“Watch it, Tyler,” Mitch said with forced jollity. “Watch it or I’ll whip your bag of skin.”
“Hey Joe,” Tyler said. “Grandma says you and Uncle Tim used to race.”
Joe laughed. “That was a long time ago.”
The rest of them had quieted down. Mitch felt his entire family look up from their gifts to become part of his conversation. “Oh, God,” Tracy said. “I hope Tim won. He was impossible to live with when he lost.” She still wore her little diamond ring, which long ago belonged to Tim’s mom, and she seemed happy about this new memory of her husband. Good, Mitch thought. Let everyone just be happy for once.
“He won,” Joe said. “Don’t worry.”
Mitch saw the asphalt straightaway outside his mom’s old house, the green world fuzzy on either side. “I remember that race,” he said. “I was in it. I was like, five. They smoked me. My whole life, NFL All-Pro, and I never beat my dad in a race.”
“Boo-hoo,” Julie said, and everyone laughed, including Mitch.
“It’s not too late,” Tyler said, that flash of anarchy again in his eyes.
“Oh, yes it is,” Joe said.
“Are you kidding?” Mitch agreed. “His old bag of skin? He’d fall to pieces in a sprint. Whoops, there goes an arm. Oops, see ya, leg!”
“Hey now, I’m not that decrepit,” Joe said, and as he said it, Mitch saw a brightness suffusing him from within, a conserved agility that belied his age. “I get my jogs in most mornings.”
“I bet you do,” Mitch said.
“Oh no,” Cindy said. “I’m not driving anyone to the hospital tonight.”
“He says he jogs!” Tyler said. “I smell a rematch.”
“In your dreams, Tyler,” Mitch said. “The turtle versus the walrus? No thank you.”
“I’m just talking about a friendly competition. No heart attacks.”
“Love you, too, son.”
“Come on.” Tyler was crumpling a sheet of discarded wrapping paper in his hands, packing it down like a metallic snowball. “You’d beat him.”
“Obviously.”
“Unless you’re afraid you wouldn’t.”
The room filled with human sirens.
“All right, be serious y’all!” Cindy said, once the noise had died down. “Nobody’s going to race.”
But Mitch was, and she knew it. Everyone else knew it, too. In a football family, there was no such thing as turning down a challenge.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” Mitch said. He felt then that he was speaking for all the guys who couldn’t. Tim and D and everyone else. “If I’m alive, I can run.”
“Yes!” Tyler sprang up, firing his paper ball into an empty gift bag, having pulled off his great manipulation. “And I’m in, too. Ha!”
The noise of family started up again, half in protest, half in support. Mitch didn’t even care that Tyler had finally tricked him into a race. What Mitch cared about, suddenly, was getting outside, on the grass, and beating Joe with his own philosophy: the motion he was, the action that was him.
Joe sat there in his bright old body, saying nothing, but declining all the same. He seemed to think there was another way to live, one that didn’t involve competition. And maybe there was, but not in the world Mitch had always known, and not in the world he believed in.
“Why not?” Mitch said, getting to his feet. He threw all the force of his ego at his father. “Come on, Joe! It’s a short move. It’s a short move, Joe, let’s go!”
It was already eleven o’clock, but it seemed much earlier. The darkness of Mitch’s yard felt partial, just a passing affliction, held at bay by the floodlights from his deck. The entire family had gathered for the event, the thrilling night game, Alyssa and Journey with Tim’s clan on the deck, Journey peering through the posts. At the foot of the stairs, Caryn defined alignment. Next to her Julie stood atop her strong, fighter’s legs. He would sleep with Caryn again one day. On her legs there in his immortal Virginia, Julie probably already knew. She’d probably even forgive him.
He had taken a few good pulls from the vape throughout the night, enough to think a few necessary, radical thoughts, and to feel himself inside himself, goggle-free out in the dark. Mentally, he rolled on his tights, his skin’s skin, which had always contained him on the field. What had to contain him now was family. Now everything he used to get from football, he had to get from them.
