"The kick is the easy part," he would say. "Anyone can learn the kick. Knowing when not to throw it, that's the black belt."
She had learned both. She had learned them so well that by the time she was twenty-two years old she held a fourth-degree black belt, two national collegiate titles, a bronze medal from the world university games, and a ranking of third in the country in the women's under sixty-seven kilogram division. And in nine days, at a convention center in Colorado Springs, she was going to step onto the mat at the national team trials and fight for one of two places on the team that would represent the country at the next world championships. If she made the team, there was a very good chance, Coach Imura said, that in two years she would be fighting at the Olympics.
She had never, in fifteen years, thrown a kick outside the ring.
Not once. Not when Kevin Marsh's older brother cornered her behind the gym in seventh grade. Not when a drunk man at a bus stop grabbed her arm when she was sixteen and told her to smile. Not when a girl on a rival team shoved her in the hallway of a hotel at a tournament in Ohio and called her a name that made her ears ring. She had walked away from all of them. Sometimes it had been the hardest thing she had ever done. Sometimes she had gone back to the academy afterward and kicked the heavy bag in the corner until her shins bled through her pads and Coach Imura had to come and take her by the shoulders and stop her. But she had walked away.
The ring is the only place.
On the morning it rained, the morning everything happened, Dara woke at five-thirty, as she did every morning, in her bedroom on the second floor of her grandmother's narrow yellow house on Delmont Street, with the sound of water running in the gutters outside and the smell of coffee coming up the stairs.
She lay still for a minute listening to the rain. It was a soft, steady, gray rain, the kind that had been falling on and off for three days, the kind that did not so much fall as hang in the air and settle on everything, so that the world outside her window was a smudged watercolor of dripping branches and gleaming rooftops and puddles reflecting a sky the color of an old nickel. She liked rain. She liked the sound of it on the roof, which was the sound of every Saturday morning of her childhood. But she did not like what it did to the roads, and she had a long drive ahead of her.
She got up. She did her stretches on the rug by her bed, forty minutes, every muscle, every joint, ankles and knees and hips and spine, the slow patient work that her body needed now in a way it had not needed when she was fifteen. She did two hundred push-ups in sets of fifty. She went down to the kitchen in her sweatpants and an old academy T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and her grandmother was already there, at the stove, in her blue housecoat and her slippers, frying eggs.
"You're late," said Odessa Whitfield, without turning around.
"It's five-thirty-eight."
"Like I said. You're late."
Odessa was seventy-four. She was a small, round, dark-skinned woman with close-cropped silver hair and reading glasses that hung on a beaded chain around her neck and a voice that could, when she chose, stop a room full of seventh graders dead in their tracks from thirty feet away. She had taught middle school science for thirty-eight years at Hollins Junior High, and there was hardly a person under fifty in the whole east side of the city who had not, at some point in their adolescence, been on the receiving end of that voice. She had raised Dara since Dara was four, after Dara's mother, Odessa's only daughter, had gone to prison for the second time and then, in the way of some people, simply disappeared into the world and not come back. Odessa did not talk about her daughter. Dara did not ask. It was one of the very few things in their lives that the two of them had agreed, without ever saying so, to leave alone.
She put a plate in front of Dara. Four eggs, scrambled, no butter. A bowl of oatmeal with blueberries. A glass of orange juice. Dara's competition diet, which Odessa had memorized from the printout Coach Imura's nutritionist had sent home, and followed with the grim exactness of a woman who had once graded four thousand science fair projects and never let a single one slide.
"You eat all of that," she said. "Every bite. You're going to be in the car most of the day."