Game Changers

by Jane Cuthbertson

  Jaye’s teammates make sure she’s part of the post-game ceremony where the Blues are presented with a league “Shield” for finishing with the best record. To watch her then, see her interact with players and fans alike, no one would know what she’s going through at home. She even does an interview with local TV, and it gives me hope that her emotional recovery has begun.

  My hope lasts only until we’re in the car, driving back to the apartment.

  “I know it was hard for you, but you did great tonight,” I say. “The Blues were happy to see you there.”

  “I never knew how much it could hurt not being able to play. I was laughing to keep from crying.”

  I take her hand, give it a good squeeze.

  “I wasn’t ready to stop.” I hear the tears in her voice. “I’m not ready for this.”

  “It’s still too early to know for sure.”

  She lets out a deep sigh. “My body knows,” she says softly, exactly like she had in the emergency room. I cringe inside, and Jaye keeps talking. “I never told you the worst thing.”

  Worse than shredding three crucial pieces of your knee? “What?”

  “Hatfield called me the Thursday before the game, before I got hurt.” Linda Hatfield is the U.S. National Team head coach. “She told me she was naming me to the team.”

  We’re stopped at a traffic light, and I turn to meet Jaye’s gaze. I’m shocked. Jaye’s eyes are dull, devoid of any expression at all. No light, no dark, no life.

  “I wasn’t even going to have to try out,” Jaye says. “I was in.”

  I recall the secret she was waiting to tell me, something that had her excited and happy. It was the last time I saw the brilliant light in her eyes.

  She doesn’t cry then, but I do, as if all her emotion is routed through me now. Only the honk of a car horn behind us brings me back to the moment, to driving. To getting us home.

  Soccer is just a job, only a game.

  Yeah, right.

  Chapter Twelve

  Fyrequeene’s Blog: September 13

  “To Strive or not to Strive”

  I’ve never been much of a goal-setter. Don’t know why, but throughout my life I tended to let things come as they would or stay away as they saw fit. I fell into a college degree, a job, a life. And it’s been okay.

  As most of you readers have figured out by now, I, The Fyrequeene, the ultimate hermit, have become romantically involved with a professional soccer player. Her name is Jaye Stokes, and she is the wonder of my life. I never thought a love like this would be possible for me. I have never been so glad to be proven wrong.

  Jaye is a world-class athlete. She’s played soccer since she was five; the game is her first and perhaps still strongest love. Early in our acquaintance she told me her goals as a child were to make the National Team, to play in the World Cup and the Olympics, and to win. And she was almost good enough to do it.

  Almost.

  Jaye made the “U” teams, the Under-17, Under-18, Under-20 squads from which members of the main, National Team, are eventually chosen. When she got to college, though, Jaye discovered she wasn’t quite good enough, wasn’t quite fast enough, to keep progressing up the ranks.

  “It’s an eighth of a step,” she told me once. “An eighth of a step separating the excellent from the great.”

  Jaye is an excellent professional soccer player. Until recently, she had never been a great one.

  Learning this raises a question for me: How many “Jayes” are there? How many swimmers are there for every one Janet Evans? How many baseball players for every one Derek Jeter? How many soccer players for every one Wendy Allerton or Mia Hamm? Thousands, no doubt. And perhaps even hundreds like Jaye, who can claim excellence—but not greatness.

  This year circumstances changed for her. Somehow Jaye Stokes found an eighth of a step, found the difference that makes good players elite. For four glorious months, she glided across the soccer pitches of the NWSL, excelling in every aspect of the game she loves, knowing, at long last, how it felt to be the best of the best. Her childhood dream was rekindled, burning brighter and brighter, buoying her to greatness.

  And in one-eighth of a second it was taken away. In one-eighth of a second, her dream got snuffed out like a match. An injury to her knee on a deliberate foul ended her hopes, her dreams, made mincemeat of her goals.

  Maybe that’s why I never set goals. If one doesn’t set goals, one can’t fail. One can’t feel the bitter devastation of coming up short. Granted, one can’t feel the exhilaration of achievement either, but is that worth shooting for when its opposite always lurks?

  I’m not sure it is. Does this make me a coward, or a sensible survivor?

  Many, I think, would say coward, and I may have to agree. But many of those same many have never had to watch what happens when, through no fault of her own, a loved one’s dream dies.

  

  Three and a half weeks after she was injured, three and a half weeks into my sincere and soul-deep efforts to take care of Jaye, I find out I’m terrible at it.

  How else to explain the slow unraveling of our relationship? One week of fraying, okay. Jaye’s in pain, in shock, numbed by painkillers and reeling from the blow that turned her life upside down.

  Two weeks, and the threads of our connection fray a little bit more. I’m considering what happened to her as a kind of death, the death of someone loved and close, someone who wasn’t expected to die for quite a while yet, whose sudden loss leaves a void so large nothing can fill it.

  Not even grief, though grief tries, spreading out, seeking the limits of the void until everything else is blocked. And I mean everything. Jaye’s grief takes her appetite, her interest in books and TV, her friends, her attention to hygiene and appearance—and her love for me. The happy young woman with the incandescent smile is buried so deep within the void that soon I cannot find her. I’m left with a silent, brooding automaton, a parody of a human.

