Chapter 42 Deep Inside, We Always Hope
Deep Inside, We Always Hope
Knox
Twenty-four missed calls. Eighteen messages. Every single one of them from Cameron. I grab my iPhone, take a sip of my beer, and watch his name blink. I put the bottle back down on the table with a smack. I lunge and toss my phone into the snow.
I didn’t go to training. What’s the point? It’s pointless now anyway. No idea what scares me more: the fact that everything’s over or my feeling of liberation.
Paisley was right. It wasn’t her. Four other snowboarders I often train with wrote in the WhatsApp group that they, too, received unannounced visits and piss tests.
All of them right after the X Games. I feel like shit.
I’m an ignorant dumbshit. I was so deluded that I thought those kinds of tests didn’t just happen.
Now I’m sitting under a blanket on the sofa outside, next to the fire, waiting for Paisley to come back from training so I can talk to her.
I wanted to raid my candy, but she’d thrown everything out.
I had to laugh when I saw it. That’s Paisley.
I tear the label off the beer bottle and toss it into the fire in pieces as the terrace door slides open.
My eyes wander across the floor, see gray Panama Jacks, black jeans, a Canada Goose parka.
Dad’s hands are stuck in his pockets, and he’s looking down at me.
He’s just come back from the hairdresser.
He’s had his salt-and-pepper hair shaved on the sides and styled up on top, like me.
I take one look at him and know he knows. He and Cameron are old friends.
“Is there something between you and Paisley?”
I turn my head and look into the gray sky. “Nope.”
“Knox,” he says. I don’t react. “Knox, look at me.” The couch’s rattan fabric scratches my neck as I turn my head. Dad leans against the sliding door, looking like some kind of film star. “Why weren’t you at training?”
I go through a thousand excuses in my head, but Paisley’s voice winds through every one of them. “You’ve got to tell him, Knox. He should hear it from you. Well, get on with it, tell him.”
I sigh, sit up, and wrap my hands around the beer bottle like it’s a life preserver. My heart is racing, and that’s rare outside of cases that have to do with Paisley. “Something happened, Dad.”
“Between you and Paisley?” He pauses. “Please, tell me she’s not pregnant.”
“No. God, no. Not with Paisley.”
My father seems to recognize that he has to be serious because he pushes off the window and sits down across from me in the chair. Snow falls off the soles of his shoes as he puts one leg over the other. “What happened, Knox?”
I can’t look at him. I simply can’t, so I watch the hypnotizing flicker of the flames instead as they grow smaller, then larger, then smaller again.
“The USADA was here.”
Dad removes his leg from his upper thigh. He bends forward. “When?”
“Four days ago.”
“Four days ago. And you’re just telling me now?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I look up. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You didn’t know how to tell me that the USADA had been here?”
“No.” I’m holding onto the brown beer bottle so tightly my fingers go numb. “I didn’t know how to tell you that the tests will be positive.”
He finally opens his mouth. “Are you kidding me, Knox?” Pause. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“What were you taking?” His voice is soft but in an unsettling way. As soft as the ocean at night, still and black, right before a storm breaks.
“Testosterone. Androstenedione. Now and again Tren.”
“Trenbolone.” He speaks the whole thing out, as if there were still a chance he’d misunderstood.
He didn’t. “Yeah.”
He takes a deep breath. Then he jumps up and bangs against the sofa. I start and grab my bottle so tightly I’m worried it might break. Dad comes to me, rips it out of my hand, and throws it through the air. It shatters against the trunk of a fir.
“Why, Knox? Why?”
“I wanted to be the best.”
“You would’ve been without the stuff!”
“No.”
He grabs the arm of my jacket and squeezes my upper arm. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to your body with this stuff? Snowboarders don’t dope, Knox. They just don’t!”
“It doesn’t matter. You wanted me to be the best.”
“I wanted the best for you! I never wanted anything but for you to be okay and to be happy. Your mother is dead, Knox. You’re my son, and I love you. I idolize you. And then you go and shoot yourself up with some shit and risk dying so I have to lose you as well?”
My throat tightens. “I’m sorry, Dad.” I have to say it one more time because my voice breaks. “I’m sorry.”
Dad cusses. He lets go of my arm and begins to pace back and forth in front of the fire.
He taps his fingertips against his nose in a steady rhythm.
For a long time, I don’t know exactly how long, but it seems like an eternity before he casts me a glance and says, “We have to wean you off this right now. After we get you off this, I don’t want you to ever touch it again. ”
“Yeah.” I was planning on doing that anyway.
