Pop

  Charlie sat down in an empty chair and began to watch with them. In an instant, his expression was as blank as theirs. He blended in perfectly, as if he had always been there.

  Mrs. Molloy nodded approvingly. “You see? He’ll be helpful to the older residents while receiving the services he needs.”

  “Wait a minute.” Charlie was suddenly on his feet again, facing them accusingly. “You’re talking about me? Living here?”

  Mrs. Popovich rushed to her husband and took his hand. “Charlie,” she began huskily. “You don’t understand—”

  “Do you think I’m blind?” he bellowed. “I know what this place is! It’s an old folks’ home, and it has nothing to do with me! Okay, sure, maybe I forget a few things but—” He stopped short, looking anxiously from face to face—his wife, his daughter, his son, and finally Marcus. He frowned uncertainly. “Mac?” It was almost a plea. If this truly was his old friend Mac, then that was proof that his concept of the universe still made sense.

  Marcus was struck dumb. This was the first time Charlie had ever called him Mac outside the context of football. He hesitated. It would have been easy to say yes, just as he had dozens of times before. He’d become so accustomed to playing the role of Mac that he’d actually caught himself thinking as if he were Mac.

  But now, in this place, he could not bring himself to perpetuate the lie. It would offer the King of Pop a few seconds of comfort while putting off what genuinely needed to happen for the man’s own welfare and safety. Would that be doing Charlie a favor?

  He looked desperately to Mrs. Popovich for some kind of guidance. Yes, he was here for support, but this was too much to put on his shoulders! He knew in an instant that there would be no help from Charlie’s wife. Her eyes were so filled with tears that he doubted she could even see him.

  He shook his head sadly. “My name is Marcus Jordan.”

  Twin streaks coursed down the former linebacker’s flushed cheeks. A muffled sob escaped Chelsea; Troy turned away. Mrs. Popovich took her husband’s arm and held on, as if she could keep him with her simply by not letting him go. Marcus was turned to stone at the sight of this NFL veteran—husband, father, tower of strength—weeping like a frightened child.

  Before this moment, the very nature of Charlie’s confusion had protected him from the truth of his situation. But at last, he was face-to-face with the fact that his life was never going to be the same again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was the perfect early-December day for the last football game of the year. The temperature hovered around fifty, mostly because of the bright sunshine pouring out of a clear blue sky.

  The DNA bleachers were packed and boisterous. Virtually all of Kennesaw was there to see history made with the completion of a second perfect season. The Raiders and their first-string quarterback, Marcus Jordan, were already up to a two-touchdown lead against their hapless opponents, the three-and-six Latham Lions.

  The next play was a quick pitch, followed by a teeth-jarring block to spring Ron for a twelve-yard gain. It wasn’t typical quarterback play—from midget leagues to the pros, coaches pampered their precious field generals. Marcus was pretty sure that half the time he did it just to watch Barker squirm.

  And because he loved the pop. He’d learned that from the King himself.

  He drank in the crowd noise, the chorus of cheerleaders chanting his name. In a way, this would always be Troy’s team, but the guys—and the town—had made a place for Marcus, too. Especially since Number Seven’s new position was in the bleachers next to his father. Mrs. Popovich had lost interest in the Raiders the minute Troy was sidelined, and Chelsea’s football boycott was still in full force. That left the ex-Golden Boy to accompany Charlie to watch the sport he still loved and had once played better than all but a few. It had to hurt for Troy to watch Marcus in his old job, but there he was, even cheering a little. Troy Popovich was a major jerk, but this was pretty damn loyal. You had to give him that.

  At the thought of Charlie, Marcus bobbled a snap and had to fall on the ball at the bottom of a pile of Lions.

  “Head in the game, Jordan!” bawled Barker from the bench.

