Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  “Oh, I just came from…” I pause. Then I think I might as well go on with it. He knows life goes on. “…Gerrard’s workout. Linebackers only.” His eyes look interested, so I elaborate. “Calisthenics, stair runs, you know.”

  He nods and looks down at his paw, flexing it. “When can you exercise again?” I ask. “It’ll do you good to keep busy.”

  He shrugs and looks away. “C’mon, Fish. When?”

  Three fingers. “Three…weeks?” He nods.

  “Good luck.”

  We sit quietly for a while. Finally he picks up the whiteboard and scrawls, You gonna talk? in jagged blue letters.

  “What do you want me to talk about?”

  He shrugs again and leans back, closing his eyes.

  “Okay, look,” I say. “So there’s this thing with Gerrard. You heard about it?” He shakes his head, but doesn’t open his eyes.

  So I tell him in a nutshell about Gerrard getting kicked out, about the family in Hellentown, and about Gerrard being so cool about it at the workout.

  He opens his eyes and writes, Gerrard = football.

  “Yeah, but there’s more than that. Can I ask you…”

  He watches me attentively. I take a breath and lower my voice. “You know, you used to…you used to fool around.” He doesn’t react. “But you stopped, and you never fathered another cub. That I know of, anyway. Or that you know of. I guess.” He still isn’t reacting one way or another. “Anyway, I just wanna know. When Gerrard came in…when guys come into the league…I mean, do they come in wanting to fool around?”

  His brow furrows. I inhale. “Like, did you mess around in college? Did Gerrard cheat on Angela in college? Do the guys who get in trouble do it because they’ve always done it or is it something that happens to you?”

  He keeps frowning and points at me, his eyebrows raised.

  “No,” I say, “I haven’t cheated on Lee.” He doesn’t have to know that I almost did, and anyway that was when Lee and I were sorta kinda broken up. “I want to know if I will.”

  He scowls and scribbles, How should I know? and thrusts the board at my face.

  I lean back and exhale. “I just want to know if I should watch out for it. I mean, is it—did you get tempted? Did you just give in?”

  The scowl deepens. He shakes his head and puts the whiteboard down. “Come on,” I say. “It’s over, it’s in the past, and it could help me.”

  We wait for a moment and then he points at the whiteboard and then back into the house. “Fine,” I say. I scoot my chair closer. “There. Now they can’t see, and if we hear the door, erase it.”

  He sits there and doesn’t move. “Fish,” I say. “Look, I’ll—” I take a breath. “I’ll tell you something if you’ll tell me. Okay? Look. Before the championship I was really stressed and pent up, and there was this fox…and he really reminded me of Lee. And I almost…” I take a breath. “I mean, I came really close. And I’m afraid I might again.”

  Fisher looks steadily at me. Then he writes on the board. Didn’t?

  I shake my head. He erases the words, and then he starts to tremble. He clutches the board so tightly the wooden frame cracks with a sharp noise.

  That jolts him. He looks at me and I’m surprised to see the shine of tears in his eyes. He looks back at the glass doors and then he picks up the marker and starts to write.

  You can never tell Gena, he starts, and he looks at me for confirmation, intently.

  “Promise,” I say.

  He erases the board and holds the pen over it. A breeze rolls through the patio. He scribbles a couple letters and rubs them out with his paw, the blue staining his orange fur.

  I wasn’t trying to kill myself.

  I thought we were talking about cheating, but I don’t want to stop his confession, so I nod and lower my voice. “I know that.”

  He lifts his paw and rubs his eyes, then stares down at the whiteboard, not looking at me. Slowly, he writes, I was thinking about it.

  I hold my breath, watching the words take shape, my mind skittering ahead faster than he can write. I took the gun out to see if I could do it. I sent everyone out of the house. I

  He hesitates, and his paw shakes, and then he erases the board.

  “You put it in your mouth?”

  He shoots me a look, eyes wide. “There were burns.” I touch my lips.

