Chapter 42
Carter
The walk from the parking lot to Coach Tom’s office is about ninety yards, and I take it slow, the way you take the last bit of a thing you’ve been putting off for two years.
It’s early. The facility’s empty the way it only is before the sun’s properly up — the corridor lights still on their overnight setting, the pitch outside going from gray to green as the light comes up over the east stand.
The bag’s on my shoulder. The weight in it is the same as it’s been every morning for two years.
My legs don’t want to make the corner to his door. I make them.
Coach Tom’s office is small and smells like coffee and liniment, and he doesn’t get up when I come in. He just nods at the chair across from him and goes back to whatever’s on his desk, giving me the thing he gives players he’s about to break open: time, and no eyes on me while I find the nerve.
I sit. I’ve got the kit bag on my knees, the notebook in it, the weight I’ve carried into every room for two years.
“You said bring what I’ve been carrying,” I say. The deflection loads up automatic — a joke about my hamstrings, a thing to make this lighter. I feel it arrive. For the first time in two years I don’t reach for it.
“I did.” Tom sets down his pen. He’s a man who’s buried people; you can see it in how he doesn’t flinch toward comfort.
He won’t make this pretty. He won’t tell me it’s okay.
He’ll just sit here and be unafraid of it, which is the only thing that’s ever made it possible to say.
“Take your time. I’ve got all morning. I’ve got all season. ”
***
It takes me a while to get there. He lets it.
The light moves while I sit there. That’s the thing I’ll remember — not the speech I didn’t give, but the way the square of sun from his window crawls across the floor an inch at a time while I work up to it, the morning getting on with itself, indifferent and patient, the way Tom is being patient.
He doesn’t fill the quiet. He’s the only man besides Earl I’ve ever met who can sit inside a silence without needing to win it.
“I had a brother,” I say.
And the room doesn’t end. That’s the thing I always thought would happen — that the sentence would tear something, that saying it would make it more true than I could stand.
It doesn’t. The room just holds, and Tom holds, and I keep going because the door’s open now and I’ve wanted it open for two years.
“His name was Diego.”
I have never said that out loud. Not once, in two years, to anyone — I let Dani say it, I let everyone else lower their voices around it, and I built a whole person out of never saying it myself.
And here it is, two syllables, in a small office that smells like liniment, and my voice does the thing it’s never been allowed to do and I let it.
“He was older. He carried the heavy end of everything so I never had to — that was the deal, that was us, he did the serious and I did the light. And then he was gone, two years ago, and there was no one to carry the heavy end, so I just—” my throat closes and I make myself finish it “—I decided I’d be so light nobody would ever feel the weight again.
Including me. Especially me. I’ve been doing the bit at his funeral for two years, Tom. I made a whole career of it.”
Tom doesn’t move to fix it. He lets the tears come and go without remarking on them, the way you let weather happen.
“And then there was a woman who saw straight through the light to the bag I’ve been carrying,” I say, “and instead of grabbing it she just made room, and I loved her so much I told myself the real thing was safe — and it got her career hung out for the whole world, and when she finally asked me, point blank, to choose her fast, I took half a second too long because I’ve spent all of it never letting myself feel a heavy thing in real time, and that half-second cost me the one person who ever let me set the bag down. ”
***
Tom is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks it’s low, in Portuguese, and it’s not a fix.
“I lost a brother too,” he says. “Long time ago. You never stop carrying it. You just stop carrying it alone.” He looks at me. “That’s the only part you get to choose. Not whether. Who with.”
I nod. I can’t talk for a second.
“I’m withdrawing from the campaign,” I say, when I can. “Today. I’m not going to be the centerpiece of a thing that used her records to corner her. I’ll take whatever the league does to me for it. I should’ve done it weeks ago, the second I understood what it was costing her.”
“Good,” Tom says. Just that. Then: “And the rest of it? The part that isn’t the campaign?”
I pick up the bag. The notebook’s still in it, still closed — I’m not going to open it here, in an office that smells of liniment, for a man who already understands. There’s one person who’s earned the inside of it, and it isn’t me and it isn’t Tom.
“The rest of it,” I say, “I have to go say to her. Out loud. The way I just said his name.” I stand up, and the bag on my shoulder is the same weight it’s always been and somehow I can carry it now. “If she’ll let me in the room.”
Tom picks his pen back up. “Then stop standing in mine,” he says, which is a gruff old man’s way of saying go, and I go.