Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Gabe
Wrenching her image from my head was never easy, especially not after last night.
But I had practice to get to and the next game to think about.
Seeing her vulnerable and bared, totally broken last night and seeing her bounce back in the morning with that bitterness, insisting I shouldn’t blow off football, stirred things inside me even though it shouldn’t.
I’d never made any promises. Guilt had no right to visit, to stay and insinuate itself under my skin.
I’d gone to see her to tell her we couldn’t be together until after the season was over.
But when I saw her, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t even promise her the hope of a post-football relationship.
It was my promise to my mother to talk to her and my promise to Coach and my team and to myself to focus on football.
It was an acknowledgment of my failing, my inability to handle a significant loving relationship with a woman and still give my all to football.
Acknowledgment of a deep wound left too long unhealed.
But I’d promised myself I would deal with everything—after the season.
I stepped outside her building and walked down the street to where I’d parked my car, disgusted at my deranged weakness.
What the hell was wrong with me? I’d taken it as a given all these years that I was normal, that it was legitimate to put football first, to forego a serious relationship in the name of being the best.
But that was a fucking load of crap. I reached over the windshield and ripped the ticket from under the wiper blade, crushed it in my hand then tossed it into the gutter.
The image of Derek’s face, his body bloody lying in the street, flashed through my head.
I swiped my face and yanked the car door open.
The effort was monumental, but I drove straight to the stadium.
A half hour late, an hour late, wasn’t the end of the world.
Other men did it when they had family emergencies.
Sometimes Coach yelled, sometimes he understood, depending.
But I wasn’t worried about the coach yelling.
It was the screaming of my own conscience that pained me. Literally.
I pulled the car into the parking lot and to my spot, screeching the tires to a halt, and pressed the ignition off. Then I slammed my fists against the steering wheel to stop the dizzying swirl of thoughts and tamp down the crazy well of emotions inside me.
What the hell was wrong with me? My gut churned, feeling more like I’d just stabbed my best friend when all I’d done was arrive late to practice. Was I really thinking that football was more important than Mia? That staying to console her was less important than getting to practice on time?
Hell, even she thought that was true, had made it clear.
She made me feel like shit because she expected me to put football ahead of her.
And it didn’t feel right. But then going inside the facility, walking into the locker room now, an hour late when I’d never been a minute late before this week, felt even worse.
I’d betrayed everything I’d been building for the past twelve years.
This couldn’t be healthy, feeling that anxiety constantly weighing on me, wondering if I was doing the right thing, making the right choice.
Wondering why the hell I needed to make a choice. That thought shot a spike of fear up my spine like an icepick through my nerve endings. Football had been my solace against unbearable emotional loss. Always. It was the thing that never failed me. But now?
I walked through the empty locker room to my locker and ripped my jacket off. A ball boy came around the corner and told me Coach wanted to see me on the field the minute I got in. Coach Marini, not Coach Parker. Shit.
My mother had called me on the drive to the stadium and, for the first time since high school, I didn’t take her call.
Had no idea what to say to her. I’d checked with her doctors, with Dad and my family and I knew she was doing better, almost ready to come home.
Without bothering to dress, I walked through the dimly lit tunnel toward the field to get the confrontation with Coach over with.
I’d visit Mom again when she went home. That would give me a day or two to figure out my head. And my heart.
To strengthen my resolve, shore up my defenses.
To do what, I wasn’t sure. That all rested on Mia.
I needed to ask her to wait for me, to let me have this season.
And to let me call her when it was over.
I stepped outside the tunnel onto the field in my street sneakers and clothes and it felt odd.
Coach Marini looked up from his notepad when I approached and motioned for me to join him.
I itched to get dressed and join the practice, needed it like a junkie needing a fix.
The coach yelled.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Wyatt?” He had a few other choice words to say in the same vein.
I stood like stone, unaffected. He must have noticed because he stopped mid-tirade and invited me to follow him to his office. I complied, keeping my mind as blank as I could, getting good at tamping down all the doubt, the conscience, the guilt.
He rummaged in his drawer and pulled out a card.
Gave me the name of a therapist and ordered me to see him, to call him now while I sat in front of him.
I didn’t need a psychiatrist when I had a perfectly good father.
A father who’d helped me the last time I had a meltdown all those years ago when I’d been a kid devastated by the horrific loss of my friend.
But my dad had been busy with my mother. Maybe now that she was better I’d call him. Or go in person to see him and have a talk.
“If I’m going to talk to someone about it, Coach, I’d rather talk to my father.”
Coach nodded. “Fine. See that you call him. Better yet, visit him. Pronto. I don’t like what I’m seeing here, football aside. And you can bet that’s a hell of a lot for me to put aside.” He attempted a smile. I attempted a smile back.
“I know, Coach. But right now, I’d just as soon get to practice.
” Without waiting for an answer, I shoved it all aside with a massive heft of my emotional baggage and walked out of his office, back to the locker room.
The sooner I got dressed and on the field, the better I would feel. Football was my solace, wasn’t it?
I slammed my locker door open, ignoring the intelligent red flag in my head that warned me of my circular reasoning.
Then I shut down everything, shut it all out, and focused in on football like I had so many times over the years, like I had when I’d been a kid shutting out the vision of my friend bloody and lying in the street, his eyes open and unseeing, his head bent wrong with his neck snapped, all life gone.
Fuck. I squeezed my eyes shut as if that could dispel the image and carried on, my hands a little shaky as I laced my cleats.
After practice, I called my father, but there was no answer so I left a message that I was coming by.
Now that I’d decided to do it, the need to talk to Dad took on the urgency of an air horn in my head.
Or maybe it was the now frequent images of that bloody scene from my childhood in my head that prompted me.
I thought I’d buried that incident long ago.
Hadn’t thought of it in years. Until now.
Now I couldn’t get rid of the image of his dead eyes or the accompanying nausea.
I called the hospital next to find out if Mom had been released, closing my eyes and praying into the unknown that they were on their way out now.
“Mr. Wyatt, your mother has not been released yet.” I said nothing and the woman, a stranger, said, “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said automatically, but I meant it.
Dad must be with her. I hoped to hell she was still okay.
I got in my SUV and took off to the hospital, cursing the traffic.
Hiding under my ball cap, I crashed through the doors and ran through the corridors, flawlessly finding my way to the wing where they held her in this mammoth hospital.
Ducking into the stairwell, I ran up to the three flights to her floor, and though I was in world-class condition, my heart raced and my breathing labored in my tightened chest.
Stopping short in the hallway, I saw my father standing outside her room.
Something was wrong. He stood like a statue, a tragic broken statue, bent and still, the glisten of tears reflecting the glaring lights.
Stark terror grabbed me if I were looking at doomsday.
But it was only one broken man. In that single tick of endless time, I read the situation, like I always did, under center or dropping back for a pass, saw all the details of the scene, the nurse rushing in with a mobile tray of equipment, the charge nurse in the hall with my father, watching him as if she might need to catch him when he fell or pick up the pieces when he shattered.
But most of all, I saw the pain, felt it. And I knew.
But there were no plays in my playbook of life to cover what I was reading.
I’d never seen this look that life had thrown at me, never faced this configuration.
So I did what I always did when I had no play left, I went for the Hail Mary.
I went from zero to fast and rushed by my dad and the nurse and pushed into the room to see my mother, squeezing out any other possibility than that I would see her lying in bed smiling at me, the way I’d left her last night.
There was a team of cardiologists in the room with her. She’d had another heart attack.