  His eyes close and his head sags. Then a moment later he lifts his head and looks back at the house. “Yeah,” I say softly, “Gena knows.”

  His paw lifts the marker, scrawls on the board. I decided not to do it. It was an accident.

  “How did it happen?” I ask quietly.

  Don’t remember. I. He stops and then writes, shakily, woke up in hospital.

  So he doesn’t actually know if he tried, if in that one moment he did decide to do it, or if his finger slipped as he was pulling it out. Or he’s lying and he knows, he’s known all along. “Listen, Fish,” I say. I put a paw on his arm. “Gena knows it and she still loves you. She’s stuck with you. That’s not going to change. But she needs to know that you won’t do it again. Will you?”

  He keeps his head down and slowly erases the board. Forget my children’s names. Sometimes I don’t know what year it is.

  “But you know now, right?”

  He doesn’t respond. “Fish?”

  I remember you, he writes. Remember the games. Then he erases again and starts over. It’s only going to get worse.

  “You don’t know that. There’s therapy, there’s treatments.”

  Watched my father die like this. He writes it fast and erases it almost before I have a chance to read it.

  I sit and stare at him and I don’t know what to say. I’ve never watched anyone die or degrade. I don’t know why this all came out in answer to my question about cheating, but it’s good that he’s talking.

  Easier to hide when I can’t talk, he writes. But still happening.

  “Lee says lingering concussion effects can last for weeks. It might still clear up.”

  He shakes his head and then below that, he writes, Started before.

  “Jesus, Fish.” I keep staring at the words, trying to process them. “Like, forgetting people’s names and shit?”

  He shakes his head, wipes the board clean. Little things.

  “Did it start before you took that serum?”

  His head whips around, and I feel like the breeze has gotten chilly very quickly. Slowly he nods, but he doesn’t write anything. I decide not to pry into the serum thing. “Look,” I say. “Tell Gena. You can get help, you can talk to people.”

  The patio is quiet, just our breathing and the sound of the breeze through the trees around us. Slowly, he writes, No help.

  “This isn’t like being on the Firebirds. Nobody’s waiting to take your spot if you can’t remember the plays. There’s no shame in it.” His muzzle keeps a stubborn set. “Jesus!” I say. “What happened to the guy who shoved me around the locker room, who told me what I had to do to make it?”

  Sorry, he writes.

  “That’s not the point!” I shove him in the arm. He wobbles in the chair, but recovers his balance easily. “The point is you have a family, you have something else to—to be good at now. Are you going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself for the rest of your life?”

  He looks very deliberately at me and shakes his head with a resignation that frightens me more than the wires around his jaw. “Fish,” I say quietly, “You’re not going to try again.”

  Neither of us moves for a moment. Then his paw swipes the eraser across the whiteboard and he holds the marker there. The fumes rise amid the late winter desert breeze. Don’t want to, he writes, and then adds, now, and underlines it.

  “There are people who can help you.” He turns away and sets the whiteboard on the table to pick up one of the half-drunk glasses of green goo. With some difficulty he fits the straw between his lips, and I watch the liquid make its way up to his muzzle. He grimaces.

&
nbsp; “Tastes shitty?” I ask, and he nods, but he keeps drinking. I lean forward and ask to smell it when he’s done, so he gives me the glass. Grass and fruit reach my nose, with an earthy undertone: beans or soy or something. “It doesn’t smell that bad.”

  He wrinkles his muzzle, picks up the whiteboard, and writes, Gritty.

  “Fish,” I say, “listen, that friend of Lee’s—no, listen, hear me out, dammit.” He makes a pushing-away gesture without touching me. “He’s been talking to other players and doctors.”

  The reporter?

  “Yeah, Hal. He’s a good guy. He wrote up that profile on Lee. Did you read it?” He shakes his head. “Anyway, Fish, listen, he’s trying to get people to talk about former players with memory problems. He might be able to—”

  Fuck, I know that closed expression. He’s staring out at the yard and patiently listening, waiting ’til I’m done so he can tell me to get lost. I follow his eyes and see the volleyball, and I think about Bradley and Junior. “What about your boys?”

