Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Callie
This morning, on my run, a thought caught up with me around mile two and refused to fall back. It kept pace the whole loop, followed me through the shower and the school drop-off, and now I’m at my desk doing what I should have done the day the photos arrived: red-teaming my own story.
Here’s the exercise. If the theory is Nate Rivers, party-boy quarterback, indulging in every vice known to man, then the alternative theory is that he’s not that guy, and the drugs aren’t his. A real journalist stress-tests both. So I start pulling facts instead of feelings.
Fact: NFL players get tested. The program’s random and imperfect, and some substances clear the system fast, but a man who’s been in the league a decade, partying at the frequency of legend, should have popped at least once by now, or he’s the luckiest man in professional sports.
Rivers has never popped. Fact: his workout regimen is famous to the point of parody.
It’s been covered in magazines, on podcasts, the Ledger’s done it.
Some of that could be PR manufacturing, sure.
But the stats don’t lie: if he’s doing even half of what’s reported, he’s outworking most of his own roster.
And the man is thirty-two, not nineteen.
At thirty-two, hard partying doesn’t whisper, it shouts, in recovery times, in the deep ball, in the fourth quarter.
He isn’t slowing down. By every measurable, he’s peaking.
If the man’s current shape is any indication he could probably play until he is forty and not even run out of breath.
And then the fact I’ve been walking around for two weeks: Danny Alvarez is at that table.
A man with a documented addiction, at a table with powder on it, and I never once ran the obvious hypothesis, that the drugs are his.
Not because it isn’t glaring. Because of my guilt.
I felt so responsible for what happened to Danny that I filed him under victim, permanently, and victims in my mental filing system don’t get examined, they get apologized to.
I put him in the witness column and never audited it, because auditing it felt like hurting him twice.
Priya was right, and I hate it: my journalist self-esteem isn’t just shot. It’s been actively rewriting my evidence.
I get up and walk into Marty’s office. He looks at me over the laptop like a man bracing.
“I need more time on the Rivers story.” No jokes installed. Serious voice.
“This better come with a very good explanation.” Marty almost never loses patience with me, which is how I know he’s one flight of stairs from it.
“The drugs aren’t his. They’re Danny’s.” I say it out loud for the first time, and it sounds right in the air, the way a true sentence does.
“The story isn’t a quarterback indulging.
It’s a man who lost everything and is spiraling, and everyone around him is letting him fall.
” And lost it because of me hangs off the end of the sentence, unsaid, where it lives.
“Callie.” He drags both hands down his face. “At this point, I frankly don’t care which story it is. Write something before somebody else does.”
“Somebody else.” I lift an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you’d hand it off?”
“I’m telling you you’re the best writer I have, and this is your story, and I don’t know who else has those pictures.
Maybe nobody. Maybe five outlets are building the same wall we are.
That’s the point, I don’t know, and every day you sit on it, we’re betting the desk on maybe. Get it together and write it.”
I walk out not thrilled, but I can’t blame him.
He handed me those photos nearly two weeks ago, and my grand output since has been Googling strangers, staring at a table, and developing this morning, this morning, the alternative theory I should have drafted on day one.
I slump into my chair and open a blank document, which stares back with its one white eye.
“So…” Priya has arrived at her desk, coffee in hand, mischief pre-loaded.
“So?” I sip mine.
“Still furious at Nate Rivers for solving your snack catastrophe?”
I do not grace that with an answer, mostly because the snacks stopped being the concern days ago. The concern is that he and I keep starting sentences neither of us finishes, two conversations now that both ended one word short of real. That’s eating at me.
“Have you considered,” Priya says, delicately, like a surgeon making the first cut, “that the man was flirting?”
I laugh. Genuinely, from the chest, because it’s absurd. Priya has not witnessed the dynamic Rivers and I have in shared airspace, and the most generous available description of that dynamic is armed dislike. This is me being kind.
“Priya. He has an endorsement deal with Power Strong, the whole team does, I’d bet.
” To prove it, I Google the brand, and there it is: a team-wide partnership, boxes and bars wallpapered with half the Outlaws roster.
