“No, Alejo,” my mother says adamantly. “No, there is nothing you could have done. Nothing I could have done. I didn’t know what he was going to do. He…he came home and he was drunk and upset but I really thought he would be angry. I thought he would yell and break things. He didn’t…” she breaks off, licking her lips, staring into space as her face contorts into the kind of horror that breaks me.
“He didn’t seem to be all there and I thought, I thought, isn’t this lucky? I thought he would be more upset about losing his job. I really thought it was all going to blow up but it didn’t and he…he went to his room. And…and,” she lets out a deafening sob. “He closed the door. He closed the door and I was happy because I thought he was going to sleep.”
She bows her head and shakes as the grief rolls through her and Armando and I are trying to hold onto her, hold onto each other.
“I opened the door to check on him,” she sobs. “I opened the door and I saw…I saw…”
“I know,” I manage to say, choking on the sorrow. “I know because I saw him, too.”
“I miss him,” she cries. “I miss him. I wish you had your father. I wish he was here, he would have been so proud of the both of you, to see what men you’ve become.”
“I love you,” I tell them. “I love you both so much.”
We hold on to each other, sharing the grief for the first time.
After my mother and brother visited, I ended up falling back asleep. To be opened so raw like that, to relive that night, to experience the loss through their eyes, really took it out of me. It was about as much as my bruised brain could handle, let alone my aching heart.
But when I’m awake enough later to force down some shitty hospital food for dinner, the Madridista nurse comes by with a big, excited smile on her face.
“One more visitor, is it okay?” she asks.
I push the food away. “Anything to distract me from the dinner.”
She giggles and scampers out of the room and I’m not too surprised to see Mateo and Luciano stroll inside, both of them in suits this time.
“Well boys, what’s the occasion?” I tell them, breaking into a grin. “This isn’t my funeral, you know.”
Luciano comes over and gives me one of our special handshakes and a hearty pat on the shoulder, “Good to see you brother,” he says to me. He straightens up and looks me over. “I fucking hate how good you look even with a concussion. It’s just not fair, pretty boy.”
I grin at him and turn my attention to Mateo, standing at the foot of the bed, his hands shoved in his pockets, head down. He eyes me and nods. “It sure is good to see you.”
I return the nod. “Same to you.”
Mateo and I have had a fairly strained relationship for the last while. It probably has everything to do with me blaming him for Thalia, and then also punching him in the face. We’ve made up and it hasn’t affected our working relationship, which I am sure is the one that counts, but we’re still a little wary around each other. Which hurts, because Mateo is someone I look up to, basically the person I want to be when I’m older. I want, need his respect and I’m not sure that I have it anymore.
“I talked to the doctor,” Mateo says. “He says you’re probably going home tomorrow.”
“Yeah but who knows when I can get back to the game.”
“You’ll get there,” Luciano says. “I mean…Jesus, Alejo if you had seen what we saw…”
“I know, the nurse gave me a play-by-play in graphic detail. She broke a fork. What happened to York?”
“He got suspended for the game but I think that’s it,” Mateo says. “Hard to tell if it was an accident.”
“There are no accidents in football,” Luciano says. “Macaquinhos na cabe?a.”
I frown, trying to pick up on his Portuguese.
“I have little monkeys in my brain,” he explains. “I’m suspicious. York is the same player you trampled the last game. He was out for revenge.”
“We don’t know that,” Mateo says.
My thoughts go to where I don’t want them to go, somewhere dark.
Thalia was the one who gave me the information about York.
Is it…possible that she gave York information about me? Granted, he could have gone for my