“Meredith, you and Brendan can’t stay in the house forever,” he kept telling me, but I had just shrugged.
However, it was true: you could only stay inside for so long, no matter how angry you were about having to uproot your life and come to Michigan. It definitely wasn’t healthy for my brother. Yesterday, I had pestered until Brendan tore himself away from his guitar long enough to go with our dad to the Woodsmen training facility to see the football team work out (although my brother told me later that he had waited in the car for most of that time).
I was getting out of the house too, but more covertly, because I wasn’t giving in to my dad just yet. I had taken to running at night, after his nine o’clock bedtime. It stayed light really late here, all the way up near the North Pole. And today, I had also gotten up early enough to sneak out while my father was still in his room doing his morning routine of sit-ups, push-ups, stretching, and meditation. I took the bike that he kept telling me to ride, and also his ID card that got me into Woodsmen Stadium through a door in the back that unlocked with a swiping thing.
The bike was how I was going to get home, right now. I hurried out of the weight room and away from the giant man, who was planted in the center of the floor with his arms crossed, watching me. I walked faster, looking over my shoulder, then did a skippy kind of jog, and then launched into a full run back out to the parking lot where I had stuffed the bike behind some garbage cans. I jumped on and sped up the stadium driveway and out to the road. First I went the wrong way, because the map on my phone pointed me in that direction but then swung around 180 degrees. I had to double back and retrace where I had ridden, passing the stadium again. My phone seemed to get confused up here, in the middle of nowhere, like it didn’t get what it was doing in Michigan. I understood its feelings.
I puffed as I turned into the driveway of the house my dad had rented. Despite those late-night runs, I had already fallen out of shape. I wasn’t doing all the exercise classes I had gone to back in Los Angeles and it showed, definitely in my heart rate, and probably also in my butt. I also puffed because even though it was still early, it was already getting hot. It was much warmer in this place than it was right by the Pacific coast where we had lived in California. Humid, sometimes, too, which I’d rarely had to deal with before, and my brown hair was frizzing like I had rubbed a balloon on my head. I opened the garage and started to try to lift the bike onto the rack on the wall, something I wasn’t able to accomplish with my weak muscles from missing my spin and yoga classes.
At least I was alive. If that weirdo hadn’t lifted me down from where I had been hanging on the bar, plucking me off it like I was a mere piece of lint, I could have been stuck there until Monday when the rest of the employees came back to the stadium. Since the entire news cycle of this place seemed to revolve around their football team, coach’s daughter’s death by gravity boots in the players’ gym would have been a big deal. I—
I turned and stared, because an old truck had just come down the driveway and rattled to a stop in front of the house. The giant, the oversized guy who had been in the weight room, opened the door and got out.
“You?” I asked incredulously, staring at him.
“Jory,” he said, pointing to his chest. “I’m Jory.”
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I just stared at the little windows on the test sticks. There were plus signs; double pink lines; double blue lines; double black lines; two dots; a smiley face; a big Y; and the topper, the one that just announced it: PREGNANT.
“Oh, no,” I breathed out. The little lines and symbols on the tests seemed to get bigger and pulse. Y, PREGNANT, they mocked me. The smiley face winked.
“Camdyn! Are you ever coming out of there?” My roommate Morgan pounded on the door again.
“Give me a minute.”
“What?”
My voice had been too weak for him to hear it. “Just a minute!” I said a little louder. I swept the sticks into the garbage can then covered them with a layer of toilet paper so that my roommates wouldn’t see. There, it was like they were gone. They had never existed…
But wait a minute. I stared at the trash. Maybe they were false positives! I had drunk at least a gallon of water before doing this, and maybe I had overworked these tests. Maybe they needed to rest some—to recharge, like a phone. Then the notifications in the little windows would change over to only one line, one dot, or the magic words: NOT PREGNANT. In the mental state I currently occupied, this seemed to make sense to me. I grabbed the toilet paper, wrapped up the tests, and shoved them in the back pocket of my jeans, which was now over my butt where it belonged.
“Finally,” Morgan gasped, and pushed past me when I opened the door. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? I could have gotten kidney damage!” He was already whipping it out, so I turned my head and went into my bedroom. I spread out the toilet paper from the garbage can and lined up the test strips on my dresser. I lay down on my bed, covering my eyes with my arm, and I tried to think, to be sane and logical. But even though it was only six o’clock, I fell asleep instead.
