Chapter 20
Jasmine
Here is what the freeze is, from the inside. It’s not a decision. That's the part nobody can understand. I am not choosing to be silent; it’s just that the words are stuck deep within me.
I want to tell my father that what Caleb said at first is true, and that, of course, I love him. I want to explain that he's lying to cover for me. I want to scream, please don't let him walk out that door!
But not one word of it made it out of my mouth. I stood in the dark of my own body and listened to my entire life happen in the next room without me in it. By the time the lights come back on in my brain, it’s too late.
He's gone.
“Caleb.” It comes out now. Now, with no one left in the doorway to hear it. The cruelest trick my body could ever play.
The room comes back in pieces, too bright, too loud, the fluorescent hum I'd tuned out all morning roaring up at full volume. The folder on the desk. My father's English Breakfast tea going cold. All of it at once, and the only thing I want is the one thing that just walked out of the room.
“Sit down, Jasmine.”
My father's voice is low and full of bass. I’ve heard him use that voice on referees and reporters and men who tried to cheat him. I’ve never once heard him use it on me, because I have never given him a reason to.
“He was lying,” I say. The words are coming now, too late, all at once. “What he said at the end. That it was one-sided, that it was a crush, that I didn't do anything. He made all of it up so–” my voice cracks. “Actually, I don’t know why he did that.”
“So it's true?” He sits back. He doesn't look angry. He looks like a man recalculating everything he believed about his child. “You and the headcase?”
“Don't call him that.”
“He’s had three transfers. A sealed juvenile record. A temper that just set fire to a future in the NHL, Jasmine.” He counts them off, flat. “Who does that? I tell you who. A headcase.”
“You were singing his praises a few days ago.”
“I need kids that are going to go on to do big things in the pros and make our program look good. He was probably always going to fuck it up. There are just some guys who can’t get out of their own way, and he’s one of them.”
“Caleb didn’t lose his shit today. He simply lost his patience with me.
He couldn’t stand to watch you call me fragile to my face, because I’m not, Dad.
I’m not fragile.” I am shaking. I have never spoken to my father like this.
The floor feels tilted under me. “I single-handedly help you keep this program afloat, for pennies on the dollar, by the way. You really should give me a raise. He sees how amazing I am. Why can’t you? ”
“Does he?” My father lifts a hand toward the door, the empty doorway, the door that's swung shut and gone still. “And yet he left.”
His words land under my ribs and stay there, because it's true, and because he still doesn't know everything. But before I can get to it, he reaches into the folder. Not the one with my name on the tab. A second one, underneath it, and he slides a single page across the desk to me, face up.
It's the Petrov report. The original one. The assistant's version. The one I rewrote.
“I pulled the raw flag after the game,” he says.
“When I started wondering why my most-watched player had suddenly stopped giving me anything to watch. The assistant logged a kid with two fists of jersey and a glove cocked back. You logged a brief verbal exchange, no contact, no action required.” He taps it once.
“I have read your reports for three years, Jasmine. You have never moved a comma in either direction, not for a booster, not for me. That’s why you have this job. But you did it for him.”
The room goes very quiet. I should have known he already knew. I think a part of me did know and just wanted to pretend otherwise for a little while longer.
“So no,” he says. “I didn't pull you off his case because you got too close. I pulled you because I caught you lying on an official record, and I could not, for the life of me, make sense of the daughter who did it. I made him come to the meeting because I wanted to see if he was complicit. If he tricked you. Hell, if he threatened you!” His voice does a thing I have never heard it do.
“My daughter doesn't bend especially for VCU hockey players. That was the one thing I knew for certain in this whole building. I made it about you being fragile because fragile was the only reason I could come up with why you would do this.”
And here’s what he’s waiting for me to do. Crumble. Apologize. Tell him I wasn't myself, and that it was a lapse in judgment. He wants to put this genie back in its bottle and pretend it’s three months ago.
I can’t do that.
“Yes,” I say. “I sat at my desk and made an executive decision about changing the details of an incident on an official page, on purpose, with my name on it. It’s the first dishonest thing I’ve ever put into your system in three years.”
“Do you think a murderer gets off for his crime because it was his first time?”
“You’re equating this to murder? Really? The crime was to your benefit. Do you really want him thrown out of the program? A player like Caleb? You’re not going to get someone of his caliber every year. Maybe not ever again. ”
“My integrity is everything to me, Jasmine, and it should matter to you, too. He needed to earn his way to the pros like everyone else.”
“Well, guess what, I would do it again. Because for the first time in my life, there was a person worth bending the rules for. The only part I’m sorry about is that I froze in this chair thirty minutes ago and didn't defend my choices…our choices. I love him, Dad, and I did a shitty job of showing him that just now.”
My father looks at me like a stranger wandered in wearing his daughter's face.
“I don’t understand. I did everything to keep you safe,” he says finally, and there is something almost bewildered under it.
“I kept you out of the spotlight like you wanted.
I never made you get on the team bus. I kept you away from the boosters.
I made sure to keep you out of reach of every slimy kid who'd try to use you to get to me. I built you a quiet life. The way you wanted.”
“You built me a cage,” I say, “and you've been calling it a kindness for twenty-three years.”
He flinches. I have never in my life seen my father flinch.
“Your mother left because she couldn't do it,” he says, and his voice isn't cold anymore.
It's old. “The crying. The needs. The meltdowns.
The preschool calling twice a week about one thing or another.
She told me she wasn't built for it, and she walked out, and she left me a four-year-old who screamed when I forgot to cut the tag out of your shirts.” He looks down at his hands.
“So I sheltered you. I kept you away from anybody who might look at you the way she looked at you right before she went. I thought that was the job. I thought that was…loving you.”
It’s the most my Dad has ever said about her.
About any of it. And for one terrible second, I can see what it must have been like.
A frightened new dad, alone with a little girl he couldn't understand, deciding the way to love her was to hide her.
He got it completely wrong for two decades with so much love underneath that no one alive could see it. Even me.
“I thought it was too,” I say. “But it’s crippling me, Dad.” He doesn't answer. In fact, he looks sad. “But I think I still have time to do something about it.”
“Jasmine.”
“I have to go.” I stand. “I have to find him before he does the thing he does when he decides he's lost everything. He burns the rest of it down so it can't burn him first. He told me that himself, weeks ago. I never thought I'd be the thing he was running from.”
“Sit down. We’re not finished.”
A few weeks ago, that voice would have put me back in the chair because his approval is the warmth I thought I needed when everything else in the world was so cold.
I don't sit.
“We're finished for today,” I say, and I walk out of my father's office, and out in the hallway, I take out my phone, and I call Caleb.
Wendy looks at me and offers a small smile.
The phone rings and rings, then drops into a voicemail that was never set up, a robotic voice reading his own number back to me.
I call again. Same robot. Pick up, I think, at a phone that will not. Pick up, please, just this once, before you do something stupid.
I text him. Words. The first text I have ever sent him with actual words in it, breaking the rule we built together, because the rule has gone to shit now, and there’s nothing left of it worth protecting.
Me: It wasn't a no. I froze. It was never a no. Please.
It sends. The little word underneath it says delivered.
But it does not say read.
I stand in that hallway, and I stare at the word delivered like wanting it badly enough will turn it into read, and it doesn't, because he’s somewhere with the phone face down, going dark before the dark can reach him first.
He warned me about this.
As I stand alone outside my father's office, watching the small safe life I spent years building coming down around me in real time, I finally understand the thing I have had backwards from the very start.
Safe was never the same as okay.