After the Win
The moments after you win are almost always quieter than you expected. The loudest part was getting there.
After || Victory || Family || Joy
The noise of the room settled eventually, the way noise always settled, and what remained was the specific warmth of people in a room where something good had happened. Mrs. Callahan shook both our hands with the formal gravity she reserved for things she was proud of, and said: “Well done. Both of you. That was the argument I’ve been coaching toward for thirty years.” She said it once. It was enough. Priya hugged me and said something into my shoulder that I felt rather than heard and that was complete in its warmth. Zara shook Jamie’s hand and they talked briefly about something — I was not fully tracking the specific content of other conversations, because I was looking across the room at my dad. He was making his way through the thinning crowd with Abuela Elena beside him, and his face had the particular expression of a man who had felt something and was deciding how to hold it.
He reached me. He put his arms around me in the way he didn’t often — the full hug, the one with weight and duration, the one he usually reserved for airports and bad news. “Estoy muy orgulloso de ti,” he said, into the top of my head. I am very proud of you. “It’s just a debate tournament,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say when something big was happening. “It’s not,” he said, and pulled back to look at me. “The argument you made. About telling the truth even when it costs something.” He was looking at me with the full eyes. “I understood it,” he said. “Watching you up there. I understood what you’ve been carrying.” I didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry it took me this long to understand,” he said. “To ask the right questions.” “You didn’t know what to ask,” I said. “You asked when you knew. That’s what matters.” He pulled me back in. Abuela Elena, beside him, touched my arm. She said something to me in Spanish, the full Oaxacan Spanish that she spoke when the emotion was real and the careful English was not sufficient. I caught most of it: You are braver than I was. And you are going to be very happy. I looked at the tin box she was not carrying — it was back at the house — and thought about Catalina laughing in a photograph and forty-seven years of thinking about a choice. “Gracias, Abuela,” I said. She patted my arm. She went to talk to someone nearby with the energy of a seventy-one-year-old woman who had just watched her grandson win something and was not done being pleased about it.
Jamie was a few feet away, talking to Dean who had, apparently, driven from Reed to be there, and the two of them had the quality of family — the easy, well-worn comfort of people who had always been each other’s. I watched them for a moment. Then Jamie looked over and caught me watching and smiled — the large one, the full-face one. I smiled back. Dad was beside me, watching me watch Jamie, with the thoughtful expression of a man connecting information. “The debate partner,” he said. Not a question. “Yes,” I said. He nodded slowly, processing, integrating. “They’re good,” he said. “In the argument. Very good.” “Yes,” I said. “The best thinking partner I’ve ever had.” He looked at me. “Okay,” he said, with the simple acceptance that was his most fundamental mode. “We’ll invite them to dinner,” he said. He said this like it was the natural next step, which for Carmen Reyes — for whom love expressed itself in food and in the offering of the table — it was. “Okay,” I said. He squeezed my shoulder. The convention center was emptying. The day was ending. I was standing in the room after the biggest thing, with my dad’s hand on my shoulder and my grandmother nearby and Priya laughing at something Zara said and Jamie looking over with the full-face smile, and the specific weight I had been carrying since eighth grade was not gone — these things didn’t disappear, they redistributed — but it was lighter than it had ever been. The river was running. The room was warm. I was, in this moment, completely and uncomplicatedly myself. It was the best feeling I had ever had. I suspected it was only going to get better.