“We can talk to him after,” Mitch said. Avoiding Goldman’s eye, he herded Julie into a row as a Skycam spidered overhead. People turned around, said hello. He shook their hands, pretended to know them. That was something he’d forgotten, all the people that came with football. Everywhere you went there were people. He spent so much of his time now on his own.
They waited an eternity, and while they waited he searched his messages for his most recent exchange with D. January 8, a cheerful New Year’s update. It was less than a year ago, but it felt like ten. D had his hands full with the players’ union and his charities. Shawna was lawyering for a community clinic. Donte and Serena were in high school; Damien was twelve, Tara ten. Mitch’s own update had been entirely about the house—We gotta have you guys down here—which was strange, because early January was when Tim had started chemo, and it was hard to imagine himself thinking about anything else back then.
“Why is no one from the NFL speaking?” Julie whispered into her program.
Mitch shrugged. “Maybe the family didn’t want them to.” He looked up, saw a row of weapons casing the stadium. “The hell are those?” he panted.
“Wind turbines,” Julie said, and he saw that they rotated, slightly.
Mitch felt himself sway in his folding seat, felt Julie clasp his knee to calm him down. He listened to the conversations around him to get himself up to speed. Donte was a senior now. He played football at Lower Merion. He’d been surfing with D when the jet ski hit him, was in the ambulance with him when he died. Mitch wanted to be angry that D would allow such a stupid accident to leave his kids without a father, but then, at long last, the music kicked up and the entire family walked in, looking healthy and almost honored to be there, and instead he just felt sad.
The sadness intensified when Donte rose to speak. “My dad was the strongest man I ever knew,” he said. “And not just because of the way he played. Though, obviously, that was awesome.” He paused at the podium to let everyone laugh. “He loved me and my brother and sisters. He told us every day. And I’m here to tell you that we felt that love. We still feel it.”
People were sniffling throughout the crowd. Relatives, friends, reporters. But Donte Mars was completely composed.
He seemed to perfectly understand the occasion, and to not understand it at all.
“I also want to tell you something I told my dad just a few weeks ago. Something we agreed on. I will not be playing football in college. I have offers. Some of them are really good programs. But life is short. I know that more than ever now. And football isn’t the opportunity for me that it was for my dad in his day. He gave me big dreams. He believed that if I studied and learned to work with people, I could actually change the world—which, I mean, I think we all know it needs some serious changing right now. I’ve had some great times on the field, and I’m playing tonight in his memory. But starting next year, I’m choosing a new life. For myself and also for him.”
The gathering sprang to its feet. Football players, coaches, owners. Didn’t they know they were applauding against themselves? After everything the NFL had been through in recent years, the favorite scapegoat of the pious media on one side, and the whiney president on the other? Mitch sat there, flabbergasted, looking at the backs of enormous legs, a mass sacrifice of big-and-tall suits.
“It’s okay,”Julie said, leaning down. “You don’t have to stand.”
Well, he could stand, for pete’s sake. He hoisted himself up so as not to look like an asshole, though he felt like one inside. What did Donte’s personal decisions have to do with anything? Wasn’t this supposed to be a memorial service? He let his bitterness envelope him until, suddenly, it gave him hope, like maybe this was just another of D’s jokes, a way of ribbing guys for their own mindlessness, a way of bringing them all together after too many years apart. Maybe he was lying in his casket, thinking, Got ’em. Thinking, Yeah, I got ’em good.
They took their seats again as the Jumbotron awoke with thrashing highlights from D’s career, his body flying, his body occupying space. And then, again, Mitch felt sad. That body had been brought down. It occupied the casket right there on the stage.
Then it was Shawna’s turn. “It’s been a hard week, y’all,” she said. “The hardest week of my life. I have asked ‘why’ so many times I no longer know the meaning of the word. But today, I’m done with why. Starting today, I’m asking how. How can I keep him with me?
“Y’all know my husband was a talker,” she said. “He talked about a lot of things. Himself, how great he was. His kids, how great they were. I bet in his smarter moments he even told some of y’all that I was pretty great, too. But the thing he actually talked about most wasn’t greatness. It was justice. It was a thing he didn’t get to see much of in his life. And it’s a thing we’re going to work for in his memory.”
She was a goddamn superhuman, Shawna Mars. Had she always been this way? He remembered her mostly as young, herding kids around. But at some point she, too, had grown up. She’d let her hair go, stopped taming it. She was big into Black Lives Matter.
By the time the service wrapped up, with D’s mother leading the entire gathering in “We Shall Overcome,” Mitch felt like a bag of bricks. It was all he could do to make it to the bathroom, where he snuck several hits from his vape.
At the reception in the club lounge, he finally spotted Moore and Griggs by the windows. He forced himself to go to them, even though he knew it would be awkward. They were guys from another time, another life, though it appeared that for the two of them at least, their time together had continued. He checked them out as he approached. They were fatter. Good, so was he. He planted his feet and they turned, greeting him with deadened faces.
