Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Nate
Sunday’s away game was a disaster. The kind of disaster that gets a full production credit: written, produced, directed by, and starring Nate Rivers.
Which is why I’m sitting alone in the film room on a Monday, rest day, in a space the size of a movie theater, waiting for Coach.
He isn’t late. He’s making me wait, which is a different discipline entirely, and one he’s a master of.
I already saw him in the hallway an hour ago.
He looked at me over the sunglasses and said nothing, and the nothing had chapters.
Here’s the week that got me into this seat.
After the knock-down drag-out with Callie on Tuesday, I reverted to the old programming, full version, no updates installed.
Train until the body complains. Film until the eyes give out.
First man in the building, last man out.
Hardest worker in the room, by a distance, aggressively.
And I made a useful discovery: the harder I push, the less I replay that conversation at the fence.
The less I feel the specific shape of what’s missing.
The system works right up until it doesn’t, because even I have to sleep, and at night, alone in the catalog house, the replay starts on its own schedule, and my thoughts swing on a fixed arc between how much I hate Callie Carter for using me and how right she felt asleep on my chest. Not good.
Right. Which is the entire problem, stated in one word.
Friday, I went to a party.
I didn’t care if Morrison found out. Genuinely, part of me hoped he would, so I could tell him exactly where to file his image program.
Because here’s what I’d figured out without wanting to: Callie, the boys, the little league, the taco mornings, that had become the pressure valve.
The partying stopped because I didn’t need it anymore.
With all of it gone, the boiler was back, and I went looking for the old release like a man digging out clothes that stopped fitting years ago.
Darius invited me to his girlfriend’s birthday party.
Half the guys were going; it was loud and crowded and exactly what the old me ordered.
And it worked the way everything else has worked lately, which is not at all.
The beer had no taste. So I moved to liquor, which I almost never touch in season, and never past one glass, and I kept going past one glass.
I wasn’t even there for women; I’d told myself, in the ugliest phrasing my hindbrain owns, that I was going to fuck Callie Carter out of my system, and then I didn’t approach a single one, and turned down the ones who approached me, because every conversation died of comparison inside a minute.
Eventually Grant took the glass out of my hand, and I told my best remaining friend, in front of teammates, to go fuck himself.
And then I drove home. Drunk.
I want that sentence to sit there exactly as ugly as it is.
No DUI, no wrapped light pole, no kid in a crosswalk, by luck.
Pure, stupid, undeserved luck. I woke up Saturday with a headache and a full-body disgust that had nothing to do with alcohol, thinking: that’s who you are now?
The man who nearly writes the ending of Callie’s article for her, free of charge?
She wouldn’t even have needed the photos.
So: Sunday.
My whole career, I’ve played the balance, high-risk, high-reward when the math says yes; safe and boring when it says no.
Stay alive at the table long enough to win it.
Sunday I walked onto that field like a man with something to prove, which can be rocket fuel for some guys.
Not for me. Not when the thing I was trying to prove was a lie: that Callie and the little league and the life were a distraction I’m better off without.
That the empty house is a choice, and I’m thriving in it.
I played like a maniac. Threw passes nobody saw, and I don’t mean too good to defend; I mean so bad my own receivers didn’t know they were targets.
Forced balls into triple coverage out of spite at the universe.
After the whistle, the locker room was a morgue.
We’ve lost before, you can’t win them all, and every man in that room is an adult about that.
Nobody said the other thing out loud, which is that we lost this one because of me.
Maybe we lose anyway with my head on straight, you never know, but I made more mistakes than the rest of the roster combined, which has to be a record of some kind.
If they gave an ESPY for worst individual performance, I’d have run away with it.
They could name the trophy after me. The Nathaniel Bowen Rivers Award for Excellence in Self-Sabotage.
Annual. Bronze statue of a man throwing into triple coverage.
The film room door opens. Coach walks in, says nothing, picks up the remote, and starts the tape.
We watch the entire game. He pauses on every one of my possessions, every single one, and asks his questions in the same flat gravel: What were you thinking here?
Why that read. What was the plan? Walk me through it.
