Pop

  Marcus was determined to get there first. He was airborne, diving for the spot where it would come down. He registered the touch of his fingertips on the pigskin, the texture of the laces as he began to gather it in.

  He was so focused on making the catch that he never saw the offensive lineman, even though the kid must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He was running full out when his knee slammed into Marcus’s helmet. The impact was like being hit by a small car.

  Marcus heard rather than felt the collision and was aware of a violent motion deep inside his skull.

  Pop!

  Darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The kiss was soft and—skillful?

  Marcus had no idea where he was, but as he rose through hazy semiconsciousness, he knew the unmistakable silky pressure of lips against his own.

  Am I dreaming?

  It felt like a dream—those last few seconds before waking.

  But whose lips—?

  Troy grabbed Alyssa by the back of the cheerleading tunic and yanked her off Marcus’s prostrate form. “Jeez, Lyss—”

  She cut him off. “He’s waking up!”

  Marcus’s eyelids fluttered.

  Dr. Prossky held a tiny bottle of smelling salts under the injured player’s nose. Marcus’s head jerked as he tried to avoid the powerful odor, and he sat up in the coach’s arms.

  “Easy, kid,” Barker ordered. “You’re okay.”

  Marcus took in the stadium, the crowd noise, the circle of anxious faces around him.

  The coach answered his unasked question. “You got kneed in the coconut by a bull moose.”

  Dr. Prossky shone a penlight into Marcus’s eyes. “Pupils are responding.” He held up a V-for-victory sign. “How many fingers?”

  Marcus’s returning focus shifted from the doctor’s hand to the scoreboard. “Three.”

  “Three?” bawled the coach.

  Marcus struggled to his feet. “Three-point game.” He picked up his helmet and crammed it down over his head.

  The rush was sudden and violent, like an explosion inside his skull. For one frantic moment, he was afraid he might leave his lunch on the turf in front of him. The nausea passed, but the tight headgear caused a persistent ringing in his ears.

  Barker gazed anxiously into his quarterback’s eyes. “You’re good to go, right?”

  “I’m fine,” Marcus replied firmly, figuring if he said it enough, that would make it so. And he felt fine—sort of. Except for that rice pudding where his knees used to be. Jogging in place made that go away, but it amped up the ringing, so he could hardly hear it when the doctor pronounced him fit to return to the game.

  Everyone looked to the unofficial member of the Raiders’ coaching staff—the head cheerleader.

  Alyssa shrugged. “It’s a contact sport. You can’t take out every guy who gets his bell rung. Otherwise there’d be nobody left on the field.”

  “I agree,” put in Dr. Prossky. “This isn’t uncommon.”

  Barker put his arm around Marcus’s shoulders. “Okay, kid, this is almost over. Just get in there and hand off quick. The guys will protect you. And for God’s sake, no more of that blocking. Okay, go.”

  “Don’t,” came a quiet voice behind them.

  Troy.

  The coach frowned mightily. “Stay out of this, Popovich. Who asked you?”

  “Don’t do it, man,” Troy told Marcus. “I’ll take the snaps.”

  “What about your broken hand?” the coach demanded.

  “I said I’ll take the snaps.”

  Marcus regarded him in suspicion. “This is my game. Let me finish it.”

  “Don’t,” Troy repeated softly. “You don’t want to end up like him.”

  “End up like who?” the coach bawled. “What are you talking about?”

  Marcus bit back an angry comeback. Even in his muzzy state, he couldn’t help but notice what was different about this conversation. Troy never brought up the subject of his father and the illness that was slowly destroying him. This was as good as a lie detector test. He was trying to do the right thing—for someone he obviously loathed. It was as heroic as anything he had ever accomplished on a football field.

  Marcus pulled off his helmet, struggling to tune out the ringing. “Maybe I am a little dizzy,” he admitted, and took a seat on the bench.

  Barker was close to hysterics. “Somebody get in there!”

