Till It Hurts by Cora Brent
Jace
Now
Adrone flies overhead, far closer than courtesy allows. McClane barks at it. The thing hums and hovers ten feet above the backyard for a full minute and flies away after its operators spot nothing more fascinating than the sight of me watering flowers with a garden hose.
That’s how things have been for the past week, ever since the sports world went bananas over the news that champion football quarterback Jace Zielinski would not be returning to the field next season. Or ever again.
I’ve stayed off the internet completely. I don’t want to know what people are saying. Mike Campinelli was inconsolable over my decision but then mused that some lucrative endorsement deals might materialize if I play my cards right. Sure, I told him, lacking the heart to immediately shoot down his dreams. The truth is, I have no intention of playing any cards at all.
Yesterday Paul Elkins gave me the news that my generous offer on a piece of property just outside town was accepted. The house has been empty ever since the original owner died two years ago and the man’s children couldn’t find any takers at the listing price. Naturally, they jumped at a cash offer that was thirty percent above market value, even though Paul sniffed that I was nuts to do it. The house, with four bedrooms and two baths, is a fraction of the size of my glittering Long Island monstrosity, which will be on the market shortly. It’s surrounded by twenty fenced acres and the only exciting view is that of Arcana, Texas.
In other words, it is perfect.
McClane barks again and this time there’s a joyful wag of the tail included. Colt must be home. I shut off the sprayer, satisfied that Tori’s flowers have received enough water to keep them alive for now.
Colt strolls through the back door and is nearly knocked down by McClane, who greets him as if he’s been missing for six months instead of running errands for an hour.
“Hey, buddy.” Colt tussles playfully with the dog. “Who’s your best friend? That’s right. I’m your best friend.”
Now he’s just trying to piss me off. I scoop a tennis ball from the surface of the grass and toss it into the orchard. McClane dashes after it in hot pursuit.
“How’s it looking out there?” I ask Colt.
He glances through the open back door. “There’s a couple of suspicious vehicles hanging out down the street. Nothing like it was last week when I couldn’t set foot outside the house without being attacked by cameras amidst the shrieking of hysterical questions about America’s favorite quarterback.”
“Retired quarterback. What did you get for dinner?”
“Gourmet mac and cheese. You’re cooking.”
McClane locates the dirty tennis ball and runs into the house with it. We follow him.
Colt has left the grocery bags on the counter. I start searching for the box of macaroni.
“How’s Tori doing today?” he asks.
“Good. Her therapy sessions are going well. She said she’d email before bed.” I heave a loud sigh and it sounds more pitiful than I intended.
Colt nods. “I know. You miss her.”
I’m not too gruff and manly to admit the truth. “Every minute.”
The first week was particularly awful because Tori and I didn’t get to speak much. Withdrawal is a bastard to endure and she needed all her strength just to get from day to day. She’s past the worst of it and she’s able to make daily phone calls. She also has access to email. Each day she sounds brighter and more cheerful. I would never rush her. She ought to stay there as long as she needs to stay there. Still, I can’t wait to have her back.
Colt is digging through the grocery bags. “By the way, I bought you a present.”
“Wait, you bought me a present?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I bought the big, fancy football millionaire something with my meager pennies.” He tosses one of the bags to me.
Inside, I find a regular spiral notebook with a blue cover.
“Looks like the kind you used to scribble in all the time,” Colt says. “Maybe now that you’re in search of a new career you could try doing that again.”
I’m genuinely touched. “Thanks.”
My fingers brush the glossy surface of the notebook cover and itch to feel a pen in my hand again. I always wrote better longhand as opposed to pecking out words on a laptop. I got used to writing until my hand cramped.
Long ago in that bleak autumn, I quit writing completely. I was so battered by anger and pain that I abandoned any pursuit that would connect me to feelings I couldn’t face having. Yet there’s also another reason for the disappearance of my creative energy. Since the age of six, Tori and Colt Malene had been an enormous part of my life. In many ways they became my muses, my inspiration. I didn’t even realize that until they were gone from my life. But lately I have been jotting down notes, just little things I want to tell Tori when she’s back or funny stories that might make her laugh. Maybe I’ll start writing more. Maybe I’ll even fill this entire notebook before Tori gets home.
