The Snap, page 18
“Support you, yes,” filled in Dayanna. “And for—”
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” Nisha was digging around in my kitchenette. “Do you have any candles? And what’s your pizza place? It looks like Georgio’s has the highest rating?”
“Pizza My Heart,” I responded automatically, “and can you please tell me what verg—whatever is?”
“ ‘To reckon with bad deeds from the past.’ God bless the Germans, they really do have a word for everything.”
“Nisha came to see me,” said Annika. It was the first thing I’d heard from her since our meetup in Hoboken. Her voice was—broken. Her hair was limp and wilted. Everything about Annika was lesser than it had been, like she’d been used up. Like she’d been rubbed out.
“Well, since you wouldn’t answer the phone, I needed proof of life,” Nisha said, lining up my collection of Diptyque candles down the coffee table. There was a forced lightness to her tone, and she snuck a worried glance at Annika. They’ve always been a little closer to each other than to the rest of the group. It comes from the ying and yang of Annika’s cool, collected demeanor and Nisha’s tendency to talk from her neck. With Dayanna and Sarah as the other little unit within a unit, I stand alone. Which is how I’ve always preferred it anyway.
But now they were here.
“I couldn’t get out of bed,” Annika said. “It’s so much worse than…” The four of us were silent, looking at her, Dayanna’s face a war between sympathy and disgust. But when a hiccup of a sob escaped, Day’s eyes softened. “Nisha came and she just—stayed. Sat in my driveway until Grant let her in, and then sat in the family room until I could stand to see her. Phone off. Missing work.”
“It’s not like I had much choice once I saw what a mess you were.” Nisha straightened and moved her hair out of her face. “Look, I’m not great at this—talking part. But we made this little—group. Family. Whatever—to help each other out, and at some point it became…You’re like my…Okay, fuck you guys,” she said, catching Dayanna’s lip-biting attempt not to smile. “Seriously, though, we’re here for business. But first we’re going to level the playing field a little, because what Anni has to tell us is not easy.”
Twenty minutes later the lights were off, and the candles were lit, their combined scents forming a heavy perfume that hung low in the air. An open pizza box sat on a dish towel to protect my rug, and everyone had a wineglass with a pinky finger’s worth of empty space at the top. “This,” said Sarah from her spot on the floor, “is the weirdest slumber party I’ve ever been to.”
“It’s like we’re a coven,” Dayanna said, passing out coasters. “Witches Against Groping Shitheads.”
Once we were served and settled, Nisha took the lead. “All right, focus up. We’ve talked a lot in this group about other people’s bad deeds. Now, at least to each other, it’s time to own up to ours. I’m going to start,” she said, putting a hand to her chest, “I’ll tell you mine. And you don’t have to go if you don’t want to but—if not, what are we doing? What is this group for if not for this?”
Annika stared at her hands, folded in her lap. Sarah and Dayanna exchanged a glance and nodded slightly to each other. And I felt the anxiety building inside my chest, because that wasn’t supposed to be the deal. We complained about other people. And ever since that conversation with Chloe, ever since she’d relayed that Red said this season was like that first one, there’d been an itch at the back of my mind. I didn’t scratch it, I wouldn’t. But it stayed. I took a long gulp of my wine.
“Okay?” Nisha confirmed. “Okay. So—here goes. I can’t fall asleep in strange beds, and that’s rough because my job is basically to hotel-hop two hundred nights a year, so I use pot to take the edge off.”
“That’s no big deal,” said Sarah.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so either, which is why I mentioned it to this other scout who said he has trouble sleeping on the road. I’ve known him forever, and I honestly didn’t think anything of it. But then he pointed out that those hotels are all over the country, including a lot of states where recreational pot isn’t legal, and I’m transporting it across state lines, which makes it a felony. And he went on to helpfully share that even a first-time offense brings a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine. Just your standard tip-of-the-tongue information. But he made it clear that since we’re friends—very, very close friends—he wouldn’t tell my team about my ‘substance abuse and trafficking issues.’ And then he invited me to his room.”
“What did you do?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“I’d like to hear what you guys think—go ahead.”
“You slept with him,” said Dayanna at the same time Sarah said, “You kept one of his eyeballs.” Annika just stared, and I shrugged.
“Wrong all around. I set up a mutually assured destruction scenario. I went to his room, shared my pot—which helpfully is quite good for sleep, I swear by it—and took some photos while he was passed out. He’s very devout, of course, and the next day I told him that if he didn’t blow me up, I wouldn’t blow him up to his wife, parents, and pastor. I left his job out of it, because I’m classier than him. But then he got caught cheating with an airport barista and came to Jesus—again—so if the photos ever appear they’ll just show what a sinner he used to be and how much he’s ‘changed.’ So that’s my big secret. I’m a drug trafficker.” She shot Annika a sarcastic smile. “We can share a cell.”
She was right, technically they could both face prison. We’d gone from prank to threat to—what? Extortion? But the notes didn’t demand anything except for these stories to be made public. And who benefited from that?
