The Truth About Aaron

by Jonathan Hernandez

  “Aaron,” I said quietly.

  His eyes didn’t move. He was in a different state, a different world. My voice couldn’t snap him out of it.

  He raised the gun from his lap and placed the tip under his chin, then slowly grazed the tip of the barrel back and forth from the edge of his chin to his Adam’s apple. I was worried by how disconnected he appeared. He looked empty. I thought about touching him, but I was afraid because of the position the gun was in.

  But I had to do something. I tenderly tapped him on the shoulder. “If you don’t put the gun down, I’m going to go downstairs,” I said.

  I waited a few seconds and then stood up to leave. He reached for me with his left hand.

  “D, stay,” he said, placing the gun down on the table.

  He looked at me and smiled softly—a smile that didn’t reveal his dimples. It reminded me of the smile a stranger gives to another stranger when you accidentally make eye contact in passing. Only two hours earlier he had seemed like he was on top of the world. The sudden change in Aaron was staggering.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “D, I’m fine,” he said softly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “D, I’m fine,” he said.

  “Why do you have a gun?”

  “People have guns, D,” he said.

  He said Shay should be dressed and ready to go out now—the babysitter had arrived when I had gotten out of the shower—and we needed to move downstairs. Aaron rose from his seat and I followed. I looked back at the gun and the bullet on the table, wondering if the gun was loaded.

  From behind, I squeezed the back of Aaron’s neck until he flinched. This was something our father did to us as kids. Aaron turned at me and smiled as we descended the stairs.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, my brother’s hands shook me awake. “D, I have to go to Florida,” he said. “I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

  He had invited me to spend the entire week with him and now he was leaving less than twenty-four hours after I had landed. How could he forget that he was scheduled to fly across the country? Was this just the life of a high-profile NFL player?

  I stayed in bed after he left the room until I heard footsteps scrambling around the house. I stepped out to watch him and it seemed like he didn’t have the focus to keep up with what he was trying to achieve: gather enough belongings for a quick trip to Florida. He reminded me of a scattered child who didn’t have his list of reminders directly in front of him.

  I went back into my bedroom. Before Aaron left, he walked in to say good-bye and handed me a phone number. “D, if you need anything or want to do anything, give this number a call,” he said. “This guy is a good guy and he’s from the area. He will take care of you.”

  Aaron gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and then said, “I love you.” At the door, he apologized repeatedly. “I don’t want to leave but I have an appearance in Florida that I forgot about,” he said. “I can’t miss it.”

  I DIDN’T REMAIN UPSET for long. I attributed this to “Aaron being Aaron.” If he didn’t have a “to do” list written out he struggled with concentrating on the tasks he needed to achieve that day. I understood this about him—and was one of the things I loved about him. This was why I arranged a youth football camp around the weekend of my bachelor party, because it increased the odds of Aaron remembering to show up.

  Aaron returned from Florida on my last night in Los Angeles. We went to a comedy club and afterward we spent the rest of the evening talking and laughing and sharing stories.

  On the way to the airport, Aaron asked if I had enjoyed the previous night. “Aaron, it was perfect,” I said. “It felt like we were kids again, just the two of us.”

  Chapter 24

  APRIL 2013

  I COULD FEEL MY MOTHER’S disappointment building through the phone. Two months after I visited my brother in California, Aaron had invited her down to Miami. She had just returned from her trip.

  “At the airport I was greeted by a limo driver who was going to take me to the Fontainebleau Hotel,” my mom said. “I sat in the limo excited to see my son. But I was also a little nervous, because I never knew which Aaron I would get. The good Aaron, the angry Aaron, or the disinterested Aaron.

  “The hotel was beautiful. I walked inside and went to the front desk. Aaron forgot to show up and I wasn’t going to hand over my credit card, because I couldn’t put a balance that big on my card and Aaron was aware of that. The room he booked was around a thousand dollars a night for four nights. I was waiting in the lobby because they weren’t going to let me into the room without a credit card on file. I had to beg the people who worked there to let me go in because my son wasn’t there for me. Do you know how embarrassed I was? I didn’t care about this uppity hotel or the damn limo ride. I could care less about that shit. I came here to see Aaron, and I didn’t even see my son until the last night I was there.