Macaroni and cheese isn’t a meal that’s especially healthy or tasty, but until I can do the marketing again without getting swamped by unwanted attention, I’m stuck with Colt’s choices. I doubt I’ll ever be able to enjoy a life of complete anonymity, but I know the future will be calmer. Another story will come up and I’ll be yesterday’s news. I’m looking forward to that.
Colt and I sit down to twin bowls of mac and cheese like we’re a pair of ten year old boys.
He wants to know if I need any help boxing up more of Gloria’s things. The process has been slower than it ought to be, mostly because the task is such an unhappy one. Objects of sentimental value and things I think Tori might want to see are set aside. All else is being donated and I just ordered new bedroom furniture. Colt sleeps in the third bedroom now that we’ve cleared it out and added some furniture. Gloria’s craft room was filled with treasures and her quilting circle got first pick but whatever they didn’t want we gave to the new art teacher at the high school.
Colt pushes his empty bowl away. “Let’s get out of here for a little while. Go take a hike or something before the sun sets.”
“Sounds good. I’m going a little stir crazy anyway.”
Colt laughs out loud when I tell him I’m going to hop the back fence to try and evade the stalkers.
“Just pick me up in front of the McNulty’s house.” I’m getting irritated now because he’s still laughing like a jackass.
“Sure thing, double oh seven.” He swipes his keys and heads out the front door.
The McNulty’s are in their eighties. They are seated on their living room couch and watching television when I slowly climb over the fence, hoping they don’t get startled. They wave at me merrily through the open drapes.
Colt’s truck turns the corner five seconds after I reach the McNulty’s bald front yard. He sees me. I’m sure of it. Yet he inches the truck forward one leisurely foot at a time while I stand around with my arms crossed. After thirty seconds of this game, I get sick of waiting and take a walk to meet him halfway. He immediately zooms down the street at full speed ahead, passing me completely, then squealing to a stop four houses down.
I jog over and jump into the passenger side. “Asshole.”
Colt is very pleased with himself. “I know you are.”
We drive out of town to a flat, unincorporated area where we used to shoot BB guns and fire arrows. My phone goes off on the way and the only reason I check it is out of hope that Tori might be calling. The number is a Las Vegas area code so I just shove it back in my pocket. I know my father’s on the other end. I haven’t spoken to him in weeks and I’m sure the news of my retirement from football has sent him into a tailspin. He’ll have nothing good to say and I’m not interested in an earful of complaining. He figured out that I block the calls from his cell phone so he’s been trying to get through using other random numbers.
“Is there trouble?” Colt asks.
“Why?”
“Because you look like you’re ready to strangle someone.”
He’s not wrong. There are a lot of things I can’t forgive my father for. But the last straw was hearing the truth about the night of the rivalry game and how he had turned Tori away when she was at her most vulnerable. He knew damn well how much I loved her. And in the moment when she needed me the most he slammed the door in her face. Right after telling her a lie that I was out fucking around. Thinking about it now makes my blood boil. I’m not sure I can ever be in the same room with him again.
Colt picked up all kinds of surprises while he was out shopping earlier. He grabs a brand new football from the bed of his pickup and rips the packaging off.
“What’s that for?” I ask.
He tosses the ball to me. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how to handle one.”
I grin and he motions that he’s going to move farther out.
We used to do this all the time, spend endless hours tossing a ball back and forth and bullshitting.
He wades through fifty yards of brush and waits. I fire a perfect spiral into his arms.
Colt catches the ball and promptly looks disgusted. “Don’t toss to me like I’m a fucking kindergartener,” he shouts and then hurls the ball over my head, forcing me to dive in order to catch it.
In response, I swivel and throw twenty yards wide of his position so that he has to run like the devil to grab the ball out of the air. Which he does with ease.
“That’s better,” he calls with approval and launches a rocket that sends me scrambling.
Then I pause before returning the ball to Colt. I can’t remember when I last felt this kind of natural satisfaction over the feel of a ball in my hands. I’m sure there was a football sitting in my crib before I have any memory of anything. My childhood was filled with football. When I had nothing else left, I fucking became football.