  Now he turns and raises his eyebrows, wary. “What if they play football? I mean, they’re good, right? Wouldn’t you want them to know what happened to you and how to fix it?”

  He hesitates. Then he writes, Doesn’t happen to everyone. His paw hesitates at the end, as though he’s thinking about writing more, or about making it a question, perhaps. In the end he caps the marker and puts it on the table.

  “What if it’s genetic?”

  His paw doesn’t reach for the marker. He stares down at the whiteboard, and then he sets it down and folds his paws in his lap. I reach for anything else, all the other points Lee and Hal and I discussed. “There’s other people going through the same things. You could talk to them instead of sitting out here alone. You’re always saying I don’t understand. Maybe I don’t. But these other guys might.”

  He turns to look at me, so slowly that he looks sixty years old. There’s pain in his eyes, but doubt now alongside it. “I know you’re tough. These guys are tough, too. They’re all old soldiers. You know how soldiers have groups and reunions and stuff, like the VFW and all? This is like that but for football players.”

  With a slow exhale, his head sinks again and shakes slowly from side to side. And then he turns his head toward me, just a little. There’s a crack in his façade, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

  “Fish,” I say gently. “It could help you. It could help Bradley and Junior, and lots of people.”

  He swallows, and then, after a pause, he nods once, sharply. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell Lee. I’ll set it up. Thanks—I mean, you’re gonna feel better, Fish. I know it.”

  There’s no relief nor happiness in his eyes, but there is a sort of peace, or maybe resignation. And then he picks up the whiteboard and marker. About the fooling around, he writes.

  “It’s okay, Fish.”

  In his eyes, there’s a little of the old fierce Fisher who pushed me around a weight room once. The look keeps me in my chair as he scribbles, Gena knows the life. When she tells me to stop I stop. After a second he stares down at the board and changes stop to stopped.

  “Was it easy? Stopping, I mean.”

  He turns and looks back over his shoulder into the house again, and then erases the board. Slowly, he writes, Nothing worth doing is easy.

  And I have to be happy with that. I don’t know what to make of it, but at least it sounds like Fisher is willing to move forward for the moment.

  When I go inside to tell Lee and Gena, they’re both happy, and Gena particularly looks relieved. I sit with them and talk for a little longer, but my eyes keep straying out to where Fisher’s sitting on the patio alone, his tail curling back and forth, staring out at the dead yard.

  Part V

  Part 4

  22

  Old Haunts (Lee)

  Friday while Dev was at his workout, I looked up some info on the southwestern schools the Whalers are going to be sending me to. I’m not officially on the clock, but it didn’t hurt to call up and introduce myself to the athletic directors, to tell them that come summer I’d be replacing the old Whalers guy. Most of them just passed me on to their secretaries to make sure that my passes got the correct name on them. A couple, bored, I guess, talked to me directly, and one recognized me from the Firebirds profile. We had a nice chat and I came away with the impression that he’s definitely ‘family,’ though he couldn’t really come out in the job he has. I promised to make time to see him when I visited his school.

  We pick up Father at the hotel Saturday morning and cram into a cab with all our luggage. It’s been less than a week since we got back from Yerba, but with all that’s happened, it feels like forever since we’ve been in an airport. It also feels like an escape from the problems of Fisher and Gena and Angela and Gerrard, even though we’re heading right into the problems of Gregory and Mother and Forester.

  When we check in for the flight, we realize that Dev booked himself and me in first class and Father is, of course, flying coach. We can’t change the arrangement because the flight is booked, but I go back to sit with Father when Dev takes a little nap. And when we get to Hilltown, Dev and I go to the rental agency and Father goes to pick up his car. “Well,” I say, parting at the parking garage, “it was nice flying with you. In separate seats.”

  Father adjusts his glasses and smiles. “Glad it worked out. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon to drive up to Eileen’s. Good luck with your parents, Devlin.”

