“I am not in Omaha, Amy,” Brian answered, and the heavy gym door at the far end of the field house swung shut behind him with a boom. He stood in the dim light of the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his athletic jacket. He looked the way he always looked, tall and tan and kind, a man who knew the name of every freshman in the building. “I turned around at Kearney. You have been sharing your location with me since October, remember? I saw your car at the school and I got worried.” He took a slow step toward me. “Why do you have the locker open, honey?”
I stood very still in front of locker 23 with the photograph of the missing bolts in my left hand and the gym bag of Tim at my feet. I had a decision to make, and I had about four seconds to make it. I decided to lie. “It is silly,” I said, and I laughed, a small, tinny sound. “I was looking for the old playbook of Tim, for Cole. I thought it might be in his locker. It is only a pile of sweat socks.” Brian smiled. He kept walking. “Amy,” he said, “that is the first time in a year you have lied to me, and you are no good at it.”
I had my right hand in my coat pocket, on my phone, and I had pressed the button to call my son. Cole had a weight session in the new gym across the lot, at nine on Saturdays, with every lineman on the roster, and I prayed he would feel his phone buzz. Brian stopped ten feet away. The light from the high windows fell on his face in long gold stripes, and I saw, for the first time, how tired he was beneath the tan. “Amy,” he said softly, “let me explain about the booster money.”
A whistle blown in the right season can call a whole family home from the wrong game.
He explained for three minutes. It was a rambling, miserable confession that came out in tangles. The booster club fund, three hundred and ten thousand dollars raised over eleven years by bake sales and car washes, had been his private account since the divorce. He had meant to repay it. He gambled, at first a little, then a lot, at the casino in Council Bluffs. Tim, who kept the books for the club as a favor, found the missing money in September and gave Brian the weekend to return it. “Your husband was the most honest man I ever knew,” Brian said. “It made him impossible to live with.”
“You took the bolts out,” I said. My voice sounded like someone else. “On Thursday. You knew he went up to check the press box before every home game.” Brian did not answer. He did not have to. In the distance, I thought I heard a rumbling, like thunder rolling down a hill. “Amy,” he said, “I never wanted him hurt. I wanted him to take a fall that would put him out for a few weeks. Long enough to move the money. I did not know the railing would go. I did not know the bolts would let him fall forty feet.” His voice broke.
The rumbling grew louder. Brian turned his head, puzzled. Then the great steel doors at the front of the field house burst open and sixteen enormous boys in gray practice shirts came pouring through, led by my son in a hooded sweatshirt, with his phone still clutched in his hand. They fanned out across the floor without a word, shoulder to shoulder, and in ten seconds they had made a wall between Brian and the exits. These were boys Tim had coached. They knew exactly who stood in front of them. Not one of them spoke.
Brian looked at the line of faces. He looked at Cole. “Son,” he began. “Coach,” Cole said, very quietly, “I am not your son.” Brian opened his mouth and closed it again. He lifted both hands slowly into the air, like a man who has been dealt a hand he cannot play. At that moment the side door opened and Police Chief Dorothy Ames walked in with two officers. She had been in the parking lot for ten minutes. Cole had called her before he called the boys.
The booster fund was recovered in part. Brian was convicted of manslaughter, theft, and tampering with evidence, and received twenty years in the state penitentiary at Lincoln. At the sentencing, the judge read aloud the letter of Tim, the one tucked inside a whistle, in the stern voice of a man who rarely cries in court. The courtroom was silent when he finished. The three hundred thousand dollars that remained went into a trust for the school, and the football field was renamed Hollister Field before the next season began.
The old bleachers came down in the spring. The district built a new grandstand with steel rails and a code inspector who checked every bolt twice. On opening night, Cole walked out onto the turf as captain, in the black and gold, with the whistle of his father on a lanyard around his neck. The stands were full. When the announcer read the name of Tim, sixteen hundred people rose to their feet, and I stood with them, alone at the end of the bench, and I covered my mouth with a hand that would not stop shaking.
He blew the whistle once, before the kickoff, a long clear note that rolled out over the lights and the frosty air. I closed my eyes. For one moment I was twenty seven again, in a faded cotton dress, with my husband handing me a lemonade at a Friday night game. Then I opened them. My son was grinning at me from the sideline, with that crooked tooth he got from his father, and I raised my hand, and I waved, and I thought that grief can sound a great deal like a whistle.
