6. #FadedGlory, November 2017

Daya pulled her hook-around sleeves over her fists, then stuffed her hands into the kangaroo pocket. Her Lulu hoodie was marvelous, but it was too light to let her linger here, at the Olympic Plaza.

The skies turned to winter for the fourth time this year. The wet chill in the air threatened to become prickling ice crystals. She should leave downtown, take a bus, go home...

She slouched. It did not come naturally to her, and she would not have done it for the gusts of wind.

What made Daya bend her neck was the questioning eyes stopping on her. She'd glance around discreetly, and nope, no one paid her any heed. It was all in her head, as usual. Nobody looked at her, not this time, not every other time she had sneaked to the Plaza after teaching a lunch-hour bootcamp downtown. Why would they, save for a bum angling for spare change?

Daya's notoriety was never much, even in the narrow circle of true Canadian skating aficionados. She was a pretender to the end, even in her imagining that someone would spare her a second thought, pointing a finger at her: here is another quitter who came to walk a distant memory.

The distant glow of the 1988 Olympics was not even her memory to cling to, rather a collective one as Mike would have said if he knew what she was thinking.

She glanced past the pink colonnade topping the brick-faced cascade. The sandstone block of the city library took up the corner of the street. If only he was there, in the library. Or hobbled toward her down the pathway between the leafless trees. He'd talk, and she'd forget her worries to keep up with the onrush of his flighty thoughts.

Though Mike would probably scoff at relegating 1988 to history. The guy acted like he was on the first-names basis with the Flintstone family, so the eighties was more like yesterday's afternoon for him than history. She cocooned her hands even tighter in the magic fabric that did not stretch out, was warm on a cold day, cool on a hot one, and did not absorb the stench of sweat.

No matter his weird perception of time, it would have been cool to have Mike here... A sigh came unbidden: how easily her thoughts turned to Mike, always turned to Mike. I think I like him a little... or a little too much? He is... he was... She gave up with another sigh: he was likable, that's why she liked him, no other reason.

Plus, the guy who thought about Borgia when he looked at a girl's ass in yoga pants couldn't think it was weird that she was pretending to live in 1988 and be Katarina Witt's BFF.

And if he would not think it embarrassing, why should she?

Daya closed her eyes and let the fantasy take over.

Friends? Why lie to oneself? They were not friends, Katarina Witt, the figure skating star, and her. They were rivals.

Katarina Witt, East Germany... Daya Dhawan, Canada...

No.

She dropped her eyes to the bricks that paved the Plaza. The names etched on them were slowly fading from sight, from history, the citizens chiding her: It's easier to insert yourself in our past, Daya Dhawan, than fight your own battles? Please...

The pad in the middle did not have the named bricks, but it had a wading pool all summer. Now drained of water, it sheltered some brown leaves instead. Come December the City of Calgary would turn it into a skating rink, not as big as they had on the Waterfront in Toronto, but nice enough. It would fill  with slipping and sliding Calgarians.

When she came here last March, she found a place to stand at the edge of a small amphitheater at the corner, and watched, missing the ice time. She kind of liked it, missing the all-important, the precious, the pricey, the coveted ice time back then. Her heart was still raw.

Her coach, Mr. Brighton, told her, "Go big or go home, Dhawan. What do you want?"

Daya scurried past a sandstone church and the red-brick buildings with black bands painted under the roof, the name of businesses on it in white block letters. The Olympic fanfare played in her head, pushing her harder than the wind. Every note pounded Daya in the back, driving her out of the Plaza, away from the champions, back to the downtown fringe of the indifferent apartment buildings, to catch her bus to suburbia, home, home, home...

Well, not home. Mike's place.

***

Mike's warrior now had different swords, larger than before. It ran circles around a dragon instead of an ogre this time. An eye-roll came on before she could check herself. Same difference...

The dragon hopped up and expelled a screen-full of vicious looking green flames. How did this song go? I need a hero, he's gotta be fresh from the fight?  Only Mike was nothing like Shreck—gosh, some movies just ruined songs for good.

"You're subdued tonight, Daya. Is something wrong?" he asked without looking away from the screen, long fingers gripping the control.

"How do you even know?" She hated the sulky note in her voice, but she could not apply the brakes half-way through a whine. "You're fighting a damn dragon in your damn video game."

"Spatial awareness,"  he replied comfortably.

Why should it matter that he didn't turn her head? What did she want, for him to vault over the couch and run to her in slow-motion, red hair swaying in and out of his eyes? He probably couldn't do it before breaking his foot.

As if reading her thoughts, he smiled in a self-depreciating manner. "My twitch is not what it used to be when I was young and nimble, but I can still spot the difference between a happy Daya and a sad one."

The dragon froze mid-flight, its jaws wide apart, vainly trying to swallow the hard-ass warrior on the screen. Mike turned to her, the big brown eyes searching her face, "So, what's on your mind? A client more impossible than I am?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

He arched an eyebrow. "Oh? Enlighten me then."

