I stared back at him, unsure I could have moved even if all my limbs were working.
“You think I don’t know who that kid was on the field?”
I hadn’t really thought about it. That seemed to be a theme at the moment—shit I didn’t think through before I acted on it.
“You smacked him around a little,” Dad went on, “but that little whore deserved whatever she got. I’d be happy to show her father and the town all the dirty little details.”
“Her father knows,” I said softly, knowing that it wouldn’t make any difference.
“Yeah, I’m sure he does,” Dad said with a nod. “I wonder how many of his co-workers do? Or the kids in your school—I bet they could use a good image to jack off to, couldn’t they?”
I had no doubt that he would do it and that he probably wouldn’t stop there, either.
“Leave her alone,” I begged. “It’s not like she can hurt my game anymore…”
“No, I think she’s fucked that up about as much as she possibly could,” Dad agreed. He stood up straight and placed a finger against his chin. “You know…maybe that’s a more fitting fate for her.”
He took a few steps backwards.
“I mean, she took your legs away…Maybe a little retribution in kind would make more sense.”
My panting increased. He wouldn’t hurt her…would he?
“Maybe she needs to be in the middle of another accident.”
“Dad…don’t,” I whispered. I could hardly get any words out. “Just forget I said anything, okay? I won’t mention her again…I swear I won’t! Just leave her alone.”
“Maybe you can see a little reason,” he said with an expression that was about as far from reason as I’d ever seen—even from him.
He walked out of the room while I tried to catch my breath again.
I was going to have to forget her. It was the only way to keep her safe, at least until I could get out of here.
Could I get out? I mean—I was eighteen. I didn’t think he could make me stay…not legally. Of course, the legality of the matter probably didn’t mean much to him. If I had said something in the hospital or rehab center, maybe I could have stayed there, but now…now it was too late.
I was here, alone with my father. I couldn’t get to a phone or the computer, and though people knew I was here, none of them would be looking for me to come out and play any time soon.
I was completely and totally fucked.
Even with that realization, all I could really think about was Nicole and making sure no matter what happened to me, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. That meant going along with anything and everything he said.
I had always obeyed him—always. Even before Mom died, I would always do what he said. Afterwards, I had to make him happy because I had taken so much from him.
I thought of Clint for a moment and wondered just what he was thinking or feeling. I wondered if he thought I hated him or if he thought it was all his fault. It wasn’t, obviously. The car just skidded, and he lost control. I was the one who decided to jump in front of it. He couldn’t have stopped me, and I didn’t feel like any of it was his fault at all.
Just an accident.
An accident.
“It was only an accident.”
“Sometimes things just happen.”
“They aren't your fault.”
It was Mom’s voice in my head though I didn’t recall her saying the words.
It wasn’t Clint’s fault.
I didn’t blame him at all.
If it wasn’t his fault I was hurt…
I felt the first hot tear run down my face.
“It was just an accident,” I whispered softly to myself.
Shakespeare once said, “Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; With them forgive yourself.” Somehow, I finally grasped the meaning.
Now I understood everything in a whole new light.
For much of the next day, people kept coming to the house. I wasn’t sure who had been there because Dad always got rid of them before I could get to the door, but I know I heard Jeremy and Rachel, Paul, Ben…and Nicole.
I was in bed at the time, just finishing my heat-and-eat supper when the bell rang, and I heard her voice. I dumped the tray on the side table and moved myself around until I could get in the chair. I was already tired from the exercises I had done with my arms right before eating, and I didn’t get over to the wheelchair the first time. Once I managed to get into the chair, roll down the hallway, get through the living room, and reach the foyer, he had already shut her out.
The next day, Greg showed up.
We had been sitting in the kitchen with Dad looking over a bunch of papers and me picking at breakfast. All of a sudden, Dad’s head jerked up and he looked out the kitchen window. He growled under his breath, and then he looked at me, strode over to the back of my chair, and wheeled me right out of there.
“What are you doing?” I cried out.
“Shut up,” he responded. He wheeled me all the way to the guest room and then actually helped me into the bed. I tried to protest—I hadn’t been up that long, but he shut me up. “Don’t say a fucking word, you hear me?”
He took the chair out of the room as he left.
“What the fuck?” I mumbled to myself.
Then I heard the doorbell.
I could hear muffled voices, but that was about it. I shuffled myself down to the end of the bed and peered out the window. At the end of the drive, I could just barely make out the back end of a sheriff’s cruiser.
Greg’s.
Then I heard the front door slam, and a few minutes later, the cruiser backed up and headed down the drive. I could just see Greg in the driver’s seat with a phone in his hand. I dropped my head into my hands and waited for Dad to bring back my wheelchair.
Steven Chase was a scary motherfucker.
It’s not that he was a really big guy—he was muscular, but not huge—and not because he was outwardly mean; he wasn’t. He was a tall and dark-haired man of maybe thirty with an Eastern European accent that I couldn’t quite place, but it definitely made me wonder if he was a descendant of Vlad the Impaler.
