One Death, Nine Stories Page 7

  Because you, because my own mother, left me, but I’m still here.

  I am alive.

  JACKSON WASN’T SURE what to expect as he pulled open the field house’s bright-blue metal door, but he figured he was in for something. Ribbing, razzing, mild hazing, whatever the usual treatment is when a new guy—especially one known mainly for getting all As—joins the football team. What he got, though, as he scanned for his locker and finally found the one with deets on a strip of masking tape, was a whole lot of nothing much. Plenty of no-eye-contacts. A few nods. A smattering of mumbles.

  The only piece of gear in his locker was a bright-yellow helmet. No shoulder pads? Jackson looked around. Nobody else had pads, either—just the gray shorts and T-shirts they’d shown up in. He set his backpack on a bench, took his rubber mouth guard out of a pocket, and attached its strap to the face mask as the other guys were doing. He put his backpack into the locker, closed the door, opened the door, took the backpack back out, fished around for his combination lock, put the backpack back in, closed the door again, and locked it up.

  “Damn, man—you got big.”

  Jackson didn’t recognize the voice, but he knew an acknowledgment of his spring and summer growth spurt when he heard one. He spun around, a grin beginning to take over his face. It stopped, though, as soon as he realized that the words hadn’t been spoken to him—and, in fact, had been spoken to someone whose flexed bicep, to say nothing of the rest of him, wasn’t especially big.

  “Huh,” Jackson grunted softly. He’d been planning to scowl a lot this morning anyway—now he had a good reason. He turned to follow other players as they carried their helmets from the gale-force AC contained by the blue door out into the 86 degrees and thousand percent humidity of the Central Texas morning.

  Jackson had never so much as watched a football practice, let alone participated in two of them in a single day. For months, his transformation from pudgy to strapping had promised a chance to stand out at Agarita High the same way his dad had thirty years earlier. He knew there was more to it than size, though. Now that he was here—one of dozens of boys in helmets milling about on the practice field—Jackson hoped he was tough enough, or at least looked it. He scowled again.

  The problem was, he’d pictured himself swaggering around in pads that enhanced his new frame while his helmetless head left his face easily recognizable. Being outfitted in just the opposite way was not creating the Jackson 2.0 impression that he had hoped for. Those helmets made all the guys look pretty much the same, so anyone who hadn’t already recognized Jackson wasn’t likely to now.

  The helmets did something else, too. The contrast between the players’ large, helmeted heads and relatively slim, padless bodies made Jackson think of the single most startling skeleton on display at the natural history museum. To a certain kind of kid, it was hilarious. Jackson couldn’t help himself.

  “We look . . .” Jackson began whispering to the rangy boy next to him as the coaches approached the field. There was no acknowledgment that Jackson was speaking, so he started over. “Dude,” he hissed, and the other guy turned to him. “We look like toddler skeletons! Don’t these helmets make us look like giant toddlers?”

  Jackson’s observation was met with blankness. Rangy didn’t answer him, and a sudden flush of unease, a sense that he’d said something unfootball, began to rise up within Jackson. Or maybe Rangy was about to respond—his lips and eyebrows had all started moving toward the center of his freckled face, as if a reply were forming—but then the coaches all blew their whistles at once.

  Practice pretty much consisted of running and sweating. Sprints. Laps. Agility drills with lots of starting and stopping and changing directions whenever a coach whistled, which was constantly. Jackson’s helmet wasn’t even used for anything, really, other than getting him used to viewing the world through a face mask. Oh, and holding the mouthpiece, which Jackson soon realized he had put in upside down. Until he had a chance to reinstall it between gulps of Gatorade during a break, the mouthpiece kept twisting out of his mouth every time he relaxed his jaw.

  Nobody said much to him the whole time, with the exception of a coach letting him know he’d be practicing with the linemen that afternoon. It was already 93 degrees by the time practice ended at nine a.m., so Jackson could only imagine how brutal it would feel by five. But maybe none of the linemen had overheard his idiotic comment about skeletons, so at least there was that to look forward to.