He looked ahead at the spot where Kaylie and Cindy had spread themselves, with their arms outstretched, awaiting the tag, which wasn’t any particular distance from the starting line, but was generally about as far as he could see. Their limbs were visible. Their expressions were not, but his mother’s was known to him all the same. It was a face that said, When will it be enough! (Never!) and a face that was already laughing at his response.
Maddie, who for some horsey reason owned a whistle, was ready as the ref at the start. His whole family, all his women, all of their voices and faces here with him now in the flesh. Finally big enough for a Suburban, finally big enough to stage a three-man race.
To his left, aiming for Kaylie’s outside hand, was Tyler, tilting forward, wanting something he didn’t seem to know he already had. To his right, aiming for Cindy, was Joe, compacted with age like a breathing stone. Here they were again, older, repeating a scene from the past. Because everything repeated, whether you wanted it to or not—but especially when you wanted it to, as a part of Mitch always did. A big part, maybe even a part as large as his body. Tyler had that part, too, but Joe, it seemed, did not. The part he had always declined to race—but then, somehow, always gave in. That was the pattern, anyway, when Mitch was watching. What were his patterns when Mitch was not watching? This, he couldn’t know.
“It’s a short move,” Mitch told him, gazing straight ahead at his mom.
“Bastard,” was Joe’s cheeky response.
Mitch coughed in delight. “You would know!”
There were no false starts. Maddie gave the signal and they went. Mitch’s body was the world and the world was Mitch running, his legs doing what he’d grown them to do. The darkness fled from him as he approached his mom, and her face came into sight. She seemed to be bracing herself for a collision, her eyes wide, her mouth small, her comprehension as layered as one of her silly pine cones. She feared him as much as ever. Because she’d given up love for him, a boy she’d lose one day, because he’d already begun his separation the moment he arrived in her womb. But she was ready, too. She was armored in all her self-grown scales and she was saying, Hit me. She was saying, You maniac. You’re all I’ve got.
The cheering started before he reached the line. He went toward his mother; he tagged her hand.
12. SARAH, 2030
Mitch Wilkins’ brain arrived in an insulated box marked Urgent Medical Shipment, like every other brain I’ve received. His was my ninety-first case, a fact that should’ve been neutral. But Mitch was from my hometown, the only brain in our bank to have attended my little Virginia high school, and though he was in college by the time I was born, I grew up a misfit and a football fan, in love with catches and contact and fascinated by the story of his success. If people like him could make it outside of Monacan, then surely I could, too. I was better at school than anyone else I knew; I had, bad joke, a brain. So when I finally met him, here, like this, in the midst of a bodily crisis of my own, it hit me pretty hard.
To cope, I assigned myself the gross exam, handled the sampling, stained the slides, something I’d normally pass on to the techs. It was a fairly healthy brain, at least as far as football brains went. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, stage two, which matched our diagnosis while he was alive. He’d suffered headaches and mood swings and the occasional bout of explosivity. But that, he insisted in his 2025 assessment, just made him a football player; that was who he’d always been. Which is not to say the elevated biomarkers surprised him. “Play football, get CTE,” he said in his follow-up. “I knew the risks, even though I didn’t.” He seemed
determined to keep working, which was all he’d ever really known how to do. In that way, I could relate.
I watched those interviews, which predate my time, in preparation for my postmortem call with his family: partner Julie Matthews, mother Cindy Wilkins, and daughters Alyssa Wilkins and Madison Jones all side-by-side at the virtual table. They, too, were unsurprised. “Honestly,” Julie said, without a drop of bitterness. “I wish he’d enrolled in a heart study instead. Not that he would’ve given up meat.” Genial laughter all around.
Oh, how I loved those women, his earlier caretakers. There was something fearless about them, the way they offered up story after story, as though they’d really known who he was. The mother especially: a sturdy mom even older than mine, who was the last of the bunch to sign off. My mother knew him, too. She’d regaled me with stories of the famous Mitch Wilkins falling asleep in her English class, so many years ago, when Dad had taught at Briarwood and she at the high school, in that long middle stretch of their adulthood, the period of life that I’m in now. On their advice, I’d gotten out as soon as I could, picked a fancy college in New England that funneled me straight to New York, and eventually to Boston, where I’d finally settled down. But it wasn’t like that for my parents. They remained outsiders in Virginia for the better part of their lives.
