Chapter 3 Chapter 3: One Game

Sade's POV

Dad stood in the bathroom doorway with his phone pressed against his leg, and the light behind him made it impossible to see his face.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough," I said. "Who was that?"

"Your mother's cousin."

"Mom didn't have cousins. You told us our whole lives she had nobody left back home." I didn't move out of his way. "And what's a pack, Dad? Who's smelling who? What am I supposed to not know I am?"

"It's a figure of speech."

"Which part?"

He walked past me, lay down on top of the covers with his shoes still on, and turned off the lamp. "Go to sleep, Sade."

I stood in the dark until the marsh went silent, and I made a decision that felt like stepping off a curb without looking: I was done asking my father for things he wasn't going to give me.

The memorial game was the national semifinal, and Ridgemont had decided to play it.

The Den held twelve thousand people, and every one of them wore red. A drum line pounded in the student section, and the bowl smelled like popcorn, cut grass, and the salt wind off the marsh. Past the open end of the stadium, the pines of Red Hollow stood black against the sky. Ridgemont had given us seats behind the home bench, and Dr. Crane sat with us for the anthem with a thermos of hot chocolate.

"He scored four in his last game," she told me while the teams warmed up. "As a freshman, in a quarterfinal. Twenty years I've done this, and I've never seen what your brother did this fall. It was as if he'd found a second engine."

"He was good in high school too."

"Not like this, sweetheart." She said it kindly, the way you'd tell someone the weather. "Nobody is like this."

Before kickoff, the stadium went dark except for one spotlight on the bench, where someone had draped Jalen's number nine jersey over an empty folding chair. His team photo filled the big screen: arms crossed, trying to look serious and almost managing it.

"Please rise for a moment of silence," said the announcer, "in memory of Ridgemont forward Jalen Holloway."

Twelve thousand people stood, and the drum line stopped. Somewhere around the thirtieth second, a howl came out of the pines.

It was long and low and terribly close. A few students giggled, and the guy behind me muttered, "Hollow boys are drunk again." But I wasn't watching the students. Scattered all over the stadium, maybe forty or fifty people had turned their heads toward the trees at the exact same moment, like dogs hearing a whistle. An usher, a woman with a baby, two old men in the booster seats; they all turned at once, and they all turned back at once, as if it had never happened.

The Ridgemont captain turned too. He wore the armband and the number ten, and when his head came back around, the spotlight caught his eyes, and for one heartbeat they flashed gold, the way a deer's eyes flash in headlights. Then he was looking up at the family section, straight at me, and he didn't look away when I caught him.

High in the glass booth above the halfway line, a broad man in a charcoal suit had stepped to the window. Below him, a whole row of grown men in Ekwueme Biotech fleeces had lowered their eyes to their shoes, the way people do in church. Only one person in that corner of the stadium wasn't bowing or looking at the trees: a tall guy in the back row of the student section with an old camera, the kind with a real lens you have to wind. He was photographing the man in the booth.

The minute ended. The lights came back up, and the game started, and that was the last minute anyone in that stadium spent on my brother.

Ridgemont scored in the twelfth minute, and the crowd forgot. A kit man lifted the number nine jersey off the folding chair, folded it in half, and dropped it in a bin so a substitute had somewhere to sit. By the second half, the big screen had swapped Jalen's face for an ad: a girl in a red jersey sprinting through a sprinkler, gold letters, Recover Like a Hawk.

"Who is that?" I asked Dr. Crane, nodding at the glass booth.

She didn't need to look. "Godwin Ekwueme. He owns Ekwueme Biotech, half this county, and the forest behind it. He paid for this stadium." She tucked the blanket tighter around my knees. "People here don't say no to him, sweetheart. Not twice."

Beside me, Dad was gripping the rail with both hands. He wasn't watching the game. He was watching the pines.

I didn't cry. I counted things instead: three goals, twelve thousand people, one minute, one game. That was what he was worth to them.

The guy with the camera left at halftime. After the final whistle, Whitaker came up to collect Dad so the team could give him Jalen's jersey in private.

"I'll wait out here," I said.

I didn't. When Dr. Crane had walked us in through the players' entrance before the game, I had seen where Dominguez parked: the staff lot right outside that entrance, under a pole light. The Crown Victoria's window was still down an inch, and the folder still sat on the passenger seat.

I pulled the lace out of my left sneaker and tied a slipknot in the middle, the way Jalen and I had learned from a video at twelve when Dad locked his keys in his truck in Toledo. I fed the loop through the gap. My hands shook on the third try, so I stopped, breathed, and made them stop. On the fourth try the loop dropped over the lock knob, and I pulled it up. Out in the dark past the lot, the pines started howling again, two voices this time, and my left wrist stung under the silver as if it had heard them.

The photos were glossy and clipped together. In the first, Jalen's little blue Honda sat nose-down in brown water at dawn. The next showed the guardrail peeled open like the lid of a can, and the next showed two black skid marks on the wet bridge deck, swerving once, then again, before they ran into the gap. After that came the driver's door after they'd hauled the car out. Four long gouges ran across the metal, parallel and deep, from the window to the handle. Someone had written on the evidence sticker: Animal damage, post-recovery.

Post-recovery, as if a dog had climbed onto a tow truck and clawed through steel for fun.

The fifth photo was a print in the marsh mud beside the bridge, with an officer's boot set next to it for scale. The paw was bigger than the boot.

The sixth was my brother. They had laid him on a tarp on a boat ramp. I looked at it for one second and turned it face-down on my knee.

The seventh was a close-up with a sticker in the corner: Left wrist, decedent.

There was no bracelet. Where Mom's silver had sat for twelve years, there was a perfect ring of raw, blistered skin, the exact width of the bracelet, as if the metal itself had been heated until it burned him. I looked at my own wrist. The pink ring I had woken up with at 11:52 was fading now, but it was the same shape, in the same place.

I photographed every page, including the report with its tidy boxes that said Weather: rain and Cause: excessive speed. One line near the bottom made me zoom in twice. Reported by: passing motorist, name withheld. Time of call: 12:04 a.m.

Someone had been near that bridge for fourteen minutes before they picked up a phone, and nobody had written down their name.

Behind me, a steel door banged open. Heavy footsteps came across the lot, along with a man's voice talking into a phone.

"I said it's closed, Grant. It's closed. What do you want me to do, open it because some kid's daddy cried in your locker room?"

In the side mirror, Sergeant Dominguez was twenty steps from his car and walking straight at it, and I was sitting in his passenger seat with my brother's file open in my lap and my shoelace still hanging from his door.