Offside (51 page)

“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 had 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.