I was desperate to tell my mom about Mitch, but also a little afraid. What if she didn’t remember him? Would it upset her? Would it upset me? She was only seventy-four but already battling dementia, while I was thirty-nine and swirling with hormones in a belated effort to have my own kid. The whole situation was delicate, demanding patience and clarity of thought. On my better days, I still had a bit of both.
I waited two weeks—two whole weeks!—until their next visit, which would overlap with my fourth embryo transfer, which I told them but otherwise didn’t dwell on; they had enough to worry about as it was. They would be spreading the journey out over a few days, stopping with friends in New Jersey and Connecticut. The drive from DC, where they’d retired for the theater and museums, had always been trying, but this year it must have been worse. When they finally turned into my driveway, on Friday afternoon, they sat molded to their seats, visibly exhausted.
“I don’t think we’ll do this again,” my dad said as we unloaded the car. I could see that it cost him to admit this, my dad the driver, who loved making excellent time. “It’s hard on me,” he said. He was seventy-six, two years ahead of her, though these days he seemed much younger. “It’s hard on your mom.”
I gripped her bag and looked at her. She was inspecting the tulips that Jonas maintained out front, paying no attention to us. Over the years she’d often withdrawn when someone had something embarrassing to say, but now I read all her behaviors differently, her aloofness most of all.
In the house I offered them seltzer with bitters, because Mom was no longer permitted alcohol. Jonas came in to greet them and we acted like everything was normal, but I could barely hold it together. My mother stood under the kitchen lights looking melted, her durable hair in its usual braid, her blue eyes watering reflexively. A month since I’d last seen her, and already, she had a different face.
“Mom,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said, brightly, as though these were pleasantries. “Happy to be here with you.”
The next morning, Dad and Jonas and I had a strategy session while Mom slept in. She was finally on the latest cocktail of disease-modifying drugs, but the doctor warned it would take time to see any progress. In the meantime, her care team had suggested we fix her with a locater in case she wandered off. Dad was adamantly opposed. He was always with her, he said, and anyway, she was his wife; he wouldn’t treat her like some cow. I understood but I also saw the value. We hadn’t gotten much farther than that when Mom joined us, already dressed, her drapey blouse buttoned straight. She sat at the breakfast table, selected an orange from the centerpiece bowl, and tucked her fingernails into the peel. She looked alert, competent even. Maybe the cocktail was working.
We had a leisurely breakfast, talking about the usual things. My father’s latest retirement project was a novel about his father, the cattle rancher, which in turn got us talking about the dairy at Briarwood, and all the related gear the college sold: Holsteinprint t-shirts and baseball caps and mugs. We had loads of it; I even had a stuffed cow with eraser-pink udders. Looking back, I think we fetishized the cows for the same reason we fetishized football, because we were desperate to belong. We were dorks, godless city people. We didn’t hunt or laugh at snakes or know how to operate heavy machinery; we rarely even swam in the lake. But we could admire Monacan’s manmade patterns: cows grazing and resting, players covering one hundred yards of field. We showed up, like everyone else, to scream ourselves hoarse on Friday nights. It wasn’t avant garde, Mom always said, but it was both ordinary and extreme, like flying in airplanes, and this alone made it worth our attention. Of course, the more attention we paid, the more interesting the sport became, a game of close and distant contact, of carefully managed personnel. A game built on the notion of forward progress, and measurements that everyone agreed were pretty arbitrary, but fun to hope for all the same. Most interesting of all, football was something Monacan did well, and we, good students that we were, had always been suckers for excellence.
“Why are cows ungulates?” Jonas asked, bringing me back to the moment.
“That just means they have hooves,” Dad told him.
