“I’m not cut off from the world.”
“Lauren, you’re a ghost. I couldn’t find you for years. You don’t exist on social media. You don’t keep in touch with anyone from high school or college.”
Lauren leaned on the metal railing and looked out at the ocean. “So how did you find me?”
The question had been eating at her since the day he’d shown up at the restaurant, but she’d been afraid to ask—afraid that someone she knew had betrayed her.
“I was at a lecture where a bioengineer from the Cam Lab at Stanford spoke. He’d developed a special mouth guard that helped track the force of injury in football players. The Polaris Foundation was listed in the program.”
She looked at him. “I purposefully didn’t use Rory’s name in the foundation to keep it under the radar. How did you make the connection?”
“It was a hunch. I’d just been watching interviews with his mother. She showed me photos of the dog.”
Polaris. Rory had loved that dog. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Well, what can I say? You’re good.”
“Tell me about the foundation,” he said.
“I knew he suffered after those hits to the head. I searched the Internet for answers that his team doctors weren’t giving me. I joined forums on concussions and sports. But when he was alive, no one we knew was talking about it in a real way. He just wanted to play. He just wanted to be great.” She sighed. “I give money to research, but I don’t know. Sometimes it feels worse to do too little too late than to do nothing at all.”
“It’s not too little too late. It means something,” Matt said.
She shrugged, unconvinced.
“You’re lucky that you love what you do,” she said. “I used to want to be a journalist. I remember how exciting it was to chase a story, to feel like you were about to put all the pieces together.”
“Do you ever think of getting back into it?”
She shook her head. “Not really.” The truth was, she missed it. But somehow, leaving behind her life with Rory had turned into leaving behind her life in general. And she had no idea how to find her way back to it.
“Well, documentary film is journalism,” he said. “And you’re helping me.”
She nodded, and their eyes locked. He reached for her hand. The touch lasted just a few seconds before she pulled away. But it was enough to set her heart racing, so much so that when the first firework flared seconds later, she barely noticed it.
It had been an impulse to reach for her hand. As soon as Matt saw the surprised look on her face, felt the quickness of her pulling away, he regretted it. He considered saying he was sorry but thought that would make a big deal out of it. Better to just move on. Mercifully, the fireworks started as if on cue.
Lauren stared at the sky with childlike wonder. It surprised him how happy it made him to see her smiling, enjoying herself.
After the fireworks peaked, a dizzying climax of sparks and booms that made it impossible to talk or think beyond the sensory overload in the sky, Lauren said, “I used to hate the fireworks. Stephanie would always tease me.”
“I’m surprised more kids don’t get freaked out. It’s loud. In New York, we’re farther away from the action, so it’s less intense. It’s really immediate here.”
The tide of people began walking back to the streets, streaming off the boardwalk in all directions. She looked at her phone. “I should get going.”
“It’s still early,” Matt said. It wasn’t that early, actually. He just wasn’t ready to say good-bye; he gave himself a pass for having that feeling, rationalizing that it was for the film. The more she talked to him off camera, the more she would be comfortable talking to him on camera. Still, he couldn’t think of one logical way to prolong the evening.
She leaned over the railing, staring at the ocean. He stood next to her quietly, wondering if there was a way to suggest they go for a drink without sounding like, well, like he was asking her out for a drink. There wasn’t.
“I can walk you back to your house,” he offered. After that, he would probably hit Robert’s for a round or two. The place would be packed, and the energy would help him let off enough steam to get to sleep.
“Tell me something,” she said suddenly. “What was it like over there? In Iraq?”
Surprised, he turned to face her, his back pressing on the rail. She didn’t look at him, her eyes fixed on the distance, as if the answers to her questions were out there. “Probably exactly the way you imagine.”
“I don’t want to imagine. I spent enough time trying to imagine. Rory’s letters made it sound like it was a lot of hours patrolling neighborhoods, not much happening. I always felt like he was sugarcoating it for me. He didn’t want me to worry. I feel like I missed the last chapter of his life.”
“Well, every person’s experience over there is different.”
“Did you talk to any of the guys who were over there with him?”
Matt nodded. “I interviewed a few guys from his battalion.”
“Did you talk to Pete Downing?”
“I did.”
“I need to see the interview,” she said.
“We can do that at some point.”
“Now,” she said. “Tonight.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
She stood next to Matt’s desk while he booted up his laptop and she felt herself shaking. Pete Downing had been one of the last people to see Rory alive. Pete Downing’s voice might have been one of the last Rory heard on earth.
Above the desk, dozens of index cards were taped in even rows. On the top left, the card read Opening image. A blue Post-it note covered the wording on the next card, but she saw one that read Theme stated and one with the name of the coach of the LA Kings.
“What’s all of this?” she asked, pointing to a small binder filled with plastic sheets and small squares that looked like the games in Ethan’s Nintendo DS player.