  The images of last month’s visit to the Kennesaw Retirement Lodge had become a haunting screen saver in Marcus’s brain, popping up whenever he wasn’t actively thinking about something else. It had to be fifty times worse for Charlie’s family. And Charlie himself? In all likelihood, the former linebacker had forgotten the facility and the fact that his name was now on the waiting list for the next available room there. Still, there was something different about him. According to Chelsea, his energy level was down and he was acting withdrawn. And while that may have been common for a man Charlie’s age, it wasn’t the norm for this NFL veteran, perhaps the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent.

  “It’s like he suddenly got old,” she had told Marcus. “Maybe he doesn’t remember the visit, but he senses something’s up. Something sad.”

  Marcus slapped his own helmet, willing himself to concentrate. It was almost halftime. Soon the season would be over, and he would own a piece of the glory that Troy had tried so hard to keep from him.

  He flattened a two-hundred-sixty-pound nose tackle, and Ron rambled through the gap, penetrating to the Latham twenty-seven-yard line. The crowd came back to life. Another touchdown, and a 21–0 lead, would seal the game. The bleachers seemed to undulate as the spectators got to their feet, exhorting the offense to put this one away.

  Barker must have felt the same way. The next call amounted to a knockout punch—a play-action pass to the end zone.

  Marcus faked a handoff and rolled right, scanning for his receiver. Luke had a step on his man and was galloping down the sidelines. It was all in the timing. The throw had to hit Luke in stride, past the defender. Delicate, but doable.

  Marcus measured the distance, cocked back his arm … and froze. At the edge of his field of vision, he caught sight of a familiar figure, tall and broad, taking the stadium stairs three at a time. Charlie? His eyes sought out Troy, who was absorbed in the drama on the field. Troy could’ve made this pass easily and probably wanted to see if Marcus could do the same.

  He’s probably hoping I miss!

  Whatever the reason, the guy didn’t notice that his father had left his side.

  Out of time, Marcus pulled the ball down and sidestepped a charging linebacker.

  His teammates were screaming at him, practically with one voice: “Throw!”

  Luke was all alone in the end zone, waving wildly.

  But Marcus’s gaze moved inexorably back to Charlie. Why was he climbing the bleachers with such singleness of purpose?

  And then Marcus saw it.

  Perched on the iron railing that ran around the rim of the stadium was a large gray-brown hawk. The voice of James McTavish came to him: I never once set foot on that field without looking up to the back of the bleachers, half expecting to see Harry finally making his way home....

  Could Charlie be reliving that? Did he believe the hawk up there was Harry, the mascot he’d birdnapped and set free all those years ago? The picture Mac had painted was vivid: Charlie tightrope walking on the ledge of the stadium four stories up.

  “Troy!” he bellowed. But there was no chance of reaching him over the roar of the crowd.

  “Throw it, Jordan!” howled Barker, his bobblehead threatening to blast off his body.

  Marcus tucked the ball into the crook of his arm and headed for the stands. He blew by his apoplectic coach, dropped the ball at the man’s feet, and hit the stairs at a full sprint.

  The crowd’s roar of agony soon turned to bewilderment. Surely this had never happened before in all of football history. Why would a quarterback run not merely out-of-bounds but off the field and clear up the bleachers?

  For the first time, Troy noticed his father’s absence and looked around in alarm. Charlie had almost reached the top when Troy spotted him. He was barreling along the last row, heading for the place w
here the hawk perched majestically, settling its feathers.

  Never, under any circumstances, could Marcus recall a higher level of performance intensity than during his charge up those stairs. “Charlie!” It was barely a rasp. One hundred percent of his effort was channeled into pure speed.

  Charlie was just a few feet away from the hawk, and he must have felt it was time to make his move. With the agility of the high school boy he sometimes thought he was, he climbed up onto the concrete lip of the stadium, the rail mere inches above his ankles.

  Marcus heard Troy shouting, but he was too focused on the senior Popovich to turn back toward him. Charlie was twenty feet away, shuffling along the parapet toward the bird.

  Marcus allowed himself the tiniest breath, the most minuscule hesitation, in order to shout, “Stop!”