I quickly called up some cow facts. “But did you know they also have long memories? They can individually identify several dozen other herd members.” I double-checked the number given. “Fifty. Fifty to seventy other herd members.”
“Your memory’s even longer,” Jonas said. He’d been sucking up to me all week, and for good reason. The estrogen tablets had made me particularly edgy this go-around, and my breasts felt packed with heavy metal from the progesterone.
“I literally just looked that up,” I told him.
“I mean you know a million people. But you also knew that without having to look it up.”
“Fifty sounds like more than enough for me,” said my father, who did not share my enthusiasm for groups. “I like cows because they ruminate.”
“That part is disgusting,” I said. “They basically eat their own vomit.”
“You’re thinking anthropocentrically. They take their time.”
“You’re the one thinking anthropocentrically. They’re digesting. They aren’t writing novels.”
My mother liked cows, too, almost as much as she liked gardening and football, but this morning she said little. She seemed to need her headspace for breakfast.
“Hello,” I said, waving my hand near her line of sight.
“Your mom’s working on her orange,” Dad said, redundantly, for it was obvious she was giving each section the same kind of meditative attention she used to give to student exams. Impatient for her company, I looked up more facts to rouse her.
“‘Citrus trees belong to one superspecies, which is almost entirely infertile,’” I announced, already regretting my zeal for the topic. “Okay, right, they survive only through human cultivation.”
“Mm,” Jonas said. Could I hear him wincing on my behalf?
Whatever, I told myself, better to ignore the personal implication. “‘The navel orange earned its name for the second, stunted, fruit at the base beneath its peel.’”
This got Mom’s attention. “I thought it was because of the Navy and scurvy.”
“That’s N-A-V-A-L,” my father intoned.
“Come on, Mom, you know that.” I picked one of the remaining oranges from the bowl, clapped its grippy rind, and made as if to throw her a touchdown pass, with the second fruit leading the way. “They have belly buttons.”
She laughed at the orange and at me, then darted her eyes somewhere lower. I don’t think it was necessarily my belly, so I’ve decided to think it was not.
“Don’t be silly, sweet
ie, I know that,” she said. “I was making a pun. Like how everything was ‘an utter delight’ or ‘utter madness’ with the cows.”
The cocktail was working. I had to believe it was.
I’d moved to Boston for my job, but mostly to get out of New York. I’d squandered years there in a panic of drunken cynicism, regularly falling into bed with aloof, charismatic men, pretending I didn’t need them either. At work I was a gunner, winning grants, and I thought my friends were gunners, too, but then one by one they got married and pregnant, retreating from the old vigor of their lives. I felt uncomfortable watching them nurse, marooned in their photo-ready apartments, the city reduced to a rumor or a view. They were sleep-deprived and distracted and there was nothing to envy in their apologetic husbands, sudden grays, or billowy, spit-stained shirts. Even so, I felt threatened. I couldn’t shake the thought that my friends were managing to expand their claims to life, their cells dividing and mattering more, while mine faded, unreplaced. I felt too good for motherhood and at the same time not good enough to care for someone else.
Once my tribe disbanded, I found myself wanting to be near my parents, but the right job hadn’t come along. Meanwhile, football kept growing more lucrative, and more objectionable to certain sectors of the public, including, for a brief, exciting period, the offended players themselves. There were protests and articles and documentaries, and summits and symposia and sitdowns, and eventually the owners did a smart thing, endowing a brain center in perpetuity. Over the years, it had essentially saved the game, advising on rule and helmet changes, and very publicly researching a vaccine for active players; football, the implication was, would always take care of its own. Even so, when I was headhunted and eventually offered the directorship of the brain bank here, my Brooklyn friends were scandalized. They were, almost to a person, boycotters, and no amount of incremental progress was good enough for them. One of the nursers in particular campaigned zealously to keep me in New York, actually using the word collaborationist over an organic dinner I had cooked. But in the end, the money was too good, and I was too much in need of different company. If the game was still good enough for the players, it was good enough for me.
A Short Move Page 29