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“We can’t wait any longer, Coach,” a ref calls out, and the Vikings coach nods, drops his head between his shoulders, and gets to work.
The game starts without the team captain, and I catch Sammy and Jeannie again—not watching the game, but watching me. “Where is he?” Sammy mouths, as if I’m supposed to know.
The only thing I can do in response is shrug. “I don’t know.”
Two minutes into game play and the crowd erupts, gets to their feet, and it takes a second to figure out why. Jace is running to the sideline, removing his jacket as he does. It doesn’t take long for the cheering to turn to hushed whispers again, because everyone else can see what I see.
Jace has a black eye so fresh he can barely open it. My heart falters a beat. Two. My stomach turning at the thought of what made him this way.Whomade him this way.
There’s wound dressing on the side of his neck, surrounded by darkness. Jace goes to call a time-out, but his coach stops him, requests the team doctor instead. The game is in play, but the only sound in the entire arena, over five courts, two teams, and the spectators, is thesingle sound of leather on hardwood as Jonah lazily dribbles in his spot. Everyone is watching Jace, even the opposing players. The doctor shines a light into Jace’s eyes, and Jace remains still as a statue as he gets checked over. The instant the doctor gives the go-ahead, Jace is subbed into play and the crowd goes crazy over it. Everyone is on their feet, cheering him on.
Everyone but me.
Pain is the price we pay for love,he once told me. But Jace… he has so much love in his heart that I fear the people he offers that love to aren’t worthy of it.
Most days, I’m certain that I was one of them.
68
Jace
My grandpa had to get stitches, so Connie drove him in to the twenty-four-hour clinic in Fremont. She could’ve done it here, I’m sure, but she worried for her own safety once my grandpa started coming out of his haze, and I understood why. Jonah and Connie came to my house in two separate cars, and so we drove to the clinic the same way. Connie in hers and Jonah in his with me and my grandpa in the back seat.
We didn’t speak.
My grandpa yelled and screamed expletives as he got the stitches in his hand, and I stayed silent while I got a few above my eye and in my neck, where the glass had pierced my skin and left a fragment there. Luckily, it didn’t get anywhere it could’ve truly affected me.
I thought it was over then. That I’d get my grandpa home and back into bed, and I’d wake up the next morning, and it would be just like any other day. But… the clinic had put two and two together and called the cops without my knowledge or permission. Two marked cars arrived, four cops in total, and it took three of them to handcuff my grandpa, who kicked and screamed, and pleaded for me—Jace, his grandson.
NotIsaac—the cause of his terror.
I watched them finally subdue him, while Jonah and a female cop held me back. I begged them not to take him, that he didn’t understand what was happening, let alone what he did to get him in that situation, but it fell on deaf ears.
It was only once my grandpa was in the back seat of a cruiser that the female cop had the heart and patience to listen to me. “There’s something wrong with him,” I told her.
There’s something wrong with me.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing when he’s like this. And he’s scared. I’m all he has.” I looked her right in the eyes, hoping that it was enough to convey my desperation. “He’s all I have left.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” she told me. “At the least, he’s in for drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, but… I can give you a ride to the station, and you can be there while we book him.”
It was the only time in my life I was grateful for living in such a small town.
Connie and Jonah left, and I spent the rest of the night sitting on one side of the metal bars, while my grandpa lay passed out on the other, and before I knew it, before I was ready, it was game time. I caught a cab home, went right to my van to make sure I had my uniform in my gym bag, and then went straight to the arena. I changed in my van when I got there, and then I put in the work.
It’s been hours since the loss, since the last game I’ll ever play in a Vikings jersey, with a team I helped build for the past four years, but it’s the absolute last thing on my mind.
I raced out as soon as the final buzzer sounded and drove to the police station to see my grandpa. In the time I was gone, he’d caused a “disturbance,” whatever that means, and that meant taking away his privileges… meaningme.
They wouldn’t allow me to talk to him, or even see him, and no matter what I said or did, nothing would change that.
I walked away, defeated, a frustration brewing in my chest that made it hard to see straight, let alonebreathe.
The moment I opened my front door, I was instantly reminded of the night before. The display case was in pieces, with broken glass covering the floor. There was a pool of blood on the carpet from where my grandpa had lain, and I can only imagine how it must’ve looked from Jonah and Connie’s perspective. I ignore the mess, ignore the sound of glass crunching beneath my feet, and head up to my room. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, so you’d think sleep would be easy to come by.
It isn’t.
I spend hours in bed, tossing and turning, my mind searching for answers to questions I don’t even know. Beyond exasperated, I get out of bed and make my way downstairs, collecting the broom from the closet before getting to work.