  Troy began to unwrap the tape around his ice pack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Troy Popovich ran seven plays for a total of twenty-four yards and two first downs. It was a remarkably unheroic drive in an otherwise stellar high school career, but it was enough to kill the clock and win the game for the Raiders.

  It was also the last time Number Seven would ever play football.

  At practice on Monday, he simply was not there. Coach Barker communicated the news to his stunned team with his usual deadpan delivery. Troy was out; Marcus was in. “Drop and give me twenty push-ups.”

  If Troy had told the coach the reason for his sudden retirement, Barker was opting to guard the privacy of the quarterback who had brought so much success to DNA football.

  “Does he really have a broken hand?” Ron probed.

  “He has none of your business, Rorschach!” Barker snapped. “Here’s what this means to you. Popovich used to be QB. Now it’s Jordan. Got it? It’s not rocket science.”

  The final hurdle in the way of Marcus’s ascension to the starting job was cleared after practice in the office of Kennesaw’s general practitioner.

  “I see no ill effects whatsoever,” proclaimed Dr. Antilla. “If there was brain trauma, it must have been very slight.”

  “I sat out for nothing,” Marcus said.

  The doctor shook his head. “There’s an odd math to concussions. One plus one doesn’t equal two. When they’re close together, one plus one equals fifty. Some sports researchers have begun to draw connections between frequent concussions and neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.”

  “I think I heard something about that,” Marcus mumbled unhappily.

  And now Mom had heard about it, too, which meant the cat was out of the bag. “Marcus, I don’t know about this anymore. Are you sure you’re safe?”

  “Is anybody?” he challenged her.

  “I don’t care about anybody. I only care about you. It’s pretty obvious that Troy Popovich got so spooked that he had to quit.”

  “We can’t know for sure what Troy was thinking,” Marcus reminded her. “We don’t read minds, and even if we did, Troy’s wouldn’t be my choice of reading material.”

  “Well, how would you explain it?” she persisted. “I’m told Troy was the best ever around here. What else would make him give it up?”

  The best ever. Even from my own mother.

  “Maybe that’s the whole point, Mom. Troy wasn’t the best because he could give it up. He was good, but there was something missing—the desire, the passion for the game. He just didn’t…”

  His voice trailed off. He’d almost finished with He just didn’t love the pop, but that probably wasn’t the best thing for Barbara Jordan to hear right then. Still, tragedy affected people in different ways, and it made sense that it would affect Charlie’s son most of all. Troy had to hang up his cleats; Marcus couldn’t wait to get back in there and cream somebody. To him, that was the ultimate tribute to the King of Pop.

  Aloud, he said, “I promise I’ll be safe. I’ll know when it’s time to get off the field.”

  But would he know? On Saturday, he’d been all gung ho to finish the game. Jerk or not, he’d always owe Troy for keeping him on the sidelines.

  Mrs. Jordan’s interest in Charlie’s condition wasn’t just a campaign to scare Marcus off football. Mom was so genuinely relieved to learn from Officer Deluca that her son wasn’t a juvenile delinquent—that Marcus’s mystery accomplice actually existed—that she was blabbing it to everybody who would li
sten.

  “Jeez, Mom, respect the guy’s privacy!” Marcus exploded. “How would you like your private family business advertised on a Times Square billboard?”

  “Well, I have to tell your father,” she reasoned. “We need to quash whatever ideas he might have gotten about having me declared an unfit parent.”

  “Fine, but only Stalin. And maybe his lawyer.”

  “And my boss at the paper,” she added. “He sees the police blotter, Marcus! Humor me, will you? I’m so happy you’re not in trouble anymore. According to Michael—”

  “Michael?”

  “Officer Deluca. He said the fact that you were just covering for Charlie changes everything about your case.”

  That was a positive development. But… Michael?

  The plot thickened on Tuesday, when Marcus returned from practice to find Officer Deluca ensconced at the kitchen table.

  “Great—you’re home,” said Mrs. Jordan. “Tell him, Michael.”

