Offside (49 page)

I barely looked at the guest room—completely outfitted with a hospital bed—before hauling myself onto the mattress and passing out.

I think Dad might have still been yelling.

Shakespeare once said “None can be called deformed but the unkind.” Somehow, I didn't think Dad saw himself that way.

Now I had the feeling I was going to consider the last two months easy.

CHAPTER 28

FINAL MINUTES

Since the day Mom died, Dad had been more than one person.

I mean, he’d always assumed many roles in his play of life—even before she was gone—they just got more dynamically opposed later. The most prominent one just kind of lived his life, encouraged me to play ball, and went to work and shit—that was the one who was around more often than not. There was Mayor Malone, who was very suave and convinced everyone to vote for him—he mostly came out just at election time and during public functions. And then there was the guy who just…couldn’t cope with what had happened.

The last one—that was the one who could be brutal. He’d yell and scream mostly, and sometimes he would lash out at me because I was the one who made him the way he was. He was usually only around for short periods of time, and then he’d go away for a while until some stress trigger brought him back out again.

But now…now something was different.

The way Dad was acting now was mostly like
that
guy, but there was something else in there—something unfamiliar. I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I started noticing it at the hospital and the rehab center first, when he lost his cool in front of the other people there.

It was almost as if the brutal one had somehow increased his ruthlessness and maybe, just maybe, went a little off the deep end. The first full day I was home, that was most apparent.

When I woke up in the morning, my first thought was
what am I doing in the guest room
? Waking up always seemed to bring confusion, but disappeared quickly, and I was reminded that I was crippled in the same way a breadknife reminds the loaf that it’s the greatest thing since itself.

I wasn’t sure if that made sense, but it was what came to mind anyway.

Instead of running every morning at six, Dad had me get up and start doing a bunch of exercises with my arms. Apparently the new PT had given him a list of things for me to do for a couple of days before he arrived for the first time. The exercises weren’t bad at all and were a lot like the stuff Danielle was having me do. None of it was the same, however, because Nicole wasn’t there, sitting in the corner of the room and trying not to piss me off by smiling too much at my little achievements.

I had to find some way of getting ahold of her, but Dad had basically cut me off. He confiscated my cell phone, and we didn’t have a landline. My laptop was up in my room, three flights of stairs away. I asked him for it and told him I really needed to get Jeremy or someone to bring me assignments so I could get caught up and graduate next month, but he said he’d arrange to get them for me.

Then I made my mistake.

“Nicole would bring it all over for me.”

Dad lost it.

“What did I tell you?” he yelled. “What did I fucking tell you? That bitch isn’t coming anywhere near this house
or you
ever again!”

“I want to see her!” I yelled back. Even as the words left my mouth, I could feel my body chill and immobilize more than it already was. I was on the proverbial thin ice carrying a precariously stacked set of dumbbells.

Dad’s eyes went dark, and he slowly crossed the room toward me. I reached for the wheels of my chair and started pushing myself backwards, but there was nowhere to go. The feeling of being trapped was no longer just a sense of dread. There were no doctors or nurses or therapists here—it was just Dad and I.

His hands gripped the arms of the chair, stilling it completely. He leaned close to my face, his eyes blazing, but his voice was calm and quiet again.

“You want to reconsider?” he sneered. “Because you say the word, and I’ll be sure you see her. You’ll see her along with everyone else in this town—with some asshole’s cock shoved up her drunk little cunt. Is that what you want? Say the word, Thomas. I’ll be happy to oblige.”

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.