But what I force myself to do instead of feeling sorry for myself about losing the ability to throw a football is keep reminding myself that Gideon lost a lot more that night, and so did his family.
Remind myself that I’m here and he’s not, even if I never do playfootball or baseball ever again or get through another day without pain.
One day when Taylor McCarter Webb is making one of her visits to the rehabilitation center, I say to her, “I don’t even know who I am without football.”
She looks prettier than ever, honey-blond hair hanging to her shoulders and blue-green eyes with so much intelligence in them, and maybe even wisdom. When she smiles, I want to feel better about things but can’t.
“Can’t lie, pal,” she says. “Football never made me love you more than I did when we were seven years old.”
“More or less?”
“There’s the old Silas,” she says.
“More like just old these days.”
She breathes in deeply and runs a hand through her hair. Takes another, deeper breath, as if gathering her strength, working her way up to a confession: “When they said you died that night, I wanted to die.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Would have had to happen overmydead body,” Taylor says.
There is another silence between us in the spacious, sunny room they’ve given me, because at least to the people running the rehab facility, I’m still Silas Tucker.
Finally, she says, “However this deal works out, you need to know that you’re still going to be you when you get out of here, whether you ever play another down of football or not.”
“I know that,” I say.
We’re both lying.
EIGHT
TWO MONTHS LATER
THE UNC CHANCELLOR himself had called in May with the invitation.
As proud as I was of my grade-point average and graduating with honors, I had politely declined to take the walk with the rest of the graduating seniors, including the ones who’d been my teammates.
Even six weeks after the accident, I still wasn’t up to it. It wasn’t the walk I wanted to avoid—I didn’t want to be out in public yet.
It’s one of the reasons why I hadn’t granted a single interview, no matter how many people had reached out, in an almost endless manner of backdoor ways, some of them slap-dick ways, including trying to go through EJ, who slam-dunked every single one of them.
What I’ve mostly been doing while I’ve tried to get better is read. Just because my mind is still working fine.
I’ve always been a reader, mostly because my father—a learned man—was bound and determined, like it was one of his missions in life, to make me more than a jock. So I’d already fallen in love with reading and books before he’d left this earth.
Even when I’d been ten and eleven years old, he’d created a bookclub for just the two of us, so’s we’d read the same book at the same time and discuss it as we went along, him asking me questions and me doing the same with him.
“You know what’s just about the best kind of big game in this world?” he told me one time. “Page one and chapter one of a book you really want to read.”
There was always a book in my locker or hanging out of my backpack or when we were on the team plane, going to a game or coming back from one.
“You lose another bet, 109?” my teammates would ride me. “No way that book is for school.”
“Trying to improve my brain,” I’d say.
And one of them, usually Gideon, would say something like “Don’t that hurt?”
What I couldn’t properly explain was that, more than anything, books were a way for me to still connect to my father.