  When Jackson got home, he had the place to himself, and would for about the next six hours. He made a couple of sandwiches, turned on his laptop, and began scrolling through his feed to see what he’d missed. It looked like it would be the usual—nada—until he saw the comment his cousin Anna had made on someone else’s status: Oh god. I’m so sorry. R.I.P. Kevin—gone too soon. (I just…

  That was where Anna’s comment cut off in his feed. She just what? Who was Kevin? And how soon was too soon?

  Jackson clicked through. Someone named Kevin had died somehow, and that was out of the ordinary. Death wasn’t a topic that typically came up among the people that Jackson was friends with. In fact, Jackson himself had never even been to a funeral, so an out-of-the-ordinary statement like R.I.P. Kevin—gone too soon made him curious. He wanted the context.

  The context, at least at first, was something that Jackson had to piece together for himself. Anna lived in New York, so Kevin was nobody that Jackson knew. And Anna had been the only person in Jackson’s feed who was saying anything about anybody named Kevin, so he wasn’t—hadn’t been—anybody famous.

  The original post (R.I.P. to my brother Kevin) had been made a couple of weeks earlier by someone named Lydia, with a cross for a profile picture. It didn’t give Jackson much to go on. But in the meantime, right on up through this morning, there had been 176 comments—176!—and each of the profile pictures that had an actual human showed someone around Jackson’s own age. This Kevin guy must have been young, Jackson thought. And popular.

  He got up from the table to get a glass of water. As he moved around the kitchen, Jackson kept his eyes on the screen of his laptop. If anyone else followed Anna’s comment with one of their own, Jackson would see it as it happened. But by the time Jackson sat back down, nobody had.

  Many had offered up condolences (Im so sorry…), memories (that time we got branded…), or expressions of shock (Kev is DEAD?). Some of the comments, however, were more cryptic—they seemed to be exchanging certain information with certain people about what had happened. On the one hand, it seemed kind of rude—disrespectful—for them to be having this sort of private conversation on the public thread a teenage girl had started about her brother’s untimely passing. On the other hand, if Jackson could crack the code, he could be one of those people in the know. He could slip into this tribe.

  Jackson scanned through, looking for clues. Nobody mentioned cancer or any other kind of sickness. There were no references to car wrecks or accidents of any sort. A lot of unfamiliar and unexplained names got tossed around—several commenters were especially concerned about whether someone named Candy had heard about Kevin. Jackson felt entirely in the dark until he came to the comment, Does any body know where he got tha gun from?

  Even as Jackson mentally rearranged the question (from where he got tha gun?), goose pimples rose on his thighs and forearms. From there on, the comments tended to be a lot less discreet. Long after the picture had become clear, Jackson continued to read on through to the end of the thread. When he got back to Anna’s R.I.P. Kevin—gone too soon, it startled him, as if he’d forgotten what had started him reading in the first place.

  Jackson pushed his chair back and stood up. Now what?

  He walked down the hall toward his room, slowed down as he approached the pulled-shut door, and stopped entirely with his hand hovering just a couple of inches from its surface. His mom had made a list of things Jackson was expected to get done between practices. He had lightly argued that he shouldn’t have to do anythi
ng during that time except recuperate, and he had breezed past the list on the kitchen counter earlier. But maybe he’d at least take a look now.

  Why would somebody kill himself?

  “Jeez, Jackson—let the guy rest in peace,” Jackson told himself as he picked up the list.

  Move laundry into dryer (and, yes, start it, Smart Mouth). Water plants on patio. Pick up your floor enough to run Roomba. Agreeing to do the things on the list each day was part of the deal that Jackson had reached with Mom. He could quit his job at H-E-B at the end of July so that it wouldn’t interfere with football or school, but only on that one condition.

  Had Kevin had a job? What would happen at H-E-B if one of the sackers or checkers committed suicide? Not in the store—nothing like that—but at home after a shift or on a day off?