“Those are drives holding all my interviews. I save them to my laptop but I keep the originals just in case.”
Matt dragged a rustic wooden bench from the window to the desk so they could sit side by side.
He hit Play. A face she hadn’t seen in four years. At the bottom, the words PFC Pete Downing, 2/75 Rangers. She braced herself to hear his voice, the voice that had tried valiantly to comfort her in the days following Rory’s death.
Off camera, Matt said, “Can you tell us, in general, the duties of a U.S. Ranger?”
“As a U.S. Ranger, we engage in combat search and rescue, airborne and air-assault operations, special reconnaissance, intelligence and counterintelligence, personnel recovery and hostage rescue, joint special operations, and counterterrorism.”
“What was your first impression of Rory Kincaid?”
Pete Downing smiled.
“I expected Rory to be a typical arrogant jock. Full of himself. But he wasn’t like that at all. He was confident but humble. He kept his head down. He came in as a private, which in civilian terms is basically a nobody. I don’t think he found it easy to take orders. Far more than it was for most of us, this was a challenge for him but he did the job he came there to do.”
“Did he display leadership qualities?”
“Rory had an inner drive and focus,” he said, looking thoughtful. “It gave us all more confidence about what we were doing.”
“Would you describe him as just one of the guys?”
“Yes and no,” Downing said. “There’s a locker-room atmosphere when you’re over there. Rory was kind of above all that.”
“Did that ever make guys resent him?”
“Just the opposite—we looked up to him. And let’s put it this way: I went in for selfish reasons. I wanted money for college. I wanted to feel like I was somebody. But Rory already had money. He already was somebody. He was there because he wanted to be there, in service of something bigger than himself.”
“Can you tell me what happened on December 28, 2012?”
&nb
sp; Downing nodded. He sat back in his chair, adjusting his tie. He took a minute before saying, “It was an ordinary day. Routine patrol looking for IEDs. We delivered water to a neighborhood near Route Irish.”
“And Route Irish is?”
“A twelve-kilometer stretch of highway connecting the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport. It also connects other areas. So, like I said, it was a routine mission. There were two vehicles working in tandem. I was teamed up with Corporal Kincaid for the day, but toward the end, one of our guys in the other group got sick. I was sent to join that group to make sure they had enough hands on deck.”
Lauren knew this part of the story. Pete had said that he hadn’t wanted to leave Rory, that being around Rory always made him feel safe. She wished he hadn’t told her. The irony was painful.
“After ten hours, we had instructions to head back. Corporal Kincaid’s vehicle was a few meters ahead of ours. The light wasn’t great—we rolled out a little later than we should have. We hadn’t been driving more than ten minutes when the IED went off. I don’t remember the moments directly after the explosion. But at some point we got out of our vehicle to help, ah…to see what happened up ahead. I saw right away…Corporal Kincaid on the ground. There was a lot of blood. It was clear that, uh, he had been killed.”
Lauren stood up. Matt paused the footage.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You wanted to hear—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s fine. This is not news to me. Pete was with me a lot in the days following Rory’s death. I asked him a million questions. I kept thinking that if I heard every detail, it would somehow make sense. I guess I’m still waiting for it to make sense. It never will.”
“Lauren, there aren’t any answers from his time in the military. If you’re looking to make sense of it all, you have to go back.”
She looked at him. “Back to what?”
Matt closed the Pete Downing interview and pulled up a new file. Lauren sat down.
A skating rink filled Matt’s computer screen. In the foreground, a blue-eyed, thirty-something-year-old man.
Matt turned to her. “This is John Tramm, former assistant coach to the Flyers. Current coach of the Villanova men’s ice hockey team.”
Matt pressed Play.
“There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Nothing overt, of course. But hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”
Lauren closed her eyes, suddenly back in Rory’s first apartment in LA, his rookie season. “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
“Jesus, Lauren. Now you’re a doctor?”
Matt, on audio, said something, snapping her attention back to the screen. “I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players.”
The coach answered, “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE. One of the first to be studied was one of our guys, Larry Zeidel. He was a Flyer. Nickname was Rock. A great guy—everyone loved him. Then he retires and suffers from debilitating headaches. Starts having a bad temper, gets violent, makes crazy financial decisions. Impulsive decisions. His entire life fell apart.”
Lauren nodded, tears sliding down her face.
Matt closed the file and clicked on the next interview.
“I want to show you my conversation with a neurologist.”
A doctor’s office, plaques on the wall, a neat desk. The neurologist had white hair and a very direct gaze. Again, off camera, Matt led the subject of the interview through questions. This time, there were visuals, slides of the brain, normal and diseased side by side. Lauren leaned forward, barely breathing.
The sound of Matt’s voice off camera: “And can you explain exactly what CTE does to the brain?”