"It's too cold," she started, picking a snag on the sleeve stretched over her knuckles. "I stopped by Olympic Plaza... and the Grand Prix is in full swing..."

Word by word she got her misery out. It wasn't exactly a cohesive story, mushing together her old coach with the events of the annual figure skating Grand Prix and the ancient Olympics in Calgary.

"Ancient Olympics would be the ones in classical Greece," Mike corrected. "No figure skating, I'm afraid. Pankration, javelin throwing, chariots...."

She sagged into the couch next to her pedantic hero. "What a Mike-thing to say."

He pulled off the glasses to inspect them, while she failed yet again to figure out what his eye-color was like. The cinnamon bark was the closest, but it didn't shine like they did. Nothing shone like that...

"Do you know why I ask you to drop me off at the library at five every morning when we open up at nine?"

"I kind of wondered," she grudgingly admitted.

"I spent three years doing research for my PhD... only to discover that I love collecting facts, sift through information, memorize it. It made me an excellent student or a trash can, however you choose to look at it."

Daya shook her head: no, I don't see you as a trash can.

"But guess what? For a PhD you need to be more than a good student. You can't just regurgitate the facts back, you need to produce something new based on all the data." He eased his head back, bringing to mind an orange tabby lazing in the sunshine. "The truth hurt when I understood it."

"So you are working on your thesis in the mornings?" Daya guessed, trying to get rid of bespectacled Garfield image in her mind. "There're folders in the corner of your desktop that have weird names... not that I was spying, it just caught my eye."

Mike's lips stretched in a happy smile. "I knew, you'd say that. That's the way you think now, but you don't have to."

"Aha," Daya said. She had no idea where he was going with it.

"I go to the library early to continue doing what I enjoy, collecting facts, memorizing them. Otherwise, how would I know that there are four Grand Prix events this November, the next one in Grenoble, France."

For a second, the room, the comfy worn-leather couch, and the red-headed devil reclining on it smudged away from reality. Instead, she saw Grenoble arena flooded with the shining light, and the sparkling ice.

Her mouth went dry with desire. If she could not be there, she wanted to see it. From afar, on a TV screen half-a-world away, whatever. She wanted to see it. Then the invisible claw got hold of her gut and twisted it... No. Never again. I wouldn't even look.

"You memorized it to make fun of me?" She sounded as raw as she felt. Mike, of all people... please, not Mike. She could not stand him judging her a failure.

Mike jerked upright to say no! so loudly that she'd heard him through the cotton ball of hurt.

He did not scream though; she doubted Mike even learned how to yell. By some reason that made her believe that he did not mean to needle her.

"Daya, what I am trying to say is that if you change the manner of your thinking, the way I did, you can enjoy what you love, but discard the painful part."

She smiled through welling tears. "Mike, are you trying to sell an ethnic Indian on accepting the suffering?"

He chopped stuffy air with the ridge of his hand. "Never mind me. I've passed my quarter-life crisis with flying colors. I am twenty-seven, and thirty does not scare me one wit."

She decided he sounded more passionate than smug, and because of it, he deserved an answer. "Good for you."

"I want the same for you. I don't want to see this harrowed expression whenever you think about skating. I want you to lace up those precious skates of yours and go enjoy whatever it is you enjoy about it."

He lost the resemblance to a feline while climbing out of the cushions' embrace.

"We need to work on your balance once the cast is off," she said half-heartedly, thinking about his unasked question. Could she explain to a dedicated couch potato that she loved skating because it was like flying? She wished he could experience it, lifting in the air to the music and lights, however impossible it seemed for him.

"Wait here," Mike asked. An inoffensive smell of soap and a drugstore deodorant touched her nostrils as he leaned forward on the crutches.

She was used to it now. It always lingered on his sweaters... whoever wears sweaters, real knit sweaters with a cable pattern? At his weight, he should sweat buckets, but he seemed to always be chilly. Maybe they need to run a full blood panel, because it could be serious. She didn't want it to be serious.

Mike disappeared down the hall, and into his Bluebeard lair, the room Daya couldn't help but secretly believe to be just like her little brother's, only strewn with comic books and funko pop from Star Wars or something, instead of clothes, fashion magazines and shoes.

Maybe he had a fatal illness, and him helping her was a parting gift to the world. He did say something about forswearing relationships the other day... She ensconced herself deeper in the couch. I'm imagining things.

Mike came back with a skinny, worn paperback squeezed between his reddening chin and knit-clad chest, laboring furiously with his crutches.

"Here," he said proudly depositing his treasure on the coffee table.

There, he looks perfectly healthy, fifty pounds too healthy, so stop imagining things. He's fine.

Daya forced herself from gaping at Mike and turned her gaze to the book instead.