by Dana Nussio
“Yeah, go Cats!”
The voice was unmistakable. The voice she’d longed to hear with every basket she’d made, when she’d received her first varsity letter and her scholar-athlete award.
The voice that had always been silent...until now.
Natalie couldn’t decide whether to be thrilled for the now or resentful for the past, and she couldn’t hold her feet still, either. Though she’d been standing in one place next to the bench, she jogged along now, following the play up and down to half-court in the regulated area for coaches.
“Let’s go, Cats,” she repeated several times under her breath and then called it out louder. The crowd responded, cheering louder than she’d ever heard them before. This team had finally experienced victory, and there was something invigorating about watching a team with at least the possibility of winning.
She held her breath as Lucas set up his first shot. It swished through the net so smoothly that she didn’t even mind that he didn’t look to see if he should pass first.
As the opposing team started down the floor toward their basket, Kendall reached in and claimed the ball, her first steal of the season. The cheering pounded in Natalie’s ears, though she couldn’t take her eyes off the court. Couldn’t breathe normally. Couldn’t relax. But the game on the court before her wasn’t the one playing in her thoughts. Instead her own highlight reel replayed in vibrant color. Each shot. Each rebound. Each steal. Even the three-pointers she’d made occasionally.
She knew it was selfish to be reminiscing about those games right now. Tonight was about this ragtag group of athletes who’d overcome so much more than just one deserting parent and another who couldn’t have spelled the word support if a spelling-bee championship trophy were on the line. But she couldn’t help herself. Her mother was watching her team tonight, even if she wasn’t actually the one in uniform taking the shots. And she desperately wanted the Cats to win this game.
As the buzzer marked the Junior Cats’ second victory of the season, Natalie leaped up from the team bench and waited on the sideline of the court for the players rushing toward her. Though Shane had been parked on the other end of the bench past the row of sub players, he reached her first.
“What was that all about?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But she didn’t look at him.
“That’s the best answer you’ve got?”
The crush of wheels, cheers and sweaty basketball players shielded her from having to answer immediately, but she knew Shane too well to think he would let his question go unanswered.
Sure enough, they’d barely finished their team meeting before he was next to her again.
“Meet me in the hall.”
She shook her head, her gaze sliding to her mother, still parked at the end of the bleachers with Laura on one side and Vinnie on the other. Natalie’s tongue darted out to dampen her dry lips, a move Shane didn’t miss if his blink gave any indication.
“Okay, then,” he said. “We’ll have this conversation right here. Don’t worry about the ladies. Vinnie’s over there entertaining them. He’ll keep them laughing until we’re finished talking.”
“Fine. The hall.”
She started that way herself, glancing back only once to see if he’d followed. This wasn’t the way she would have imagined their first conversation since their afternoon in bed. Discomfort she’d expected. Even warmth that would spread up her neck and face over the sweet images that would replay in her thoughts. But she wasn’t prepared to be called out to the hall for a lecture. She wasn’t the one who’d done anything wrong.
As soon as they’d passed the heavy double gymnasium doors, she whirled to face him. “Why did you bring her here?”
Shane stared back at her, his mouth open. “Are you kidding? You should be thanking me for getting your mom out of the house. When is the last time you convinced her to leave when it wasn’t for a doctor’s appointment?”
A hell of a long time. “But you shouldn’t have brought her here. It’s none of your business. And it’s certainly nothing you can fix by flirting with a lonely, fragile woman.”
“I wasn’t...flirting—”
“That’s not the point. You shouldn’t have gotten involved in something you don’t understand.”
“Wait.” He studied her as if trying to decipher all that she’d said. “What am I not getting here?”
“She...never...came.” The words sounded flat in her ears, childish even, and yet a mix of emotions tightened her throat.
“To watch the games you coach?”
“To watch me.” Her voice broke on the last, so she stared at the ground. “Ever.”
“Not even when you were little?”
“She dropped me off and picked me up.” Long-buried humiliation resurfaced over being that girl, the one whose parent was never in the crowd, whose mother never volunteered to bring the team bagels for after a game.
“Well, that’s an awful thing to do to a kid.”
Natalie blinked, but the corner of her mouth lifted. Shane had taken her side. “Remember, she said she didn’t like basketball.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“But she had other reasons.”
“You didn’t know that then.”
He was right. Why was she defending her mother now when she’d carried that anger with her all these years? Was it because Shane was critical of her, too?
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t know.” But then she couldn’t help asking, “Why did you bring her here, anyway?”
“You were here,” he said with an eye roll. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“It was a surprise, all right.”
He shrugged, his silly grin back in place. “You said you wanted her to finally start living again. I thought I could help her get started. You know. Because of this.” He patted the armrests of his chair.
