Family Matters Page 12

  “Andrea Kendall had been right to suggest the X rays,” Dr. Phillips told Jennie and Michael the following evening. “I liked what I saw. Cody has at least a thirty percent range of motion, which is borderline. It doesn’t mean surgery is out of the question…say in the next three months or so. But, for right now, I have to say we’d be better off to take a wait-and-see approach.”

  Jennie’s heart soared. She was too happy right now to even think of saying I told you so. Three more months. Three more blessed months. If she and Cody worked hard enough until then, the unthinkable might never happen.

  The news stunned Michael. He stood watching his son and his ex-wife as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard.

  “I told you, Mom,” Cody said, his tousled blond hair sticking straight up from his cowlick like the crown on a rooster. “I told you I’d show Dr. Phillips a thing or two. See. Here’s one.” He pointed to one leg. Then he pointed to the other. “And here’s two.”

  Michael left the room before Jennie. But five minutes later, after Jennie had kissed Cody goodnight, she found Michael still waiting for her.

  “Hey.” He was leaning against the wall just outside the door. “I don’t know why you’re not rubbing this in.”

  “Rubbing it in?”

  “All this time, I’ve been trying to convince you to do the wrong thing.”

  She realized that, in his indirect way, he was apologizing to her. “Michael.” She was desperate to make him understand. “No matter what you seem to think this isn’t a competition about who’s right and who’s wrong.”

  “We’ll have to deal with it again,” he reminded her. And it won’t be a competition then, either.

  “If I’ve learned anything through this—” Jennie spread her hands wide, palms up “—it’s to take things as they come. I’m going to work my butt off and I’ll worry about that part of it when it gets here.”

  “What did Andy say?” he asked.

  “Three days. He’ll be leaving the hospital in three days. I’m going to hire a lady to do some of the housework. That way I can spend extra time with Cody on his therapy.”

  “I’ve hired a nurse to stay in the house with him and do his therapy with him while I’m gone.”

  “Michael…” So it was coming to this again. “Let him be with me first. I’m going to be home.”

  When he heard her words, his face twisted. “Jennie, I can’t. You know that. I want him, too.” The thought that came plunged him into despair. Father, because of what happened to Cody, she doesn’t trust me anymore. It happened on my watch.

  The physical attraction was easy.

  Trust wasn’t.

  “Jennie,” he said. “Can’t you let go some? I’m not going to let what he’s gained so far slip away. And I’m not going to let him slip away from you.”

  “I’ve got him signed up for swim class. I can start taking him next week.”

  “So can I.”

  “You mean the person you hired can start taking him next week.”

  Really that wasn’t the issue and they both knew it. With all the custody possibilities they’d discussed, it came down to this. Jennie didn’t trust him with Cody anymore. And Michael wasn’t so certain he trusted himself, either.

  “Michael,” she said, reading his heart in a way she’d never been able to do before, “I trust you with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not.” His voice was suddenly fierce. “Why would I be thinking that?”

  “It could have happened when I had him, too.”

  And so she had thought of it, he knew it now, how Cody had been with him when everything started going wrong.

  With a heaviness that threatened to topple him, Michael rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a quarter. “Cody’s the important one. Not us.”

  “He is. The last thing we ought to do is put him through more conflict.”

  “Then are you willing to try it this way?”

  “You want to flip a quarter for him?” she asked, aghast.

  “I want everything to be perfectly fair for both of us.”

  “Nothing has been fair for us, Michael. One of us will win. One of us will lose.”

  “It’s the only way I can think of.” And, suddenly, for Michael, that seemed very, very important. She recognized that he wanted to be completely equitable for both their sakes. They both could picture Cody’s face. When they’d told him that their marriage hadn’t worked, that they wanted to live in separate houses. They both could remember the anguish on his little face, the question, no matter how young he was, that this might somehow be his fault.

  She waved one small hand in the air. “Do it then.” She hugged herself, squeezing hard, as if she had to hold herself in. “This will decide it.” She made a vow to stick by the result of the coin toss, no matter what the outcome.

  “You call it, Jennie.”

  “I will.”

  Michael held out his hand, closed his eyes and sent the coin flying.

  “Heads.” The quarter flew through the air. It hit the tile floor, bounced twice, rolled across the terrazzo. It spun around three times in smaller and smaller circles. Then, it fell.

  They walked over to it together, each of them peering to see what it was, before he bent to pick it up.

  Jennie said it aloud first. “Tails.” Her voice broke. “He goes with you.”

  “Tails.” Michael, torn between joy at his good fortune and sympathy for his ex-wife. “Jen…”

  “You said so yourself.” She shrugged but he knew she was devastated. “It was an unbiased way to decide.

  “You and I,” she stated simply, “have always been out for ourselves. Since the beginning and maybe even before that. It’s about time we just stopped.”

  Michael had no reply. “I know how much this must hurt,” he said.

  “You don’t know what’s inside me, Michael. You never did. You never tried to know.”

  He closed his eyes at the sting of her words. “If I had tried, Jennie, you wouldn’t have let me.”

  She looked up at him, her face still as a statue, her features so stiff they might as well have been etched in marble. “What does it matter now, anyway?”

