23. The Sins of the Father
TWENTY-THREE
The Sins of the Father
CALEB
“Yes, coach. Of course, coach,” Caleb said, nodding earnestly at his phone as though his head coach could see his seriousness. “Yes, sir, Coach Marshall’s next on my list, then—of course, I’ll call Dr. Neely. I have my surgeon’s information for her and for the trainers so Andre can—yes, thank you, coach, it’s—oh, your dad? Yeah, it’s a rough time, but I—of course, coach, I’ll keep you posted.”
Abraham half-smiled when his son hung up the phone, wide-eyed and shaking his head. “I remember those calls, little buddy. ‘Yes coach, no coach,’ like they’re standing in your face with a whistle.”
Little buddy. He hadn’t heard that for a while, at least not with the natural affection he just did. His father’s attempts at the pet name for his youngest rang hollow and awkward for years. “He made it sound like I was giving him a kidney,” Caleb said. “His dad needed a transplant at one point, so I guess it’s a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to me.”
Caleb scrolled down his haphazard list of people to call. He hadn’t expected the head coach to be in his office, let alone answering the phone, and nearly forgot his own name when he answered. Next up was the defensive coordinator, followed by the team doctor and trainer who had been working on his ankle. He debated calling one or all of the defensive captains, but none of them were bound by student privacy laws the way the program staff were, and they might not notice his absence from conditioning, anyway.
His father watched him pace in front of the windows that looked out on the lake, opening and closing his mouth in silence half a dozen times as he struggled for words. His sons completed their tests together, waited for their results together, and fist-bumped the one who could provide a life-saving transplant to the man who let them all down.
Not until the appointments had been made and schedules determined did Abraham notice that his youngest son never offered the transplant. Caleb simply signed his consents and spoke with the transplant team to coordinate a plan for missing minimal class time. Waiting until later in the spring would make it harder to catch up before finals, and after the semester ended, he’d be too close to training camp. “Let’s just get it done,” he said at least once in every planning call.
Caleb kept his eyes down as he finished his calls and tapped out messages to his professors, attaching notes from the surgeon who would perform the procedure. He’d wait until he had post-operative paperwork and was on some decent pain medicine to call the City of Columbus Police Department to ask for an extension on his summons, if he needed it.
Thumb hovering over the student app, he pondered the writing group. No one used the app for that class, and any message would likely go unseen. He and Shannon were due to swap a second round of drafts after spring break, when he might or might not be back at school, and he still didn’t have her number. What a sick game they’d invented, a twisted way of proving to one another who cared less. He kicked himself every time he thought of how he left her at the jail, exhausted and cutting her off when she obviously had as much to tell him as he told her. Hers was the voice he wanted most to hear that day, and he didn’t know how.
His mouth popped open, and he flipped through his contacts.
Caleb
Can I please have Shannon’s number?
He stopped pacing and drummed his fingers on the sill as he waited for the reply.
“Caleb? Are you all right?” Abraham asked.
Caleb laughed nervously and nodded at his brothers on the sand as a distraction. “Look at those morons. Luke is trying to carry Eli on his shoulders like they’re still three feet tall.”
“Those two.”
“Yeah.” Caleb paused. “It looks like rain over the lake.”
Missy
Hello to you, too. Why?
Caleb
Please.
Missy
Why?
Caleb
We’re working on papers together and I need to do something over break. I’m home already and forgot to ask.
Missy
Doubt it. She hates you.
Caleb
When did you last check? I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. I think she doesn’t, as of three days ago. Ask her.
Missy
If she wanted you to have her number, you’d have it by now. Use the class app if you need to chat about papers.
He scowled at his phone and dictated the next message since he doubted his ability to type it with shaking hands. “I’m giving my dad a fucking kidney tomorrow and I’d like to speak to the girl I love, so get over yourself and me and everything and just give me her goddamn number in case I don’t wake up.”
Caleb jabbed the ‘Send’ button and dropped into a chair next to his father’s. “Sorry,” he mumbled. So much for privacy. He could count on the football program to toe the line, but he’d just notified all of Sauganac in his frustration.
“I couldn’t help but overhear that,” Abraham said, “and I have questions.”
“That was for Missy. I’m sorry. If you don’t want people to know, I’ll tell her right now so she doesn’t run her mouth. Hopefully.”
“I’m sure your mother will tell her mother, anyway. I was going to ask if you’re all right, little buddy. About the surgery, and in general.”
Caleb brushed his hair off his face and exhaled, slouching. “I’m fine about all this.” He stared at the darkening sky and didn’t meet his father’s eyes. “I really am. I want to do it, and nothing about the procedure or recovery worries me.”
