“Why?”
I turn away. The road is deserted, and the pines are becoming thicker. “Chess is a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Look where it got me.”
“It got you here. To me.”
Blood rushes to my cheeks, but his tone is matter-of-fact, not suggestive. He doesn’t mean it like that. He means . . . I don’t even know.
“It was you who saw him, wasn’t it?” Nolan asks. I look back at him, puzzled.
“What?”
“Your father. Something happened between him and that woman— that arbiter at the Olympics. You found out. Your mom kicked him out. I’m assuming you were estranged for a few years. And later his accident happened.”
I straighten. The seat belt tightens into my sweater. “How— how do you know? When did you— ?”
“I didn’t. But I remembered some rumors going around the tournament circuit at the time. About Archie Greenleaf. The rest . . . I just guessed.”
“You guessed? How?”
“Little things. Your reaction at the Olympics. You obviously love chess but talk yourself into thinking that it’s a loathsome thing. You feel responsible for your family, not just your sisters but your mother, too.” His tone is even, idle, like he’s reading a boring textbook to the rest of the class. “You constantly act like you’re guilty of something awful. Like you deserve nothing but scraps for yourself.”
Me. The boring textbook— it’s me.
“Because I am guilty,” I blurt out. Surprising myself. It’s not something I’ve verbalized out loud to anyone before. But if I hadn’t told Mom about Heather Turcotte, if Dad hadn’t left home, if he hadn’t had a reason to be driving drunk at 3:00 a.m. . . . If. If.
If.
“Did you know,” he says conversationally, “that I was the reason my grandfather was institutionalized?”
“What does this . . . No. I didn’t.”
“He’d been acting weird for a while. He’d say and do really inappropriate stuff, sometimes in public. My parents had gotten wind of it, but I think they just chalked it up to my grandfather being old. And I was staying with him a lot at the time, so I covered for him when I could. I honestly thought he just needed to sleep more or some shit like that. But then . . . it was his birthday. I went to his apartment, the one you’ve been to. I walked upstairs— same doorman as now, he doesn’t give a shit— and let myself in. I had a present for him, a chess set I’d made. Nine months of woodworking.”
He signals right and takes the exit. We must be home. Nearly. “We’d met the day before. We met every single day, but this time he didn’t recognize me. Or he did, but thought I had bad intentions. I’ll never know, I figure. He wasn’t a violent man, but he had a knife. I saw him take it out of the block and thought he wanted to . . . chop celery? I can’t fucking remember. But instead he stared into my eyes, ran at me, and the cut was deep. I needed stitches, which meant going to the hospital, which meant filing a report, and that was it. My father had the ammo he needed to lock him up. Said it was for the best, and maybe it was, but that’s not why he was doing it. He’d always hated his father for caring more about chess than he ever did about him.”
His voice is clinical. Like he’s turned this story in his mind so much, told it to himself so often, it’s a memorized thing by now. He thinks about it every day. Every hour. I know this, because I’m in his head. “I’m the one who gave my father that power. And my grandfather died in that institution, medicated to his eyeballs. It’s the last thing he wanted, and it’s something I have to live with every second of every day. So when you talk about guilt— ”
“What— no. No.” I twist toward him. The seat belt digs into my breast. “It’s not your fault. You did what you could, considering that you were— How old were you?”
“I was fourteen. How old were you, when you saw your father?”
I close my eyes. Because it’s not the same. At all. But he makes it sound like it might be, and I do not deserve to be let off the hook and—
Suddenly I am furious. Explosively, incandescently furious.
He— he manipulated me. He pretended to self-disclose, and instead turned me into . . . whatever the hell this is. He sacrificed his queen to checkmate me, and how dare he? How dare he come into my home and analyze my family as though we were a Morphy game?
“Fuck you, Nolan.”
His expression is indecipherable and unsurprised. “Did I say something untrue?”
“Fuck you. What do you even know about families?”
“Is that the problem? That what I said is true?”
“Stop trying to— to trap me. To checkmate me. You might want to play chess against me more than anything, but it doesn’t give you the right to— ”
“Not more than anything,” he murmurs with a lingering glance. I ignore him, enraged.
“Is that what’s happening? You want to win against me so bad that you’ll score points however you can? Tic-tac- toe? Taking cheap shots at my family?”
“It’s not— ”
“Nobody got stabbed in my family. I could have kept my mouth shut, and things would have been fine. It could have been my secret to keep, my burden, and no one would have known or suffered for it. Mom would have had health insurance, and my sisters would have had the family they deserved, and Dad would be alive— ” I stop. Take a deep, shuddering breath. “You don’t know me, or my sisters, or my mom, and you most certainly did not know my dad. So don’t try to pretend you and I are similar in any way, or like what I did is comparable to what happened to you.”
“You’re not being fair to either of us,” he says calmly. Maybe he’s right, but I’m past caring.
“You know what?” The seat belt cuts into my throat. I’m overflowing with anger now, anger at . . . at Nolan. Let’s say Nolan. “Screw this shit. We’re going to play. Tonight. We’re going to play this stupid chess game, and you’ll quit the armchair psychology.”
“I— ” He stops, registering what I said. His throat works. “You’re not serious.”
“If you’re not interested— ”
“I am.” He sounds eager. Young. “I am.” Then he’s silent, as though he’s afraid to spook me, that I’ll change my mind. He barely looks at me until after the car is parked, the passenger door slammed closed, our coats tossed in a corner of the living room. We usually work across from each other, but he sets the board on the coffee table, and we sit side by side on the couch. Because this is not an analysis of someone else’s game, and it needs to be clear.
It’s midnight. The heat has been off for hours, but I don’t feel cold. “Okay?” he asks, serious, making sure this game is consensual.
You know what wasn’t consensual? The stuff you said about my dad.
“You can be White,” I say, cutting, expecting— wanting him to be offended.