  “The December second court date has been canceled—all charges dropped,” Deluca announced. “You’re clean, Marcus.”

  He was grateful to be off the hook for Charlie’s antics against Kenneth Oliver, but why hadn’t the officer delivered the news by phone? The only thing worse than trouble with the cops was having Mike Deluca hitting on your mother.

  Maybe he was reading too much into it. On the other hand, Mom deserved to be happy. Seventeen years of marriage to Comrade Stalin—if there was ever a definition of “suffered enough,” that had to be it. Now she had freedom, the Gunks, and a nonfelon for a son. Barbara Jordan had finally hit the trifecta. Good for her.

  But he drew the line at Mom telling her editor the real reason behind Marcus’s legal problems. “Let him think I’m an ax murderer for all I care. You can’t tell a small-town paper that its most famous citizen has Alzheimer’s.”

  He owed that much to Charlie.

  Marcus looked at Three Alarm Park as if he’d never seen it before in his life. How much had the world changed since he and Charlie had first played football here? Part of him was waiting for the NFL veteran to burst out of the bushes and unleash one of the famous pops that had earned him his nickname.

  No. That hint of movement atop the Paper Airplane? Just a squirrel. Anyway, he should know better than to look for Charlie. It wasn’t likely that the family would let him wander around on his own again. Marcus had himself to thank for that.

  Yet the sculpture called to him—almost as if, by climbing to the King of Pop’s aerie, he would somehow be closer to the man himself. He began to ascend one of the smooth granite flukes, amazed that he felt absolutely no fear of falling. Here was the payoff from all those weeks of Camp Popovich: His center of gravity was low, his balance as steady as the heavy stone he was standing on. He had never understood the former linebacker’s attraction to perilous perches until this moment. To Charlie, they weren’t perilous at all.

  He sat at the top and enjoyed a Charlie’s-eye view of the park. This must have been one of the few experiences that still made total sense to Charlie—something he could remember from the past and experience in the present. Marcus stayed up there, drinking it in, for more than an hour before the cold wind drove him down.

  Back on the Vespa, on Poplar Street, he suddenly found himself face-to-fang with Kenneth Oliver. The exterminator didn’t exactly look happy to see him, but the warlike animosity seemed to be absent. And could that be a little embarrassment softening the man’s perpetual outrage?

  “Officer Deluca explained the misunderstanding.”

  Marcus nodded curtly. Still, he vowed to himself that one insult, one derogatory word against Charlie, and Deluca was going to have to set another court date—this one for assault.

  But the exterminator had no interest in reassigning blame. Instead, he said, “I have something for you.”

  He stepped into his shop and emerged a moment later holding an old photograph in a cracked frame. Marcus accepted it with a frown.

  “It was in the basement of my store,” Mr. Oliver explained. “I didn’t realize what it was until Officer Deluca came to explain about Mr. Popovich.”

  Marcus examined the picture. It featured a proprietor standing in the doorway of K.O. Pest Control, minus the giant cockroach. The sign in the window—DINGLEY’S HARDWARE EMPORIUM—matched the one in the print outside Mom’s office at the newspaper. From the sour expression on Old Man Dingley’s face, Marcus could tell he was twice the stinker Kenneth Oliver was on his worst day. No wonder Charlie mixed the two up. They were practically brothers across time. This was, without question, a guy who deserved to have every nail in his store dumped out and mixed up.

  “Why give it to me?” Marcus asked.

  And then he saw why. Reflected in the plate glass below the lettering were two kids—boys, probably about twelve or thirteen. While it was impossible to tell from a simple still shot that they were up to no good, Marcus could see that this was a pair of natural hell-raisers. One of them had dark, unruly curls.

  Charlie. Marcus would have bet his life on it. The other boy was indistinct, his face half hidden beneath the visor of a baseball cap. But it was a pretty good bet that this was Charlie’s partner in crime, James McTavish.