I woke up the next morning, 12 hours later, and my eyes lit right on those damn plastic sticks balanced on top of my sock drawer. That meant that my first word of the day was not a pretty one, but sometime in the night, my mind must have come to terms with the fact that those results were not going to change from positive to negative. All the pluses, lines, and other symbols of the truth were still there, and I was past the point of trying to deny them. So, yeah, I was…I sat up and swung my feet onto the floor, groaning. Holy shit, I was pregnant. It was real.
But I wasn’t one to run from a fight, not ever. I tossed out the tests, done with them. It was time to move on. I threw up and then got dressed, because I had a lot to get done before I went to work. Like finding the guy who’d had a hand in this—or more accurately, a sperm. We had some things to go over.
“Camdyn, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s January third,” my roommate Kaya told me when I came into the kitchen. This was her house, and Morgan and I owed her rent.
“Yes,” I said. I was breathing through my teeth because her bacon smelled so bad, so incredibly noxious, I wanted to open a window and heave it outside. “I’m going to give you the money on Friday.”
She looked up at me and sighed. “Cam…”
“I know! I know, and I swear, I’ll have it for you. Things last month got tighter than I expected, with the holidays.” Money was going to keep being tight, with a baby…my vision got a little grey around the edges and I grabbed the counter until it cleared.
Kaya didn’t notice, and she didn’t look appeased as she finished the last strip of bacon from her breakfast, crunching it loudly. The unfortunate smell still lingered in the air. “Ok, it’s fine if you get it to me Friday, but this is the last month that I’m going to be able to give you a grace period.” She looked at me. “You were never late with your rent before November.”
Some things had happened in the fall, but I hadn’t mentioned them to Kaya, and I wasn’t going to now, either. “I’m sorry, and I’ll get it to you,” I promised her. “For sure.”
“Ok,” she said again. She got up and brushed some crumbs from her hockey jersey. “I gotta go, I have a game later. If Morgan drags his lazy ass out of bed, you could remind him that we’re having our January house meeting tomorrow.” Kaya not only owned the cottage, but she also took on the role of RA, like we were still in college. “Also, you can tell him that I tossed his POS bike out of my way last night because he had left it in the middle of the garage. If it’s ever there again, I’m going to run it over and leave it under my tires.”
“I’ll pass that on,” I said. “Good luck in your game. Don’t lose any teeth.”
She grinned, showing a full set, and headed out to the rink.
I suddenly had a craving for milk, like, a lot of it. Milk with cinnamon
and ice. And salt. I looked more in the refrigerator and added a squirt of hot sauce to my travel mug, and it was delicious. I slurped the cold liquid as I went to my car in the driveway. Morgan still hadn’t gotten his butt out of bed, and I saw where Kaya had put his bike after it had blocked her car from parking in the garage the night before. Only the front tire and handlebars showed from where it was embedded in the snow across the street. I nodded in appreciation at the distance and depth into the snowpack she had gotten when she had flung it. Kaya was really strong.
I got into my car and took off. My first order of business was to go to Woodsmen Stadium, the home of our local pro football team. The roads that took me there were very familiar because I had been going to games since I was a baby. It had been a few years since I had spent a lot of time hanging out in the stands, but I still knew my way around the place—it had been a home away from home for a large part of my life. The guy who manned the main gate still recognized me and let me in even though I didn’t have a Woodsmen-approved sticker on my windshield. I also knew which door would be propped open a little so that Lyle, the security guard, could sneak in and out for quick smoke breaks. I would use that one now to get into the stadium to find him and ask for his help.
It was quiet in the parking lots, since the season was over. The amazing Woodsmen quarterback, Davis Blake, had been injured in the very first game of the preseason, and the team had gone into a tailspin of losses. They hadn’t made the playoffs for the first time in, well, I wasn’t sure how long it had been since they hadn’t. Because before Davis Blake, the Woodsmen QB had been Warren Wilde, and he was the best player to ever suit up in the United Football Confederation. He was the GOAT: the greatest of all time.
He was also my father, and also a goat in another sense—I considered him to be about the same as a barnyard animal. But it was too cold to stand in this parking lot and waste my time thinking about Warren Wilde. It didn’t take me long to find Lyle once I let myself into the stadium through the open door.
“Camdyn Riordan! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” The security guard hugged me. “Did you sneak in here?” he asked.
