Seven
DESPITE THE TRAUMA in my back and the tibia fracture in my left leg, the most serious damage, I quickly learn, has been to my right shoulder.
My throwing shoulder.
I have basically broken that, in addition to breaking a bone in what had been my plant leg when I was still throwing a football. Or baseball.
Surgery had to be postponed until the swelling made worse by the fracture of my clavicle goes down.
From that first morning on, Dr. Gregory turns out to be a total star in my book, ends up working seamlessly, and without ego, with the specialist Laurance Most has flown in from Los Angeles, Dr. Alex Ertegan, the most famous sports and celebrity orthopedic surgeon in the country, and maybe the world.
He’s the one who eventually does the surgery, with Dr. Gregory assisting, on my busted-up shoulder.
Dr. Ertegan would tell me much later what a mess he’d found behind my shoulder, nerves and tendons and the tear in the rotator cuff.
I come to think of him as having graduated from the Humpty Dumpty School of Medicine.
Humpty being me.
Who’d definitely had a great fall.
Out of curiosity, during a break between my daily rehab sessions, I type left-handed on my laptop and look up the original verse:
Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before…
Not even sure where “before” is anymore.
After a few weeks at the hospital, they move me to the UNC Center for Rehabilitation Care over on Fordham Boulevard. I am allowed to have visitors by then, friends and teammates and coaches. But the only one there every single day is Dr. EmmaJean Tucker, as I’ve taken to calling her.
“Best wingman you’ve ever had,” she says.
“Definitely the smallest,” I say.
Laurance Most tells me that it didn’t take much agenting from him to get the Steelers to step up and do the right thing by me, despite my condition.
They still send their coach and general manager to Chapel Hill and sign me to a rookie contract, even guaranteeing a first season that I might never play for them.
I’d told Laurance beforehand that I didn’t think it was right, being paid for being mostly useless at this point, but all he said back was “Their call, kid. Not yours.”
Of my former teammates, Vince Tarplay is the one who visits me the most. One day when EJ has taken a break and it’s just Vince and me in the room, we get to talking about Gideon, a subject we’ve mostly tried to stay away from, because that’s still the worst hurt of all for me.
Vince is the one who starts crying then.
“All’s I tell myself is that he was where he wanted to be that night,” Vince says. “Hanging with you.”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” I say, my voice not much above a whisper.
Vince gives me a long look, not even bothering to wipe away the tears.
“Now, you listen good,” he says. “Your whole damn life, you’ve never felt sorry for yourself or whined or complained when things didn’t go your way. So I ain’t allowing you to start that shit now. Straight up, dawg? You survived losing your dad the way you did and you’re going to survive this.”
Thanks to my agent, Dr. Ertegan flies in every couple of weeks from Los Angeles. He’s in the gym with me one day, observing my workout, one of the longest and most grueling I’ve had yet, despite what little range of motion I still have with my right arm and shoulder.
Dr. Ertegan, a short, dark, wiry man with a beard so perfect I’ve accused him of having painted it on, says, “Never forget that it’s a miracle that you’re even here, Silas. If your head had hit that tree first that night and not your shoulder, I’m almost certain you’d be dead.”
I’m about to say, “Lucky me.”
But I don’t. Vince is right. I have never whined or complained.
Or allowed myself to feel sorry for myself, at least not in front of anybody.
I reserve those moments, when they do come, for the middle of the night, when I’m alone in my room.
When I do cry sometimes. Only then do I think about what I had and what I know in my heart I’ve now lost for good, whether the doctors are coming right out and saying that to my face or not.
But what I force myself to do instead of feeling sorry for myself about losing the ability to throw a football is keep reminding myself that Gideon lost a lot more that night, and so did his family.
Remind myself that I’m here and he’s not, even if I never do play football or baseball ever again or get through another day without pain.
One day when Taylor McCarter Webb is making one of her visits to the rehabilitation center, I say to her, “I don’t even know who I am without football.”
She looks prettier than ever, honey-blond hair hanging to her shoulders and blue-green eyes with so much intelligence in them, and maybe even wisdom. When she smiles, I want to feel better about things but can’t.
“Can’t lie, pal,” she says. “Football never made me love you more than I did when we were seven years old.”
“More or less?”
“There’s the old Silas,” she says.
“More like just old these days.”
She breathes in deeply and runs a hand through her hair. Takes another, deeper breath, as if gathering her strength, working her way up to a confession: “When they said you died that night, I wanted to die.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Would have had to happen over my dead body,” Taylor says.
There is another silence between us in the spacious, sunny room they’ve given me, because at least to the people running the rehab facility, I’m still Silas Tucker.
Finally, she says, “However this deal works out, you need to know that you’re still going to be you when you get out of here, whether you ever play another down of football or not.”
“I know that,” I say.
We’re both lying.