R.E.M. Part 10

The next few weeks were the happiest of Todd’s life. Blair’s company was two years old, and she could run it from Cincinnati at least for a little while. In the mornings, while Todd was at practice, Blair would go around to the local stores and spas and push them to stock Melador products-- or to use more of them, if they already did.

The afternoons they spent mostly in bed.

At night they’d go out to one of the exclusive, wild places that was always open to a professional athlete, even one who’d barely ever played.

It was basically the perfect life.

Todd couldn’t help being convinced that it would all collapse, and he wasn’t wrong.

The last preseason game of the year generally meant less than nothing. Todd expected to play for once because the stars would all be rested in preparation for the regular season. The team wasn’t going to risk an injury to a player who mattered in a game that didn’t.

The locker room was filled with nerves of rookies who hoped to prove themselves and guffaws of veterans who had nothing better to do today than make fun of the quarterback for having banged a cheerleader that everyone knew had once been engaged to the opposing team’s star tight end.

Todd was half-ready for the game-- taped and wrapped, but not yet into his pads-- when the scuffle broke out in the hall between the home and visiting locker rooms. From what he could hear, it was all about the stupid girl, who certainly wasn’t worth it. (It wasn’t like she was Blair.)

Coach threw open the door and Todd could see the years being scared off the man’s life when he saw his quarterback, unprotected, backed against the wall by a flurry of punches. The quarterback took an elbow to the throat; his eyes rolled back in his head. “Get him out of there!” Coach barked at Todd and a few of the rookies who were close by.

Despite the fact that football basically consisted of hitting people, it had been quite a long time since Todd had been in a real fight. In college, all he’d had to do was threaten and everyone else had backed down. In the pros, he’d mostly known his place and stayed out of the way. Almost every fight that happened in the locker room was really a lot of posturing and shoving while the combattants waited to be pulled apart so they could shout at each other from across the room that they would have beaten the shit out of each other if only they hadn’t been restrained.

It never occurred to him to disobey Coach’s order. Half naked or not, Todd ran into the fray. It was always, always the other players’ job to protect the quarterback. In this case, the quarterback wasn’t a bad guy, either; he wasn’t into humiliating the younger or less talented players. He just happened to have at least one woman in every city they passed through.

Todd landed a few punches in between trying to rip bodies away from his teammate. He took a few more punches than he landed, but he knew how to play through it. He didn’t like to expose his back and be surrounded by enemy combatants on all sides, but there was no other way…

Everything flashed white as something hard hit him behind his right ear and his head bounced off the wall. The brawl was forgotten as Todd gripped his head with both hands, feeling blood and trying to stay conscious. He squeezed his eyes shut against the pain and fell to his knees. He attempted to crawl back to the locker room but he never found out whether he made it there.

***

The next thing Todd knew, he was in a bed and Peter was yelling. Disconcerted, he tried to figure out what he’d done wrong around the pounding in his head. The pain was almost unbearable.

“You stay away from my son!” Peter was bellowing. “You have no business being this close to him after what happened. I ought to have you arrested!”

“For what? Loving your son?” Todd’s whole body shivered. That was Blair. The last time Blair and Peter had gone at it, Todd had ended up standing there like a fool while Peter called Blair names. It wasn’t going to happen this time, not now when he and Blair were as close as they always should have been.

“You do not love my son. You want to hitch your wagon to my son, you want to exploit my son, you don’t give a damn that because of you my son just had emergency surgery to correct a subdural hematoma!”

Todd didn’t know what that meant, but he supposed it explained his headache and why he was finding it impossible to sit up.

“I had nothing to do with it! I wasn’t even there!” Blair objected. “There was a fight and he got hit over the head with something heavy and I came to the hospital just as soon as the locker room attendant called me.”

“There was a fight over a woman,” Peter corrected. “I hadn’t thought there was any particular woman in Todd’s life-- which is just as it should be for a man of his age and station-- and then I came here and saw you and it all made sense. What happened? You worked your way through the entire team and then convinced Todd to defend your honor? He’s had a blind spot for you since he was in college. But the joke’s on you, Lady-- and I use that term loosely-- because he’ll never play football again.”

“Who cares?” asked Blair. “I bet Todd doesn’t. He only kept playing to please you.”

“Oh, so you don’t care about him losing the career he worked for his whole life. That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said. I suppose you don’t care about him being deaf in one ear, either, or the scarring on his face that the plastic surgeon doesn’t think he’ll be able to fix!”

Todd’s hand flew to his face. For the first time, he realized that it was swathed in bandages. Peter and Blair were both yelling, and between that and his headache he hadn’t noticed that he’d heard everything through his uncovered left ear and nothing at all through his cotton-wrapped right.

“I care that he’s in pain,” said Blair. “But he can do more than play football and I know that. That’s more than I can say for you, since you’re the one who got him convinced that he’s stupid and that everyone’s out to get him.”

“Not everyone. Just gold-digging little homewreckers. Oh, don’t look so surprised. I heard what you did to that woman when her husband wouldn’t leave her for you.”