“Right, but?—”
“And I’ll be a hundred percent recovered in time for training camp.” He finally turned from the window. “Good timing.”
“It seems like every day we’re learning something new about how our game can kill us,” Abraham said. “I took a couple of helmets to the lower back twenty years ago and ended up with unhealed kidney injuries scarring up my renal artery all this time. I went from feeling perfectly healthy to reading up on dialysis in a matter of weeks. You know, I could still tell you what happened then, those exact hits, and it was all legal. I was pissing blood for a week each time, and then they said I was fine. For two decades, no one knew the damage was getting worse every year.”
“A lot of rules are different now, Dad. Our protective gear is better, and the team doctors know more about what to look for. No one pushes me to play through something that might be dangerous.”
“They will if you play professionally,” Abraham said. “Things haven’t changed that much. I still have a quarter of the coordinators in the league in my phone, and a bunch of the trainers, and you bet I’ve been making calls to test the waters for Isaac. He’s dead-set on going for the draft next year.”
Caleb furrowed his brow. “Of course he is. We’re all going. We agreed on that a long time ago.”
“You and the boys might feel differently after his rookie year. We’ll see.”
“Does he know you’re doing this? Calling people?”
“He does.” Abraham paused. “What about the rest of it?”
“The rest of what?”
“What does Missy have to do with a girl you love whose number you don’t even have? Is that the girlfriend you were so cagey about?”
He sighed heavily and glanced back at the gray sky. “She’s Missy’s cousin, and it’s a long, pathetic story. I’ll give you the highlight reel when we’re all doped up after surgery. It’ll be less miserable that way.”
Luke, Eli, and Isaac turned their heads to the house when Caleb heard his mother summon them to dinner. He looked at the reply from Missy on his buzzing phone and held in a disgusted groan until his father left the room.
Missy
You think just because you slept with her, you’re suddenly in love? That was a hookup. A one-night stand. She needs a normal guy who will respect her and take care of her and take the time to fall in love before trying to get in her pants. You already messed it up with her and Trent. Back off.
Hope your dad feels better soon.
Messed it up with her and Trent? Finally, something positive .
He paced again, trying to piece together the next steps if Missy wouldn’t help him, but her words lingered. A hookup. Mumbled aloud, the words sounded cheap, nothing like the memories of her lips and legs and laughter tattooed on his heart. The blonde fuzz on her knees or the imperfect nails that always left a scrape to burn him for days. A one-night stand—or two nights, two extraordinary nights.
Missy would never understand his chaos, despite living through it with him. She would never believe in love at first sight, or a connection that lit up their lives with no care for reason or timelines. Missy was practical.
A spring breeze quickened into a gust, bringing clouds from the west to churn over the water as Caleb gazed over the shifting grays and blues. As the wind picked up, the waves responded, brushing the shore one moment and attacking it the next. Shannon’s eyes were everything at once in the lake, the connection between its peace and its power, the spring and the storm, the past and?—
“That’s it!” Caleb yelled. He clapped a hand over his mouth but couldn’t keep from laughing at himself. “Oh my God,” he murmured through his fingers. “That thing she said the first night. And the ducks. Shit. What am I hunting?”
He called Jags.
Two days later, Caleb glared at the ceiling of the hospital room. “Really, Dad. Three hours post-op is not the time to have another conversation about repentance.”
“I tried to have it yesterday evening after dinner without anesthesia,” Abraham retorted. “You seemed more inclined to go out with your brothers.”
“Can you blame me?” Caleb asked. “There’s nothing new to say unless you want to bitch at me about the assault charge, and I didn’t want to hear your dramatic deathbed apology for everything else again. You’re sorry, everyone’s sorry. You’re still our dad, and we love you, and you know that. It’s not going to be the same as it was before, but we’re still here. We’re still a color-coordinated, stupidly enmeshed family. Look, we match today.”
“I am not talking about your brothers. You boys lump yourselves together like you’re one being sometimes—how we are thinking, what we are feeling. I just wanted to talk about you.”
“We lump ourselves together because that’s how we get through things,” Caleb said, turning his face to the window and the gray drizzle outside. “It’s how we are, and how we always have been. It’s how you taught us to be.”
Abraham slowly bobbed his head. “You were always closer than my brothers and I were. Another set of four Fields boys. I was in Isaac’s position a lot, as the oldest. Your uncle Benjamin had to be about as scrappy as you are to clean up all the messes after we were grown and gone.” He paused, and when he realized Caleb wouldn’t look back, continued speaking. “I’m proud of you, little buddy.”
