I feel the tears too. I want to be with him. I know I want to be with him. I know that I bolted like a scared rabbit. I look around the kitchen, at the calendar pinned to the wall. I see a turkey-shaped sticker stuck to today.
“Jimmy…” I put one finger to the calendar. “What day is it?”
“Thursday. Thanksgiving.”
“No, I mean… is it the 28th?”
“Yeah.”
If I thought my heart was in the storm cellar a minute ago, it’s now boring downwards through the earth. If today is the 28th…that means… I blink over and over again at the calendar. I take it off the wall and look back, at the Monday after Halloween.
“Are you okay? Are you still there, Mary?”
“You’re sure?” I stare at the Birds of The Great Lakes calendar. A rather menacing-looking loon peers back at me from the photo as if to say, Oh yes. Yes indeed…
“Yeah, I’m sure. Why? We play the Colts tomorrow. In Indianapolis. 29th. So today is definitely the 28th.”
Running my finger down November, I count the weeks. Then the days. My period…is almost a week late
I stand there, absolutely stunned, for I don’t know how long. Jimmy says, “Listen. I don’t want you to come to the game tomorrow. I’m fine, and I want you to have all the space you need.”
“Jimmy…” But I don’t go on. What am I going to tell him? I’m almost a week late, which is unlike me but not always and so, you know, maybe there’s something to say? Possibly? Or that it’s possible all this emotion and upheaval just made me late, so don’t worry, but maybe keep it in the back of your mind that I might be…
Pregnant?
No. I can’t do that to him. Not yet. Not tonight. He’s been through enough for one day. And tomorrow, he might need a good distraction, but not this kind of distraction.
“Will you stay in Indianapolis or will you come home after the game?”
“Home. Fuck,” he says, his voice crackling again. “Yeah. I’ll be home. Tomorrow night, late.”
The words are already formed in my head before I say them. So clear, so obvious, so simple, I don’t know why I haven’t said them a hundred times before. “I love you, Jimmy. I’m sorry about today.”
He exhales, long and relieved. “I love you too. So fucking much, Mary. So fucking much.”
And then he’s gone.
But it’s all happening to someone else again. I realize I’m standing here, tipsy, and very possibly…
Carrying Jimmy Falconi’s baby.
Which is when Bridget walks in with Frankie in her arms. “Everything okay?”
“Bridget,” I say, planting my hand on the loon’s face on the calendar. “We need to get a pregnancy test. Right now.”
And for the first time in as long as I’ve known her, her mouth drops right open and not a single word comes out.
In an instant, we are in the car. Bridget gets in the driver’s seat and rolls down all the windows, and the cold air blows through the Wrangler, a classic Bridget Shaw sobering-up move.
“Are you okay to drive?” I ask her, because I most definitely am not. I’m also so furious with myself. How did I not know? What will happen to the baby with all this wine, all this port? And the screwdrivers?
The baby. Oh my God, the baby.
Our baby.
His baby. Inside me.
My heart picks up, and I realize I’m not terrified. I’m not worried. I’m absolutely over the moon. So happy, in fact, that I can hardly talk. Panicked and petrified, but totally and purely in love with it all. It’s like it’s split open my cold heart.
“Hell yes. I’ve been drinking like this since I was 21. I’m good. So buckle up, gorgeous. Time to see if the NuvaRing failed you or not.”
Off we go, down her parents’ long, winding driveway, and barrel toward a nearby White Hen.
“What’ll you do if you are?” she asks, with her hands at nine and three. She glances at my stomach. Almost instinctively, my hand goes to my belly.
“I…”
“Never mind!” She guns the engine. “No point worrying about it until we know for sure.”
Inside, the White Hen is shockingly bright, and it makes my puffy eyes sting.
Bridget charges in first, with my hand in hers. The guy at the counter jumps as we go through the dinging eye, jolting himself awake with a snort.
“Evening!” he says.