And my answer, every time, is silence. Because I’m a thirty-two-year-old man being taken apart frame by frame in an empty theater, and I can’t summon the will to defend myself.
There’s no defense to summon. Every question is deserved. Every pause is deserved. I sit in it.
The final whistle sounds on screen. Hardin turns it off.
“Nate. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Off day.” Almost true; I’ve been having an off day since Tuesday, and the day won’t end. “My head’s straight now. It won’t happen again.”
“I’ve seen your off days, son. I’ve coached twenty years of off days.” He lets it hang. “That was an embarrassment.”
I want to slide down the seat and out of my own skin, because from him, that word has mass.
“This past month you were different. Playing free. Best stretch of your career, and I’ve watched every professional snap you’ve ever taken.
A changed man.” He taps the dead remote against his palm.
“Now, I could ask around that locker room and have the why inside an hour. I won’t.
Personal is yours. But yesterday was the photographic negative of the last month, and we both just watched it, so let’s not insult each other. ”
Yeah, well. A week ago I had a woman I loved and a bench full of eight-year-olds I haven’t been able to face since, and I’m running on autopilot with the instruments dark. I don’t say it. Saying it means admitting the machine is broken, and the machine is all I have left.
“Bad sleep schedule, Coach. It’s handled.”
Hand the man an Oscar. Nothing is handled. I think about her at red lights.
Hardin looks at me for a long moment. And then he takes the sunglasses off.
Twice a season. Maybe. My stomach drops through the building, because whatever follows the sunglasses is scripture, and I’m suddenly, vividly certain it’s a benching — Cash under center Sunday, Cash seizing the audition of his life, me finishing my career as the league’s most expensive bench warmer —
“Nate. What are you going to do when you retire?”
“…Am I being benched?”
“No.” A grunt that’s almost a laugh. “Answer the question. Two years out or ten, doesn’t matter. What’s the plan?”
“Travel the world.”
It’s the first thing my mouth finds, because there is no plan. There has never been a plan. There isn’t even material for one, no family, no hobbies, no house that feels like anything, and a set of friendships I’ve spent the last month strip-mining.
“Mm.” Hardin folds the sunglasses, unhurried. “And you’ll be traveling the world alone, I assume?”
The retirement question was a gut punch. This one skips the gut entirely and lands right between the legs.
I don’t answer.
Which is, of course, the answer, and we both know it, and he lets the silence certify it.
“You’re free to go.” He stands; sunglasses back on; gravel back to factory settings. “I’ll see you at practice tomorrow.”
He leaves me alone in a room built for a hundred and twenty people, with a black screen, a career-worst game tape, and one question with no film on it anywhere.
I drive home with the radio off. Not for any reason.
There's just nothing I want louder than it already isn't; no game I care about, no takes I can stomach, nobody I'm I want to call.
A month ago silence was my natural habitat.
Now it rides in the passenger seat like something I hit at an intersection and didn't stop for.
The house is exactly as I left it. The house is always exactly as I left it; that used to be the selling point.
Tonight I stand in the entryway with my keys in my hand and the place feels emptier than usual, which shouldn't be possible — empty is empty, it doesn't have gradations — except apparently it does, because I've seen the other thing now and my eyes won't uncalibrate.
Her house has a doorframe with pencil lines on it, two boys getting taller in real time.
Her fridge is a collage of drawings, a spelling test with a star on it, a dinosaur-look-alike drawn in crayon.
Nothing in that house was chosen by anyone with credentials, and every square foot of it is alive.
My fridge holds containers, milk and filtered water behind a door a designer selected, and the front of it is bare steel, because there has never been one single thing in my life that needed hanging up.
A magazine nobody reads. That's what I called this place, standing in her hallway with a sleeping kid on my shoulder.
I turn on lights I don't need, room after room, five bedrooms' worth, like maybe the wattage is the problem.
It isn't. The house isn't empty because they're not here.
It's empty because I built it that way, and until her, I called that winning.
#
Callie
Tuesday night, Priya’s at my house, and the four of us are eating Chinese takeout around my kitchen table.