“You already know what I did,” Dayanna said. “Like thirty percent of relationships start at work, except not in sports, because then people think you’re only there to meet guys. Have you ever noticed no one says that about accountants?”
“And it’s not like most of the players meet their wives in the office!” Sarah added. “If you really wanted to date one you’d take a shit-ton of Pilates classes and hit the Señor Frog’s near spring training. It’s the dumbest, dumbest argument.”
“Exactly. It was a real relationship—secret, but real—and then we broke up, and it’s fine. He’s a good guy. But if it ever got out, I’d be reduced to the world’s least efficient jersey chaser. No one would remember that we’ve been a Selig award finalist for the past five years—it’s not like that just happens. I love community relations, I’m great at it. And I’d never get to do it again.”
The warm feeling that came with finding the girls on my doorstep was ebbing away like the light from the candles as they burned through their wicks. In its place was a collection of facts that I’d folded up very neatly fifteen years ago and put in a box on a shelf. I hadn’t opened that box. I hadn’t even looked at it. But now it was here, coming toward me, forcing me to revisit things that I did not want to know.
I was to Dayanna’s left so all eyes swung to me, bringing an instant flop sweat. I wanted to climb inside of my wineglass.
“I’m sorry,” Annika broke in. “I know it’s Poppy’s turn, but if she doesn’t mind, I’d like to go next.”
“By all means,” I croaked.
“It’s just—you all know what I did. Or at least some of it, and I can’t sit here for another second without at least explaining. And I have something important to tell you, but first, I’d just like to explain.” Annika looked like she was going to be sick. Her egg-white skin had paled even further so that it took on a sickly, bluish tint.
She picked at the polish on her fingernails, making a little tick tick tick sound as she chipped it away. “A lot of my job,” she gave us an ironic look, “my unofficial job, has been doing some administrative things for Damian. It was nothing illegal.” Her chin raised as if it was very important to her to stress that point. “It was just a bit…deviant, if that’s even the right word to use when you’re talking about consenting adults, but he’s the face of our franchise, and we have a very family-values-forward fan base. His private life needed to stay private, and so we used NDAs pretty liberally. And as long as I made them very strongly worded and included a sizable cash bonus for their troubles, the young ladies tended to comply without any issues.”
“Wait, wait,” Sarah broke in. “Why were you doing that? Damian has to have his own legal team, right?”
“Our idiot owners. They’re control freaks, and they wanted it done in-house. No leaks. So I did it. Then one day the bonus went way up—inflation, right?” Annika gave a frustrated laugh. “I wrote up the document like always, but this time the woman didn’t want to sign.” Annika looked at her fingers. Only jagged streaks of polish remained. “This time, she claimed it wasn’t quite so consensual. Damian said it was. He told me he met this woman on Instagram, that this was what women do nowadays—hook up with athletes so they can make some crazy claims afterward and extort them for money. He showed me messages between the two of them that indicated she might be into this kind of thing. Two other players on the team said they’d slept with her too.”
“But that doesn’t—” Dayanna started, and Annika held up her hand.
“I know, that shouldn’t mean anything, and I’m so ashamed to admit it, but it hit her credibility for me. It shouldn’t have. But it did.”
A woman who’d been with someone else in the organization was less likely to be believed. And there were messages between the two of them that showed she might be into that kind of thing.
“And this is Damian, he’s my friend,” she went on. “I’ve known him for almost ten years, for Christ’s sake. I wanted to help.”
God, I was going to be sick. I was back in that anteroom, my head was throbbing. I couldn’t breathe, he was crushing me, I—
“Wait,” Nisha interjected, and I gulped for air, trying to bring myself back to my townhouse. Sarah furrowed her brow at me, and I pointed nonsensically to my throat and took another long sip of wine. I was drinking way too fast, I could feel my face going red and tingly from it. “Anni,” said Nisha, “what kind of thing are we talking about here?”
“Erotic asphyxiation. Damian said it was a sex game they’d agreed to play. The woman claimed she’d agreed to no such thing and that she thought he was going to kill her. She was terrified, and she wanted to press charges. The entire idea of it was absurd, he would never hurt anyone, let alone…” Annika bit both of her lips, bringing them together so fiercely that they disappeared. She cleared her throat. “I redrafted the agreement. The figure went up, she took it, and the whole thing went away. And I got to be the big-shot protective lawyer who’d saved the day. Until the second girl. And by then I’d already done it the first time, and it was easier to believe that they were both lying than to think that I’d…that I’d been a part of…”
I ached for her. And I feared for me. Because something was shifting inside me, something I couldn’t yet understand. A wave was coming to wipe me off my feet and suck me under and away, and I could sense it coming, a scent on the wind that whispered of a storm still buried far beyond the horizon.
Red was my mentor and my friend.
Annika’s voice thickened. “But the third girl—that was what did it. Not because I’m a good person, because clearly I’m not. Not because it showed a pattern I couldn’t ignore anymore.” She closed her eyes as if she was in physical pain. “The third girl’s name was Joanna.”