“Sure did. I’m glad to see you too, Lyle.” He asked me about Christmas and about Warren Wilde and my sister, Ellie, and I answered as vaguely as I could. “Hey, I was hoping you could help me get an address from the personnel files,” I announced in a break in his interrogation.
Lyle tilted his head and gave me a look.
“I wouldn’t ask this of you, but it’s really, really important. I have to have it.” My eyes suddenly filled up with tears and Lyle’s widened.
“All right, I can help you! I think I can pass some information along to the girl I’ve known since I changed her diaper. Come on, we’ll go up to HR. It should be empty today.”
We walked through the stadium with Lyle chatting to me about the quarterback’s recovery. “You know that most of the offensive players stayed up here for the winter so they could work with him. They’re all determined to get themselves back on track for next season.”
I already knew that, because no one in our town talked about anything other than the Woodsmen, and besides, my sister Ellie used to work for the team and she had mentioned it, too. And it had been on the radio and reported by the TV news, how the players were meeting and practicing together without coaches in the off-season. The fact that the majority of the offensive starters hadn’t gone to spend the winter elsewhere was why I was here at the stadium today.
The Human Resources department was totally deserted. “Grigor is sick and Juana took her vacation to Mexico,” Lyle mentioned. He moved a snow globe off the keyboard of a computer in the back and two-finger typed a login and password. “I’d like to be on vacation in Mexico right now. Everyone around here needs it after the way things went last season.” He looked pained at the memory. “Ok, ok, who are we looking for?”
I said a name and Lyle’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you need with him?”
“I just need his address. It’s nothing very important.”
“You already told me it was really, really important,” Lyle countered. He looked at me for a long moment. “Camdyn, are you in some kind of trouble? Should I call—”
“No, don’t call Warren Wilde,” I said. I didn’t want my father involved at all, in anything. “I don’t need any help besides this address.”
He looked like he thought that I was full of it, but he wrote out some information on a pink post-it. “I won’t tell Warren, but I’m here too, if you need me,” he said as he handed me the paper. “That’s my cell number below the address.” He tapped the pink square with his finger.
“Thanks.” My eyes got wet again. “I know you could get in trouble for helping me like this. I owe you big, and I’ll never forget it.” My voice broke on that last part. Damn it!
His face got very, very worried. “Camdyn, what—”
“Gotta go. Thanks again, Lyle.” I kissed his cheek and rushed out of the stadium.
A light snow started to drift down from the sky as I drove. It was heavier by the time I made it to the address on the post-it note, but snow wasn’t going to stop me. Neither was the big gate that blocked my way down the driveway. I parked in front and studied it through my windshield for a moment before I got out and stuffed my gloves into my coat pocket. Not electrified, not even pointy at the top. In terms of security, the gate was ridiculous—any child could have climbed it, and it took me all of five seconds. I straddled the highest rail and looked around, getting a lay of the land, and then quickly descended the other side.
I brushed off my hands and replaced my gloves as I stalked up the driveway, staring more at the house. It was big and gaudy, much too ornate for my taste. There was no style, either, just stuff piled on top of stuff. It looked like the builder had googled “fancy house” and then added every element he had seen there. I had gotten to help pick the colors and furniture to redecorate the tasting room in the winery where we’d had the New Year’s party. From that, I’d developed an interest in design, and this house was definitely not what I would have chosen. Actually…
Actually, it was damn cold. I blew a cloud of steamy air. It was much too cold to stand in the driveway and criticize the architecture in order to delay ringing the doorbell and confronting the problem inside. So yeah, here I went. I stepped forward and pressed the button and stared into the camera.
No one came. I waited and then rang again, hearing the bell tones echo through the big house. Awesome, I had come all this way and climbed the stupid gate and—
The tall, ugly door swung open and a very tall, but not at all ugly man stood in front of me. He squinted, confused. “Uh, hi…Camille.”
Jesus and Mary. “No, it’s Camdyn. Hi, César.”
The Woodsmen tight end stared at me. “Camdyn, right. What are you doing here?
There wasn’t a great way to sugarcoat this. “I’m pregnant,” I announced.
His brown eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “What?”
“Yeah, pregnant,” I said. “I took ten tests.”
César seemed to gather himself. “Why are you telling me?”
Because I wanted to spread the cheer. “Why do you think I’m telling you?” I asked angrily. “It’s your baby!”
The words puffed out of my mouth and hung in the frozen air like tiny nuclear bombs.
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The Last Whistle Page 28