Bridget takes utter and complete control of the situation, looping her arm around mine and dragging me down the first-aid aisle. There, down at the bottom, is a First Response test boasting that it’s the ONLY BRAND THAT CAN TELL YOU SIX DAYS SOONER!
“Sooner than what?” I ask, peering at it, trying to see the suspiciously fine print in the corner.
“Never mind! Doesn’t apply to you.” She snatches it up and opens the box, pulling one of the plastic-wrapped tests out and putting it in my hand along with a neatly folded directions sheet printed on tissue-thin paper.
“Oh my God, I can’t do it here, can I?” I glance at the window, at the back side of a blinking OPEN 24 HOURS sign on the window.
“What, you want my mom hovering, asking you if you’d want some more mulled wine? Go on!” she says, and pushes me toward the bathroom while she heads to the front desk to pay.
The little bathroom is too bright, and smells overwhelmingly of apples and cinnamon air freshener. My hands are shaking so hard that I have to use my teeth to open the pouch. I pull down my leggings and my underwear and attempt to read the instructions. I first try to read them in Spanish—for an embarrassingly long time—before I realize that’s not English, not English at all, and flip the sheet over. I place the directions on my leg and go down, step by step, with my finger moving along each line.
I start peeing and stick the end of the stick into the stream. I count out five Mississippis, and then stop peeing. I hold the stick downwards and put on the cap exactly like it says.
And now I prepare to wait for three minutes.
Three minutes.
I grab my phone from my purse and look at the time. 10:51 p.m.
Part of me knows I should call him. I need to call him. He needs to know. But part of me is just still so utterly flabbergasted that I don’t even know what I’m thinking, or what to do, or where I am.
But I do know this: I am so happy, so elated, so excited, that I have to blink back a new wave of tears.
10:52 p.m. says my phone. I don’t stand up from the toilet. I glance at the test, but nothing seems to be happening yet. So I close my eyes. And wait. I think of Jimmy on that couch with Annie, that sweetheart of a little girl who has had the worst and best day of her life, even though she doesn’t know it. Because she is lucky, so unbelievably lucky, to have ended up with Jimmy. Who is kind and caring and would never ever let anything bad happen to her ever again. Or me.
Or our baby.
As if it were a flipbook, it all spreads out in front of me. Every moment, every appointment, his hand in mine. Him, too big next to me in waiting rooms; him, talking up half the delivery room, wearing a paper cap.
I open my eyes again. Still 10:52. I grab a handful of toilet paper from the big industrial dispenser, and the time flips to 10:53.
But then, as I reach between my legs to wipe, my heart stops. I feel a very familiar sensation. I look at the paper.
And see a tiny, faint smudge of blood.
The sob of disappointment shoots from my mouth before I can stop it, and Bridget storms in.
“Are you?”
With my hand to my mouth, still on the toilet, I shake my head and lose sight of her behind tears. I am suddenly, unexpectedly, utterly crushed by the thing I only thought I had for a moment, and had no idea at all how much I’d wanted all along. I hadn’t feared it at all, but had wanted it with a want so deep down, so bone-sure, that I misunderstood it completely.
“No,” I sob. “I’m not. But oh God, Bridge. I wish so badly that I were.” I drop the test to the ground and crumple the instruction
s in my hand. And then the tears start coming in a flood.
I feel my thighs slide to the side of the toilet seat, and to my left, Bridget’s jeans against my bare skin. Her arms wrap all the way around me, and I let my wet face fall into her perfect loose curls.
52
Jimmy
By my count, I’ve played in almost a thousand games, if you go all the way back to the days in Odessa when I was five years old and my helmet felt so heavy on my head that I thought I might topple over like a Pez dispenser. But hands down, this game, this one beginning right fucking now, is probably the biggest and the most important of all.
And she isn’t here.
But I can feel her with me. I taped up my leg just like she did. On the sidelines is Curtis, not Mary, but I can hear her voice in my ears as I lower down into the huddle. I love you, Jimmy. And I’m sorry.
