Offside

  The words tumbled around in my head—I am your father. I couldn’t help but hear them in James Earl Jones’ voice. I watched Dad’s face turn red in anger but couldn’t bring myself to feel any guilt or fear from his rage. I just felt numb toward him. When had he ever been a father to me? Before Mom died, maybe he could have made the case, but now? No. Definitely not now.

  “You never told me,” I said quietly. “Why?”

  “Why should we have?” I realized it was the first time he had referred to both himself and my mother together for a long, long time. “He was nothing—nothing to her and nothing to me. He is nothing.”

  I remembered years ago, when I was a very young child, wondering why I only looked like Mom. I remembered her public memorial service—held a month after her death—and the lines of people who stopped to pay their respects. I remembered seeing Dad with a man who had the same color hair as mine and wondering if he was one of Mom’s relatives. I had asked Dad about him, and he had blown off my question.

  “He was at her memorial service,” I stated. I wasn’t asking.

  “He had no right to be there!” Dad screamed in response.

  “You should have told me!” I yelled back. I tried to move forward and raise myself up—knowing I was taller than him when standing on my feet, but of course I couldn’t. I was still partially trapped by the desk drawer. I slammed it closed and tried to move the chair with one hand.

  Dad’s foot reached out and kicked at the wheel, shoving me backwards.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he screeched. “You think you are going to him? Huh?”

  He kicked the wheel again.

  “No fucking way! You are my son! Mine!”

  “I’m not!” I yelled back. My mind flashed through every push, every shove, every punch to my gut, every broken rib he had given me through the years. “That’s why you treated me like you did! That’s why you hate me, isn’t it? It has nothing to do with Mom dying! It’s just because I’m his kid, not yours! You always fucking hated me!”

  This time his foot hit the wheel at another angle and with much more force.

  The wheelchair toppled, and as I grabbed for the desk to hold myself up, I ended up with my fingers on a stack of books. The chair, the books, and I all tumbled down and smashed against the floor. The pain from my side nearly crippled me as I smacked my jaw on the edge of the chair, and my breath was knocked from me.

  “You are not going to him, you hear me? You will not! I forbid it, dammit! I’m the one who raised you—ME! She left me, and the only thing left of her was YOU! I did what she would have wanted—I made sure you became the best fucking soccer player you could be! I did that! There’s no way in fucking hell he’s going to get his fucking hands on you now!”

  I pulled myself with my arms, trying to get out of the chair so I could attempt to set it upright again. Dad was still screaming, but my head was pounding, and my ears were ringing, so I couldn’t understand what he said. I shook my head a few times, trying to get rid of the dizziness.

  “You’re my son! My son!” he was yelling over and over again. “He’s got no claim to you! None!”

  I reached up to my mouth and looked at my fingers, covered in blood from my busted lip. There was a shift in my mindset that I could almost hear in my head. I wiped at my mouth and turned my glaring eyes to him.

  But my look faltered when I met his eyes.

  There was something there—something in his eyes I had not seen before. The look was cold, and it was heartless, and it sent a shiver down my back. It wasn’t just anger or determination.

  He looked…resigned.

  “You weren’t supposed to know,” he said, his voice calm and cool again. “She never wanted you to know. She didn’t even tell him. She said you were mine. You are mine, and no one’s ever going to change that. Not him. Not you.”

  He turned abruptly and yanked open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, stuck his hand inside, and turned around to face me. His arm reached out to its full length, and I looked to the end where his hand gripped a gun.

  Pointed at me.

  King Lear’s words from Shakespeare’s writing came to mind: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Somehow, I was pretty sure the warning had come too late.

  Now that I had this knowledge, would I even survive the outcome?

  CHAPTER 29

  OFFSIDE TRAP

  “Steven!” I screamed toward the doorway.

  Dad just shook his head.

  “Gone,” he told me. “He’s not coming back today.”

  Not today, which meant Dad hadn’t fired him. Why had he kicked him out? I looked from the door back to his face, and the only sound I could hear was his breathing.

  We were alone in the house.

  “You took her away,” he said. His hands were shaking as he spoke, and even when I tried to push myself farther away with my arms, there was nowhere I could go. My ankle was caught between the footrests of the wheelchair and the bottom of the desk. “You’re just like him. He tried to take her away, but he couldn’t. He had nothing to offer her—nothing. I could support her—support you. I told her I’d go to med school, forget about soccer, and help her raise you. He couldn’t do that because he didn’t have shit, and she knew it. He couldn’t take her from me, but you…but you did!”

  “It was an accident!” I cried.

  “That you caused!” There was barely a heartbeat between my words and his. “If you hadn’t been so forgetful, she would still be here!”

  “It was an accident,” I said again. My chest felt tight, and my head was hurting behind my eyes. I tried to shuffle back again, shoving some of the fallen books out of my way, but that fucking skeleton was right behind me.

  “You took everything that meant anything to me that day,” he said. His hand steadied a little, and I cringed, flexing my shoulders. “I still raised you. I was still your father.”

  I thought about Greg and how he talked to Nicole, how he cared for her and protected her—and the ludicrousness of his words struck me full force.

