12. Carter #2
I could almost hear my heart breaking. It wasn’t a shatter of an antique vase on the concrete floor or the smashing of a glass window.
The sound that went through my head was that of a deep crack, as if I were standing on the ice in the middle of a bottomless lake, and the only thing keeping me alive had just split.
The suspense before the inevitable crash and death should have lasted only an instant, but it went on.
I wasn’t on the ice. There was no plunging into my cold grave.
It was just this. The world lost a hint of its brightness.
Life got a little sadder. And I had to go on.
There was no cut-to-black for me. There was no numbing coldness of death or the crushing pressure on my chest that would prevail and make me fill my lungs with water.
There was just Nate, turning a little away from me, swirling the alcohol in his glass, keeping his mouth shut, and wearing a regretful look as if he’d just stepped onto some random child’s hamster. He was sorry for politeness’ sake, but he couldn’t fathom how deep the pain ran.
“Come along, Carter,” Dad said, crossing the room and putting an arm around my shoulders. I shrugged him off as if he’d put a snake around my neck and marched toward the hallway. Behind me, Dad’s voice was muffled. “The best thing you can do for your career is to die, Nate.”
“Get out of my home,” Nate replied grimly. I was already at the door, and I knew the way. The last thing I heard from the apartment was Nate opening the bottle.
A chauffeur I didn’t know waited in a car I didn’t recognize. I was soaked by the time Dad showed me in. He sat next to me in the back, telling the chauffeur to take us back to the airport. “I’ll wait in the plane for the approval to take off.”
He was silent while the car glided out onto the street, the wipers barely managing to clear the windshield for long enough so the chauffeur could see where we were going.
I didn’t care if a train split us in half.
Dad didn’t seem to care either. He wanted to get to his jet or die trying, but he wasn’t paying attention to anything beyond the tablet in his hands. On the screen, a list of Google alerts regarding his name.
It wasn’t until we were inside his jet that he met my look for the first time. I was rubbing my wet hair with a soft towel a flight attendant had handed to me. “You think I’m cruel,” Dad said in a voice that was almost offensively soft. Its sweetness made me think of rotting flesh.
I sank deeper into the comfortable seat and looked out the window at the downpour that was keeping us grounded.
My father dabbed his hair with the towel and threw it on the floor for the attendant to pick it up. I sighed as I bent over and lifted the discarded towel, folding it twice before placing it on the small, foldable table near me.
Dad sat on the right side of the cabin, and I had strategically chosen the left. Still, when he turned his head to me, we faced one another. “Think what you want, Carter,” he said calmly. “And when you’re old enough, you’ll thank me.”
The flight attendant was a red-haired girl with corkscrew locks falling over her pretty face.
She was new. Or, at least, she hadn’t worked here when I’d last flown with Dad this summer.
I wasn’t in the habit of flying to the closest Starbucks and back and only came along when it was absolutely necessary.
The woman, whose name I didn’t know, was trying to open a new bottle of something light brown with an elaborate black label on it.
Dad didn’t pick and choose. She was struggling with it in my father’s sight.
Dad glanced at her trying. “Of course, you don’t believe me now, but you’ll understand in time. What I’m doing is for your best, son. Even if… Will you give that to me?” he snapped and yanked the bottle from the woman’s hand.
“I apologize, Mr. Prince,” she blurted.
Dad was ignoring her already. I looked at her face, but she wouldn’t seek comfort in my eyes. Instead, she apologized again and asked if he needed anything else.
“If I need anything, I’ll get it myself,” he grunted, twisting the bottle open and pouring himself a drink.
The flight attendant reached for the bottle when he was done.
“Leave that here,” Dad snapped, and the woman walked away, still apologizing. He turned his forcibly softened gaze to me. “Everything we have will be yours, Carter. And with your talent and name, you’ll double it. Triple it.”
“So I can bully underpaid flight attendants until my liver is pickled and my nose explodes,” I spat.
Dad slammed the glass against the foldable table in front of himself and pointed a threatening finger at me.
