Rescuing Holly

From the age of twelve, Holly had been confined to the three-story Tower House of her mother’s Southampton Estate on Olde Towne Lane—a veritable prison lined in gold, restricting her every move. Her mother Rose was in San Diego selling a historic Southern California mansion—the “Coronado Castle” on Coronado Island, the Old Hollywood haunt where Marilyn Monroe filmed Some Like it Hot—and she wouldn’t return until after Labor Day. 

This was Holly’s chance to escape and see the world. Although Holly, at the age of 22, was already finishing up her Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics from Princeton, she had never set foot in a classroom due to her condition.

The pop of the tennis ball against Holly’s racket gave a satisfying twang as the dart rocketed through the dry sea-kissed air and plummeted just past the two-inch white band of the net, landing far left of her invisible opponent’s backhand. 

The SpinFire ball hopper served up a lob to her forehand and then another. She popped each one on the same precise angle with the same vicious slice, causing the balls to travel low and away. Then she scrambled with short quick steps before leaping to an attacking straddle at the net and volleyed the ball with a shallow, acute passing shot at a severe cross-court angle that cut a clean forty-five degrees from dead center.

Holly was now warmed up for her lesson, and excited about meeting her new tennis instructor, a young local tour pro who was giving lessons on the island as he transitioned off the pro circuit. It was a cloudless day. The sun crouched like a cat on the horizon, its muzzle full of bared teeth inclined toward Holly and it increased the intensity of its rays with a low growl. 

She had never faced an opponent like this before. Rose had hand-picked a string of husky, wrinkled old-timers who spent their time alternating between drills and long-winded theoretical speeches but who could not keep up with Holly for a New York minute.

Orli Mizrahi stepped out onto the Court to announce the tennis instructor. Orli was a stunningly efficient woman. She managed Rose’s estate and the small army of household staff, cooks, housekeepers, and security. She always wore crisp, stylish suits and carried herself with the military precision of an Israeli soldier—an older Gal Gadot in a pantsuit. 

“Holly—this is Mr. Jeff Nicoli—your new instructor.” Rose had met Jeff Nicoli after the 2009 Wimbledon Championships in England, where she had watched Jeff rise to fame when he came within a hair’s breadth of dethroning the Swiss Maestro, Roger Federer, after a record-setting marathon 77-game match. Holly had heard the story too many times to count, and now he was here.

Jeff’s skin was tanned like fine leather, and his blonde hair was sun-bleached to the color and texture of golden straw. His bangs hung over his cobalt-blue eyes. He wore all white. He captured the aspect of the Greek God Apollo, as if Mount Olympus were just at the other end of the LIE and he had casually saddled down to the Hamptons for some light exercise. This was perhaps the first time that Holly had seen a boy her own age in the flesh, and she was struck dumb by his appearance.

“Shall we get started with some easy rallies to get into the swing of things… get to know each other,” he said. Without waiting for a response, he had cleared the court and was standing in his backcourt. 

She served him up a moonball that drew a slow looping hyperbolic curve before falling at his baseline and bouncing high overhead. With a simple adjustment of his feet, he coiled like a cobra, jumped backward at a terrifying angle, and raised his bronzed right arm high and straight, causing his shirt to ripple above his slim musculature, as he caught the ball flush in a motion like an outfielder in baseball reaching for the fences. Pop. The ball sang forward ruthlessly at her feet, and the game was on.

* * *

“Did you keep your distance from the boy,” Rose asked over the FaceTime call.

“Yes, mother,” Holly said.

“And did you do the protocol after?” Rose asked.

“Yes, mother. I washed my hands, did a full spray down, put all my clothes down the shoot, and sent my gym bag with my racket and balls to the decontamination room for Orli to disinfect, ran all the fans in the Tower, and ran HEPA-filtration. I took all the precautions,” Holly said.

“Good. You know this is risky and it is only for your own safety. If you want to have privileges, you will have to be responsible. These go hand-in-hand,” Rose said.

“Yes, mother. I know. I’ve come too far to backtrack now,” Holly said.

“We’ve waited all these years for a cure, and it is only months now until you undergo the treatment. But if you get sick, you will not be able to. We are at the end of the line. In addition to the bone marrow transplant, you can finally do the gene therapy—it is finally approved and ready—and everything has to go perfectly,” Rose said.

“Let’s talk about something else. How are you coming finding a buyer for the Coronado Castle? Did you take the prospective buyers out on the putting green like you planned?,” Holly asked.

“Oh, darling. You’d love it! It has a Tower and everything. These new buyers have the most grotesque plans for the place. They want to paint it pink,” Rose said.

“How awful!”

* * *

As Rose sat with the architect surveying the massive Toy Room and Theater with life-size replicas of Return of the Jedi figures stationed around the room—perhaps even the original costumes from the film, who knows—she imagined converting the grounds for these toy moguls into a chic dreamhouse—like the kind Barbie lived.

The thought of a dreamhouse made Rose think back to Holly’s childhood, when she briefly cared about such things before the illness swallowed any excitement or joy of play and turned her into a devotee of pure, cold, hard mathematics. She was such a prodigy. 

