The Prophet (42 page)

“Which is?”

“You can tell your sister what happened.”

“Talk to my sister.”

“It’s what Adam did,” she told him. “He’d like her to know, I think. I believe that would matter a lot to him.”

Once this would have struck Kent as madness, but no longer.

“You know I could have gotten her home,” he said.

Chelsea regarded him silently.

“Adam was supposed to drive her,” he said. “But he’d told me he wasn’t going to. He’d decided to let her walk. And all I was doing was watching game film. I could have walked her home myself, run back, it would have taken ten minutes. It all fell on Adam, but I knew the situation, and I made the same call he did. I said it was five blocks, what could go wrong. He wasn’t the only one who failed to look out for her.”

Chelsea said, “You ever tell him that?”

“No,” he said, and his voice was unsteady. “No, I never did. But I wanted to tell you.”

Chelsea’s palm was cool when she touched his arm. “Tell your sister,” she said. “Tell her that, and all the rest. It would have mattered to Adam.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Will you be around, Chelsea? If we could talk at some point… I think we should. Please.”

She looked away. “We can talk, Kent. But I don’t think I’ll be around for long.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “But it’s time for me to leave. I know that much. He was ready to, and so was I, and now… well, now
I’m what’s left, right? But we weren’t wrong about its being time to leave.”

She slid off the hood of her car, and they said good-bye then, all that could be said, but she paused with her hand on the driver’s door.

“I read in the paper that you’re done coaching for the year.”

“That’s right. I don’t belong on a football field right now, Chelsea.”

“Your brother,” she said, “would have kicked your ass over your shoulders for that.”

Those were the last words she said to him before she got into the old Corvette and drove away. Kent took his wife and children home, and then he went to Adam’s house, alone, to tell his sister that her brother was dead, and explain how he had gone, and why.

Matt Byers coached the team through the week. Kent did not make any appearances at practice. He wanted the news crews to go away, to leave his boys alone, and his presence there would not help. He stayed in a hotel with Beth and the kids until Thursday, when they finally ventured home. The cameras were gone. Some neighbors came by, but most people kept their distance, gave the family some space.

“You’ve got to be at the game,” Beth told him. “You know that.”

He knew it. They went together and sat in the stands, the first time he’d been in the stands for a Chambers game since he was a child, and watched as Byers used a run-heavy offense and a blitz-heavy defense to guide the Cardinals to a 14–10 halftime lead over the Center Point Saxons, a program known more for its marching band than its football team until this season. Lorell tried to connect with Colin Mears on two plays, both unsuccessful. He did not go back to him in the second half, and though
the offense couldn’t generate anything, the defense played brilliantly, giving up only a field goal to preserve a 14–13 win and earn a berth in the state championship game in Massillon.

The next week was supposed to be the same. He met with his coaching staff on Sunday and said that they’d done great work, and that he offered nothing but a distraction and that he needed to be with his family and not his football team. They told him they understood, and he told them that he knew they would get a win, and that was supposed to be the end of it. He’d sit in the stands in Massillon, that hallowed ground he’d dreamed of all year, and he’d watch from a distance.

On Monday evening, though, the doorbell rang and Kent went to answer it expecting a reporter and found Colin Mears instead.

“Can I have a minute, Coach?”

Kent didn’t want to give him a minute. He didn’t want anyone in his home except for his family, but of course he could not say that, so he let the boy in and listened as Colin told him that Kent needed to return to the team.

“I appreciate it,” Kent said. “I do. But right now is not a time for me to be involved with football. You need to understand that.”

He realized as he said it that if anyone understood, it was of course this seventeen-year-old boy.

“I’ll be there to support you,” Kent said. “You know that. But, son, I just don’t have much to contribute right now.”

“You’ve seen me play,” Colin said. “You’ve seen exactly what I’ve contributed to these games. Nothing. But, Coach? I didn’t quit on anybody.”

“I’m not quitting on you,” Kent said, but it was a hard position to defend. He’d chosen the stands over the field. It was the right
choice, he thought, but how to make that clear to Colin, he was not sure.

“I promised Rachel we’d win it,” Colin said. “You told me that didn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t.”

“When you promised me you’d be there regardless, did that matter?”

The boy was bristling with anger. It went beyond anger, actually. Betrayal, that was the word. Kent looked at him, told him he’d consider the request, and took him to the door. When he closed it, Beth was waiting.

“You heard?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“You told him you need to be with your family now,” Beth said. “But that team is part of your family, Kent.”

And so he returned. He was at the field when the team arrived for Tuesday’s practice, and nobody said a word to him, not coaches or players, they just waited to hear what he’d come to say.

“I’m not in a very good place right now,” he told his team. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be to you. But I’d appreciate it if you all would let me be around to watch you finish what you started.”

He let Byers run practice, and he helped with the position drills, commenting on technical details, not saying much, just observing. That night he watched video for the first time. Their opponent, Center Grove, was very good. They had a fine quarterback and skilled receivers and they spread teams out and scored lots of points. Their number-one receiver was a great route runner with sure hands, and their number two, a kid named Shepherd,
was not so reliable, but he was fast. He could fly, and that threat opened the field. Kent spent an extra hour watching him.

On Wednesday he called Colin aside and asked if he’d watched video from both sides of the ball. Of course Colin had. He watched everything.

“If we needed you to,” Kent said, “could you play press coverage on Shepherd? Could you stick with him?”

Colin stared at him. “You mean at cornerback?”

Kent nodded. “He’s going to give us trouble with his speed. I know you can run with him, and we don’t have anyone else who can. But are you able to play the position if we asked you to go man-to-man on a few plays? Be honest.”

“I know all the routes,” Colin said. He was giving the idea careful consideration, and he nodded. “I can play it.”