  The laundry was easy enough. He’d do that now. It was all his stuff, anyway. No way did he feel like doing anything outside, though, not even in the shade of the patio. And what was the point in having a robot vacuum cleaner if you had to pick stuff up out of its way? His room was a mess, sure, but it wasn’t bothering him too much at the moment.

  Besides, there was something else he needed to do. Jackson got back on his laptop and went back to R.I.P. to my brother Kevin. He went to the end of the thread and just rested his fingers on his keyboard for the longest time. Finally, he typed Kevin won’t be forgotten. Then he hit ENTER, joining the mourners.

  Almost immediately, he got a message from Anna. What are you doing? his cousin asked. You didn’t even know him.

  She was right. Jackson deleted her message and then deleted his comment about Kevin. He shut his laptop down.

  After that, he tried lying on his bed to finish rereading Watchmen, but every other panel, his mind wandered. He wasn’t any more focused when he moved on to the Xbox. It turned out that, compared to those activities, picking up books and bath towels and dried-milk glasses was relatively easy to do while thinking about some dead guy. By the time his mom got home to take Jackson to afternoon practice, he’d done everything on the list. Except actually turn on the dryer.

  Grouped with the offensive and defensive linemen, as promised, Jackson could see that even with the height he’d put on since the spring, he was only in the middle of the pack sizewise. Maybe closer to the bottom third. He definitely wasn’t one of the favored players, but at the moment that just meant he could observe the more experienced guys doing the drills before he had to do them himself.

  Had Kevin played football? If he’d still been in high school, would his teammates be doing the whole black-armband memorial thing for him this season? Would—?

  “You’re up, Deets! Four-point stance! When you see my hand move, that’s the way you roll!”

  On the whistle of the coach facing him, Jackson dropped to all fours. When the coach’s hand to his left moved, Jackson fell to his stomach and rolled over once in that direction. He lay there in the practice field’s bristly green grass, waiting for the next hand movement, but the coach seemed to be waiting for something, too.

  “Deets, get up! Four-point stance!”

  By the time Jackson got the hang of the drill—attempting something a dozen times in fifteen seconds gives you a pretty good sense of what you’re supposed to do—it was another player’s turn. Jackson jogged to the back of the line, where he stood and tried to brush off the bits of grass clinging to his sweaty forearms, without much success.

  The coach next led the linemen off the field to a telephone pole lying on the ground and framed on either side by a strip of dry, packed dirt. Jackson heard him say something about fingertips just before demonstrating a pole-straddling bear crawl. “Remember: tips of the fingers.” Then the coach blasted his whistle, and the players in front of Jackson began cheering on the first guy in line.

  Could Kevin have possibly pictured this scene? Not this drill, not this practice itself, but him, Jackson, thinking about him, Kevin? Before Kevin decided to end his own life, could he ever have imagined the ripple effect it would have? The thoughts and comments and conversations that would result? The fact that, two weeks later, some kid he’d never met, practicing football all the way down in Texas, would be thinking about Kevin, the fact that he’d lived and the way that he’d died? Would knowing all that—?

  “DEETS!” A whistle shrieked in his ear, accompanied by an echoey slap to his helmet. “Look alive! Go!”

  The first player to bear-crawl the length of the pole had looked like he’d been shot from a cannon. Maybe the next eight or ten had, too—Jackson couldn’t say. But Jackson felt like he was just lumbering along. The palms of his hands hit the hard dirt with a thud, and with his legs spread to avoid starting a splinter collection in his inner thighs, he moved forward his left foot, then his right. He pulled up his arms and pretty much just fell forward, catching himself with the heels of his palms before his face mask bashed into the pole. Time for the feet again, Jackson thought.

  Would knowing all that have made any difference to Kevin? Would he have still—?

  Jackson felt the tearing sensation in each hand at the same moment. His palms both skidded a bit when they came into contact with the cracked ground, and then they began to burn and sting. He could hear another player thundering and grunting behind him, and Jackson knew that—face mask or not—falling onto the pole would only hurt worse. Fingertips, he remembered, and he finished the drill with his fingers spidered out and the heels of his hands as far from the dirt as possible.