  “I thought you might know someone who’d want this,” the exterminator explained.

  Was that a smile? Not possible.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see that he gets it.”

  Marcus stood on the porch of the Popovich home, the Dingley picture under his arm, feeling foolish. How could he possibly be welcome in this place after EBU homecoming? After everything?

  He might never have worked up the courage to ring the bell if Chelsea hadn’t noticed him there and opened the door. “You.”

  “Hi. Uh—where’s Troy?”

  She was annoyed. “Do I look like his secretary? He’s got a life again, since quitting football. You should try it sometime.”

  Marcus shuffled uncomfortably. “I’d better go. I just came here to bring you this.”

  Her eyes fell on the picture in Marcus’s hands. “What is it?”

  He held out the broken frame. “Check out the kids reflected in the window. Isn’t that your dad on the left?”

  She examined the image. “Maybe. I’ll show Mom.” She frowned. “Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s kind of a long story.” Marcus hesitated. “How’s Charlie doing? Is he okay?”

  He saw a brief flash of anger in her eyes, but it passed quickly. She seemed to be weighing his interest, deciding if it was genuine—or even whether or not he had the right to be interested.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied at last. “I don’t trust myself anymore. When I thought I knew how he was, he turned out to be much worse.”

  Marcus hung his head. “Thanks to me.”

  “No,” she said gently. “Taking Dad to homecoming was the right thing to do. We should have done it. Mom thinks so. Even Troy thinks so now.”

  Marcus, however, felt that he might never be sure. The moment of triumph had been so fleeting compared with the grim reality of what was in store for Charlie.

  Chelsea hugged the picture. “Listen, I’m glad you’re here.”

  He managed a crooked smile. “No, you’re not.”

  “My mom was going to call. We need some help with Daddy, and we know he really responds to you. It’s okay if you want to say no.”

  The Kennesaw Retirement Lodge resembled a gracious old manor house nestled among rolling hills and rich greenery. The elegant lobby could have been the reception area in any five-star resort in the country. But underneath the scent of fresh flowers and furniture polish, Marcus detected the antiseptic smell of a hospital—a harsh reminder of what this place truly was.

  “I appreciate your coming with us today,” Mrs. Popovich murmured to Marcus. “Charlie really likes you, even if he thinks you’re someone else.”

  “I’m happy to help,” Marcus stammered. In actuality, he would have traded all that he owned to
be anywhere else. But he owed this family. It was the least he could do.

  What a procession they made. Chelsea and her mother, devastated; Troy, tight-lipped, trapped between anger and sorrow; Marcus, uncomfortable and out of place. Only Charlie seemed untouched by the crushing weight of where they were and what their business was.

  “I’ve never seen so many old people in my life. What is this, the Crypt Keeper family reunion?”

  Such a comment normally would have triggered at least a snicker from Marcus, but nothing seemed funny right now. Charlie’s observation had a deeper truth behind it. The lodge’s residents were old. The youngest of them must have had twenty years on Charlie. Many seemed to be in their nineties or even older. Not all were in ill health, but there were a lot of canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. It was hard to picture an NFL linebacker, not far from peak physical condition, living here.

  Troy was thinking the same thing. “This was a mistake,” he said grimly. “We’re leaving.”

  Mrs. Molloy, the social worker who was serving as their guide, smiled understandingly. “I know it can be jarring at first—”

  Troy cut her off. “My father doesn’t belong here.”

  The social worker was patient. “We’re the facility that’s equipped and staffed to deal with his particular problem. It just so happens that most people with the same special needs are considerably older.”

  In a small lounge at the end of the hall, three wheelchair-bound ladies sat staring at a television set that exhibited nothing but snow. Their concentration was intense and unwavering.

  It was sad, and Charlie must have thought so, too, because he walked over, picked up the remote, and changed the channel for them. “Better, right?”

  He got no response. No one even blinked. If the viewers noticed that the show they were now watching was any different from the nothing that had preceded it, they gave no indication.