He was going to have to muster himself. He held up his phone like he was recording them. “‘I’m an alien on Earth,’” he said. D’s catchphrase. “‘Can someone please explain this shit to me?’”
Shoulder to shoulder, they held him in suspense, maybe still deciding how they felt, maybe just wanting to be dicks. Stop being dicks, he thought at them, and apparently they heard, because after another beat, they caved, made their brotherly sounds, clasped his hand, thumped his back.
“You some kind of scientist now?” Moore laughed, batting Mitch’s goggles.
“Cured my migraines, bro,” Mitch said, which was met with appreciative noises. He wasn’t the only one with headaches.
“They would’ve killed on ‘The Martian,’” Moore said.
“They would’ve.”
D’s locker room interviews had gotten big on YouTube, at least among Eagles fans. By his last few seasons he was posting weekly episodes of “The Martian with D’Antonio Mars.” Mitch had been back a few times as a guest, but never recently enough to show off his goggles. The premise was that football was a complicated life that most fans didn’t understand. And that made sense, D insisted, because most players didn’t understand it either. Neither did the coaches or the front office or the media. Especially not the media. “We were born into a system that completely shapes our life. It’s complicated. And we are basically all Martians just trying to figure it out.” That was D’s belief. Eventually led to his work with the union.
It turned out Moore and Griggs didn’t see much of each other either. Moore was back in Florida, Griggs in Cali. Kohler had joined them, totally red-faced. He was back in Iowa most of the year, wintering in Arizona, like Hardy. Like a lot of guys, in fact.
They talked about the old days: Kohler’s naked musings, Griggs’s girl problems, Griggs’s suits. Griggs had been a baby then but even he’d caught up. Now everyone was stiff as hell and grim and responsible and worried about their kids. They asked Mitch about his goggles, traded tips on supplements and patches and pills. It was easy to talk, like no time had passed, though every memory was a reminder that time had done nothing else.
“He was just better than the rest of us,” Moore said, when the conversation finally came back to D. “Always was.” They were
all sitting around a table with plates of rib carcasses and crumpled up napkins and empties all over the place. The wait staff couldn’t come fast enough. The women had come and gone.
“Fearless,” Griggs agreed. “Team player.”
“Come on, y’all, wake up,” Mitch said, finally feeling comfortable enough to speak his mind. “The man died in the most senseless way possible. Let’s stop pretending he was some kind of hero.”
Moore and Griggs looked at each other.
“I mean, this funeral?” he went on, because no one else was talking. “‘Donte’s quitting football. Everyone work for justice.’ No disrespect to the Marses, but it was crazy!”
Kohler leaned forward, and before he even spoke, Mitch could feel his condescension, like something physical. Which was odd, coming from Kohler. “Every death is senseless,” he finally said. “People have to do what they can.”
“Direct hit to the head,” Griggs said. “Brother never had a chance.”
“It’s ironic.” Moore was almost wistful. “We’ll never know if he had CTE.”
“They’re saying he pushed Donte out the way,” Griggs said. “Saved his life.”
“I heard that, too,” Kohler said.
“Obviously they’re saying that.” For some reason, Mitch was exasperated. “They always say stuff like that.”
“Naw, man,” Moore said. “Usually it’s, ‘That stupid black man, he had it coming, what a thug, don’t he know black people don’t surf?’”
“Come on, bro,” Kohler said. “They don’t say it like that.”
“You right—it’s worse! D knows.”
“Knew,” Mitch said.
“Whatever,” Moore said. “He knows a lot of things now that we don’t.”
Mitch made a noise that was not quite supportive, not quite dismissive. “Since when did you get spiritual? And when did D learn to surf?” He thought of Caryn and it was almost too much.
“I guess he was learning. Since when did you throw in the towel?” He reached over and swatted Mitch’s gut.
“Trust me.” Mitch shook him off. “It’s been worse.”
“Seriously, though,” Moore said. “Y’all were like this.” He held up two banged-up fingers, pressed them together as tightly as he could, and still, there was a gap. “Why not call him a hero?”
January 8 flashed again in Mitch’s mind. “I don’t know. It’s been a long day.”
He stood. He needed Julie. He looked around until he found her little fighter’s form, listening to someone who needed comfort. In movies women were always screaming and being useless, but in his experience it was not like that at all. A terrible thing happened and they sprang to action. They knew important phone numbers, and gave clear instructions, and had enormous emotional reserves. They needed reassurance, sure, but they also tended to come to the right conclusions. The ones he liked to think he would’ve come to had he been half as smart as them.
“We’ve got a long drive,” Julie said, having made her way over to his table. She had those big eyes that saw the whole situation. “What do you say we head home?”
The next several weeks were fine, nothing out of the ordinary. He dove back into work, took Ricky out for lunch, closed out a decent September at both lots. But then one day shortly after his forty-eighth birthday, he felt dizzier than usual, and the next day was even worse, his head like a rowdy, overcrowded harbor, and when he had space to think about anything at all he couldn’t help but think about the jet ski, crushing tissue as it banged through D’s skull. He came home early, sacked out in his chair by the pool. He could almost feel his goggles working overtime. Tiny shock, tiny shock, tiny shock. He fired up the vape and took a hit. He tried so hard not to think about his headache that he wasn’t thinking about anything else.
