Chapter Twenty-Two

TWENTY-TWO

Bits of the Charles River are visible through the window of the hotel room, but the main thing to see is the Zakim Bridge. Its cables and pylons rise like the great geometry lesson in the sky, like a supersized string instrument on steroids.

"Like two giant concrete Spider-Men shooting webs from their wrists. That's what I always used to think," I say, rolling over in bed. It's Wednesday, and we're in Boston. The first round of the tournament—tomorrow's game and, if we win, Saturday's game too—is down the street at the Garden.

The pulsing glow of the muted TV lights Ben's face. He closes one eye and lifts a strained brow. "I think I can see it. You have quite the imagination."

"I told you the other day, I'm a visual person."

He nods toward the window. "Did you live near here?"

"Across the river and west. In Cambridge." I often forget that this is a place I once lived, because it doesn't feel like home. In my memory that time is more like a series of scenes from a movie I remember, not my actual life. Long cold walks to the T with my headphones on, a drunken fight with Oliver outside a restaurant in Inman Square, an office where nerdy bros played pranks on one another. I can't summon the faces or names of any of those former coworkers.

Version 2.0 of my relationship with Oliver was all-consuming, sucking up all my energy so I had nothing left for anything else. When he wasn't with me, I was worrying about our relationship or missing him or analyzing his text messages. I began to fade out of my own life. I thought—so, so wrongly—that it was a sign, that if I spent so much time stressing and crying and he spent so much time sulking and withdrawing and then showing up at my door in the middle of the night, it meant the relationship was worth fighting for. Because we did fight over it, over and over and over again. I measured its value in quantity of emotion.

Version 1.0 of the relationship had been costly for me, and I couldn't bear the idea that it was all for nothing. Senior year, everything with Maynard, wouldn't have gone the way it did if our breakup hadn't wrecked me.

After the night Maynard drove me home from the bar, he started texting me. I have the screenshots saved in a Google Drive folder. Cassie was a lawyer-in-training even back then. "You don't have to do anything with them," she urged me months later, after I finally told her what happened. "But keep them, just in case."

I opened the folder for the first time the other day. The first few messages were things like You doing okay? I'm always here if you need advice. My reaction at the time was Wow, he's such a great coach. Not just taking care of his players, but also checking in on me about parts of my life completely unrelated to basketball. I felt like he cared.

It changed so gradually. I'm up late reviewing scouting reports. Please tell me you're out at the bars like a senior should be, not moping around over that guy? Or: After my first heartbreak I moved into the gym and didn't come out until I had abs that looked like they were drawn on with a marker. You do spin classes, right? If you want to come into the office later on Fridays to catch an extra class, go ahead.

Each time he got more personal than the last, but not so much more that I could even point to what made it different. Nothing that seemed inappropriate, exactly. I didn't feel uncomfortable about it in the beginning. Not until October.

What are you dressed as for Halloween? he asked, at 11:07 p.m. He only ever messaged me at night. You're a beautiful girl (I bet I sound old saying that) so I'm sure you look great no matter what. Don't forget to post pictures on Facebook so your ex can eat his heart out.

Then, at two in the morning, when I was sitting on the living room floor with my friends eating chicken fingers, dressed as a bumblebee: Will you send me a costume picture too? And a minute later: Are you dating anyone?

I was wasted, but for the first time, an alarm went off in the back of my mind. Yet I told myself maybe it was a clumsy way of trying to play matchmaker, because he was always talking about his younger cousin from Maryland. Or maybe he was clueless about how his texts came across because he was older. Or he was trying to be cool and supportive but didn't know how. Telling someone they're beautiful doesn't have to be anything more than a neutral observation. Plus, what an obvious cliché—the college coach creeping on a student?

I know it wasn't my fault. But it's hard not to think I might've been able to keep his behavior from escalating if I had been thinking more clearly, if I hadn't been such a heartbroken wreck. That can never happen again. It's why I've only dated guys I'm certain will never breach my defenses. Guys who'll never cause me to lose control of myself, who will never turn me into a mess. Which often means choosing guys I don't like much.

Ben's not like the guys I normally date. But he's not like Oliver either. Being with him makes the rest of my life sharper, not blurrier. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm mature enough now for something real, and I didn't realize it. Maybe it's the fact that I know there's an expiration date. Or maybe it's him, us, together.