Natalie cleared her throat. He’d convinced his friend to drive, talked her mother and her caregiver into coming, and brought the whole merry band to a basketball game, and he’d done it all for her. And she’d been furious at him for it. What kind of ungrateful person was she?
“How did you talk her into it?”
He brushed off the question with a wave of his hand. “It wasn’t that hard. Really. She was more concerned that her hair wasn’t done.”
Natalie couldn’t help but grin at that. She’d seen how her mother reacted to Shane when they’d met. Of course he’d been able to convince her to go with him. Even now, looking through the gym doors, Natalie saw her mother reach up to pat her hair as she continued talking to Vinnie on the other side of the gym.
“It looks like she fixed that.”
“I gave her and her nurse a few minutes to primp.”
She nodded. Besides having her hair neatly combed instead of the messy way she usually wore it, Elaine was wearing lipstick. Natalie couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother wearing any. She was surprised Laura had found a tube that wasn’t dried up.
“I think she has a little crush on you.”
Natalie glanced over to find Shane watching her instead of her mother.
“I do have a way with women. Especially the Keaton ladies.”
He was kidding with her, telling of two very different ways she and her mother had been susceptible to his charms. But his gaze was so warm that she wasn’t certain if all the heat on her face had come from the inside. Even in the hallway, where anyone could have walked in and interrupted them, he allowed his gaze to linger indecently on her.
If only the full meaning of his words hadn’t settled heavily on her chest then, stealing her breath and cooling her skin quicker than an ice pack. A way with women. She’dgues
sed that about him. So why did it bother her so much? Why did she get the sense of a long hello and a short goodbye that would leave her more scarred than even the gunshot had left Shane and the accident had left her mother?
“Besides, it looks like I have some competition now.”
He gestured toward her mother again. Either Vinnie had said something funny or Elaine was having a blast tonight—maybe both—but her mother was laughing in a way Natalie hadn’t seen in years.
Signaling something to her mother’s caregiver, Vinnie stepped behind Elaine’s wheelchair and pushed it to the bench where some of the players were still meeting up with their parents. Elaine gripped each of their hands and must have congratulated them on their game because they all sat higher in their chairs as they continued past her.
Though Natalie smiled, her expression felt fragile, a happy image carved into the softest wood. But the children’s joy was contagious, and she realized with a shock that her own mother had inspired it. More than that, she could see a spark of possibility in Elaine, as well. Hope filling the void of despair.
“Still think I shouldn’t have brought her tonight?”
Shane was watching her when she glanced at him again, and he was grinning.
“It’s a start,” she admitted, not wanting to jinx anything by speaking too soon.
“The first step’s the hardest, right? And then another and another.”
Their gazes caught again and this time, held. They were talking about so much more than her mother’s first outing in who knew how long. For Shane, one exhausting first step offered hope of the next. Promise of a reward just out of reach. Would his next step lead him closer to her or just stretch his shadow behind him as he walked away from her?
She couldn’t worry about any of that now, she decided, as her mother noticed her standing in the doorway and started toward them. Elaine was grinning before she even reached them.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me how fun this was?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAYBE SHE WASN’T ready for her mother’s first step toward a new life. Natalie accepted that hard truth with a frown as she pushed Elaine through the front door, exhausted after a long ride while listening to her mother gush. Laura must have been tired of the conversation, too, as she’d slipped away to her car just after they’d parked in the drive.
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in years,” Elaine said as Natalie closed the front door.
“So you’ve said, Mom.” She took both of their coats and hung them in the closet.
Having missed Natalie’s snide comment, Elaine prattled on as she drove her electric wheelchair into the family room.
“That Shane is such a nice young man. You and the kids were so lucky to have him join you as a coach.”
“Yeah, from the way the Livingston Community Center people talk about him volunteering with the Junior Cats, you’d swear he was a retired Detroit Pistons player and not just a cop on leave from his day job.”
“Oh, that’s right. Vinnie told me that Shane didn’t know anything about basketball when he started volunteering.”
Natalie could only stare at her mother. She’d expected her to have at least some reaction to her coaching with a police officer.
“I never realized how much fun it could be to cheer on those young athletes.”
“Really?” Natalie snapped. She’d been itching for an argument all night. “You would have known it if you’d ever just once come to one of my games.”
Elaine stopped and turned back to her. “What are you talking about? Of course I attended—”
“No, Mom,” Natalie said. “You didn’t.”
Her mother blinked several times, shaking her head as if the delicate construction of her make-believe memories had just been rammed at their cornerstone.
“That’s not possible. I wouldn’t have—”
This time her daughter interrupted her with a fierce and final shake of her head. Then she posed the question she’d longed to ask after so many wins, losses and other moments no parent should have missed.