I felt the word in my gut, the way Annika must have. Or no, not the same way Annika did, because Joanna wasn’t my daughter. I didn’t have a thousand memories of picnics on sunny days and cold water hitting my face as a tiny body propelled into a pool. I didn’t have backpacks and lunches and tutus and the image of a small girl twirling, smiling over her shoulder at me as two braids swung wide in the breeze.
“What if one day some asshole did that to her, and some other asshole like me let it happen?”
Several beats passed in silence, and then Dayanna said quietly, “So what did you do?”
“I wrote a letter of resignation. I typed the whole thing up and spent two weeks editing it in my home office. Sometimes it went on for pages, describing exactly why I couldn’t work there anymore; sometimes it was just a single sentence. But I wrote it. And I fully, fully intended to hand it in. I still do, I want to, I have to, it’s just that…”
“What?” Sarah’s voice held a note of warning. I realized I was leaning forward, perched on the very edge of the sofa.
“My daughter found it—Carolyn. She needed some financial documents for law school and looked on my computer, and I still had the draft up. The long-form draft. Once she read it, she knew what I’d done, and then she went poking around to see what else was there, and she found our group chat—you know how the texts go to the computer?—so that’s how she identified the rest of you. She doesn’t actually know anything—there’d be no way for her to, since we never talked about it in any detail before tonight—but she knows who you are and what we do here…She sent the letters.” Annika hung her head. “I’m so sorry.”
It made sense. The delivery of the letters was impressive. Carolyn must have mailed the first set from home and the second, I realized, from JFK during her trip back to school. But now, with the lights on and all the shadows snapped back to their shapes, the rest of it looked like what it was. An unrelated crime. A natural heart attack in a man begging for one. Twitter messages from a creep, because that’s what creeps did.
Carolyn was a girl who’d stumbled onto something that shook her to her core and wanted—needed—to feel like she was doing something about it, but had no idea what. So she sent those letters without a plan and then stalled out.
Except that she didn’t. I was slower to figure it out than I should have been, but once I did, an aching fatigue overcame me. When I looked at Annika, it was with deep, deep pity. “ESPN. The story…”
“She leaked it.” Annika wiped savagely at her eyes, determined not to let a single tear escape. “We’ve always had such a happy home, and we’ve talked to the girls so much about respect for women, and how to look after themselves. What to demand in their relationships, what to do if they’re in trouble.” Carolyn was following in Annika’s footsteps as an attorney. Joanna was majoring in feminist theory. As if she could read my mind, Annika went on, “She must have felt so betrayed. It makes me sick even thinking about it, I don’t know how we’ll ever…”
The four of us sat in stunned silence. Annika’s own daughter turned her in. The depth of her betrayal was stronger than the foundation of her love. It was horrible. It was heartbreaking.
“Even that might not have been enough, but apparently Carolyn has this professor this semester who’s become very important to her. She didn’t know what to do with what she’d found, so she went to talk to her, and the professor was all, Why are you in law school if you won’t stand up for the law. I don’t think—we’ve talked and talked and talked to the girl, but it was all…feminist theory! I don’t think it had ever clicked for Caro before that these things really happen, to people she knows. I don’t think she truly realized that men are usually bigger than women, and if they want to, they can force them, violently, to do things. It just—hit her, hard. And she didn’t know what to do.”
Annika turned to me. “Poppy, there’s no way she could have done it. She’s angry—so angry—but it’s directed at me.”
“Oh, Anni, I know.”
The others spoke softly to Annika, offering words of comfort, but I was lost in my own head. Hearing Annika talk about what a good guy Damian was, how they were friends, it all felt so familiar. Because friends could have a misunderstanding. Friends could accidentally lead each other on, a misread cue, a text meant for someone else. And friends weren’t predators. There were more innocent explanations for what they did.
And that made it so much easier to stand.
I dug my nails into my palms and flashed to every time I’d stood with Red over the years, his hand casually on my shoulder as we laughed and chatted. I thought of quiet moments we’d shared on the team plane, late-night flights across the country when the cabin was dim and the players all wore sleep masks. We’d talk—really talk—about our shared love of comedic horror movies, or what college stadiums we dreamed of visiting, or whether lobster rolls should have butter or mayo. We talked about our fathers, both football coaches, and how they’d shaped us, how that made us special. You couldn’t hurt someone and then have those kinds of conversations, you wouldn’t dare. Everything we’d said and done and been since that one day between the field and the press conference proved that I was wrong, that it couldn’t be that. And yet when Chloe talked about Red’s friendliness, the hairs on the back of my neck had floated up like a spooked cat’s fur.
The wine sloshed dangerously in my stomach, it clawed at the bottom of my throat, begging to come up. I was going to be sick. I needed to be sick, I couldn’t hold this thought inside my body, it would poison me, it would kill me.
“I promise you—all of you—Carolyn doesn’t know anything about you, other than the fact that this group exists. We have a lot to work out together, but as far as the rest of you go, she’s done. Your secrets are safe.”
But mine wasn’t.
Because mine was a secret I’d kept from myself.
And because I’d refused to see, because of what I’d done after, it wasn’t just my reputation that was at risk now—it was my freedom.
I was a criminal.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