We’re facing the Colts, who have a defensive line about as friendly as a cellblock in Attica. I don’t know where they find these guys, but it’s uncanny. About half of them have spider web tattoos on their elbows, and the other half look mean enough to have killed the tattoo artist before he even loaded the ink in the gun.
At the start of the fourth quarter, we’re tied, 7-7. So far, it’s gone fine. A few shit-ass calls and a few gimmes. The biggest problem, though, is the fucking catastrophe spilling from the sky. What weathermen call a “wintery mix” and what we call “bullshit.”
It’s do or die. And Valdez, wearing a tight thermal shirt under his jersey, rubs his hands together.
“You ready?”
Fuck yes. Ready as I’ll ever be. “Yeah.”
Together, we jog out onto the field.
Snap goes the ball.
I make a pass completion to Martins, who bobbles it, but catches it before skidding out of bounds. It’s a yard-by-yard game, and so we inchworm down the field.
But at the third down, I fumble, and one of the defenders scoops it up right in front of my eyes and takes off running, his footprints the only sign he was here as he bolts out into the snow. There’s a moment there, at about the fifty, when I can just barely see him, when he almost loses his footing. But the guy’s got momentum with him, and surprise, and all the adrenaline of a game-winning nab fueling him. It isn’t ten seconds later that the crowd erupts in cheers.
I look up at the sky, at the snow in the night, lit up brightly by the lights.
“What, you fucking praying?” Valdez says.
And I realize that yes, holy fuck, I am. “I don’t know what else to do.”
He laughs and gets on one knee, making the sign of the cross up at the lights. “We’ll make a Guatemalteco out of you yet, ése. Just you wait and see.”
But whatever it is, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or God, or Joe Namath, or hope and luck and everything in between, it works. They miss the extra point kick, just barely, and it bounces back onto the field, ricocheting off the upright.
We take the field again and I glance up at the play clock. I get the first down on the first try, but then the defense closes ranks. In the next two downs, we make it a total of negative two yards.
The play clock ticks, ticks, ticks. 20. 19. 18. And Radovic takes a time out.
We hustle to the sidelines while the grounds crew clears away the snow from the sidelines with small plastic shovels too light to dig up the turf.
In the huddle, we don’t say much. It’s obvious what we have to do.
Running is almost fucking out of the question, it’s so slick.
So it’s the one pass that you never want to make. The one pass I know I can make if conditions are perfect.
The Hail Mary.
We get in formation. Through the snow, the crowd roars at us, trying to make it so we can’t hear ourselves think. But the wintery mix is on our side, and dampens the catcalls and the fuck yous and the boos that rumble up around us, never quite getting to our ears.
As we get into position, the world becomes so strangely, so perfectly quiet. It is the same sound as when I kissed her that first night, not very long ago at all, on the street.
For a long moment, before the snap, I’m in every winter game I’ve ever played. There is snow, there is steam, there is ice. There’s the groaning one-ness of the offensive line, a mass of muscle on each side of me. The fullbacks chatter like birds. The tight ends are serious. And Valdez’s eyes are right on mine.
We spread out, the old run-and-shoot, and my wide receiver takes off running.
I back up. I pump fake. And then I let loose with a long, say-your-prayers throw.
Hail Mary.
Full of grace…
My wide receiver leaps, his arms extend. The ball lands between his palms, and as he pulls it to his chest, a puff of steam surrounds his face.
We did it. Holy fuck.
But then I’m airborne.
And everything is dark. And silent.
53
Mary
The catch is good, and the Bears have pulled it out with a Hail Mary pass so magnificent it took even the announcer’s breath away. I have been watching so closely that my eyes sting from not blinking. So finally, I do blink. Just once. That’s when Bridget screams like she’s been stabbed. I open my eyes and see Jimmy lying on the field.
Motionless.
Clusters of Bears and Colts, too, gather around him, suddenly brought together by something horrible, something awful, something unthinkable, that has happened to my Jimmy Falconi. They replay the hit, over and over, in nauseating slow motion. Jimmy let go of the ball, and from his right, one of the Colts hit him low and hard, so hard that his feet came right off the ground and he flew through the air like a rag doll.