“Hey Zielinski, does your arm hurt already?” Colt props his hands on his hips and cocks his head.
Funny. I’ve seen game footage of myself standing in that exact same pose while idling between plays or on the sidelines. From this distance it’s like looking at a mirror image.
Colt Malene, the best friend I’ve ever had, awaits my response. On that long ago day when we met, we clicked instantly and were thereafter inseparable. From the neck up we don’t look alike. His features are a thicker, masculine version of his mother’s. My hair is darker. His eyes are blue. But we’re the exact same height, exact same build. Colt could be my goddamn stunt double.
For no particular reason, or perhaps for a very good reason, a piece of a conversation that happened weeks ago replays in my head.
“The way I remember it, your dad was laid off and your mother was pregnant with you so they moved in with Gloria and Jacek until they could get back on their feet. They left when you were about five or six months old.”
The day I met Colt and Tori Malene, it was Tori who pointed out that I’m six months younger than her and six months older than Colt. I’m aware that my father knew Tori’s parents in high school. I never thought much of it because that’s just the way small towns are.
I’m thinking about it now.
As very young newlyweds, Janna and Eric Malene bought a house on Tumbleweed Lane. They were living there when their baby daughter was born. Shortly after, Eric left for his deployment on the other side of the world. At the same time, my father, broke and desperate, brought his pregnant wife home to Arcana. And they moved in with his parents. Right next door.
Colt is getting exasperated and raises his arms. “Jace, come on! I’m never gonna be any younger than I am right now.”
My fingers dig into the ball and I aim to throw it deep and wide. It would be a tough catch for an amateur. But Colt never was an amateur. He’s every bit as good as I am, maybe better.
We keep the game of catch going for about half an hour and Colt chuckles when I suggest packing it in. “Tiring out easily in your old age, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He gives me a funny look but doesn’t comment and I don’t announce what’s on my mind.
At home, I wait until Colt is hanging out in the backyard with McClane before I pay a visit to Gloria’s room. The leather bound photo albums lined up in the bookcase have all been packed into one box and set aside in the closet so I wouldn’t confuse them with the stuff being donated to charity. I select albums at random and flip through them. There’s Jacek and Gloria in the golden early years of their marriage. There are endless photos of their beloved only son as he grows from a chubby cheeked toddler to a sullen faced teen. There are all kinds of albums filled with photos of me after I came to live here. Very often these include snapshots of Tori and Colt.
Finally, I find what I’m looking for. Pictures of me as a newborn. And a few pages before that, a photo of my pregnant mother. She’s wearing a red maternity top and she’s unsmiling, her dark eyes fixed on the camera and conveying a desperate unhappiness. This, I remember, was so often her expression. I flip back one more page and look at the group photo in the center. It was taken in the backyard here at Gloria’s house. There’s a carved jack-o-lantern in the middle of the redwood picnic table. It was autumn, and baby Tori is being held by a smiling Gloria. Seated on a bench beside Gloria is my mother and she wears the same maternity shirt she wore in the last photo. She keeps one hand on her swollen belly and she’s distracted, not looking into the camera. She’s trying to see what’s happening behind her, where Janna Malene stands beside my father, so close that their arms touch. Her husband, Eric Malene, is not in the photo. He would have been thousands of miles away at the time. Janna Malene is pushing her hair out of her pretty face and she’s laughing. Her head is tilted up to look at my father, who grins down at her.
I stare at the photo for a long time, until the room begins to darken as dusk settles. When I hear Colt open the back door, I shut the photo album and carefully nestle it back inside the cardboard box with the others.
This isn’t evidence, not exactly. There is a possibility that everything is entirely coincidental.
I’m trying to reach back through my own memory for hints in my father’s behavior. After I came to live with Gloria, he was around so rarely. His visits were erratic and never lasted long. It’s true that he disliked Tori, especially after she became my girlfriend. But Colt? I don’t recall him showing anything other than indifference to my best friend, not ever.
Still, the seed has been planted.
And I can’t shake the idea that some of the answers to old mysteries have been right in front of us all along.