That was what I thought before I realized what he had planned for me.
He had a bunch of equipment all over the living room, some of which I had seen before. Danielle had me use a few of the items, and there was the one predominant one—a set of parallel bars—that Danielle had pointed out to me in the rehab center but said I wouldn’t be trying them out for a while. Steven didn’t agree with that, I guess.
He did, however, like needles.
“We will begin with your exercises,” he told me as Dad watched from the entryway. “After you have completed those, you will do them all again. There will be no change in the time from the first set to the second set. Then, if you admit you are tired or if it is just too hard for you, I have several ways to give you more incentive.”
My whole body tensed. I even felt my toes flex.
He opened up a case full of hypodermic needles.
“What is that?” I asked hesitantly.
“Adrenalin in this one.” Steven held up a needle. I shuddered a little. “This one contains testosterone.”
I narrowed my eyes and looked over to Dad.
“Really?”
“It makes perfect sense,” Dad said, “though it is the reason some whinier PTs don’t care for Steven’s work. Testosterone builds muscle. You need to build muscle so you can play again.”
“Wouldn’t there be some…um…side effects or something?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Dad said. “Maybe your dick will get bigger.”
They both thought that was pretty damn funny. I glared up at them from my chair.
“It can’t possibly be any bigger,” I snarked back at them. I wasn’t so sure I agreed with Dad about side effects, but he was leaning against the wall with his hands crossed over his chest, and arguing with him wouldn’t have bee
n advisable. He was definitely teetering on the edge.
The beginning of the session wasn’t unlike those I had been through with Danielle—hard and painful, and before it was done, I ended up with sweat pouring down my back. This was different though—we weren’t done.
“Keep going!” Steven yelled. He hadn’t just “spoken” since we started; he only yelled. “Ten more! And then ten more after that if you start slowing down!”
It wasn’t even the pain in my arms that bothered me—I’d done enough weightlifting to understand how that felt—but my side ached where the gash was, and it was becoming harder to breathe. Needless to say, I did slow down, and about sixteen more tries later, my arms gave out, and pain rippled through my torso. The small hand weights fell to the ground.
“Is this all you can do?” Steven asked, his voice filled with contempt. He picked up the weights and handed them back, one in each hand, but my right arm just dropped it again. He growled at me and then went over to his bag for a hypodermic needle.
“What is that?” I asked as I tried to sink back into the chair.
“We already went over this!” he screamed at me. “Adrenaline, so you can keep going and get the results you need! This is only your arms! Just wait until we get to your legs!”
Before I could protest, he jabbed the needle into the crook of my elbow and pushed down on the plunger.
Almost immediately, my heart began to pound.
My breath came in pants.
My head started to swim.
Steven put the weights back into my hands, and my fingers gripped them tightly, reflexively.
“Twenty more!” he commanded. “Now!”
Though my hands were shaking, my fists were closed too tightly to drop the weights again, and my arms—though in protest—did as he demanded.
As I lay in my bed twenty minutes later, my heart was still pounding in my ears. My hands were still shaking, and my mind was flying.
I wanted Nicole.
I wanted my Dad to walk into the room so I could haul back and punch him.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to slow down my breathing, but the gasping was impossible to control. I was dizzy, and when I closed my eyes, I felt like I was going to throw up. I turned my head a little so my nose was up against Nicole’s pillow, stared out the small window, and begged the stuff to make its way out of my system.
My old buddy The Bard once said, “In time we hate that which we often fear.” Somehow, I couldn’t agree with him more.
Now please, please make it stop…
“Stop your whining,” Steven said. He used his head to gesture over to his little bag full of needles and shit. “Or do you need a little help?”
I shook my head and did another set of lifts as my arms burned, and my side felt like it was going to split right back open.
Could that happen?
I felt a shudder run through me but wasn’t sure if it was due to the weights in my hands or the thought of ripping open the gash down my side. I pushed on because there wasn’t a choice. Dad was watching from the kitchen, and as I was finishing up, he took his buzzing phone out of his pocket and walked out of earshot.
“Where are your charts from yesterday?” Steven asked as I sat like a limp noodle in my wheelchair.
“I think Dad put them in his study,” I replied.
“Well, go get them! I need to do some comparisons.”
I took a big breath and wondered if my workout-fatigued arms would even be able to wheel me over the hardwood floors at this point. Somehow, I managed to get myself down the hallway, slowly, and to the door of Dad’s study. I reached out and turned the handle and then pushed it open so I could wheel myself inside.
I could hear Dad’s voice from the kitchen rise and intensify though I couldn’t quite make out his words. Something about how no one’s going to try to pull that shit, and he was the goddamned mayor or something. I heard Steven responding but couldn’t make out his words, either.
I went through the doorway, trying to ignore whatever the hell was going on in the other room. I just didn’t have the energy.
