Chapter 28 The Night Before

Chapter 28 The Night Before

Cole

I could not sleep the night before the game.

I had turned the light off at ten and lay in the dark run plays in my head.

My brain ran through them and then jumped to the scouts, then jumped to my mom getting home in the morning in her scrubs, standing at the counter eating toast because sitting down took more energy than she had left after a twelve hour shift.

At twelve thirty I got up.
The house was dark except for the stove light and a thin strip of light under the kitchen door.

I pushed it open.

Wren was at the table with her notebook open in front of her and a bowl of cereal pushed to one side that she had clearly stopped eating halfway through. She was running her finger slowly under something she had written. She looked up when I came in.

We looked at each other.

She did not close the notebook, she did not ask what I was doing up. She just looked at me and waited.
I went to the sink and filled a glass.

Then I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.

"You can keep writing," I said.

"I was reading it back." She set the pen down. "It is the same thing."

"Is it."

"Reading it back is writing in the other direction." She looked at the page. "You are doing the same thing right now in your head with the plays."

I looked at her. "How do you know that."

"Jake told me. He said you always do it the night before a game and you cannot help it."

"He talks too much."

"He talks the exact right amount," she said. "He just talks about the wrong subjects sometimes."

I drank some water. The kitchen was quiet around us. The refrigerator hummed, outside a car passed slowly on the street and then it was quiet again.

"Big day tomorrow," she said.

"Yeah."

"Are you ready."

"I think so." I set the glass down. "I can usually tell the night before if my head is in the right place. Tonight I cannot tell."

"What is in your head."

"Everything."

"Name one," she said.

"My mom," I said. "She is working tonight. She will not be there tomorrow."

"I know."

"She found out the game got moved up.”

"She thinks about it all the time," Wren said. "I can tell when she calls."

I looked up. "She calls you."

"To check on the kids. Sometimes we just talk." She shrugged once. "She loves you very much. She is trying hard not to make it feel like pressure."

"It feels like pressure anyway."

"Yes." She looked at the page. "But that is because you love her back. That is all it is. It is not the scholarship she is scared of losing."

I did not say anything for a moment.

"Jake asked me if you stare at the ceiling the night before games," she said.

"What did you tell him."

"I told him I did not know. He said he stares at the ceiling before tests and wanted to know if it was a family thing."

"It is definitely a family thing."

"That is what I told him." She turned her pen over slowly. "He is proud of you. He does not know how to say it out loud so he asks questions instead."

"He is ten."

"He is ten and he is paying very close attention." She set the pen down. "Mia made a sign for tomorrow. She has been working on it since Tuesday."

I looked at the table.

"That is not pressure," Wren said quietly. "That is love, it feels the same from the inside but it is different."

"How is it different."

She thought for a second. "Pressure says you have to earn it. Love says you already have it and they are scared of losing it."

She looked at the page. "The feeling lives in the same place in your chest. That is why it is hard to tell them apart, but the reason is different."

I held that.

"You are very good at saying the actual thing," I said.

"I write." She almost smiled. "It helps you figure out which words mean what."

"Does it always work."

"No," she said. "Sometimes I write the whole thing out and it still does not make sense, but at least then I know which part is the problem."

"What are you writing tonight."

She looked at the notebook.
"Something complicated."

"Is it going to make sense."

"I do not know yet."

I nodded. I did not push it.
Twenty minutes passed after that. Neither of us moved or said anything that needed to be said.

The cereal bowl sat between us. The notebook was open but she was not writing in it. Neither of us was doing anything in particular except sitting in the same room and not making it into something.
I had not had that in a long time.

"You should try to sleep," she said finally. "Even a couple of hours is better than nothing."

"I know."

She looked at me directly. "You are ready, Cole. The part that belongs to you. You have had it for a long time."
I held her gaze for a second.

"Okay," I said.

She nodded once. She got up and took the cereal bowl to the sink and rinsed it. I sat at the table a moment longer and then I stood too.

We left the kitchen at the same time. We walked up the stairs in the quiet of the house and at the top she turned down the hall toward her room and I turned toward mine.

I layed on my bed.

I thought about my mom standing at the counter eating toast. I thought about Mia's sign in blue marker. I thought about Jake asking whether staring at ceilings before important things was a family trait and already having decided that it was.

That was all love. I had been carrying it like pressure because from the inside they felt the same.

I closed my eyes.

Tomorrow was the game and the scouts and everything that had to go right.

After that I was going to knock on the door.

Three things in that order. That was the whole plan.

I stayed still.