I'm not going to dwell on this, not right now.

Sneaking into Ben's room undetected took a bit of spy craft. We're staying on different floors, and he's near the coaches. There was a hooded sweatshirt involved, and an empty manila folder with a ready excuse in case of emergency. He stood sentry in the doorway, peeking toward the elevators, and I looked around corners before speed-walking down the hall. Neither of us is all that worried, but it does add to the thrill.

My phone vibrates on the nightstand. I reach over to feel around for it. "It's my dad's friend Big Ed," I say. "All week he's been texting me everything he knows about Monmouth. A lot of their players are in-state, so he's coached against them."

"That's adorable. What's he saying?"

I read it. "?‘Greer's right-hand dribble is weak. Always prefers to drive left. Force him to go right.'?"

"Hmm," Ben says thoughtfully. He falls silent. I assume he's thinking about basketball, but then he turns toward me. "What was he like?" he asks, propping himself up on one elbow. He rests his other arm on my waist, his fingertips tracing patterns on my lower back. He smells like his own soap, not the generic hotel stuff.

"My dad?"

His patient, discerning gaze is fixed on my face. His eyes look black in the weak light of the TV. I pause to consider all the ways I could answer this question.

"He had the best sense of humor," I start. "He always kept a straight face when he told a joke. If you didn't know him well, you'd wonder if he was being serious or not. You had to earn the ability to recognize his humor. But when he thought someone else was funny, he couldn't hide it—he'd laugh until his eyes watered. I loved that about him, that he broke for other people but not himself. He was a good listener. He had excellent taste in TV and movies and terrible taste in music. How can a person's favorite show be Friday Night Lights while his favorite musical group is the Bee Gees? It's unnatural."

Ben laughs and lifts the thin gold chain of my necklace. He runs it back and forth between his fingers, thinking. "You must miss him."

"So much," I say. "When I had to learn the states and their capitals in grammar school, he volunteered to teach me. This was a lifetime first. He never helped me with my homework. He came up with all these word associations using the mascots of each state school. And on top of memorizing the states, capitals, and mascots, he made me memorize which ones were good at basketball."

"Did it work?"

"Short-term? I did okay on the test. Long-term? I can tell you the University of Maine is the Black Bears, but I don't have a freaking clue what the capital is."

He smiles, a sweet, contemplative one, like he's imagining me as a kid. "So it was all basketball, all the time."

"Yes. For sure. He came to Career Day in fifth grade and brought everyone autographed cards from some of his former players who made it to the NBA. He missed my cousins' weddings because of his coaching obligations." I swallow. "Not just my cousins' weddings. I don't know why I said it like that. He missed a lot of my milestones too—holiday concerts and winter formal photos and honor roll breakfasts."

Ben tilts his head. "I'm sure that wasn't always easy for you."

I frown. "It was fine. I understood. I loved basketball too. In high school I started making videos for his team, so we spent a lot of time together."

"That's great," Ben says. "But it's okay if it wasn't always fine."

I shrug. "When I was a toddler, he brought me to a summer league game at the outdoor courts and left me there. Totally forgot I was with him, got swept up in a conversation with a friend of his, and they decided to go to another game. One of the refs had to lift me up and yell to him as he was pulling out of the parking lot, ‘You forgot something!'?"

I don't know why I'm telling him this. I don't even remember it happening. I've just heard the story a million times, a funny anecdote about his one-track mind.

Ben doesn't laugh. "You're allowed to remember everything," he says. "Even the parts that weren't good. You can miss him and love him and still wish certain things were different. It's not a betrayal to remember him as imperfect."

I huff out a laugh. "Yeah. I wish he were a little less dead, for example."

He covers his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking.

"Sometimes I wonder what our relationship would've been like if I hadn't been interested in basketball," I venture, rolling the corner of the sheet between my fingers. "Would he have made an effort to connect with me if I were obsessed with synchronized swimming or playing the oboe? I'm afraid he died disappointed in me. I gave up on the dream we both had for my future. I was working at an appliance company. He never knew I came back to Ardwyn."

"Annie," Ben says. "He wasn't disappointed in you."

"Please don't say anything nice," I plead. "I don't want to cry right now."

"He couldn't have been disappointed in you," he insists, pulling me close. He whispers in my ear: "You're an excellent free throw shooter."