  She rustles up enough energy, barely, to attend the playoff against the Flash. The game is a disaster: Rheaume Delacroix is no match for the skill and experience of Wendy Allerton, and KC’s offense is aimless and impotent without Jaye. The Blues fall hard, 4-1, and their season ends.

  Two days later, Jaye has surgery, which goes well. Or so everyone says. Jaye will be in bed for a few days, on crutches for six weeks, then face months of rehab. The prognosis is good, unless you’re a top-notch athlete. Then it’s much more nebulous.

  “You should walk without limping,” the surgeon tells Jaye. “We’ll reevaluate when you start rehab, gauge your scale of recovery. There was a lot of damage, and each person heals differently.”

  He should have been a politician. Jaye hears what I do: there’s no way to know if she can play soccer again. If, up to that point, I held some faint hope she could empty the void of grief, the surgeon’s ambiguity chops the hope right off. At the knees.

  Two days after, she is, as expected, named MVP of the league, which is a mixed blessing at best. Everyone involved in the NWSL makes happy sound bites and tweets about how she deserves the award, hands down, but what a shame her season was cut short.

  She hears and reads none of this. Jaye is lucid enough to record a very simple “thank you for the honor” press release, but there is no spark there. She literally switches off her smile when the recording is done, and goes back to lying in bed, taking her pain pills on schedule, and saying as little as possible to me.

  Three and a half weeks after the injury, Jaye uses the excuse of post-surgical discomfort to ask me to sleep separately from her.

  “You toss and turn sometimes, and I don’t want to risk the knee. It’s only for a little while.”

  There’s a logic to this, so I accept it, but it cuts me to the core. Now, finally, I grasp the extent of the disconnect between us, Jaye’s shift from grief to depression, her own version of the dreaded guerrilla/gorilla.

  When depression ruled me, I, too,
had days where I couldn’t get out of bed, periods where the only reason I left the house was because something such as work made me, long stretches of believing nobody cared or would miss me if I was gone.

  Like Jaye, I didn’t fight it. I let the depression be my bully slave master, let it block out the light, let it take my body over and plunge me into a darkness and sadness so bleak I knew I could never escape. Throughout those times, I always wished deeply for someone to hold me in her arms, to love me and help me endure. I was certain a partner and her love would be enough to overcome my captor.

  The big difference, though, between Jaye and me? She has the partner. She has the love. I’m the one holding Jaye (well, until she kicked me out of our bed), trying to help her endure, trying to be what she needs. Three and a half weeks in, I realize it’s not enough. Nothing is okay.

  This discovery is so shocking that the darkness pulls me in, too.

  And the discovery is a shock, not creeping up on me slowly, but hitting all at once late one evening after Jaye has drugged herself to sleep. I’m watching some Blues’ soccer highlights, including a replay of the game where Jaye was injured. I rewind the awful moment a couple of times, and the evidence is clear: the Portland player fully intended to hit Jaye rather than the ball. She purposely set out to put Jaye on the ground. If I’m charitable, she couldn’t have known she would succeed so spectacularly. If I’m not charitable, she deserves more than the broken nose Nickory gave her.

  Portland won their playoff game and advanced to the finals. At least Nickory’s punch literally knocked Green out of the playoffs, too. I feel no guilt over the petty pleasure this gives me.

  The replay isn’t what stuns me, though. The shock comes when I watch Jaye’s interview with local TV after the last regular season game. I had watched her do the interview and saw only her polite, “We’re all doing this for the team” face, complete with clichés and smiles. I didn’t listen to what she said, though. I listen now.

  The reporter asks the usual questions about KC’s chances in the playoffs, listens to Jaye give the usual answers. He then asks if it’s hard to watch and not be able to play, and Jaye replies with what at first seems like another typical cliché.

  “Oh, it’s killing me,” she says, with a smile even. But I know Jaye. Underneath the smile, I see the despair. She means it. Not being able to play is killing her. Literally.

  I sit there, numb. Surely it can’t be that bad? How can someone who has so much light inside, so much intelligence, plus a partner who lived through her own darkness and talks about it, how can someone so innately positive feel so hopeless?

  The answer floats up from deep inside me. She’s never felt anything like this before.

  But what about the soccer coach bitch? Jaye told me herself how devastated she was when the woman dumped her.

  Another floater: Jaye knew, deep down, something was wrong with her teenage love affair. There was nothing wrong with her soccer dream, nothing wrong with the goal of playing for her country.

  Thus, all the more shattering to have it taken away.

  I get up and go into the bedroom, stand over Jaye’s sleeping form. She has been silent today, as usual. I check on her now, making sure her injured leg is stable. I listen to her quiet breathing, watch the peaceful face slumber brings. A small thing to be grateful for. She is not so tortured that sleep provides no escape. For the hundredth time, I wish I could take on some of the pain.

  After a somewhat heated inner argument, I take a chance and lean my head down, gently kiss her forehead.

  “I love you, Bacall,” I breathe, far too softly for her to hear. “If I could take away this grief and roll back time I would. If I could take on your pain, pull it away from you, I would. Please don’t give in. Please don’t turn into me.”