  “You’ve never been a father! I took care of myself! You didn’t do anything a father is supposed to do! How could Mom even love you?”

  “She did love me!” he screamed. He took a couple steps toward me, pointing the gun toward the floor where I was lying.

  I pushed myself back, forgetting what was behind me, and the skeleton in its case toppled to the side, smashing the corner table full of Real Messini merchandise. The garden gnome shattered, and I jumped again.

  “Don’t you dare say she didn’t!” Dad kept yelling. “She loved me! I know she did!”

  “Then why are you doing this to me?” I cried. My mind was spinning completely out of control. I kept moving from one thought to the next—Lou Malone wasn’t my father; we were alone in the house; I needed to see Nicole just one more time, before anything else happened.

  He’s going to kill me…

  “She wanted you to be successful!” he yelled again. “She always said she wanted more for you…I could have given you that!”

  “I can’t do it anymore!” I looked down at my legs as if he hadn’t noticed yet. He ignored my comment, turned to the side, and grabbed his hair with his fist as he growled incoherently.

  “You just need more drive!” he said through clenched teeth. “I just need…need to push…”

  His voice faltered, and his words trailed off into nothingness. I watched his shoulders slump as he faced me again. His eyes were heavy.

  “Don’t you see, Thomas?” His voice cracked as he spoke, and he turned away from me to lean against the bookshelf, his arm across his forehead. “You’re all I have of her. I can’t lose you…I can’t.”

  He turned to face me and then began to pace back and forth.

  I knew I had to keep him talking. As long as he was talking, he wasn’t shooting. The longer I could keep him going, the better the chances were for me to come up with some way to get out of this. I ha
d to, because I had to see Nicole again. I just fucking had to see her one more time.

  My mind raced. How could I get a message to someone? Anyone. I glanced at the small window in the room and knew I couldn’t just throw myself out of it—it was too high up. Even if I did, how would I get away? I did the only thing I could do and said the first thing that came to my mind.

  “You named me after him?” I asked. “You gave me his name. Why?”

  “She never told me!” he screamed, and his face contorted with rage again. “She never fucking told me his name! I didn’t find out until…until…she was gone…and he showed up. Motherfucker!”

  Shit, maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do. Dad rubbed his face with his free hand, and I pushed myself a little farther from the chair, dislodging my ankle.

  “He figured it out…but I told him it didn’t matter.” Dad went on. “You had been through enough, and I wasn’t going to let him disrupt your life any more than it already was. I was protecting you! You were mine…the only thing of hers I still had. No way in hell was he going to take that from me!”

  He looked back to me again with his eyes blazing. He raised his hand and pointed the gun at my face.

  “No one is taking you from me! You’ve lived as my son, and goddamn it, you’ll die as my son!”

  My body was shaking, and I couldn’t stop hot tears from cascading from my eyes. I squeezed them shut because I didn’t want to watch and covered my head with my arms as if that was going to make any difference. I waited for the shot.

  But no shot rang out.

  I peeked through my arms and saw him still standing over me with his chest rising and falling quickly. His hands dropped back to his sides, and the gun pointed toward the floor. My eyes followed the weapon, waiting to see when it would rise again and end me.

  “I just wanted you to be the best,” he said quietly, and when I looked back up at him, he was crying. “I didn’t know what to do. She was the one who took care of you. I just wanted her to be…to be…proud. Proud of me, because I…I took care of you…made you a star.”

  “Dad…” I could barely hear my own voice. I coughed, cleared my throat, and tried again. “Dad…you didn’t have to…to do all that shit. I would have played anyway…”

  “But I made sure you were the best,” he told me. His eyes suddenly went dark again, and his voice turned into a snarl. He raised the gun once again to my head. “Until you let pussy get in your way.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that!” I yelled. I remembered wondering years ago whether or not I had a breaking point. Apparently I did, and it had just been reached. I had nothing else to lose. If I was going to die anyway, I wasn’t going to put up with any more shit talk about Nicole. “That’s not what she is, and don’t you fucking talk about her like that again!”

  Through my own labored breaths, I watched him watch me. He stood for a while and just stared, not moving and without changing his expression at all. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I spoke again.

  “I love her,” I whispered. “Just like you loved Mom.”

  “No one ever loved anyone like I loved her,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not possible.”

  “I love Nicole,” I repeated.

  His gazed dropped to the floor.

  “She was all I ever had,” he said as he backed against the filing cabinet and slid to the ground. The gun was lying across his lap, still pointed toward me. “She was the only thing that made any fucking difference in my life. She left for school…and it hadn’t been that long…and then she went with him. But I was the one who loved her—not him! She came back with me…”

  He scratched at his forehead and sighed heavily.

  “She was everything,” he said again. “What do I have now, huh? Not you—you’d rather go find some idiot who doesn’t fucking know you. And now…now they say I’m not treating you right. What the fuck!”

  “Who says that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “No one tells me how to raise my son. And you are my son, dammit.”

  He looked back at me and then laughed.

  “If they came, you’d tell them to take you away, wouldn’t you?”

