Chapter 8 Ben #2
My steps slowed. I let the imagery wash over me.
What would it be like to come home to this?
To be greeted by a beautiful woman? The sight was almost painful.
Because I didn’t think I could do it. I couldn’t bring myself to ask someone to share my fate.
I’d been out here for months trying to figure out where to go from here, how to move forward with my life, and I felt like my feet were stuck in the mud, preventing me from placing one foot in front of the other.
Suddenly, it seemed like I hadn’t made any progress at all, despite my therapist’s assurances.
Ella was a bright light in a sea of darkness.
I was beginning to think of her as a friend.
I hadn’t let myself progress past that yet, but I did so now.
What if that friendship eventually changed?
What if I allowed my gaze linger on her?
To be drawn into the infectious joy of her laughter?
To stop teasing her and start flirting with her?
What if we slept together? Started a relationship?
Could I really unload all of my baggage on someone like her?
Smother her light with all of the dark shit I didn’t tell anyone but my therapist?
Anything less wouldn’t be fair. Wouldn’t be a real relationship.
But the thought of crushing that infectious joy beneath whatever symptoms of TBI or CTE I may or may not manifest turned my stomach.
She waved at me from the window, giving me a thumbs-up to say that I grabbed the right box. I took a deep breath of frigid night air and started walking at a normal pace again.
This is ridiculous.
I was just starting a friendship with her.
I didn’t have to keep my eyes from lingering too long.
I didn’t have to police my thoughts. I was still enjoying all the feelings of being around a new person that I liked.
I was still experiencing the nerves, the anticipation of hanging out more and getting to know each other.
And with Ella, that also meant a lot of time spent wondering what she was going to do next, and how hard it might make me laugh.
I needed to stop getting ahead of myself. Stop thinking of worst-case scenarios and instead take this one day at a time, just like my therapist had advised.
I stepped back inside, slipped off my boots, and brought the package to my ear, shaking it. It made a small rattling sound, but felt like a solid board of wood.
“It’s cribbage,” she said.
I frowned at her. “Wha..hey. You’re not supposed to ruin the surprise.”
“Fine then. It’s a salmon.”
“A whole salmon?”
“No. Just a couple of fillets.” She glanced at the present. “That were pounded into a perfect rectangle and then frozen. Which is why it’s cold. And doesn’t smell. Open it quick, before it defrosts.”
Our gazes caught and held, for one second, ten. We were very serious adults having a very serious discussion about Very Serious Things?. At what felt like the end of a solid minute, my lips twitched. Or course I’d be the first one to break.
She gave me a blinding smile and took the present from me, heading into the living room where we’d left the dogs.
I kicked my boots off and followed her. The dogs didn’t so much as crack an eye open when we walked in.
“Wow, impressive level of dog exhaustion,” I said.
She frowned at them. “I think I might have let them play too much the last few days. Huskies are a working breed, and they’ve been known to hurt themselves by pushing too hard.”
She handed the present back to me and moved to Fred – I knew it was him because of the little white splotch on the tip of one ear – and then leaned down to systematically inspect him, rubbing his shoulders, haunches, legs, and paws to check for any sore spots.
She repeated the process with Sam. Both tolerated it fairly well, and conked right back out when she got to her feet, looking satisfied they were uninjured.
I went to the couch and pulled the hidden latch in the middle seat. The chairback folded forward to reveal a flat wooden surface with two cupholders built in.
“Is this big enough to hold the board?” I asked. “I figured you’d want to keep them in sight and maybe sit in something more comfortable than a folding chair.”
“That’s perfect. If you want to open it, I can get it set up while you go grab those beers you mentioned earlier.” She sent me a pointed look.
“Deal.”
The wrapping was some sort of thick kraft paper with little pine trees and snowflakes printed on it in black.
I had a feeling she might have made it herself; it was too nice to be store-bought.
I slipped a finger beneath the tape and pulled the paper free to reveal a lightly stained piece of wood with a lot of peg holes in it.
I handed it to her. “What’s the little skunk mark for?”
Her grin was a wicked thing. “Oh, you’ll see, Ben. You’ll see.”