Dad nods. He sits down on the arm of the chair and folds his hands in his lap.
“You’re going to be suspended for a few months.
At the very least. You can forget about the World Cup.
But, with luck, you can be at the Burton US Open.
I’m going to call Jennet. She can straighten it all out with the press and… ”
“Dad.”
“…certainly get something going so that it doesn’t go public. We’ll have to pay back all the sponsors’ money, but that’s not a problem, and…”
“Dad.”
“…I’m sure the sponsors you still have will stick by you. I’m going to call them all in a minute and explain…”
“DAD!”
He looks at me. I miss my bottle. My whole body is shaking, but I’ve got to do this. I take a deep breath.
“I want to stop.”
He blinks as if he misunderstood me. Then he laughs. “No. No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
His smile dies.
“Listen, Dad.” I rub my thighs through the blanket and knead my hands.
My chest hurts, this discussion is that difficult.
“Snowboarding, that’s…that’s your thing, okay?
I like it, it’s fun, but only in the way of things that you do every so often.
Like climbing or, I don’t know, baking Christmas cookies.
I wouldn’t want to be a professional baker.
And I don’t have any interest in being a star snowboarder.
I’d like to keep on going, but without any pressure.
Just so that I don’t stop enjoying it and do it the way I want to.
” I hesitate a second, then add, “Colorado Mountain College accepted me. I applied to their psychology program, and they…they accepted me. That’s what I’d like to do. ”
My father looks at me as if I’d just pushed him into a crevasse. He swallows. The fire illuminates his bouncing Adam’s apple as he turns his head and looks out to the Aspen Highlands.
“Dad,” I say carefully.
But he shakes his head and stands up. “Excuse me, I need a bit of time.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
He walks out into the evening, and I am once again alone.
When he gets back, his cheeks are glowing red. I can tell immediately that he’s had something to drink. It’s late, almost ten, and Paisley still isn’t back. I’m starting to get worried.
“What a load of shit,” Dad mumbles, closing the front door. His keys land on the floor after he misses the bowl. “A dirty fucking load of shit.”
A dirty fucking load of shit?
I put my book down and walk over to him. He collapses onto a chair at the dining room table and starts tapping around on his phone.
“Everything okay?”
Dad snorts. Drops of mucus land on his display. “These motherfuckers.”
“Ah.” I take a seat across from him. “I know that you’re angry, Dad, but if you want to insult me, you don’t have to do it in the third person.”
He looks up and squints as if he was just noticing me. “Why would I insult you?”
“Hmm. No idea. Because I just tossed all your future plans for me out the window?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Huh?”
Dad sighs. He puts his phone down on the table and looks at me. “Psychology, you said?”
I nod.
“You think that will make you happy?”
I nod again.
He shrugs. “Then do it. I want what you want.”
I can’t believe what’s happening. “Just like that? No scene?”
“Knox, please. Why should I make any scene?”
I spread my arms wide because the answer’s so obvious. “My being a professional snowboarder was always your dream.”
“Yeah. Because I thought it was your dream.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Maybe you should’ve told me, Knox.”
Yeah. Yeah, I should have. I’m sitting here in my chair like I’ve turned to stone, I simply cannot believe this whole situation is real. To be on the safe side, I pinch my arm, but instead of waking up, my skin starts to turn red.
“But I hope you realize you won’t get off so easily.”
I let go of my arm. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t owe the USADA any more tests, but you owe me. You are going to go and see Dr. Sherman regularly and have your blood taken. He’s going to keep me informed. If I find out that you are shooting that shit again, Knox…”
“I won’t,” I interrupt. “I’ll go to Dr. Sherman. Promise.”
“Good.” He starts typing on his phone again.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m getting in touch with a few folks.”
“Because of me?”
“Not everything has to do with you.”
“Why are you getting in touch with people?”
He takes off his jacket before responding. “Ivan Petrov is here in town. I saw him at the ski hut.”
An ice-cold shiver runs down my spine and all I can think of is Paisley.
Paisley.
Paisley.
PAISLEY.
I choke back a gasp. “What’s he doing here?”
Dad looks surprised. “You know him?”
“Yeah. He was Paisley’s trainer in Minneapolis. He…” I don’t know how much of her background I’m allowed to share. “She ran away from him. That’s why she’s here.”
Dad’s eyes widen, then he jumps up.
I follow his lead. “How do you know him?”
He purses his lips. His face grows firm. “Your mother. They were a figure-skating pair when young. He was a fucking pig.”
What the…?