Page 5 of The Rest of the Story
“Shea is in surgery,” I croaked. “There was an incident at the arena today. A car drove through the pregame crowd and smashed into the concourse, and it struck Shea when he was taking photos with the fans.” He’d been posing with a little boy, a little boy who thought Shea was his hero. Darling on his back, number 14 on his jersey. “Shea was very lucky.” That phrase again. I wanted to punch myself for Amelia’s sake. “His right leg is broken. His femur is shattered. He’s in surgery now, but the paramedics said he was in good shape, other than the broken leg.”
Amelia was dead silent. I heard John muttering, cursing, breathing hard. “What—” Amelia began. “Who was the driver? How did this happen? Why— How—” Her voice went high and then died, and the next sound I heard was her sobbing.
There was no way to explain over the phone how Isaac Coates had entered, exited, and then crashed back into her son’s life. I told her I’d gotten rid of him.Liar, fucking liar.“The driver is known to the team. I’ll tell you everything, Amelia, John, when you guys get here. I need to tell you in person. It’s… It’s a nightmare.” My voice twisted, and I fought back my sobs.
“Morgan…” She was still crying. “Are you okay?”
“No.” My words were small, and they sounded frightened. “No, I’m so fucking far from okay.”
“We’re on the next flight.” She was rallying, focusing, coming back to herself. A long sniff, a deep breath. Women like Amelia, like Kathy, amaze me. How they could take all the shit the world threw at them and their loved ones and then power through it, stack all the tragedy up and move forward, pick up the pieces and keep going, keep loving. I could feel the waves of her over the phone line, her love for Shea as strong as the sun. “It’s boarding in ten minutes.” She read out the flight number, and I scrawled it on the back of my hand with a pen left behind by someone who had fucked up a crossword puzzle. “We’ll land shortly before 11:00 p.m.”
“I can pick you up—”
“Don’t you dare. You stay with Shea. We’ll get a taxi to the hospital. Text me the address when you hang up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She didn’t even correct me. “Give my baby hugs and kisses and tell him we’re on the way.”
I couldn’t say a fucking word. I forced out a sound, a grunt, a sob, a sniff.
“I love you, Morgan,” Amelia said. “We’ll see you soon.”
It took a good twenty minutes and a lot of pacing to come down from that call. Hands shaking, boots shaking, deep breaths. My eyes were burning, my heart was racing, and I felt like I was going to leap out of my skin. I kept knuckling over my breastbone, feeling Brody’s scream. Brody, Brody. My God, Brody.
Making the next call was harder than dialing Amelia’s number. I backed myself into the corner of the empty waiting room. Shame made me hunch my shoulders. Made me curl forward, drop down to a squat, cover my face with one hand and cry into my palm before I could hit Call.
Brody’s father picked up his cell phone. “This is Owen.” He sounded cheerful, like he had no idea his world was about to be upended. He hadn’t seen the news yet.
“Mr. Zeagler, this is Morgan Elsher, Brody’s team captain.”
He knew, he knew right away. “What’s happened to my boy?”
I don’t know how I got the words out. They weren’t in any order, and I wasn’t any kind of coherent, but I managed to get across the broad strokes. There’d been an incident, a driver ramming into a teammate—Brody’s best friend—and the driver had been a former associate of the team. After that… things had come out, and Brody had revealed he was carrying a lot of pain, a whole lot of hurt, and he needed his family with him as fast as they could get here.
“We’re leaving this instant.” I heard Owen grab keys off a counter, call for his wife. “Hazel! Let’s get a move on, missus.” Back to me. “It’s a twelve-hour drive to Boulder. I can make it in ten hours, faster than any flight could get us there.”
“Drive safely, Mr. Zeagler. Brody needs you here in one piece. He’s with the team and he’s resting now, and getting here at six or seven in the morning won’t make a difference. Get here, but get here safe. Pull over and sleep if you need to.”
“Would you sleep a wink if one of your boys said they needed you as fast as possible?” Owen asked. A car door was opening. Brody’s mother’s voice came over the line, asking what was happening.
I’d rip the world from its axis for any one of my guys. I’d drive until the wheels fell off, crawl on my hands and knees, build wings out of toilet paper and duct tape, do whatever the fuck it took to get to their side if any of them said they needed me. Fuck the day, or the night, or the time it took. “Drive safely,” I repeated. “I will be here when you arrive. Call me on your way into town, and I’ll meet you at Brody’s house.”
“Will do.” A car engine fired up, and Owen hung up the phone.
And then, I was back to waiting, alone with my shame.
I’d good gone and done it, proven exactly what I knew all along: I wasn’t the good guy everyone kept claiming I was. All the promises I’d made, to protect the team, to get rid of Coates, to keep them safe from him. To love Shea and to put him first, always, and to protect him with my own life, my own limbs, to give myself up in place of him. How many promises could a man break in one day and still call himself a man? Or a husband? Or a captain? Or a friend?
An hour later, I was pulling out my phone again and dialing a number I hadn’t expected to be calling tonight. The line rang three times, and I calculated the time difference, added two, realized it was late, far too late to call. I was about to hang up when my mother answered, said, “Morgan? Baby, I’ve been so worried. My phone, it has this setting, this Google alert, and it tells me whenever there’s news about your team, and it said that one of your players was hit by a car—”
She was going a mile a minute, and so were my tears, building up at the corners of my eyes. I smothered my mouth with my hand, as if that could stop my crying. “Mom—”
“Morgan.” Her voice took me right back to when I was four years old and she’d hold me in her lap. “Morgan. Talk to me.”
“It was Shea. Shea was the one who was hit.”
“Is he— Is he okay?” There was a shakiness in her voice, terror rounding out her words, and that was something I hadn’t heard from her in sixteen years.