  And Charlie did stop, poised on the rim, perfectly balanced. He turned and fixed Marcus with a penetrating stare.

  Marcus was turned to stone. He had seen the King of Pop look this way only once before—on the podium at EBU homecoming, during his induction into the university’s hall of fame.

  He took another step and reached for the bird. Marcus closed his eyes in silent prayer, just for an instant. And when he opened them again, Charlie Popovich was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Marcus hadn’t been to a funeral since he was eight. Great-grandpa Benjamin, from the Stalin side of the family, whose birth predated the Titanic, had died at the ripe old age of ninety-nine. The service had been low-key, attended by just a handful of family members.

  “Where is everybody?” Marcus remembered asking his mother.

  She had gestured around the cemetery. “They’re already here.”

  Great-grandpa had lived long enough to bury just about everybody he’d ever known. But that had left virtually no one to pay their last respects when his turn finally came around.

  The opposite was true for Charlie. At only fifty-four, he was among the first of his peer group to die, so hordes of mourners packed the chapel. By the time Marcus and his mother got there, the seating area was already full. They huddled under a too-small umbrella in the parking lot with countless other latecomers, listening to the eulogy as it was amplified on an external speaker. A fine mist rendered uncomfortable clothing even more so, but a damp suit was the last thing on Marcus’s mind.

  Most of Kennesaw was there. Apparently, there were no hard feelings against Charlie for putting a permanent asterisk beside the Raiders’ back-to-back perfect seasons. Now the final game would never be completed, due to the tragedy in the stadium.

  Standing there in the rain, it struck Marcus that when all was said and done, the Popovich family had succeeded in keeping Charlie’s disease a secret. Despite the attention he had received as the town hero, only Marcus had figured out that the man had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. In a way, the former linebacker’s celebrity had shielded him from real scrutiny—he was “charismatic,” “quirky,” “a real local character.” Marcus alone had been close enough to see deeper—just as Marcus had been the closest at the very end.

  To him, it still played like a clip of sadistic film editing—Charlie on the ledge … quick cut … the ledge and no Charlie.

  It was the last thing he remembered in sharp focus that day. The rest had been filtered through a lens of tears. The multicolored blur of the agitated crowd; someone who might have been Troy running past him on the bleachers. In the confusion, everybody was charging up the stands, while Marcus was charging down. At that point, only he knew that the scene of the accident was no longer at the top of the stadium but on the pavement four stories below. And when he burst through the exit—

  Marcus had seen firsthand the ravages of memory loss. But some memories were best forgotten.

  In addition to the Kennesaw people, there were also quite a few NFL veterans who had made the trip to Charlie’s funeral. Marcus couldn’t put names to the faces, but there was no mistaking the football players. Even now, many years into retirement, they looked like mountains wearing suits. Their thick necks bulged within tight, starched collars.

  After the graveside service, the crowd began to thin out. Only relatives and close friends returned to the Popovich house in support of the bereaved family.

  Mrs. Jordan pulled up to the curb at the end of the long front walk.

  “Are you sure you want to go in?” she asked her son.

  He sighed. “I’m sure I don’t want to go in. But I’m going anyway.”

  She ruffled his hair. “You’re a really good kid, Marcus. And I hope you’ll forgive me for thinking that maybe you weren’t.”

  Marcus nodded gravely. “Understandable. When Officer Mike is on the trail of a serial toilet paperer—”

  She skewered him with a sharp look. “What is it with you and him?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. I’ve got no hard feelings. He’s a pretty good guy....” He gave her a meaningful look.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Seems like you two are getting pretty friendly.”

  “A word of advice,” she said. “Back off. You’re my son, not my life coach.” But as she drove away, he could see she was smiling a little.

  Entering the Popovich house, Marcus had been expecting the worst. Instead, the place resembled a crowded short-order restaurant, with a constant supply of drinks and sandwiches being paraded from the kitchen.

  The buzz of conversation was about Charlie, but other topics too—the weather, politics, and, inevitably, football. Old friends and family reminisced, and the memories were fond and happy ones.