I kick him lightly in the shin, even though it was the perfect thing to say. Turning from my side to my stomach, I nudge him down so he's lying on his back and tuck myself into his chest.

I know him pretty well by now. Well enough to read his face in the dark. But I don't know everything. There are some things I've wondered but hesitated to ask. "Tell me about your dad," I say.

His face doesn't change at all. He expected the question, maybe even wanted me to ask. I rake a reassuring hand through his hair.

He stares at the ceiling for a long time. I'll wait all night for him to be ready, if that's what he needs. In the near-quiet of the hotel, muffled voices float in from a nearby room over the footsteps and jostling sounds of somebody dragging a heavy suitcase down the hall. Finally, in a resigned voice, he says, "Not all parents have redeeming qualities."

It all spills out of him so calmly while he rubs the nape of my neck. The worst bedtime story anyone's ever told me.

"My parents started dating when my mom was a senior in high school," he begins. "My dad was a couple years older. They were together for about a year, and then she got pregnant. He stuck around until I was six months old and then…" He shakes his head. "He said he was going to stay with his brother in Raleigh for a bit, to see if it was a better fit. My mom thought he meant for all of us. She didn't realize he'd left us until a few months later.

"Eventually he did come back. It was like that for years, him bouncing in and out of our lives. Usually when he wore out his welcome somewhere else or got lonely. We were like a friend's couch he crashed on whenever he felt like it. We moved a lot because my mom had trouble paying the rent, the bills. It was hard for her to turn him away, especially when he had a job."

The shame of my old assumptions about him, that he was a spoiled brat who was used to having everything go his way, corrodes a hole in my lungs. "I'm sure it was hard for her," I say. "And it must've been confusing for you."

A minuscule nod. His hand drops a few inches, and he kneads gentle circles around my shoulder blades with his knuckles. "I dreaded him coming around, because I spent the whole time waiting for him to leave again. Every day was like the last day of a vacation. When you can't enjoy yourself, because you know it's almost over? Each time he'd fixate on some father-son bonding activity that he'd talk about and talk about but never actually do with me. The zoo was a big one. Phillies games. One time it was building the Lego pirate ship. I swear, he saw a commercial for that thing with a dad and a kid, and he liked the idea of being that kind of parent. But he could never bring himself to sit down and put together all one thousand pieces with me. I learned early not to expect him to keep his promises."

I wrap my ankle around his. "What was it like when he was gone?"

"Rough on my mom. She sees the best in people, so it blindsided her every time. She tried so hard to act like everything was fine. I think she hoped I'd be less upset if she hid that she was upset, but it made it worse." He swallows audibly. "I was confused about why he was there one day and gone the next, and I had no framework for processing it. I thought since she wouldn't talk to me about it, it must've been something awful. And it must've had something to do with me."

When I was ten, Dad's team had a rough season. They lost so many games he almost got fired. I knew my parents were stressed, but nobody explained why. Tension filled the house like pollution. I convinced myself they were getting a divorce.

When adults refuse to talk, kids fill in the blanks with something scary. And a missing dad is a pretty big blank.

Ben continues. "Sometimes he'd be gone for weeks or months. Other times it was years. The last time, Mom got pregnant with Natalie. It's weird to think about it, but at that point she was the exact same age I am now. And she was responsible for two kids with no help."

I press my lips to his chest, feeling his heart beat against them.

"After that, I told her I didn't want him around. I made a PowerPoint presentation to plead my case."

A load-bearing wall in my chest cavity crumbles. " No, " I say, my head snapping up. "Ben." I tighten my arms around him. "Were there slide transitions?"

"Twelve-year-old me would never have expected a PowerPoint to be taken seriously without slide transitions," he says. "Clip art too."

It's so him and so heartbreakingly vulnerable that I have to close my eyes. Ben learned too young that there are people who chip away at your limits to see how much room they can make for themselves. How much of you they can get without giving anything up. It's them or you. You have to choose. I had to learn this lesson too, but not until later.

"I don't know exactly what happened after that," he says. "My mom didn't tell me back then, and she either doesn't want to rehash it now or has blocked the details out of her memory. But I haven't seen or talked to my dad since."

I place a whisper of a kiss on his cheek. "Thank you for telling me," I say. "You don't know where he is?"

His chin pokes out. "I don't know and I don't care."