It was rare for me to go into this room. It’s not like it was ever specifically off limits or anything, it just…didn’t invite company, I guess. The walls were painted to look like red leather, and one whole wall was lined with bookshelves containing medical books and journals. There was even an authentic human skeleton in the corner, enclosed in a large, glass case.
It gave me the willies.
The place was also full of all kinds of shit. There were books stacked everywhere, a couple of trees’ worth of papers, and tons of dust. There were staplers and hole-punches and letters on a table next to a wing-backed chair and one small corner dedicated to Real Messini merchandise, including a little Real Messini garden gnome.
Okay, the gnome was actually creepier than the skeleton, if you asked me. The skeleton didn’t have any eyes, but that gnome always seemed to be watching me.
Ignoring the peering black eyes of the plastic figure, I maneuvered the chair around the side of Dad’s desk and grabbed the file sitting on top. I flipped it open to make sure it was the right one and then closed it and started trying to back up around Dad’s desk chair and the desk itself.
Dad and Steven were definitely yelling at each other now. I still couldn’t make out the words. I hoped maybe Dad was going to be pissed off enough to fire him.
I should be so lucky.
I held tight to the file folder so nothing would fall out as I tried to get out of the small space. It wasn’t easy—the space was too tight for the chair to fit, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t come close to bumping into the skeleton. That would just freak me out. I backed up and pulled forward and eventually turned myself part way around so I could get out.
Well, almost.
I knocked right into the side of the desk, and three books fell off from where they were stacked. They knocked into a bunch of papers, which fell on the floor. I tried to back up to reach them and banged right into the desk again. More books fell, taking more papers with them.
“Dammit!” At this rate, I was going to wear myself out picking up all this shit before Steven even got round two started on me. I heard the front door open and slam shut and half prayed he was getting fired right now.
I reached down and grabbed at the stack of papers. It put a bit of strain on my side to reach down like that, but I managed. I stacked them up along with the books and reached over to fully close the desk drawer that had been jarred open in the process. Something very familiar caught my eye as I reached for the drawer’s handle, and instead of closing it, I opened it a little more.
It was my sketchbook.
I glanced over at the door, but there was no one there, so I reached in and grabbed the sketchbook. I turned it over and over in my hands and then flipped through it. All the sketches of Nicole were gone, but the ones of my mom were all still there as well as a couple soccer sketches. I looked around my chair to see where I might be able to hide it when an envelope fell out from between the pages and landed in my lap.
I reached for it and flipped it over, noting my Dad’s name and our address on the front and that the stamp had been cancelled in Chicago, Illinois. There wasn’t a return address, and my curiosity got the better of me.
I reached in and pulled out the letter.
Dr. Malone,
When we last met, it appeared Thomas would be playing soccer professionally. At that time, I agreed I would not reach out to him even though it is my right since he is now eighteen. Since then, I have heard of his accident and injuries.
You have to let me contact him. I have never even seen him, since that’s how Fran wanted it, but he is my biological son. Our understanding was always that if he played professionally, like you wanted, then I would not approach him. If he is no longer walking, it makes sense, now more than ever, for him to know who I am and to learn that he has other options.
You can’t keep me from him forever, Lou. Y
ou said he was still sketching, which means he already has possibilities there. He can’t play soccer if he can’t walk, and I can offer him a whole different path in life.
Contact me before the end of the month to arrange this, or I will reach out to him myself.
Thomas Gardner
I stared at the paper in my hands.
I read it over and over and over again as Shakespeare’s words echoed in my head: “The voice of parents is the voice of gods.” My heart was beating as if Steven had just given me another shot, and I knew—I just knew—from the words on the unassuming piece of paper in my hands, I had found my salvation.
My arms felt as if someone were running ice cubes down them, and my toes seemed to be flexing involuntarily. I realized I wasn’t breathing when my chest started to burn, and I took a quick breath to fill my body with oxygen.
I read the letter again.
Little tiny clicks seemed to be going off in my head, and like the tumblers of a complicated lock, the combination of events slowly fell into place.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I jumped and practically threw myself out of the wheelchair altogether. Dad was standing in the doorway, and his eyes went from my face to the sketchbook in my lap and the letter in my hands.
I just stared at him like a dumbass.
“I asked you a question,” he repeated.
“I was…getting my chart…” I stammered. I looked down at the letter in my hands and then slowly raised it as I looked at him. “Dad…?”
His eyes seemed to glaze over as he stared at the paper in my grasp. He licked his lips and slowly inhaled.
“Give me that,” he demanded though his tone was not as full of anger as I would have anticipated. My chest tightened as he reached out his hand, but I didn’t offer him the letter.
“You’re not…” My breaths started coming faster as I tried to figure out what to say. “You’re not my…”
“Shut up!” he yelled. He took a step toward me, and I gripped the letter tighter. “I am your father! I’m the one who raised you—sacrificed for you! I gave up my fucking career for you! He did nothing for you! Nothing! It was all me!”