  Marcus spotted Troy at the center of a group of Raiders, all of them fidgeting in their jackets and ties. Alyssa was by Troy’s side, hanging off his arm, in fact—closer than close. Marcus had noticed them at the cemetery, too, but under the circumstances, he hadn’t really given it much thought. Now he could see that the on-again, off-again relationship was definitely on again. More than that, she was a full mourner, stunning in black—a bona fide member of the family. That was going to gag Chelsea—then again, the poor girl probably had other things on her mind today.

  Alyssa’s eyes met his, and Marcus quickly turned away, focusing his attention on a tray of sandwiches on a nearby table. He picked up an egg salad triangle and nibbled a tiny bite from the corner, not because he was hungry, but because even now—even here—Alyssa had the power to unsettle him. He’d given up on her and didn’t even care very much, but for some reason it stung that she was back with Troy.

  He stared into the platter until the cellophane decorations on the toothpicks blurred into a kaleidoscope. A moment later, there was a light touch on his elbow, and he heard Alyssa’s voice.

  “I wanted to explain. You know, before you saw me and Troy together.”

  Marcus’s tiny bite went down like a bowling ball. “You don’t owe me any explanation.”

  “Troy needs me,” she forged on. “I see that now. He only pushed me away because he didn’t want anybody to find out what was happening to his dad.”

  So she knew about that, too. Troy must be pretty serious this time. That secret was for family only—if you didn’t count the young intruder who had stuck his nose where it wasn’t wanted.

  “And you need Troy,” he told her. “You always needed Troy. Even when it was about me, it was about him.”

  She flushed. “I guess it seems like I’m a total bitch who was only using you to get at Troy. But when it was going on, you and me, I was—into it.”

  Marcus nodded. “Same here.”

  He felt stupid, because given half a chance, what guy wouldn’t be “into it” with Alyssa Fontaine? But he took her at her word when she said she hadn’t meant to mess with his head. She wasn’t a malicious person. Besides, he’d always have her football heart. Troy may have been the man of her romantic dreams, but when her fantasies drifted to blocking schemes and power sweeps, the guy with his hands by the center’s butt would be Marcus Jordan.

  Th
e rain had finally stopped, and some of the NFL players were gathered on the patio, swapping Charlie stories, arguing good-naturedly about which one of them the King of Pop had hit the hardest.

  “I heard bells for a week....”

  “Remember my torn ACL? That was courtesy of Guess Who....”

  “My head went one way, my body the other....”

  As Charlie’s earliest tackling dummy, James McTavish was right in the middle of it, telling the tale of Harry the Hawk. “I think that’s why he went up there in the first place,” Charlie’s oldest friend was saying. “He was back in that moment at the top of the stadium with Harry. And then—I don’t know—he must have just put a foot wrong, and that was all it took.”

  Marcus had a flashback—Charlie, dancing along the top rail, seconds before his fall. That last look Charlie had cast at Marcus—the King of Pop hadn’t been caught up in any moment from the past. He hadn’t seemed confused or impaired. His eyes had been clear and lucid and knowing.

  “Marcus!” Mac spotted him standing there by the screen door. “This is the kid I was telling you about.”

  Marcus shook beefy hands all the way around the circle, hearing names he knew from NFL history. This should have been a big moment for a high school football player. But all he could think of was escape.

  He stammered his excuses and rushed back into the house, as if removing himself from Mac’s presence could wipe the images of that day from his mind. He’d find a phone, call Mom for a lift, get away from here.

  He was moving so fast that he nearly collided with Chelsea in the kitchen. This was the first time he’d talked with her since her father’s death, and the emotion just poured out of him.

  “I never should have stuck myself into your family’s business, or pretended to be someone I wasn’t! I’m so sorry—”

  Suddenly, her arms were around him, cutting off the torrent of apology and self-doubt. Chelsea, who had just come from burying her father, was offering comfort and support to the outsider who had invaded all their lives.