The announcers are eerily quiet, the crowd hushed. They flash to cold, huddled-together faces of fans, bundled up in duffel coats and scarves and hats, all of them looking terrified. They zoom in on the Colts’ head coach, with his hand clenched in a fist, pressed to his nose. Eyes closed.
Praying.
“Oh God, Bridget, please tell me this is normal…” I say with my face in my hands, on my knees on the rug in front of the television. “Please tell me this happens all the time…”
She says nothing at all, except for a very, very quiet, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” over and over under her breath.
A cluster of team medics run out from both sides of the field. The circle of players around him opens up. Helmets come off. Valdez, right there beside him, falls to one knee and makes the sign of the cross.
Still, Jimmy is motionless.
“He’ll be okay,” Bridget tells me. “Quarterbacks take hard hits all the time.”
A minute passes. Maybe more. The announcers say grim things about concussion statistics and quarterback injuries this year. All I can think is that he isn’t a number, he isn’t a new case in a line of many. He’s Jimmy Falconi. The man I love. And he isn’t moving.
But as the people gathered on the field make way not for a golf cart but for an ambulance, and as the medics slide him across the icy ground onto a backboard, I know that what Bridget said isn’t true. This isn’t just a hard hit. This is the nightmare that I never imagined.
Automatically, I put on my boots and grab my jacket. Bridget is in a ball on the couch with her knees to her chest. Wincing.
And as the announcer says, “The NBC Sports family just wants to say that we are praying for Jimmy Falconi and his loved ones. We’ll keep you updated…” I’m grabbing my keys and running down the steps. To get to Indianapolis as fast as I can.
At Indiana University Hospital, I find Radovic in the waiting room. His eyes are puffy and he’s pacing back and forth.
I take him by the shoulders. “Where is he?”
He holds his hand out in front of his mouth and closes his eyes. I see a sob sneaking up behind his lips. “Please don’t tell me he’s gone,” I say, feeling so far away, so lost. Broken and empty.
Radovic shakes his head violently and points at the hallway, still speechless. At the nurses’ station, I find
a nurse in purple scrubs with a clipboard.
“I’m looking for James Falconi.”
The woman glares at me. “Honey. You and half of America.”
“No, but seriously, I need to see him,” I tell her, grasping her forearm.
She narrows her eyes, her fake lashes fluttering. “You family?”
I hate lying. But sometimes, you’ve just got to fake it a little bit. “I’m his fiancée.” I rip off my glove and show her my Claddagh. “We’re Irish.”
The nurse is clearly too tired to mince words, or rings, or ask why it’s on my right hand. Instead, she says, “All right then, come with me.” She leads me down a long hallway and across through a nurses’ station. I see x-rays of shattered bones on screens. MRIs. Doctors milling around quietly. Somewhere, I hear the noise of a respirator kicking on and off.
“What happened to him?” I ask the nurse. She looks at me over her shoulder, her long, dark braids swishing down her back.
“It’s a concussion. He’s unconscious.”
“Is he paralyzed?” I say, standing aside for a team of doctors zipping past with someone on a gurney.
“Too early to say.” She opens the door to his room. “He won’t wake up.”
They have him in this contraption to keep his neck still. I grip cold metal bars surrounding his bed and force myself, absolutely force myself, to remain calm.
“Jimmy,” I whisper.
His face is still and stoic. He’s got his greasepaint on his cheeks and a red flush of windburn on his nose. I step closer and take his still hand in mine. “Jimmy, I’m here.”
The machines beep back their dismal, heartbreaking reply. I look from screen to screen to get some sense of his vitals. Everything is normal, it seems. His heartbeat strong, his pulse oxygen just right. But he is not here. He is not with me.
As the nurse leaves us, I grab his chart and thumb through, trying to make sense of it. But like she said, it’s too early to know anything at all. So I put the chart back on the hook and move to his side.
Hail Mary Page 28