“That was an accident!” Blair snapped.

“Accidents just follow you around, don’t they? What happened to that Luna person was an accident. What happened to my son was an accident.”

“I had nothing to do with what happened to Todd! If you want to blame someone for that, look in the mirror and remember who bullied him into playing football in the first place. Some day, Todd will realize exactly what you did to him, exactly what you took from him!”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Peter thundered, but his voice trailed off shakily.

“Can’t handle the truth, old man?” Blair asked. “Have to fake a heart attack?”

That was when Todd summoned everything he had to throw himself out of bed despite the tubes and wires meant to keep him in place. It wasn’t far to the door, and he opened it to see his father writhing on the floor, clearly in the throes of a heart attack. Blair had backed away and was screaming for help, which came quickly in the form of a team of nurses who whisked Peter into a wheelchair and out of sight.

Two more nurses and a doctor came to put Todd back in bed. He stumbled and swore; pain aside, his sense of balance had deserted him.

“That’s the damage to your ear,” one of the nurses said gently. “They help you balance and some of that’s gone. You’ll learn to compensate for it, but you can’t get up on your own for now, not so soon after surgery.”

“My dad?”  Todd asked, temporarily too terrified to care about his own pain.

“If you’re going to have a heart attack, the place to have one is when you’re already in the hospital,” the doctor answered. “They’ll take good care of him. He’ll have every chance because he received treatment immediately. But you’ve just come out of surgery yourself, and you need rest. Under the circumstances, I’m going to add a little something to your IV to help you along. All right?”

It was clear that Todd was going to be dosed with a sedative whether he said it was all right or not. The world went white again.

***

The next time Todd revived, there was an orderly in the room with him. “Hey,” he said, hoping to get painkillers for his head or at least an update on his father’s status. It wasn’t until she turned around that he saw that it wasn’t an orderly at all. It was Blair, who had somehow commandeered a hospital uniform.

Even driven to the edge of madness with pain, wondering whether his father had lived or died, and with a face full of bandages, Todd noticed that Blair looked hot. If all this hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have minded playing the naughty patient and the even naughtier nurse. No, he would not have minded that at all.

“New career, Blair?” he asked instead. “Melador not working out after all?”

She started hard at the sound of his voice and crumbled at the side of his bed. “It was the only way I could get in to see you. I had to see you, Todd. I had to see for myself that you were going to be okay.” She gently stroked the few strands of hair that weren’t covered by his bandage.

“My dad?” he asked.

“Stable. He came through the surgery. It sounded like this wasn’t his first heart attack?”

“No,” said Todd. “It wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said Blair. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have-- well, I meant everything I said to him but I didn’t want to do anything to make this harder on you than it already is.” She grabbed his hand and kissed it. “Do you need anything? Should I call the doctor?”

“Not yet.” His mind churned through the insurmountable list of problems before him. One was that he didn’t know the extent of his own injuries. They’d told him about the damage to his ear and that that alone was enough to mean he would never play football again, but they hadn’t explained why his whole face was bandaged. “Do you have a hand mirror? Like a compact or something?” He knew she always did.

Blair paled, realizing why he was asking. She pulled her bag from its hiding place under a chair and removed a thick plastic rectangle, emblazoned, naturally, with the Melador logo. She held it just out of his reach. “You’ll get better, you know,” she said. “A lot of what you see now is just swelling.”

He had no patience for her attempt to soften the blow. “Give me the mirror, Blair.”

She did.

It was worse than he could have imagined. He looked like Freddy Krueger.

He sank back against the pillow and let the mirror fall from his hand. Peach-colored powder exploded from behind it when it hit the floor. He closed his eyes, but all he could see was his distorted, damaged face.

“Get out,” he told Blair.

“Not until you tell me you know the swelling will go down, and you’ll look better then.”

“I’m deformed, all right? My football career is over, I’m deaf in one ear, and my father is down the hall dying. That’s enough. I don’t need you to go around pretending that it’s sunshine and roses and that you always secretly wanted to screw the Elephant Man. I’m not stupid.”

“You’re not stupid and you do not look like the Elephant Man,” said Blair.

Todd glared at her. She looked casually back at him, but he saw that she was faking it. He’d always had a way of knowing with her. “I scare you, don’t I?” he asked.

She bent down to put the shattered compact back together. “No,” she said.

“I know when you’re lying, Blair.”

She looked him full in his ruined face again. “Then you know I’m not lying when I tell you that the only reason I don’t like looking at you right now is that I don’t like to see you hurting. And I regret my part in that.”

“What did you do?”

“If I hadn’t fought with your father--”

Todd almost laughed, but stopped himself when he realized how painful that would be. “Arguments don’t cause heart conditions. If you sped it along, that probably helped him because it happened here and not in his hotel room.”

“Are you sure?” Her big green eyes were brimming with tears.

“I heard the whole argument, Blair. I’m sure. I’m not going to lose the only thing I have left. The only thing that was ever really mine, not his.”

He reached for her hand and held on.

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