“Why not, Mom?”
Elaine turned her chair away so her daughter couldn’t see her face. She stayed that way so long that Natalie wondered if she would get the answer to her question tonight. When she finally turned back, her cheeks were damp.
“Why not?” Elaine repeated the question.
Something gripped inside Natalie’s chest. As much as she’d wanted answers and apologies, now she only longed to restore equilibrium, to balance the toxic cradle of secrets and lies they’d rocked in for so long. But as she opened her mouth to take back everything she’d said, her mother looked straight at her.
“It hurt too much.”
For a few seconds, Natalie froze. Prior to the accident, she couldn’t recall her mother ever admitting to weakness of any kind, let alone of actual pain. She sat on the love seat closest to her mother.
“What hurt?”
“I couldn’t watch you play. It reminded me too much of him.”
Her mother no longer needed to announce her pain. It was telegraphed in her eyes. Natalie might not have been able to understand her mother on so many issues, but she could relate to this.
“My father?” she asked, because the word needed to be said.
Elaine nodded and then studied Natalie’s face for so long that she had to look away.
“You should have seen him play. It was like watching a perfectly choreographed but utterly masculine ballet with a basketball for a prop.”
Natalie frowned. Somehow she couldn’t connect the picture her mother painted to the man she’d been researching on the internet now that she actually had his name.
“He was so handsome. Like a fine black statue, but larger than life and a lot shinier.”
Natalie could only stare at her mother, who never spoke in analogies. Who always wrote her world in the black-and-white columns of a spreadsheet. Except in that journal from long ago. And in the words she spoke about a man Natalie had never known. Someone who had no interest in ever knowing her.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what, Mom? For never letting me know anything about the other half of my heritage? For not even telling me his name? For keeping my father to yourself so I would come to see him—and myself—like some dirty little secret?”
Elaine’s eyes widened as if she only recognized now the damage she’d caused. “I should have told you.”
“Yes, you should have.” With that, Natalie stood and stalked from the room, pain propelling her forward.
“Natalie, wait,” her mother called.
But she couldn’t wait. She’d waited for far too long. Now she needed answers. All of them. Instead of heading to her own room, she stepped inside her mother’s bedroom and pulled the item she needed from the second drawer in the bedside table. It was hidden all the way at the bottom, beneath the flannel pajamas.
In the same tight clip with which she’d marched from the room, she returned to where her mother sat. Instead of reacting, Elaine stared out the window at a cobalt night sky as stingy with light as she had been with details involving her daughter’s birth.
Natalie lowered the book into her mother’s hands.
“I found this.”
Elaine stared at the journal and then traced her index finger over the embossed leather cover. She didn’t complain about the violation of having her daughter go through her private things. Those boundaries had evaporated long ago when the child had been forced to become the parent.
“So you know,” she said, not looking up.
“Some of it, yes. At least I know his last name now. Did you ever plan to tell me the truth about my father?”
Finally, her mother looked at her. She shook her head. “I never wanted you to know.”
“That he left you instead of the other way around?”
Elaine’s expression was stark, the pain still real, even after so many years.
“I wanted to protect you,” she said in a small voice.
“Was it really for me, or were you just protecting yourself?”
“Both, I guess,” she said with a sigh. “I was humiliated. Zeke Morris, hero power forward, and me, the bookworm. Even if we were opposites, I thought we had a future. So when I became pregnant with you, I thought it was just a wrinkle. He...didn’t agree. He had big dreams of fame and fortune in a European league. He thought I was trying to steal money he didn’t even have yet. He chose those dreams over me. Us.”
“I read that in your journal. A kid just didn’t fit in with his plans.” She didn’t need to have those words repeated in an ode to the fact that he’d seen her as an end to those dreams. A trap.
“You read the part where I said I always wanted you, right?”
Natalie could only nod. Her mother might have been a young woman at the time, and one who found out she was on her own rather quickly, but there was no doubt in those words that she’d wanted her baby.
“You weren’t the only one who was a kink in his plans,” she said with a sad smile. “There I’d been, thinking I would go along with him on this amazing ride, and I found he hadn’t even planned to take me before the pregnancy. In fact, I wasn’t even his only girlfriend whom he intended to leave later—out of sight, out of mind.”
“Were there other...babies?” She had to choke out the question. As if it hadn’t hurt enough to find out that she was left behind. Now she might discover that she’d only filled one crib in a whole nursery.
“Not that I know of.”
“Did you love him?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Natalie regretted them. From the pain in Elaine’s face, from the effort she’d made to keep her secrets, Natalie already knew the answer. Just as she knew that if she wasn’t careful, she just might fall for Shane.