“I have been more patient with you than any sane person would have been. You betrayed me, you stole from me, and you lied to me. Not only that but you got involved with a man twice your age, a man I used to call my friend, just to hurt me. I’m trying to be a bigger man, Carter, but you’re making it very difficult. ”
“Not everything’s always about you, Dad,” I said in a voice so hollow and devoid of emotions that I might have been speaking from beyond my grave. “But if you want to talk about the things you’ve done, be my guest. It’s not like I have something to do.”
“You are an ungrateful little brat. Do you hear me?” He wagged his finger like a TV housewife.
It was better than the alternative, where he was waving his fist. His knuckles were red, and I hoped they hurt.
“First, I’m putting a stop to this guitar nonsense.
You have the talent you need and the easiest shot at the NHL because of me, so you can say goodbye to being some rich asshole’s entertainment. ”
I wondered if he was aware that he was the definition of a rich asshole.
I hadn’t allowed myself to see him that way before, but I really had nothing else to do with myself.
Recontextualizing my father’s image was as fun as eating salted peanuts while the plane was grounded.
Not that. I was not doing this on purpose.
What was happening here was me becoming aware that my father was not a very good man.
“I’ll coach you myself if I have to,” he droned on as if I would ever believe he was capable of spending time with me.
Even if it was on guard duty with me as his prisoner.
He had relegated that task to Nate Partridge throughout my life.
When they were off, Dad did whatever the hell he liked, and Nate was the one telling me the stories from the ice, from the trips, and from his vivid imagination.
Nate’s big heart had forged me into the person I became. Could I have fallen in love with anyone else? Had I even had a chance?
“…confiscate that piano. You have no need for it. It’s a distraction, and your mother never should have encouraged you to have a hobby.” He said that with a straight face.
A laugh burst out of me. Only my father could imagine a life without a hobby was the preferable choice. “Dad, you can stop talking,” I said. “You’re getting tired.”
He glared at me.
“If you need to refuel, the bathroom’s that way.” I pointed to the front part of the plane.
Dad stood up furiously and bent down, bringing his face close to mine. The stench of alcohol was nothing like that faint, sweet aroma I loved on Nate’s lips. This one was like the fermenting rot in a tooth cavity. “I’ll teach you some fucking manners if I have to beat them into you.”
I gazed at him, unimpressed. “It’s true, right?”
The anger it dragged out of him was more than enough to confirm even the wildest tales I’d read. “What are you talking about? Shut your mouth, boy.”
“I heard you snorted cocaine off a hooker’s ass in Belize,” I said with a sinister note of amusement.
Dad grabbed my wet shirt and yanked me out of the seat. “I should have left you there so he could do whatever the hell he wants with you.”
He should have. I wouldn’t have minded being Nate’s anything, his everything.
“Let go,” I said politely, pushing his fists off my shirt.
I dropped back in my seat, and Dad fell into his.
“Just…leave me alone,” I said. The thought of being back with Nate and letting him do whatever he wanted made my throat constrict and my eyes sting.
“I’ll do what you want. You won, Dad. You threatened him, and he chose himself.
” My voice quivered slightly, but Dad was too selfish to notice anyone’s feelings.
“You can tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.
I don’t care. But you can’t make me enjoy it. ”
I closed my eyes and sank lower into my chair. Dad said nothing. It was an agreement we could both respect and hold on to. He would shove me back into the rink, and I would hate my life. He would take away my music, and I would hurt.
Hurting would remind me I was still alive.
And I will be alive, I thought spitefully. I’ll be alive when we hear that your heart exploded. And on that day, I’ll be free. Without Nate for the rest of my life, yes, but I would eventually be free of the warder of my prison, too.
I shut Nate out of my thoughts. He had tossed me aside, and I couldn’t do anything about that.
I was on my own. If I wanted to cry, I wouldn’t do it in front of Dad.
So I bottled it all up. I pressed it down, all my rage and sadness and the dust that remained from my shattered heart, and I pushed it all the way to the pit of my stomach.
I wouldn’t let it out even if it killed me.
I wouldn’t be weak.
I wouldn’t give him the pleasure.