“Thanks,” Caleb said, barely audible.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “From the time your brothers left?—”
“Say their names, Dad. Say his name.”
Abraham exhaled. “From the time Luke and Eli left for school, everything was on you, and I don’t just mean football. I think it meant a lot to your school and maybe this town to see you with your head held high, even alone.”
“I should never have been in that position alone,” Caleb said. “You did nothing for the rest of us after you did everything for Isaac, because it looked bad if Luke was the only one you left out. Eli and I went behind your back with the athletics association and recruited ourselves.”
Abraham hung his head. “There’s nothing I can do now to take any of that back. And I’m sorry you didn’t feel recognized for everything you accomplished.”
“Fuck what I’ve accomplished!” Caleb slung his arms wide and grimaced in pain as he yanked his IV. “What about what Isaac accomplished, lighting up our whole town with the first Division I athletic scholarship ever, right in the middle of everyone’s scandal crisis mode? What about what Eli accomplished as a four-star recruit, getting Luke a package deal so they could play together? I didn’t want to be recognized for anything, but you never understood that. I played ball and toed the line so I could get out. I should have gone to Oregon or Texas and never come home.”
He caught his breath, panting as his pulse monitor slowed. “And what about Luke? Your golden boy. Your favorite. He still doesn’t know you said you didn’t care if he offed himself. We never told him, and we never will. He’s turning himself around. We are proud of him, and until you quit tolerating him and start loving and respecting him, he’s not yours to be proud of.”
Caleb turned back to the window and let the flush in his cheeks cool as his father closed his eyes.
“You carried all that into the operating room to save my life,” he said. “It didn’t occur to you, with all that bitterness, to let your old man lie in the bed he made?”
“Never,” Caleb said. “And that’s because this is what real forgiveness looks like. It’s not about pretending nothing ever happened. Our lives are not the same anymore, but I will never withhold my love or duty from you because you did something I don’t like, or something that embarrasses me. For fifteen years, I had the best dad in the world, and this is how he taught me to be.”
Abraham stared at his son in disbelief while the monitors beeped around them.
Caleb breathed in the medicinal plastic smell with flared nostrils and finally stared back. “You should be glad I don’t forget when I forgive,” he said, his shoulders falling heavily into his pillows. “But it would be awfully nice if you could live up to all the lessons you tried to teach us. Can you fix this?”
“What does that look like to you?” Abraham asked in a hoarse voice. “If you have any ideas on how to change this, I’m all ears. I can’t just undo my mistakes and the way I hurt you boys. You still have a touching faith in old Dad if you thought I ever could.”
“You need to fix things with Luke. I mean really fix them. You’re running out of time.”
“Out of time for what?”
“He’s running out of motivation to keep his life on the right path as long as you keep showing to him none of it matters to you. Nothing the three of us do will ever be enough to make him your son again.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Someone always has to tell you Luke had a good game. His stats are literally right next to Eli’s online and you act surprised when he gets a sack or something. He gets better grades than any of us, which I know Mom has to tell you because you don’t look. Did you ever notice he is always there when you talk to Eli?” Caleb asked. “Eli screens your calls and doesn’t answer without Luke, so you can pretend you’re glad to talk to both of them. You never call me, but I chalk that up to you trying to normalize what you do to him, so it doesn’t look so bad.”
“Caleb, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care if you call me or read my stats or check my grades. Luke is still having nightmares, and one of these days he’s going to fall back into thinking nothing matters. Wherever he goes with that will be at least partially your fault. Again.”
Abraham stiffened. “I was not responsible for what he did in high school.”
“I could go on and on about the things you did that contributed to the powder keg Luke was in high school,” Caleb said, wincing as he adjusted his pillows. “He’s the one who snapped and did it. You pulled the pin on the grenade, and you have never apologized to him for the pressure and fear you bred into him. When it was time to step up and help him turn his life around, you made a bunch of noise all over town about how it was intolerable and unforgivable, so you wouldn’t look like you were an inadequate father who should take any blame. You had a responsibility to help him, and you let him down.”
He gulped and continued, keeping his voice steady. “You were our hero and the center of our world, Dad, and if you succeeded at anything, it was raising children to handle a trauma better than you did. We handled it because of everything you and Mom taught us about teamwork and brotherhood and resilience. And love.”
Abraham waited in silence.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” Caleb said. “You talk to your son and figure it out. You be the adult. You owe me three years of youthful stupidity. I won’t charge you for the kidney.”