  I stand and walk out of the room, a gorilla following gleefully in my wake.

  

  Over the next few days, no matter my intentions, no matter how simple or complex a task, I do everything wrong.

  The problems start innocuously enough. Because of the surgery, Jaye has to keep weight off her knee for six weeks. This puts us in the middle of October before she can even think about walking unaided again. Our lease is up at the end of September. I make what I think is a logical decision.

  “We should stay another month here,” I say to Jaye one morning. I have managed to get her out of bed and parked over a bowl of cereal. She’s clearly lost weight; every time I get her to eat is a small victory.

  She gives me a blank stare. “Why? Don’t you still want me to go to Denver?”

  Where did that come from? “Of course I do. I thought we’d wait until you can put weight on the knee again, when you don’t need the crutches.” I attempt a grin. “It’s not like Kansas City’s the worst place in the world.”

  “Part of me died here, Rachel.”

  Well, shit. I’m behind the eight ball, and the cue shot is coming hard. I apologize, and she shrugs.

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  Crash. That little incident sends me flying into the air without a gyro, blind and tumbling. A couple of days later, I come back from my usual early morning swim to find Jaye up, balanced on a crutch and her good leg, standing at the countertop separating kitchen and living area. She turns my way, holding something.

  “I thought you were going to wear this all the time.”

  I draw closer and see the ring Jaye bought in Boston. I gently take the steel band from her fingers.

  “I do wear it all the time. Except in water. I take it off when I swim, and I take it off to shower. Then I put it back on.” I slide the ring onto my finger. “See?”

  I’m puzzled. I’ve been doing this since we got the rings. Did Jaye never notice? Why should she care now?

  “So you’re still trying,” she says, reminding me of what we said that day.

  “With all my might.”

  She leans against the countertop, as if her energy has suddenly deserted her. “Why?”

  It’s a tiny little word to instill such utter terror in me. I’m knocked back on my heels for a fateful moment.

  “Because I love you, Jaye. Because I made you a promise, and I’ll always keep my promises to you.”

  She acknowledges this with an even tinier little word, a sharp little needle which shoves the terror right through my soul. “Oh.” No inflection, no emotion. Nothing except detachment, like I’m talking about something she has nothing to do with.

  I touch her shoulder. “Jaye? You believe me, right?”

  She looks at me with empty eyes. “I believe you’ll keep your promises.”

  I hear a roaring in my ears as the gorilla screams in triumph.

  

  This is depression’s third major victory in its war with my soul. The first was the nervous breakdown in my mid-thirties. The second was a few years ago, when I was close to retirement but not close enough, and the stresses of my job and my solitude combined to put me on the brink of suicide.

  I think back to the second episode, remember how I acted then, and realize with a sick pain how closely Jaye’s current behavior matches it. I spoke to people only when necessary, cut myself off from all and sundry life whenever possible. I stopped eating, stopped exercising, stopped caring. I let myself sink almost to the brink of oblivion.

  Now I’m watching the love of my life do the same things.

  I suppress the terror bubbling inside me and take action, doing as much as I can, without being obvious, to make the desperate next step more difficult. I keep the doors locked. I hide the kitchen knives—I’m the only one preparing food now anyway. I take much shorter swims. I stop sleeping. But there’s one thing she is bound to notice.

  “Where’s the Percocet?” Jaye asks me the morning after I move the pill bottle to my car.

  I pull a little case out of my pocket. “Here.” I hand her the morning dose.

  Jaye may be blank and hollow right now, but
she’s still smart. “You don’t trust me.”

  “I’m beginning to worry, yes.”

  Part of me hopes she’ll lash out a defense or at least get angry at me for treating her like a child. But no. She pauses a moment, then takes the pill from me and disappears into the bathroom.

  We don’t speak for the rest of the day.

  

  The next day I ask Bree to come visit and bring Nickory. If my brain were working better, I might have thought of this sooner. But my brain is fogged from worry and sleeplessness and also clouded by my normal tendency to let people do what they want. I don’t force my will on people. I don’t arbitrarily decide I’m right and bull ahead against others’ wishes, especially when my lover and partner is the one I’m defying. But hiding the pain pills starts that very process in motion, and once moving, I decide I may as well continue it.

  Jaye has been extremely reclusive since the injury. Other than the two Blues games and the brief recorded press release, she has seen no one other than me and the doctors. She told her parents not to come down, she would be fine, a decision I disagreed with. Most of the team, including Rick and Becky, scattered to off-season homes and distant jobs after the playoff loss. The only ones left here are Bree and Nickory, and even they will be moving to their home base in Chicago when September ends.

  Since the night in the ER, Bree and Nickory have repaired their relationship. I don’t have the details, but something is working again that wasn’t before. I know this because Bree has kept in touch with me, both to build back our own nascent friendship and to check on Jaye. She and Nickory have tried to come over a couple of times already, but the new dark version of my lover refuses to see them.

  I keep my promises, yes, but I never actually promised Jaye I wouldn’t let the pair drop by unannounced. After her listless little “oh” and the pain pill incident, I call Bree and we make plans.