Chapter 3 Ella #2
I grabbed a few pieces and stacked them over the kindling already laid out in the fireplace.
Five minutes later, a merry glow filled the room, the dogs had ended their game – Sam won – and I was sprawled out on the side of the couch that had the chaise lounge, sipping my coffee and searching through the internet.
Okay, cyber-stalking Ben.
He was still active on social media, with three posts on Twitter from last night after I’d left Jack’s.
They were retweets. One was from a study by Johns Hopkins on TBIs in the USFL, another was from The Concussion Foundation, and another was from The New York Times on something called CTE.
I clicked on each link and spent the next forty minutes reading through the articles.
Then I spent another God-knows-how-long clicking on still more links, falling fully down the rabbit hole of brain-related medical research.
It was light outside by the time I picked my head back up. I stared out at the sun glancing off the snowbanks, trying not to feel overwhelmed. This was a lot of information to unpack.
I had known about TBIs, but CTE was a new term for me.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. It was a degenerative brain disorder associated with repeated head trauma.
Like, from years of playing a contact sport like football.
From what I could decipher through all the medical jargon, your brain cells just started dying off.
The most troubling study showed that nearly all of the brains posthumously tested from former USFL players showed signs of CTE. The author cautioned that there was a bias in the tests, as CTE was suspected in many of the cases, but still. Ninety. Nine. Percent.
Another study examined a large number of ex-USFL players still living, using a combination of brain scanning technology and written and verbal exams. The results were…
not great. The scans revealed that 40% had abnormal brain structures, 43% had damage to white matter in the brain – which, thanks to Google, I now knew connected nerve cells between the brain’s regions – and 30% had damage to the structures that neurons communicated through.
The other tests showed 45% had difficulty with memory and learning.
And it didn’t even get into the behavioral aspect of CTE.
Altogether, it was a devastating disease, one that couldn’t be properly diagnosed until an autopsy was performed.
Among the symptoms associated with it were mood swings, memory loss, suicidal thoughts, problems with impulse control, and violent outbursts.
Then there were headaches and seizures. The onset of symptoms could vary between just a few years after the trauma, to decades later.
If Zach Kakoa had it, did that mean…
Oh, God. Ben.
I immediately dove back into my phone and tried to find out if he was one of the living players who’d been tested. No luck. They didn’t publish names. Next, I searched out interviews he’d given since Zach’s death. Again, they were a no-go. Then I stumbled across a video interview with his mother.
The journalist questioning her asked if their family had concerns about Ben.
“Of course we do,” she answered. “He’s 28 years old. God forgive us, we put the boys in the pee-wee league when they were eight. That’s twenty years of brain trauma.”
“But at the time you had no knowledge of the increased risk of CTE in players that start before the age of twelve,” the interviewer said.
“We didn’t even know what CTE or TBIs were back then.
You think that helps me sleep at night? You think that helps my dead son?
You think that helps my still-living son deal with the fact that in five years, or ten, or twenty, he might start to lose himself to a degenerative brain disease that could have been prevented by more awareness, or stricter rules, or better protective equipment? ”
I stopped the video, set my phone down, walked over to Fred and Sam, and snuggled down between them, drawing them close with my arms.
“I love you both,” I told them. “So much.”
Sam licked my face, and for once, I didn’t pull away.
Last week I cried after accidentally stepping on Fred’s paw hard enough to make him cry out. Part of it was because I had felt so bad for hurting him, while the other part was because I realized I could never be sure that he knew it was an accident and that I was so, so sorry for it.
The dogs were like my children, but I knew there was a difference between them and actual children. I could only imagine how Ben’s parents felt. How Ben felt, every day, not knowing what the future held for him.
My face burned with embarrassment again. There I was last night, ogling his good looks and trying to get him to lighten up because of my own stupid need to feel liked.
I immediately abandoned my plan to put him at ease around me and instead adopted the much better plan to leave him the hell alone.
I also needed to talk to Jack. He all but forced my number on the poor guy before we left last night, in case Ben wanted help with design choices.
From everything he’d said last night, Ben knew what he was doing.
He probably wouldn’t call, but if he did, I was going to let him decide everything.
I wasn’t going to invite myself over or him here.
I was going to drop the full-blown charm offensive I went on last night and try my hardest to treat him like I would anyone else.
He said he came out here to get away. It was easy enough to guess from what. The media, the trolls. Maybe he needed space and time to deal with the death of his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. Or to come to terms with his own risk of CTE and what it might or might not mean for him.
I hoped he was able to. I tried to think about it from my own perspective, like if I had to deal with all of that. I had no idea how I would react, or how long it would take me to process through everything.
My phone rang from the couch. I let the dogs go and stood to get it. My sister Megan’s name flashed across the caller ID.
I swiped right to answer. “Hey, Megan.”
“Hi, Ella,” Stacey’s voice greeted me. I would have worried that something had happened to Megan if not for the fact that she and her wife were forever calling me on each other’s phones.
“Hey, Stace. What’s up?”
“We’re supposed to get a Nor’easter on the twenty-third and want to get the hell out of Boston before it hits. Is it okay if we get there a day early?”
They were staying with me through Christmas, because with Anabel still in high school, Charlie home from college, and Jacob and his crew all crashing at my parents’, the house would be packed.
Megan was enough of an introvert that crowding in with everyone else was a non-starter.
Staying at Jane’s was out, too, because they’d never progressed past the antagonistic stage of their sisterhood.
My place was the perfect option. Megan and I had always been close, and because I was so good at reading people, I recognized when she needed to be left alone for a few hours.
I put Stacey on speaker and pulled up my phone’s calendar. “So, you’ll be here Friday?”
“Yup.”
I looked down at my unswept floor just in time to watch a tumbleweed of dog hair roll by my feet, then glanced around at the rest of my house. I wouldn’t have called it a disaster zone, but…
“Friday’s great!” I said with forced cheer. “What time are you going to get here?”
“Meg, when do you want to leave Friday?” Stacey asked my sister.
“I don’t know. Noon?” was her muffled response.
“We should be there by six or seven,” Stacey said. “Depending on traffic. We’ll call you along the way and give you updates.”
“Sounds good.”
“Okay, talk to you later.”
“Love you guys.”
“Love you too,” she said before hanging up.
Friday. That would still give me time to finish up printing all my open orders, get to the post office, deep clean my house, set up the spare bedroom, wrap my Christmas presents, and drive over to Walmart to stock up on all the tofu and vegetables I could find.
Megan and Stacey were vegan, and I wanted them to have plenty of food options while staying with me.
Right, first I needed to make a list.
My stomach rumbled, as if to say, “No, first you need food, woman.”