He tried praying, even though prayer had not done it for him for a long time, not since he’d left Lori. Or really, if he was being honest, not since he’d left the league. He hadn’t lost his faith so much as he now recognized it for what it was: a tool for getting through football and marriage, which any neutral observer at the time could’ve seen. Even at his most outwardly devout, he’d talked to himself far more than he talked to God and was so tolerant of other creeds as to not even pray for those, like D, who held them. He was more honest with himself now and he felt pretty certain that this also meant he was being more honest with God.
Still, there was this problem with his panic, which was only intensifying. He tried getting in his Suburban, and going for meditative drives along the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the October leaves were just beginning to change. But all that produced was more vertigo, ears popping, the kudzu creatures advancing and falling towards him, the mountains shrinking into heaps beneath the double-speed clouds that raced through the infinite sky.
“Can we talk about therapy?” Julie asked him one night as he lay there clutching his head.
“But what if I’m really sick? What if I’m having a heart attack?”
“Are you short of breath? Do you have pain in your belly?”
No, he told her, and no. She pulled the blood pressure sleeve from the nightstand and slid it up his arm. “When did you last check it?” she asked over the device’s inflating drone.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. Now his memory was dying. Surely he was dying, too. The sleeve released him with a sigh.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Your meds are working.”
But she still looked at him with unsettling concern.
“I think you need to talk to someone,” she said.
“We’re talking.”
“No,” she said. “A professional.”
He had to drive all the way to Charlottesville to see the doctor Julie had found, an older woman who spent most of their first session together asking him who he was and why he had come. He liked her well enough. Dr. Evans. She was deeply wrinkled, but pretty for an older lady, and she smiled a lot, which he always appreciated in a woman.
He started slow, told her who he was. Football, family, basic stuff. He told her Julie had wanted him to come because she thought he was feeling down. He told her an old friend had died, so of course he was feeling sad, he’d been sad when his uncle died, too. He also told her he’d felt some dizziness lately, but he’d checked out fine at the doctor, so that, too, was probably just because he was sad. By the end of the hour, they had agreed: when people died, you got sad. If this was therapy, he’d be fine.
At the start of the second session, she asked him if he had any questions for her. He didn’t, so she took a few minutes to explain her method. He listened, heard the main point about it being more like a practice than a cure, but found himself zeroing in on her mouth, the source of all her educated words.
“You know who you remind me of?” he asked her, suddenly. “My high school English teacher, Mrs. Murray.” He remembered he was in Virginia. “Do you know her?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, plainly not thinking about it at all. “Why do I remind you of her?”
“It’s not how you look. She was younger. It’s something about the way you talk.” He laughed, realizing what he was getting at. “You’re both too smart for me.” Caryn had also been too smart. Maybe he’d give her that little tidbit, see what she did with it. “But so are all women, aren’t they.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Don’t you?”He was pretty pleased with himself for managing to turn the tables. Now he was the one asking questions.
But she was quick, this Dr. Evans. “It isn’t about what I think. We’re here to talk about you.” And she was crafty, too. Before he knew it, he was filling her in on his childhood. He tried to tell it all from the beginning, in order, the way it happened: first his mother who raised him, then his father who didn’t, but even this basic, straightforward chronology broke down pretty fast. He had to backtrack to cover his grandparents and Tim, and the one time his dad did visit, and the fight between the brothers. Then there were the couple of times he ta
lked to Joe on the phone as a kid. Then all of a sudden he was in the present.
“We talk once or twice a year now,” he told her. “It’s been pretty normal for a while.”
“How did that happen?” she asked.
“I think I just called him up one day. I wanted to see how he was doing.”
“Do you remember what prompted that?”
He shrugged. “I was in college. There wasn’t any need for bad blood.”
“I see. And do you ever visit?”
“He won’t. Doesn’t even text.”
“What do you mean ‘won’t’?”
“I mean he always has some excuse. He’s got these dogs. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s because he’s broke. Always has been. I went out to see him once, after my first divorce. Stopped over on my way to Vegas. I could tell he was touched. He made up a bed for me. His wife made me dinner. It was nice, but it was weird, too. I forgot they don’t drink, so I brought them this bottle of top-shelf tequila. It just sat there on the counter the whole time.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“We’re better on the phone.”
“Has your mom seen him?”
“No way. I think she would if he turned up. But like I said, he doesn’t travel, and she’s not gonna go chasing him.”
She nodded. “So when did you last talk?” She really was fixated. Who could remember the exact timing of one little thing when there were so many other things happening?
“I don’t know,” he said. She was exhausting him. “Recently.”
“A few months ago, maybe,” Julie said, when he put Dr. Evans’s question to her. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” He was glad she couldn’t put her finger on it either. Very few important things escaped Julie’s finger.
She gave one of her disciplined pauses, in which he imagined her resting inside her brain, preparing to kick him with high-impact words. “Does this mean you’re liking therapy?”
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