  I’m now pretty familiar with the road up to Lake Handerson, even when it’s five below zero and the highway’s bounded with dirty snow walls thrown up by the plows. At least the snow on the hills beyond is a pristine, gleaming white. “Ah, the north,” I say, leaning back and adjusting the heater to stop it from blowing my fur all over the car. “Sorry about the shedding,” I say because Dev’s been quiet ever since we got on the road and I know he’s way deep in his own head about his parents and his brother, and I want to get him thinking about something else.

  Dev waves at the air and shakes his head. “How do you grow all that fur? You’re just a little fox and you’ve got enough fur blowing around here to make a whole other fox. This didn’t happen last winter.”

  I laugh. “Sorry. It’s going back and forth from the hot to the cold. And it did happen, it’s just that we weren’t living together so I only shed a little when I came over and I cleaned it all up.”

  “So every year we’re going to have a house full of fox fur.”

  I pull my tail around and comb through it, pulling out loose fur. “If you didn’t want fox fur, you shouldn’t have chased after a fox.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t want it.” He turns, and I’m relieved to see a warm smile on his muzzle. “I prefer it attached, is all.”

  “Me too, but sometimes you don’t have a choice.” I pat my tail down and let it fall back beside the seat.

  His smile fades, but he’s more relaxed now. “Want to talk about it?” I say. “This is only your parents, right? Gregory’s tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.” He sighs. “I just want to tell them I’m upset. I mean, I want to hear what they think too. Do they think it’s all right?”

  “Did they call you back after you talked to your brother?”

  He shakes his head. “I meant to call them, but Fisher and all. Talked to them last night and confirmed that I was coming and they said it was okay. I didn’t ask about Gregory. Figured I’d be up here today, no point getting into a fight over the phone.”

  “I don’t think it got out into the media. The AllSports guy didn’t follow up?”

  “Nah. Nobody else called about it either. I think it sank out of sight.” He pauses. “I’m glad, of course, but you know, it’s kind of sad, too. I mean, it probably made him even angrier. He wanted to be noticed.”

  “He’s going to have to learn to deal with it. Getting mad at you isn’t helping. I’m sure it’s making him feel better, but he’s gotta grow out of it.”

  He stares ahead into the
white snowscape and the narrow black line we’re driving through it. “Great. I’m sure if you tell it to him just like that he’ll see the error of his ways.”

  I lean back into the seat. “I’ll leave the talking to you, stud. Don’t worry. I’m just along for moral support.”

  The car is quiet for a moment, and when I glance his way again, he keeps flicking his eyes over at me. “What?” I say.

  “Oh,” Dev says, “I was wondering if you were also going to promise to change your fur to have tiger stripes, while you’re making impossible promises.”

  I snort. “I can keep quiet. I can totally keep quiet.”

  “All right, all right. Maybe you can change.”

  There’s not much more I can say to that, so I change the subject. We talk a little about what we’re hoping to eat while we’re visiting here, about the places at Forester and the burger place he wanted to take me to in Lake Handerson last time and didn’t have a chance to. “Butterburgers,” he says. “They’re awesome.”

  I put a paw on my stomach. “God, I think I gained a pound just hearing that.”

  “You’ll like them.” He grins at me, and I ask if there’s a “Saladburger” option as well, and he says I don’t appreciate good food.

  We check in at the hotel and drop our bags off at the room, where I check my e-mail and find a response from the real estate agent in Yerba. “She says if we can pay cash, then five-fifty will probably work fine,” I say. Dev doesn’t answer, and I choose not to crow about being right. “But she still thinks that five-seventy-five would cinch it. That’s her opinion. So…should we make an offer?”

  He sits on the bed with his elbows on his knees. “Do we need to decide what we’re doing here…” He gestures between himself and me. “Before we decide on that?”

  I’d like to. But I also don’t want to jump the gun on anything. “Well, if we wait then this house might be gone and we’d have to look at another one, and I’ll have to rent a hotel room for a month. Which is fine, I guess.” I take a breath. “I know we still have another two weeks or so in our month.”