Quarterback Bait (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Ash

September 13
^th

One lazy Friday, after a botched orgo pop quiz, I rode out
to visit Anya. I figured she'd been putting in more than enough time at the
dorm.

I knew something was wrong before my cab-driver had given me
the change. Though I didn't subscribe to a lot of the superstitious astrology
BS that, say,
Carson
liked to blab about, I was shocked when conviction
tiptoed over my skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. I
knew
something
was wrong, I just
knew
it. At that point, my imagination shut down. I
shut out the specific possibilities, and felt my body go on autopilot as I made
my way up to the house.

The driver was still trying to give me my change when I
found my feet had carried me to the open doorway of Anya's condo. The house was
silent. I couldn't even hear the dull murmur of the TV, or the rasping of the
wall clock. Walking slowly into the kitchen, I found my first explanation—the
kitchen clock had been prodded off the wall with some blunt instrument, and lay
in punctured, shiny ruins on the floor. Broken glass covered the linoleum, so
it almost looked like rushing water. My breath caught in my chest.

“Mom?” I asked the silent house. Then I made my body rigid,
just in case her reply was small and faint. No dice. I left the kitchen and
turned down our long hallway, which seemed unbearably long today. “Mom?” I
repeated. My footsteps fell lightly on the carpet. In retrospect, it might've
occurred to me that we'd been robbed, that the first sensible thing to do might
be “call the police”—but I didn't hear reason. I was just about to call her
name again when the house made its first gesture toward me. When I reached the
bathroom door, I heard the unmistakable sound of water running from a slow tap.

“Mom!” I cried again, hearing the panic in my own voice.

I'd gotten good at blocking out some of Anya's and my worst
memories, but here they came again, like a parade: all the wretched
possibilities. Like how once, in a small town in Nebraska, my mother had found
her way to the roof of a barn while tripping balls on LSD. I'd gotten the call
in the middle school nurse's office, under the pitying gaze of a Ratched
disciple. A robotic-sounding orderly had informed me that my mother had leapt
from the rooftop into a field, and “thank God, only broke her sternum.” I'd
spent two days at her hospital bedside, answering the requisite, terrible
questions from nurses who were deciding whether or not to call CPS.

She had always been reckless. She had always been
accident-prone. She was happy to be addicted, to this day, and even from the
wagon could make the occasional spiel for drugs and alcohol that the whole
program thing was effectively designed to halt. Once, my mother had told me—on
the downswing from a night on E—that she believed people were meant to exist
under the influence. “I pray to God that someday you feel this alive, baby,”
she'd said, her pupils big as the moon. I'd been fourteen, and getting ready
for school.

Mom was a mess, a mistake, unfit—and yet, she was all I had.
I'd pulled her out of the ruins many a time, sure, but even so—it was
impossible to imagine my life without her. She was my best friend. She was my
worst enemy. I loved her more than anything, despite our whole miserable
history. And I knew, with a shaking but deep conviction, that if anything
happened to her that we couldn't bounce back from...I'd crumble.

I gripped the rickety brass knob of the bathroom door and
twisted. It wasn't locked, but the light was off. With quivering hands, I
reached for the switch. “Mom,” I whispered.

She was buck naked, sitting in the bath-tub. The tap wasn't
opened all the way, and the drain was only half-in, so just as the tub was
filling up, the water was slipping away. She sat in a pool that just barely
grazed the tips of her hips. The wasted stream reminded me of something we'd
been studying in my Intro to Classics course—that figure Sisyphus, from Greek
mythology, who was always pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back
down to the bottom again. But I shook off this nonsense. Now was so not the
time to be thinking about school.

It was a relief, for a moment, to see her sitting
upright—that is, until I saw her face. When she tilted her head up toward the
light, I realized that half of my mother's face was tomato red, like skin
that's just been burnt. When she tried to smile at me, everything got worse.

The skin around her left eye was swollen, even broken in
some places. The wound was wet-looking; it looked like she'd tried to dress the
slices on her skin with nothing more than a few handfuls of bathwater. I went
to kneel on the grubby bathmat, deciding not to be fazed about seeing the naked
body of the woman who'd given birth to me. Up close, the eye was even grislier.
Somebody had clocked Anya good. Though it didn't look like she could open wide,
what little I could see of the whites of her eyes were shot through with broken
blood vessels.