“We might never use you,” Kent said. “But it’s an idea.”

They were three minutes into the second quarter when Colin Mears caught his first pass—from the opposing quarterback. The game was tied at seven, and it was the third time they’d rotated him in to play press coverage as a cornerback. Kent was limiting him to down-and-distance situations where he knew they would pass. The first time he chanced it, they ran a draw instead of passing, but Colin flew to the ball without hesitation, coming in wild but fast, laying himself out to assist on the tackle. It took self-sacrifice to hit like that; you couldn’t offer contact without taking some yourself. The next time he lined up at corner, they tried a pass to the tight end, and then, on the third attempt, Center Grove finally tested him. They sent Shepherd on a go route, pure speed down the sideline, and the quarterback put it out in front where only he could get it.

That was the idea, at least. But Colin was with him, it was speed on speed, and while the ball was in the air, he pulled a full
stride ahead of Shepherd, eyes up, a receiver’s instincts taking over now, forgetting his man to play the ball.

Just knock it down,
Kent thought. That was all he needed to do, just knock it down.

Instead, he caught it. Pivoted and looked surprised, then saw open field ahead of him, and took off. Brought it back to midfield before he was tackled. On the sidelines the kids mobbed him, and Colin was smiling and Kent realized it had been five weeks since he’d seen a smile on the boy’s face. It would not last, but it was there, and he was glad.

“Reward one, risk zero,” Byers said in Kent’s headset.

“My brother’s idea,” Kent answered, pacing down the sideline. The headset went quiet then, none of the other coaches sure what to say, but that was fine. Kent said, “Let’s make them pay, gentlemen,” and then it was football once more.

They led 14–7 at the half, and early in the third quarter, Lorell tried a pass to Colin on a slant route. The Center Grove fans seemed confused by the roar that went up from the Chambers crowd when he caught it for a simple gain of seven yards. He caught another just two plays later, and then Lorell scored on a run, and it was 21–7 and Byers asked Kent if he wanted to try Mears at cornerback again.

“I think we’re good,” Kent said.

It was never a ballgame in the second half. The final score was 35–10.

Beth met him at midfield, the kids at either side, and Kent said, “Why are you crying?” but then her arms were around him and he was crying, too. She reached up and pulled the brim of his hat down to shield them, her face pressed against his, her tears on his. She held him for a long time, and then she leaned back and wiped his face clean with her hand and said, “Go talk to your team.”

He went to them. They circled at midfield, the way his teams had in so many season-ending games before, but this one was
different. He did not need to tell them where the victory was tonight, where they might find it. The trophy was making its way through the ranks, everyone wanting a hand on it, and Kent watched and tried to prepare the right words.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I know this feels like a moment of pure celebration, and celebrate we will, but first I need to…”

He stopped then.
Remind you,
that’s what he’d been about to say,
remind, remind, prepare, prepare.
But they had been reminded and they had been prepared and tonight they had won. Tomorrow might bring different things their way, but tonight they had won.

“I need to thank you,” he said. That was all he had for them, tonight.

The prison occupies just over eleven hundred acres, most of that covered with pavement or buildings, tall fences and razor wire protecting the perimeter. It’s a bleak place on the most beautiful of days, but in February, beneath gray sky and above week-old snow, it’s particularly foreboding. Hundreds of people make their way to and from the brick buildings each day for work; more than two thousand remain inside. For them it is home.

The man and the boy are just visitors. The man is familiar with the place, the boy is not. They check in, pass a security screening, and follow a corrections officer down a winding corridor and through a series of doors that lock behind them as they pass. The boy, tall and lean and agile, looks at each door as it closes. The man asks him if he’s certain he wants to do this, to be here.

The boy says he is.

All you have to do is listen, the man says. You don’t have to say a word unless you want to.

Let’s see how it goes, the boy tells him.

They’re through a final door then, and in this room a group of
men in orange uniforms are seated on plastic chairs in all directions. The corrections officer addresses them, says that the coach is here. The man asks that they call him Kent, not Coach. He says that he’s not here to talk about football, that there are other things to discuss today. He’s here to tell them about his family, about his sister and about his brother and about himself, here to tell them that they are not so far apart, these men behind the bars and the razor wire and the man who has earned his fame on a football field. They are not so far apart at all, and it is important to know that.

I would like to tell you, he says, about the time I went to kill a man.

I would like to tell you what I have learned.

This book would never have been written without the generous support of the Bloomington High School North football program. To Coach Scott Bless and the rest of his staff, my deepest thanks for allowing me to be part of the program for the 2011 season, and for enduring all of my questions.

Tyler Abel deserves the lion’s share of thanks, as he both facilitated my contact with the Bloomington North program and was forced to hear by far the most questions. He helped carry the book from an idea to a reality, and for his insight and friendship I am deeply indebted.

Thanks also to all of the players from that team, who provided a wonderful and dramatic season for me as I conducted my research. Nice conversion in overtime down in Columbus, guys.

Don Johnson of Trace Investigations was, as always, an invaluable resource, as was George Lichman of the Rocky River Police Department, and Gideon Pine was a tremendous help on the research front. Anything I got right is a credit to people like them.

On the book front, it’s the usual suspects, but their critical roles cannot be overstated. To Michael Pietsch, David Young, Sabrina Callahan, Heather Fain, Vanessa Kehren, Victoria Matsui, Miriam Parker, Tracy Williams, Eve Rabinovits, and countless others at Little, Brown, thanks for the tremendous support you have provided these books. The Inkwell agenting team, David Hale Smith and Richard Pine and Kimberly Witherspoon in particular, also deserve grateful recognition, as do Angela Cheng Caplan and Lawrence Rose.

Deepest gratitude is reserved for all of the early readers who made it into something better than I could have on my own.

And for Christine. Always.