had assumed they’d be eating together. After all, she was only back home a handful of nights a year at this point—ordinarily her father would jump at the chance for dinner together.
She forced herself to say brightly, “Oh, I didn’t realize you had plans. I was thinking I would make your favorite filet and the twice-baked potatoes. An orgy of carbs and red meat, just the way you like it.” She smiled but instantly regretted using the word “orgy,” especially since she knew what her father was thinking.
Her father seemed to be struggling to decide something, but then he said, “So about this whole . . . pot thin
g.”
Charlie stared at the floor. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know this must be super humiliating for you. I never meant . . . I didn’t think . . . well, anyway. I’ve explained how the whole thing went down. I just wish it hadn’t happened at all.”
He walked over and sat beside her on the couch. “Sweetheart, I was going to say that you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone makes mistakes. God knows I did.”
“Oh, come on. I’ve googled you a thousand times. Aside from dating every female player in the top fifty, there’s nothing there. Clean as a whistle.”
Her father cleared his throat. He twisted his hands together and then, without looking at her, said, “I had an affair with a married woman once,” he said quietly.
Charlie forced herself to remain completely still. She didn’t even take a breath.
“I was twenty. A kid. An idiot. She was twenty-six, and married to my friend’s coach, a much older guy—he was probably forty at the time. She was unhappy with him, of course. And we thought we were in love. I told myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I wasn’t married to anyone.” He coughed. “Anyway. As you might imagine, it didn’t end well.”
“What happened?”
Her father sighed. “We were caught together in Wimbledon Village. A borrowed apartment . . . Anyway, it was awful. Her husband went crazy, threatened to kill me and divorce her. Not quietly. The whole tour knew everything. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks. She never spoke to me again—they’re still married, by the way—and I felt like the biggest piece of shit ever to live. Probably, I imagine, a little how you’re feeling right now. But I’m telling you this, Charlie, so you know that I understand. I know what it’s like to be on the road day after day, in and out of anonymous hotels, grinding through practice after practice. And now, with Todd and your intensified training schedule? It’s a lot. So cut yourself a little slack. We all know you’re not some pot-smoking idiot, just like I wasn’t some asshole home-wrecker. We all screw up. We hopefully apologize and make it right, but life goes on.” He nudged her chin up with his finger so she would meet his gaze. “Okay, kiddo? Can you do that for me?”