“It's not so bad,” she croaked, cautiously. He'd gotten the
corner of her mouth, too—I could tell from the way her lips moved as she spoke.
The whole left side seemed...inflated. “Really, baby. It looks way worse than
it feels.” But no sooner was the lie out than the rest of my mother's face
seemed to collapse in on itself, making the most terrible picture. I leaned
forward and pressed my mom's wet head against the front of my shirt.

“Where is he now?” I asked, after her sobbing had subsided.
We both kept our faces pinned in the direction of the dripping faucet, as if it
would be too hard to look at one another square-on while having this
conversation. Anya sniffled, but didn't say anything. I repeated the question.

“Mom, you need to tell me.”

“But there's an explanation,” she whined. For a second, a
white flash of fury wracked my bones. The very idea that she could protect any
man who was capable of this…
monstrosity
, made me unbearably sick. If I
were a praying lady, I'd have pulled a Scarlet O'Hara right there by the
bathtub: “as God is my witness, I will never let a man lay a hand on me in
anger. Not unless he happens to be tired of having testicles.”

But I remembered my mother's fragile body in my arms. Her
life had been hard. She deserved to be happy. She had tried her best. I leaned
across the tub and gently twisted the faucet, so the water stopped running. My
fingers brushed against the dwindling stream. The water, I discovered, was ice
cold.

“It doesn't matter,” Anya sighed. “He's not coming back.”
With a slight inclination of her head, she indicated a corner of the sink. In a
little pool of moisture, a perfect circle against the pink enamel—there was her
wedding ring.

Chapter Eighteen

Landon

September 13
^th

I'd never been angry like this before, not that I could remember.
I'd been mad when we'd lost the championship to the Baylor friggin Bears in the
fourth quarter last fall. I'd been mad the first time Zora cheated on me, and
mad at myself for taking her back. I got mad thinking about a dozen tiny
slights, a dozen skirmishes in games—but not like this. My whole body felt
amped up, just the way juicers described life after taking a steroid cocktail.
But I didn't feel capable and strong, like those dudes. I just felt helpless.

I'd heard in the locker room.

I'd started at the familiar pain, then remembered to roll my
eyes as a wet towel slapped against my bare ass. A post-game snap was SOP for a
Longhorn who'd made a winning play, so I knew not to get too twisted—but to
this day, I have to confess that I hate that tradition. It was always the
dirtiest dirt bags who could be counted on to target another man's junk when we
should have been celebrating.

“That was a bitching last play, your majesty,” crowed Dixon,
one of our fullest fullbacks. “I thought for sure that 22 was ‘bouta kill you
dead. You're a fucking snake in the grass, Landy. Faster than fucking Forrest
Gump.” Dix hooted and hollered at his own joke, and I took the opportunity to
angle myself away from his towel. I slid the jeans up over my hips, already
feeling the spots along my body that'd be sore by sun-up.

The team was prattling on at full-steam about the after
party when I heard my phone go, which was already weird. Since the break with
Denny and Z, I'd been getting way fewer calls than before. The Pastor had even
lapsed a little from his weekly check-in (Sundays, at 3pm). I hadn't spoken to
Pop man to man hardly at all since his wedding day. Half of me figured he was
tripping on marital bliss, so had less need for his collegiate son—and the
other half was content without an explanation. I felt bad about this, but there
was also something nice about feeling like he and I were headed off to lead our
separate lives in peace.

The number on the screen, so grudgingly entered at my
step-mother's request (
step-mother
; still sounded weird...) was Ash's.
In fact,
Ashleigh Bennett.
She wasn't Doll anymore. I'd finally gotten
it through my thick skull at the wedding reception, watching her go all
doe-eyed and cutesy with her ancient date. Ash was a pretty young thing with a
bright future, and whatever thing it was that moved between us was impossible
to act on. Had always been impossible to act on.

And I couldn't continue to put her on a pedestal in my mind
and hate her in close proximity, because it: A) just plain wasn't fair and, B)
was fucking with my mind. Besides, Clay had promised to introduce me to the
Alpha Kappa crowd at the next mixer, and I had high hopes for some new pootie
tang. There were lots of pretty faces at UT, and I was the fuckin’ Longhorns
quarterback. Not that I could get too serious about anyone, as I was fixing to
make a scout connect any day now. Anyways.