When Rose had brought her by private jet to CalTech for a mathematical conference, they’d installed a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and Holly had delivered her lecture from behind a blue hypoallergenic medical curtain. Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disorder (SCID) is what it was called, and it was like a Biblical curse that had robbed Holly of her childhood and made Rose into a tyrannical overlord over her own daughter. But she was grateful for all of it.

Rose remembered how it had been waiting for years with a barren womb, after losing a marriage over it, and finally wrestling the girl away from her birth family. She had gone through such red tape with the adoption agency and with the parents to confirm she had the means to properly support a girl in her condition. 

The same relentless drive for success and fortune that isolated Rose for years, sealed her womb, and lost her a husband, was ironically—the thing—that brought her Holly.

All of the struggles had been worth it once the Tower was ready and once Rose had finally got Holly settled and set apart safely from the world and all its infecting forces.

* * *

Holly scuffed her left foot and bounced the ball two times in front of her forefoot before bending her front left knee and rocking into her service motion—something she had practiced a thousand times and perfected—but the weight of concentration was heavier this time, because Jeff was waiting across the court. 

Holly had been formulating a plan for days, ever since her first lesson with Jeff, and now she was ready to execute.

Leaning forward and flexing her left knee into an explosive jump, she raises her left arm for the toss, simultaneously extending her hollowed right armpit and bent right arm far behind her arching coiled torso and bringing her breasts forward, a white shimmer of light glancing off her soft collarbone at the top of the stroke as she leans into gravity and hammers down into the shot, sending the ball sailing at a hard right angle directly into the opposing court.

Jeff shook the hair from his eyes and made a fast lateral shuffle to his right before switching to a closed stance and swinging his hips, trailing the racket in a C-motion, and connecting, returning the ball with precision at an accelerating arc right back to her.

“Thirty love,” he said.

This time, Holly served the ball with a quick jabbing motion and approached the net for the volley. When Jeff smoothly launched another looping forehand shot, Holly pretended to botch her footing and faked a turned ankle. She fell to the green court surface and screamed out in pain.

Jeff appeared by her side and lifted up her ankle, wrapping it in his shirt. Beads of sweat trailed down from his collarbone and dripped from his bangs, where the shirt had been.

“I need some ice—there is an ice machine back in the Tower,” Holly said.

He scooped her up in his arms and began carrying her back.

“Why do you live in that Tower, anyway?”

“That’s a long story” Holly said, feeling the warmth of his chest against her back and the firmness of his grip on her hip and shoulder.

* * *

Holly lay on the daybed by the panoramic windows of the Tower Suite with an ice pack wrapped around her left ankle, which was propped on some windows. Jeff sat by the nook of her hip, resting on his left arm which brushed against her bare left thigh.

“You spend a lot of time up here?” Jeff said.

“Ohh, yes. A lot of time,” Holly said.

“It must be nice to be at home. I spend all of my time on the road, from one hotel room to another, or staying in rented apartments near a ball court. Different cities and countries. It is dizzying,” Jeff said.

“But you are staying all summer here on the island, right?” Holly asked.

“Yes, just up the street in an Air BnB. But I spend most of my days at the Future Stars Tennis Club, when I’m not giving lessons,” Jeff said.

“It must be so exciting, traveling around the world, meeting so many different people,” Holly said.

“More like being a soldier with marching orders, pitching your tent along the path of a war—only this war never ends until you call it quits—it is a war that has been waged forever and which goes on for eternity. And I think I’ve come to the end of my tour of duty,” Jeff said.

“You make it sound so dreary. Come on, you must have some fun? There must be a special lady out there that meets you out on the road,” Holly said.

“No. Not really. With my schedule and all my handlers, coaches, dieticians, managers, and assistants, I scarcely have a moment to breathe,” Jeff said.

“Funny, sometimes when I’m up here in the Tower, I feel as if all I have is time and not one good thing to do with it,” Holly said.

Jeff looks at Holly’s freckled cheeks, studious green eyes, and solicitously pursed burgundy lips and begins to caress her arm with an aloof detachment.

“Do you think we can continue our lesson… later this afternoon?” He nods. “Will you stay with me?” He nods. Her heart stirs and she sits up. She gazes at his face and looks from his lips to his eyes. “We really shouldn’t.” He moves his face near to her far cheek and whispers in her ear, “We should.” Then, pulling his face a few inches back and inclining his eyes downward, she feels a pull and all at once puts her hand on the back of his head and begins kissing him.

* * *

Rose stormed into Holly’s room and said, “You can’t be serious.”

“What mother?” Holly asked.

“You had that boy in the house,” Rose said. “After everything we’ve been working toward—toward a normal life—a chance at a mathematics chair at Princeton?”

“I was injured mother,” Holly said.

“Injured my ass. You aren’t seeing that boy again, and you are going to New York tonight where you can start the treatment,” Rose said.

“But mother! I have the whole summer before I’m set to start the treatment,” Holly said.

“Not anymore you don’t,” Rose said.