  When he got to the end of the pole, Jackson used his recently honed rolling-over skills to bring himself to a sitting position, from which he rose without using his hands. He was almost afraid to look at them. He turned his palms up and saw that on each, the outer layer—two outer layers? three?—of flesh on the heels had been ripped away, with dirt and bits of dried Bermuda grass sticking to the blood.

  “Coach?” Jackson said.

  One of the student managers led Jackson to the break area and turned on a spigot. Jackson winced as the water hit his palms. “We’ll get you cleaned up more in a bit,” the kid said as he unsnapped Jackson’s helmet and took it off. “Coach says go ahead and get yourself something to drink.” Then he ran back toward the practice field.

  There were three coolers, each nearly as long as Jackson was tall. He used a knee to open the nearest one. It was filled with ice and Gatorade. Jackson grabbed an orange-flavored one and let the cooler lid drop. He was just about to twist the cap off the bottle when he remembered he had no flesh on the part of either hand that would come into direct contact with the cap. Even without twisting it open, that would hurt like hell.

  He opened his mouth wide to fit around the cap, thinking he could twist it off with his teeth, but that just made his jaw ache.

  So Jackson waited.

  A few minutes later, the entire team took a break and hustled over to where Jackson stood waiting with his hands stuck out and a bottle tucked under his arm. Everyone’s first priority was getting himself something to drink. Jackson could relate.

  Rangy was the first to notice him. “Yow!” he drawled as he saw Jackson’s hands. “You didn’t stay up on your fingertips, did you?”

  Before Jackson could answer, Rangy grabbed the bottle from under his arm. “Let me open that for you,” he said, removing the cap with an ease that Jackson thought he’d never again take for granted. “Here.”

  “Thanks . . .” Jackson’s voice trailed off at the point where he would have used Rangy’s real name if he’d known it.

  “Kevin,” Rangy said. “You’re Jackson, right?”

  Jackson nodded. He took the bottle in both hands, holding it where his fingers met the undamaged upper parts of his palms. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and began drinking the whole thing down.

  “Welcome to the team, Jackson.”

  THE PHONE JANGLED. Lydia Nicholas, eighteen, looked up from her book but didn’t move. It was her mom’s phone, the one with a tangled black cord and old-school answering machine; it
s calls had nothing to do with Lydia. But her mother and grandmother were gone to Mass, and the phone kept ringing. Eight times, actually, before the answering machine clanked alive.

  Lydia mimicked her mother’s voice: “This is Rosemary Nicholas. We’re not home. . . .” For God’s sake, why not just say, “Leave your number”? This was the 21st century. People knew what to do. Why belabor the obvious? Or how about a phone message with the truth: None of the Nicholas family is freaking home right now—literally or otherwise. Don’t leave your name and number, because no one will get back to you. We don’t give a shit. We have our own problems.

  “This is Sergeant Benilli at the Queens Village precinct station.”

  Lydia yanked off her earbuds and sat up. She heard herself suck in a breath. Please, please, no more bad news.

  “We have closed out our paperwork on the shooting incident at your house and we have some personal effects ready to release back to you. You may have a family representative pick them up anytime from the station. Please bring proper identification.”

  She let out a breath and stared across at the answering machine and its now-blinking light. Her sudden worry (a random shooter at church? a taxi crash?) for her mother, and grandmother, who was still living with them four months after Kevin’s funeral, washed away before a sudden high curl of rage.

  “‘Effects’?” she shouted at the blinking light. “Fucking effects? No ‘Sorry for your loss’? No ‘You have our deepest condolences’?”

  Heartbeat thudding in her ears, she turned back to her College Algebra I book. She took night classes at Queensborough Community College, and real numbers were just beginning to make sense. Now her train of thought was gone. She took a long breath and read the passage again: Real numbers are points on an infinitely long line where the points are equally spaced. An irrational number is a real number that cannot be written as a simple fraction, and so is missing from the line.