  “Who?” I asked again.

  “Doesn’t fucking matter,” he said and shook his head. “None of it does anymore.”

  With his eyes still on me, he raised his gun hand higher.

  “All gone,” he said. “Everything.”

  His expression went blank as he looked at me. The tears on his cheeks were drying against his pale skin, and his chest rose slowly as he inhaled. He let the air out again without looking away from me. I couldn’t move. My heart seemed to stop beating, and my breath got caught in my throat, threatening to suffocate me. I couldn’t bring myself to do or say anything. I only stared as he turned the gun around, placed it against his temple, and fired.

  I startled at the sound, and my throat started to burn. I couldn’t close my eyes, but I also could not comprehend what I was seeing. The ache in my throat got worse, and I realized I was screaming. I couldn’t stop.

  “He that dies pays all debts.”

  Curled in a ball, my body shook and shook and shook.

  I couldn’t stop it. I had to bite down on my tongue to make myself stop screaming. I knew he was dead…There was no doubt. He wasn’t moving at all…and his head…

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep myself from vomiting. I looked at my hands in front of my face, not allowing myself to peer around the room and see anything else. I had no idea how long it had been since he…since he did that. It could have been a few minutes or hours, as far as I could tell.

  One thing was certain—I had to get out of there. What time was it? I glanced at the clock on the wall and saw it was only a quarter past noon. I wasn’t sure what time it was when Steven sent me to find the chart, but it was definitely after ten. Steven wouldn’t be back until tomorrow at the soonest, and no one else was scheduled to be here at all. The idea of Steven coming back before I could get ahold of anyone else was enough to get me to move.

  I forced myself to straighten out as much as I could, which meant picking my legs up and pushing them off to the side. I could make them move a little, bend at the knee maybe an inch or so, but that was it. My hips worked okay, so I could move them from side to side. The rest I had to do with my hands.

  Twisting and turning, I got myself in position to lift the wheelchair off the ground, but as soon as I looked at it, I knew there wasn’t any point. Where the wheel had been kicked, the frame was bent. There was no way it was going to spin even if I did manage to get it back up and pull myself into it.

  “Fuck!” I grunted. It would have to be all me, then. It was a good thing my arms were basically back in shape, but where was I going to go?

  There was no way I was going to make it out of the house and down the mile-long driveway to the highway. Even if I did, I’d probably be run over before anyone saw me. I looked out the window and watched the rain pour down. There was a flash of lightning and thunder in the distance.

  Yeah, no way.

  We didn’t have a landline, so I needed a cell phone.

  Dad’s was probably in his pocket.

  Fuck.

  I rolled over and sat up, splaying my arms behind me to lean against them. My back was to Dad’s body, and that was just fine with me. I took a few breaths to prepare myself, focused my mind on the single goal of getting his phone, and used my arms to maneuver myself backward across the floor while my legs dragged uselessly.

  I knew I was close—I could smell it. I swallowed and then held my breath as I reached behind me and touched his leg. With a shiver, I first ran my hand up to one pocket and then the other. Nothing. Not in his back pockets, either. I forced myself to look at his shirt, but there wasn’t a pocket there at all.

  “Fuck!” I yipped as his hand dropped from his leg to the floor. I quickly pushed myself away—across the study and right out the doorway, where I lay panting for several
minutes.

  Okay, no phone on Dad. He must have left it somewhere. I pulled myself the rest of the way into the hall, glad for the smooth hardwood floors, and could have cried when I saw a small black rectangle lying on the floor near the entrance to the kitchen. With a couple of breaths to get me going, I pulled myself across the floor until I reached Dad’s phone.

  Well…part of it, anyway.

  The screen was cracked and dark, and no matter how much I poked at it, nothing happened.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” I screamed. I banged my fist on the floor and stared at the shattered screen. I looked around quickly and saw a small, black mark on the wall where he had obviously thrown it.

  What was I going to do now? He had hidden my phone. It could be anywhere in the whole fucking house. I had to call someone…Nicole, Greg, 911…anyone. How else could I tell someone that I was here? That Dad was…Dad was…

  Laptop.

  I lifted my eyes to the stairs leading up to the third floor where my laptop was waiting for me in the closet.

  Three flights of stairs.

  There was no fucking way in hell.

  I would never make it.

  I was nearly exhausted just from dragging myself from the study, down the hall, to the kitchen, and that was all one level. Upstairs? Using just my arms? I might be able to make it halfway, but then I’d have to sleep for a freaking day before I could go on. I just couldn’t last that long without help, unless…

  A small black doctor’s bag caught my eye where it sat next to the PT equipment in the living room. Steven must have left it here when Dad threw him out. Again, I wondered what their argument had been about, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was he left it behind in his haste. From my experience the previous day, I already knew the collection of hypodermic needles full of testosterone and adrenaline was inside his bag.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was at the bottom of the stairs with a shot of adrenaline in my hand.

  As I looked up to the top of the first flight and contemplated the length times three, I couldn’t help but conjure images of Julius Caesar and hear Shakespeare’s words through his lines: “Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”