“I’m sorry.”
“We did normal, wild teenager things, like pool hopping in the community pool, taking the train to jump off the rocks into the Harlem River where the waterway meets Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or stealing a bottle from her grandmother’s liquor cabinet and riding the subways while passing it back and forth in a brown paper bag. Teenage shit. But Willow was always pushing for more. It seemed to get worse every time her mother would reappear. We lived in apartment buildings next to each other in Brooklyn. They were close together, but not attached. There was maybe three, three-and-a-half feet between our flat rooftops. When her mother would reappear, Willow would come to my apartment, jumping from roof to roof. She’d straddle the jump, not thinking twice about the thirty-foot drop to concrete below her. She’d go from being wild to dangerous.”
There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach listening to him talk about Willow. For so many reasons. I’d met Drew around the same age as he’d met Willow. I knew how my story ended, and now I knew his wasn’t going to be pretty either.
“I could spend hours telling you the shit we went through together over the years. But I’d rather fast forward and give you the Cliffs Notes version so you can understand why I lost it today.”
“Okay.”
“By the time we were seniors in high school, Willow had followed in her mother’s footsteps. She’d found drugs and quickly went from experimenting to chasing a high on a daily basis.” Brody let out a humorless laugh. “You should see the looks you get riding the subway at two a.m. with an eighteen-year-old you just pulled out of a crack house and a seventy-year-old woman in a bathrobe and curlers. There were nights when I’d have to toss Willow over my shoulder because she couldn’t walk, and poor Marlene would be right next to me.”
Brody paused again, and his next words hit me hard. “I hated her so damn much, but I couldn’t make myself stop loving her.”
I laced my fingers together with his and squeezed.
“I was recruited by some of the best colleges in the country, but I wanted to stay local. Senior year, I’d narrowed it down to Syracuse and University of Georgia. My dad was pushing for me to be a Bulldog and we all knew why, although we didn’t talk about it. When Willow disappeared for six weeks right before I had to commit to a school, I was so pissed off at her, I committed to Georgia. After I left, I kept in touch with Marlene and kept tabs on Willow, but I started to move on.”
“That’s understandable. It sounds like you’d already done so much.”
“The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I came home. Marlene had had a mild heart attack, and it seemed to have woken Willow up. She was clean and even had a part-time job at a music store that she loved. We spent a lot of time together, and I hated to go back to school when August rolled around. I felt like I had the girl back I’d fallen in love with, and I was afraid she’d disappear again when I left. Marlene sensed I was considering not going back, so she decided she and Willow were going to fly down for homecoming weekend to see me play. That way I was going to see her again in only three weeks.”
Brody paused again. “I promise. I’m finally getting to the point of dumping all this shit on you.”
“Take your time. We’re in no rush.”
He nodded. “Anyway, two days after I got back to school and we started practicing again, Willow stopped answering her phone. That was never a good sign. I talked to Marlene, and she said Willow hadn’t come home all weekend. We were practicing six hours a day, NFL scouts were starting to come to practices, and all I wanted to do was go back home. But I couldn’t. Eventually, Willow surfaced again, most likely because she had run out of money, and the next three weeks she played on her grandmother’s weaknesses. I hadn’t actually expected her to show up for homecoming, but somehow Marlene got her on the plane. She meant well. She thought getting her away from her dealers and back near me might help. But scoring on a college campus is a heck of a lot easier than some people might think. After homecoming, Willow disappeared, and Marlene and I spent a week looking for her, but the drug addicts I threatened to help me find her were more scared of losing their source than they were of me beating the shit out of them. People with nothing aren’t easy to find.”
I was afraid to ask how she eventually turned up, but since we hadn’t gotten to Colin yet, I knew the worst was yet to come. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I do. I owe you an explanation and an apology. If you’ll have me when I’m done explaining, I hope to give you a long, multiple apology.” Even in the middle of an obviously painful story, Brody was . . . Brody. It made me smile, for the first time since the bleachers this afternoon.