I turn the monitor toward her like an exhibit.
“He wasn’t storing protein bars in his SUV on the off chance Callie Carter fails at motherhood.
They were sponsor product. It’s a coincidence with branding. ”
“Obviously!” She waves this away. “I’m sure he forgot they were even in there.
The bars are irrelevant. The bars are not the data, Callie.
The data is this: you told me yourself that the first practice, the man showed up in jeans, radiating I-would-rather-be-anywhere-else.
If Ellie over there showed up to coach sports in jeans, fine, I’d understand —”
“Hey.” Ellie surfaces from behind her monitors, wounded.
“— but he didn’t stay in jeans, did he? He evolved.
Jeans, to coaching clothes, to hauling Gatorade he had no obligation to haul.
He could have shrugged. He could have sat there thinking sucks to be Callie Carter and privately enjoyed it, which, given how you two met, is what he was owed. He chose the boxes.”
“That’s still not flirting, Priya. That’s a man progressively developing an interest in Little League football.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Besides, why are we even discussing whether he —”
“Because I love the look on your face.” She grins over her mug like a cat with a canary subscription. “Because your eyes lit up when I said it. Lit up, Callie. No disgust face. I’d like the record to show that one week ago you were calling this man the worst.”
“He is still the worst.” It’s a weak defense and we both hear it, so I reinforce with available facts. “He calls me sugar. He blames me for Danny and half the roster. He looks at me like I’m a nuclear device with a snooze button.”
I have more ammunition, but my phone rings, and Travis’s name is on the screen, and just like that the morning changes weather.
“Hey,” he opens. “What time’s Eli’s game Saturday again?”
“Eleven.” Like every Saturday. Every single Saturday of the season, eleven o’clock, same field. A man could set a watch by it, if the man ever looked.
“Right. Yeah, see, I don’t think I can make it. Tommy booked the tennis court from ten to twelve, and we’re playing.”
Not a hint of apology in it. Not even the decency of a decent lie.
“Tommy booked —” I take a breath. The long one, from the diaphragm, the one eight years of this man trained into me.
“Travis. Tennis with Tommy is not more important than your son’s game.
And listen, if you’d been at every game this season and needed one Saturday for yourself, I would drive you to the court myself.
But you haven’t been to one. Not one. Eli asks every week, and this week you finally told him yes. He told his whole team you’re coming.”
“I’ll be there next week.” A pause, and then, because Travis has never met a hole he didn’t keep digging: “It’s not like a bunch of eight-year-olds running around is the highlight of my day.”
“Your son should be the highlight of your day.”
It comes out low and furious, because I should not have to explain this to a grown man, and here is the part that truly breaks my brain: I know Travis loves his kids.
I’ve never doubted it. What he cannot seem to metabolize is that love isn’t a feeling you have at people from a distance, it’s attendance.
It’s a body in a folding chair. “Travis. You will be at that game. You will cheer for your son like it’s the Super Bowl, and if he plays ten seconds, you will make them the loudest ten seconds of your life. ”
I hang up before the next excuse loads — Tommy, tennis, lunch with the guys, whatever’s on this week’s schedule of more important things, and sit very still, breathing, while Priya silently slides her emergency chocolate across the desk without a word, because she is the worst and also the best.
#
Nate
Johnson calls me at seven a.m., dying. Stomach bug, the man apologizes approximately forty times between waves of what sounds like genuine peril, and asks if there’s any chance I can run the game today.
And the idiot I have recently become says yes. Doesn’t even hesitate. Doesn’t consult the schedule, the routine, or the last remaining shreds of his judgment.
Which is how I destroy a decade of game-weekend protocol in one phone call.
I have team practice until ten. I have to be on the team plane at four, because we’re away tomorrow.
The day before a game is sacred, has been since college.
Routine, film, visualization, silence. I don’t do anything the day before a game, least of all youth sports in direct sunlight.
And yet: right after practice, here I am on the east-side field, running warmups for a squad of eight-year-olds and drawing up a game plan like it’s a conference final.