“In CTE, a protein called tau builds up around the blood vessels of the brain, interrupting normal function and eventually killing nerve cells. The disease evolves in stages. In stage one, tau is present near the frontal lobe but there are no symptoms. In stage two, as the protein becomes more widespread, you start to see the patient exhibit rage, impulsivity. He most likely will suffer depression.”
Lauren stood up and started pacing.
Matt closed the file. “Does any of this sound familiar to you, Lauren?”
She didn’t bother answering. He knew it did.
“This isn’t the film I was looking for, Lauren. I’d love to hear that Rory was just a gifted athlete turned selfless hero. But he was damaged. He was making irrational decisions by the end, wasn’t he? As if his mind weren’t his own?”
She turned to him, breathing so hard and fast she couldn’t speak.
“I’m not trying to diminish his accomplishments,” said Matt. “His talent. His bravery. I’m not saying that he failed. I’m saying the system failed him.”
She nodded. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely. And I need to get this film finished, for other guys like Rory out there. And other women like you.”
She didn’t say anything, just moved her head in a slow, hesitant nod. It was all he needed to start staging the room.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Matt clipped the mic to her top and tucked the sound pack behind her, out of view. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder, to have him hold her. Her emotional scale was really out of whack.
Matt sat in the chair facing her.
“Are you ready?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
“Let’s jump ahead, to the summer of 2011. How did Rory react to the news that he didn’t get an offer from the Kings?”
She’d known nothing about it until his agent mentioned it—at their wedding. Jason said something about how she shouldn’t worry, that someone else would make an offer and he would land somewhere. “This is just a speed bump.”
Lauren was furious that Rory hadn’t told her.
“What’s the point?” he’d said. “I’m done with hockey.”
“No,” she said to Matt. “I didn’t know about the offer until his agent brought it up. He was just a month away from basic training.”
After their honeymoon in Jamaica, they had only two weeks together before Rory left for boot camp at Camp Darby in Fort Benning, Georgia. She crossed each passing day off her calendar, the deadline looming like a guillotine.
“Did he perceive that you were supportive of his decision to enlist?”
“I think so. I tried to give him that impression. I mean, I was scared, but who wouldn’t be?”
She kept her negativity to herself. Rory was more excited and confident than she had seen him since she moved to Los Angeles. Maybe this is what he needs, she told herself. She had to trust him.
Lauren hated to admit it, but Emerson’s words just before she walked down the aisle stuck with her. No, she didn’t agree one bit that she could “barely handle” being a hockey girlfriend. She thought she’d done a good job, maybe even a great job, of keeping things working for the past five years. And if she had moments of worry or doubt, well, who wanted to see the man she loved get pounded bloody? Who wanted to know—not suspect but know deep in her heart—that head injuries were making her fiancé a different person? The chronic headaches. The insomnia. The recurring flashes of anger. She was afraid for his safety in the military, but the truth was, the NHL wasn’t exactly safe. He’d admitted as much himself.
“I bet I get banged up less over there than I did right here at the Staples Center.”
She tried to smile.
Basic training was nine weeks long. She didn’t have any idea how often they’d be in contact, and so she prepared herself for the worst-case scenario.
“I’ll be able to call,” he assured her. “And look, we’ve been apart for nine weeks before.”
Rory had urged her to join some of the military wives’ groups. “It’s an important support system,” he’d said, sounding like he was reading out of the army handbook for How to Deal with Your Nervous Wife.
She’d lurked on some of the groups online, read through some of the chat threads. The basic training/boot camp chat rooms seemed to be frequented by parents of new recruits and maybe the occasional girlfriend. Lauren couldn’t relate to any of the comments. Rory was older than most of the guys and she felt their circumstances were unique. She clicked around, desperate to find a thread that would help her feel connected. All the while, she told herself that this was temporary. In three years, they would move on with their lives. It was less time than college.
Just as she’d almost gotten used to him being away, he came home.
“He told me it was boring—frustrating sometimes. One day he spent eight hours mowing a lawn.”
“Was this discouraging to him?”
“No. He said, ‘I had to learn to skate before I could score.’ But he did have to get through months of Ranger School, and that wasn’t easy. I think people wanted to remind him that he might have been a star on the ice, but he was a nobody there. The thing they didn’t realize was that by that point, Rory hadn’t felt like a star in a long time. And he was deeply motivated to change that.”
“And how did things go at Ranger School?”
“He graduated with the Darby Award. Top honors.” Finally, he was the best at something again. “And his decision to do this was completely affirmed.”
“And in your mind?”
Lauren took a deep breath.
“In my mind, I guess something was affirmed too. The understanding that my husband was an exceptional person and that everything that was happening was part of the deal. My life with him was going to be one of high highs and low lows, and it always had been.”
The Husband Hour Page 20