It explains a lot. The unwavering loyalty to the people he loves, because that's all he ever wanted, and he knows what it's like not to have it. The trust he places in the people who've given him loyalty in return. This is why he won't give up on Maynard. Maynard chose him, mentored him, took care of him. Did everything his father didn't.

My throat burns and I let out a shaky breath.

"Hey, I don't want to make you upset," he says, trying to turn my face up to his. I bury it in his chest instead. "We're all good now, and we have been for a long time. Though I sometimes feel bad for Natalie. Guilty. My mom and I know the alternative—him being around—is worse. She has to take us at our word on that."

I sit up straight. "No," I say with force. "You should not feel guilty. Your sister has you. And between you and your mom, that's all she needs."

He looks at me, his mouth rippling, turning down and then up into a faint smile. I've affected him, somehow. It can't be what I said, because it felt so inane.

We've spent several thousand hours of our lives together. Yet I'm just beginning to understand him. "I didn't actually know you at all in college," I say.

His hand catches my waist. "Do you know me now?"

I nod.

"Good." The faint smile again. "Do you think this ever could've happened back then?"

"Us?" I try to imagine it. Ben, the Disney prince, and me, the main character in a music video directed by an overdramatic teenager. "I wasn't adult enough to date an actual adult. I would've ruined it."

"I can't imagine it either. Which is wild because it feels so inevitable now. Even if it weren't for Hailey, I never would've been able to wrap my head around the possibility back then. You scared me. You were fearless and funny and confident and so smart. I wouldn't have known how to handle you."

I try to ignore how moved I am by the compliments. "You wouldn't have survived it. Cause of death: girlfriend picking a fight because we didn't fight enough. An actual thing I would've done at the time." My face ignites when I realize I used the word girlfriend, even though it was in the context of the eight-year-old relationship we never had. I'm sure he notices, but he lets it go.

Instead, he whispers, "I like you so much."

The words land like a Taylor Swift key change, and my heart grows a pair of wings. But my brain immediately hits the panic button. Like the sprinklers above us might start spraying at any second. My whole body does this wiggle like I've just felt a spider crawling down my back, and I cough.

I recover enough to take one of his hands. I turn it upright and trace the lines with my finger. "Ben," I say. "Please, can we not say things like that until the season is over?"

He looked so comfortable and open a minute ago, reclined unself-consciously like someone in a painting who knows he's being studied and depicted on canvas but doesn't mind. Now he sits up against the headboard. "What do you mean?"

"We're in a fantasy world right now. This is a once-in-a-lifetime season. We're traveling nonstop, with nothing else except us and the best basketball this team has ever played. Right now we don't have to worry about anything outside our little snow globe. We've never gone to the grocery store together or spent an hour trying to decide what to have for dinner on the third boring Friday night in a row. We can pretend the budget cuts aren't coming, that things aren't about to change. It's not real. It's like The Beach House. "

"I always knew I hated that show," he says. "Hm." It's a contemplative noise, and he goes silent, thinking. "Wait, so does that make me Logan? Is this the hammock room? There should be some melted chocolate somewhere around here…"

It coaxes a smile out of me.

He squeezes my knee. "It's like Italy, you mean, right? Oliver said nice things in the snow globe and then as soon as you went back to normal life, it didn't work out."

I nod, my mouth dry like paper.

"Your fear is, what? That I'll say nice things and you won't be able to believe me?"

"No," I say. I swallow thickly. "I'm afraid you'll say nice things and I will believe you. You can't trust anything you think you feel right now. Not until things are back to normal and we know what's going to happen."

He might think we can rise above the fallout once Coach Thomas chooses between us, if it comes to that, but I'm more skeptical. Regardless, he doesn't do any of the things Oliver would have done. He doesn't sigh and get moody and passive-aggressive. He doesn't argue about why my feelings are wrong. He just sits there with his hand on my knee, thinks about it for a minute, and says, "Okay."

It feels too easy. "Okay?"

"If this is what you need, sure. Until the season is over, right?"

"It might be over tomorrow," I offer.

He arches an eyebrow. Yes, it's March Madness. Anyone can beat anyone on a given day. That's why they play the game, Dad always says.

We both know the season won't be over tomorrow.

I amend my statement: "Not until the last piece of confetti hits the ground after the ticker tape parade."

Then he can tell me anything he wants. And I'll do the same.