  Michael didn’t see Jennie again until three days later, when she came to the hospital on the morning of their son’s discharge.

  “Well, Bear,” she said as cheerily as if she were sending Cody off to camp. “Be good for your dad. Make sure he takes you to swimming on Tuesday. Andy’s brother will be there. It’ll be fun. If you need something and your dad’s not around, call me. Sound good?”

  “Yeah.”

  She rumpled his spikes of hair so close to the color of her own. “Love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  “Your dad’s going to bring you to group therapy with Andy these next two weeks. Be sure and work hard.”

  “I will.”

  “Where’s Mason? Do you have Mason?”

  “He’s in the suitcase. Dad packed him.”

  “This kid weighs a ton,” Michael said as he stood with Cody draped across his arms. “Clear the way so I can set him in the car.” He gave her a reassuring smile, trying to say with his expression what she would never accept in words. I know this is hard for you. I’m glad you came.

  When she tried to laugh, it sounded too happy, forced and brittle, like something that might break. “You two had better get out of here.”

  He hoisted Cody higher. They were halfway to the BMW before Michael heard Jennie running behind them.

  “Wait!” she called out breathlessly. He turned to see her trailing a bag from F.A.O. Schwartz in one hand. “I forgot! I’ve got things for him.”

  Michael reached his car. He tried to fit his key in the lock but couldn’t while he held Cody.

  “Here…Michael.” She had her composure back as she caught up with them. “Wait. Let me get the door, okay? Here.” She took the keys from his hand and quickly unlocked it.

  “Thanks, Je
n.”

  He bent in and settled Cody on the passenger side.

  “I forgot all this stuff,” she said, still panting slightly. “Presents.” She handed them in to Cody, then backed away. “You can open them when you get to your dad’s, Cody. I know you two are in a hurry now.”

  Michael leaned back against the fender of his car and crossed his arms. “We aren’t in that big of a hurry. Now that I’ve gotten him into a seat, I mean. Let him open them here.”

  No words of agreement came from Cody. They both looked to see him already ripping open the first box. “A new swimsuit!” the little boy cried. He held it up to show Michael the suit with pirate insignia across the seat.

  “Ahoy, maties!” Michael said, feigning a pirate accent. “Ye better be watching out. There’ll be a new captain sailin’ the seas!”

  Cody held up the next surprise from her, a huge poster of the Dallas Cowboys.

  “For your wall. At your dad’s house.”

  Next came Guitar Hero for Playstation 2. After that, a little wooden box of dominoes and a gigantic squeeze tube of Where’s Waldo? bath soap. He held the tube and read the instructions. “‘Finger paint gel soap. The fun way to color yourself clean.’”

  Michael cocked his head to one side, looking at Jennie with an amused, doubtful grin.

  “It’s red,” she said in explanation to both of them. “You use it in the bathtub and you smear it all over yourself and it cleans you.”

  Michael raised one eyebrow, still teasing her. “You’re sending this stuff to my house? Thanks.”

  “Well,” she said, floundering for words. “I had bought it for mine. I thought ‘why should it have to stay here?’ I thought he might want to smear red around everywhere…your house, too….”

  Jennie could feel the telltale signs of emotion beginning to emerge, the reddening nose, the sharpening of her voice. She had to blink rapidly, tears stung her eyes.

  “Better get out of here.” She kissed Cody again, this time as quickly as she could manage it, right on the end of his upturned nose. “Love you, kid.”

  “Love you, too, Mom. See you in two weeks.”

  She couldn’t answer. Grief clogged her throat. She felt Michael watching her retreating figure growing smaller and smaller, the way she felt like she was growing smaller and smaller in her son’s life. She wove in and out of the parked cars in the lot, looking blindly for her own. She found it at last. Only then did she hear Michael put his own car in gear and drive away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fans filled the seats around the Burn’s field, settling into the ring in bright, random patterns of color. As the crowd increased, the noise and the chants rose to an echoing cacophony around them.

  It was amazing that the fans had wanted to keep up with them at all, the way the team had been slumping. Five losses in a row, three of them at home, and their chances at the playoffs.

  “I need a player who’s willing to give me everything on the field the way you used to,” Harv said. “And I don’t know who that’s going to be.”

  I do, Buddy thought, but he didn’t say it. I know exactly who.

  During the past three weeks, Buddy and Marshall Townsend had been getting together, sitting around the video room with feet propped on the coffee table, watching soccer plays. If anyone had asked him to define it, Buddy would have said they were participating in “mental exercises.” But, luckily, no one had asked.

  “Just don’t know what’s wrong with my game lately,” Marshall had said, stretching lazily and crossing two arms behind his head before he settled into a new position. “I can picture you making these incredible shots. Remember that cross-field shot you made during the Galaxy game? I dreamed about that one.”

  Buddy knew how frustrating it could be when you weren’t performing as well as you knew you could. Oh, did he know. But he suspected Townsend’s problems stemmed from the fact that he wasn’t mature enough to face the mental pressure of the game. It would come in time, though. He knew that, too.

  “I picture you making those incredible shots. I saw you making them one after the other. Then I picture myself and it’s just me.”