“Hey,” I said into the phone, trying—no,
not even trying
—to
sound breezy and cool. It occurred to me that she might've just watched the
game in a bar, and could be calling to congratulate me. But then, that was
ridiculous. Ash was under twenty-one in a college town, and had also never
demonstrated an interest in football. Plus, she'd never called me before—it was
then that I realized something might be wrong.

“Landon,” she rasped, and her voice proved my second theory.
I held up a hand to the noisy locker room crew and made my way out into the
cement-lined hallway, head ducked in the direction away from the press.

“What? What is it?” I strained to hear the sounds in her
background, but all I got was silence. She was speaking softly. “Where are you?
Is everything okay?”

“No. No, everything is not okay. Where the fuck is the
Pastor?” She seemed to spit out the name. I'd never heard Ash talk like this,
with this callow edge in her voice. It rankled me.

“I don't know,” I started, trying to put on my most soothing
voice. “I haven't heard from him in a week or more. Will you tell me what's
wrong? You sound upset.”

There was silence on the line for a second, in which I
thought I could hear her thinking. Deciding whether or not to believe me.
Deciding whether or not to clue me in. Some belligerent ESPN reporter took the
opportunity to ping a paper football in my direction, grinning like a maniac
when I turned around. I frowned. The press could wait.

“He hit my mom,” she said, finally. “I came home today and
the house was trashed, and half of her face was knocked in. Four stitches. We
just left the ER.” She sounded so tired. So sad. The anger started there, as I
felt my jaw set. And the worst thing? It didn't take me more than a second to
believe her.

“I need to know if he's ever done something like this
before,” she continued. Some of my teammates were emerging from the locker room
now, gussied up like show ponies. The press queue seemed to rev at each
entrance. I wandered further down the hallway. “Landon? Please.”
“A long time ago,” I heard myself say, without having planned or prepared to
speak. The anger began to mingle with worry, and doubt, and an alien feeling:
guilt. And I
was
guilty. I was a participant. I had known, all this
time, that he was capable of cruelty. For he'd been cruel to my mother. He'd
been cruel to me.

“When my mother was alive, they had fights sometimes.” I felt
my fists clench and unclench. I was going to lose her forever. This was how it
was going to happen. “Well, we all had fights. He got back from his tour and
was just so different. When he got mad, he'd slap her sometimes. If I got in
the way, he'd get me.” I tried not to imagine Ashleigh's face as she processed
this. I'd never told anyone any of this before. Not Zora, not Denny, not Clay.

“Oh, Jesus,” she breathed. I took the non-screaming as an
invitation to continue.

“When she died, that was when he got really religious.
Leased the property in the city. Started drumming up 'religious support.' He
told me that he was a changed man. He asked me to forgive him for all of his
bullshit. And Ash, I really did believe he'd changed. Nothing's happened in years.”
I wanted to pull her into me, across the telephone line. I wished I could rest
my fingers in her hair. “I truly, truly did believe it. I figured he deserved a
second chance, you know? He is my Dad.”

The line fell silent. Behind me, the locker room procession
had basically ended. The stadium would be half-near empty by now, the boys well
on their way to getting wrecked at any of a dozen post-game parties. None of
that sounded appealing to me, now.

“I'm so sorry.” And thank God the press had retreated, 'cause
for just the third time in a decade I felt tears bubbling up in my throat. But
it was too hard to think about our whole miserable family history without
remembering...her. “I'm so sorry,” I repeated again, desperation and anger and
grief all souping together, drowning out what remained of my post-game
adrenaline. “I'm so sorry,” I chanted a final time.

“Landon,” my step-sister said, her own voice strangely
bereft of hatred and fury. If I were in her place, I think I might've wanted to
throw lightning bolts. “I'm gonna give you the address to my sister's place,
okay? It's near Kerbey Lane. I want you to pick me up.”

“Why?” I blubbered. In the olden days, dudes had carried
around hankies to prevent just this kind of gross-face situation. Scanning the
area for any unexpected street traffic, I ducked my head below my collar, tried
to sop up some of the nonsense.

“You're going to buy me a thousand drinks, is why,” she
said.

The anger changed form—and
became fear.