The laughter that followed me out of the room was slightly concerning.
I grabbed two oatmeal stouts from the fridge and headed back in. She sat sideways on the far side of the couch, facing the drop-down table, her legs folded beneath her. She’d laid the board out horizontally. Two pairs of brightly colored pegs stuck out from the starting line.
She glanced up at me as I approached. “Sharing your oatmeal stout?”
I handed her one. “Yes. Like a well-adjusted adult.”
She snorted, then took a sip. “Oh, God. That’s so good.”
“Like, Jack could make a lot of money off of it good,” I said, folding myself down into the other seat.
“Right? He’d never hand over his recipe, though. Dad and Jacob tinker around with homebrew, and they’ve been trying to get their hands on it for years.”
“Jacob is your oldest brother? The one who looks kind of like Sterling K. Brown?”
She nodded. “And when he realized it, he changed his glasses frames to match the ones Brown wears on This Is Us, though he vehemently denies it every time I try to bring it up.”
“Ah, yes. Sibling antics,” I said, thinking back to all the shit Zach and I did to each other as kids. Okay, and as adults. Kind of hard to get over your rivalry when you’re both professional athletes in the same sport.
Fuck, I missed him.
“Jacob is hard to tease,” Ella said. “He’s too serious by half sometimes.
Typical oldest child. He and Dad are both doctors.
He started as some fancy surgeon in Boston, but as Dad’s gotten older and Jacob started a family, he had the urge to move home and take over Dad’s family practice when he retires. ”
“What do your other siblings do?” I asked. Her family was fascinating to me. What were the dynamics like when you had that many brothers and sisters?
“Megan is the deputy director of a non-profit in Boston that works with LGBTQ+ teens and adolescents,” she said.
“Her wife is a social worker. They met when Stacey brought one of the children she was working with into the center. Theirs is a very symbiotic relationship. Stacey smooths out all of Megan’s rougher edges, where Megan is there to lift Stacey up and stick up for her when Stacey is too quiet or reserved to do it herself.
And they both understand the highs and lows of each other’s jobs. ”
“They sound like perfect teammates,” I said, reminded of how cohesive the last offensive line I played on was.
“Exactly. They’re relationship goals in that way,” she said. “Jane and Dave are both journalists. They met at UMF.”
“UMF?”
“It’s a college about halfway down Maine.
Dave writes for the political section of the Maine Journal and Jane freelances.
She’s been published in a few national press outlets this past year, mostly for taking a unique line on current events.
Annabel is still in high school, and Charlie is pursuing his bachelors in molecular biology and will probably go for his doctorate before he’s done. ”
“Sounds like a smart kid.”
“He is smart, but its more that he just…loves school. In a way that not many people do. He’s one of the few of us who has found his birth mother.
Or record of her, at least. She was from Herat, a city in northwestern Afghanistan.
The adoption agency wasn’t able to locate her, likely because the war displaced so many people, but they knew from the paperwork that she was working class and illiterate.
It’s driven him to learn as much as humanly possible. ”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Does his experience finding her play a part in why you haven’t searched for your birth parents?”
She looked at me.
“Tell me to shut up if you don’t want to answer that,” I said.
She shook her head. “It’s fine. Like I said that first night, I get being curious.
And yeah, it is, in part. Me, Charlie, and Jacob all come from war-torn countries.
The agency Jacob was adopted from doesn’t even exist anymore, and the records have all disappeared.
The resulting chaos of war makes it damn near impossible to find people.
Charlie was lucky just to track down those few details about his mother.
He doesn’t know anything about his father. ”
She fell silent for a second, worrying her lower lip in a way that I now recognized was her tell for mulling something heavy over. “Honestly, I’m more worried about what I might find instead of what I might not.”
I took a sip of my beer. “What do you mean?”
“The Bosnian War was…ugly. Not that all wars aren’t.” She turned to look at the fire. “What if I find my parents only to learn that they were killed in the Albanian ethnic cleansing? Or worse, that they were the ones doing said cleansing?”
“Jesus.” I took another deep swig of my beer.