  Buddy shook his head, smiling to himself. What a sage I am, he thought. “Life isn’t always reasonable, Marshall. So stop trying to play it out that way.” How many times had Andy Kendall told him this very same thing? “You’ve got the right idea but you’re going about it wrong.”

  “I am?”

  “Your brain controls your body,” he said simply. “If you make yourself see the right things, you’ve got it made.” If I say this to many more people, he thought with an odd quirk of humor, I’ll end up believing it myself.

  Sports medicine, he reminded himself. This is nothing but psychological sports medicine. But Andy had used it with her kids, too.

  “I learned that a while back,” he said. From someone I cared very much about. “I think it can work for you, too.” Strange that during rehabilitation after the accident, he’d forgotten so much of this.

  “I’d like to try it,” Marshall said. “Anything that will help me make those impossible shots.”

  What do I tell him now? What would Andy have told him? Buddy let his mind travel back, back before the accident, back when he had been a superstar at soccer, back when there had just been Andy.

  “Come on, you!” They were skiing Breckenridge together, the snow so light and dry around his boots that it had reminded him of the flakes of dried paper he saw in all the store windows in Dallas at Christmastime. Andy’d waved at him with a wide arc of her arm. “All you do is point your skis downhill and you go.”

  “That sounds easy enough,” he’d said blandly, peering down the hill. “It just doesn’t look easy enough.”

  “You can do it. If it looks like you’re going to run into a tree or a person, you just fall down.”

  “Something tells me I’m not getting the traditional ski lesson here.”

  “You get,” she said, swinging her curly, dark ponytail at him, “exactly what you pay for.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” He used his poles to push himself downhill toward her. “So I do this? Just go downhill and if I start running…into…somebody…” Here his skis passed right over hers and, as he continued on, he grabbed her tightly, hanging on to her the way a frightened child would hang on to its mother’s legs. “Then I just fall…” And here she started screaming and giggling at him all at the same time, pushing him to try to get out of his grasp.

  “Down…”

  Kerplop. They both landed face first in the snow.

  They thrashed around a bit, laughing. Andy spit snow out of her mouth. “I think I’d recommend a professional lesson,” she said, deadpan. “This doesn’t seem to be working.”

  Buddy looked at her and grinned the grin that had made him tremendously popular with female soccer fans. Her cheeks were as red as crab apples and her nose was three shades brighter. He could see two matching reflections of himself in her snow-blotched Smiths. “I think it’s working just fine.”

  “Get off,” she demanded, giggling. “Get off!”

  “You aren’t being very persuasive, and besides,” he’d said, grinning at his own reflection in her glasses, “I don’t think I can.”

  Their skis were so jumbled up and lying at such odd angles to each other that they would never get them untangled.

  “Instructor!” she shouted from where she lay in the snow. “Instructor! This man needs an instructor! Help! Help!”

  Someone had come along soon after and had mercifully untangled them before they froze that way. After that, she had stalwartly refused to give him any more free lessons. “Enroll in a class,” she told him, kissing him quickly on the lips to punctuate it. “Now. Before you kill somebody. Like me.”

  He had signed up immediately, and three hours later he knew how to traverse a hill and turn and draw himself to a crude, skidding stop. Rejoining Andy, Buddy persuaded her to take the lift to an intermediate hill with him.
Andy had still skied circles around him. “How are you doing that?” he’d asked her.

  “It’s easy,” she’d called back as he did his best to follow in her tracks. He was trying to decide whether it would be more fun to concentrate on his own turns or to watch the stem-christie turns she was making ahead of him.

  He’d decided to match her turn for turn. He attempted to follow her but hit an icy spot, headed straight downhill and lost control. As she helped him up one more time, he realized he’d better stop concentrating on Andy’s turns and start worrying about staying alive. “I tell this to the kids at Children’s all the time,” she’d said then. “Picture yourself doing something exactly the way you want to do it. Your brain and your body perfectly connected.”

  By the end of the day, he’d been able to keep up with her. And when he got back to the Burn to start playing again, he’d found himself picturing plays, completed plays, successful goal attempts and victories.

  Andy’s concept was foolproof. It worked. What she had taught him meant everything to him until the accident, until he let it go.

  It’s funny, he thought, that I’m sitting here beside Marshall Townsend watching tapes and trying to help him grasp the idea. In some way, trying to get it through Marshall’s head, he felt like he was teaching it to himself again.

  “Marshall,” he said. “I wish I could take you skiing. I think I could make you understand this if I could get you on a ski hill.”

  “Oh,” the player said. “I ski. Had a great vacation in Vail just a couple of months ago.”

  “That’s just it, then,” Buddy said, excited now, figuring they were getting somewhere. “Control of the ball in a game of soccer is just like control of your body while you’re skiing a slope. It’s that brain, body, hill connection. Everything working together.”

  “What does a ski hill have to do with soccer?” Marshall’s eyebrows narrowed. “In case you haven’t noticed, our field is flat!”

  “It sets the rhythm to catch, controlling the ball, trapping it and passing it. It’s seeing yourself shooting past the goalie and driving in the score.”