  “I was relaxing on the hotel bed, watching TV, when Aaron walks in the door with a designer book bag over his shoulder. Behind him are four goons with gold teeth and a stripper. He came over to me and gave me a kiss before sitting on the end of the bed near my feet. The other people were out on the balcony smoking and the prostitute lady was just sitting across the room in a chair.

  “Aaron dropped his book bag off his shoulder, unzipped it, and poured all of his money out onto the bed we were on. He started counting it—it was a ton of money.

  “I asked him, ‘What is all this money for?’ He said, ‘I’m renting high-end cars for everyone.’ We’re talking like a Maserati, a Lamborghini, a Benz, and so on. They were in my room for about thirty minutes and then they all left.”

  Aaron returned to her hotel room the next morning, wearing the same clothes and stinking of booze. “He laid on the bed right next to me—he was so hungover.”

  She just kept saying, “Aaron, you were not raised like this.”

  He had already made arraignments for a limo driver to take her back to the airport, but now he offered to take her himself so they could spend more time together.

  “No way in the world,” she said. “At that point, I just wanted to go home. I was pissed.”

  Looking back on it later, she told me, “Over the years, all I ever wanted to do was be with Aaron and to see how he was doing, but at that time all I could see was how much he was changing. I thought it was all my fault. I would ask myself, How could my baby turn out like this?

  “As much as I loved him and loved to see him, I started to hate being around him. As a parent, it is terrible seeing your child head down a path and not be able to do anything about it. I tried and I thought I would be able to help him, but he had stopped listening to me a long time ago.”

  “I MET YOUR BROTHER at a club called Greystone and from there we started hanging out,” Ralph, one of Aaron’s LA friends, told me. “I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary beside the fact that he came on to me one night. It was shocking to me but it didn’t affect my friendship with him.

  “Another time, we were in the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel and Aaron was coming on to a male bartender. I noticed it and Aaron saw that I noticed it. Aaron looked over at me and said, ‘Please don’t tell anybody.’ We talked after and he said how it was so difficult for him being an NFL player, having a fiancée, and having a baby.

  “One night we had strippers in a hotel room and I could tell Aaron wasn’t entertained like I was. He just kind of sat there in his own world with a blank look on his face. I was like, ‘What’s up, dude?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m not really into it.’ I told him that we didn’t need the strippers and we could have them leave. He told me that he was going along with it because he thought that was what I wanted.

  “We walked out onto the patio to have a conversation. He said, ‘I love Shay and my daughter and my family, but when it comes to my sexuality, I am really confused.’ We then talked about him being open in the NFL. I thought that was the direction he was going in.”

>   Another LA friend, Keith, described another evening at the Roosevelt. “Aaron was really fucked-up when I got there,” he said. “Aaron was flirting with the male bartender. That night, Aaron was over-the-top with his flirting in public. I finally told him, ‘Aaron, you can’t do this shit here. This is Hollywood. You will be on TMZ in two days.’ He looked at me without saying anything. It was for an entire minute he looked at me, a long eye exchange.

  “I had called him out and he finally said, ‘I ain’t no faggot.’

  “I asked him not to say that in front of me because I have gay friends—friends who are comfortable with their sexuality. I could tell that Aaron had a lot of self-conflict. Aaron was struggling to accept himself as a gay man.”

  Chapter 25

  JUNE 2013

  THREE WEEKS LATER, I was on a plane heading to One Patriot Place to complete a four-day internship. I had asked Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz if he could help me land an internship with an NFL team so I could continue to develop as a young coach. He made a few calls and days later I received an email from the Patriots inviting me to attend their offseason workouts. I was excited for two reasons: to learn and to see my brother.

  A day after landing in Boston, I went to Aaron’s house, where he was having a birthday party for Shay. I arrived in the afternoon. Aaron played the role of the gracious host: he talked to guests as he moved from the outdoor pool area—where I was seated with a dozen kids and adults—to the “Man Cave” downstairs. Aaron had a massive outside built-in grill, and I helped Aaron cook burgers and dogs for the group of twenty, which included Shay’s sister and her boyfriend Odin Lloyd.

  As I was cooking, Aaron jumped into the pool with his daughter, Avielle. I looked over the open grill lid and saw him guiding her around on a floaty in her pink sunglasses. It was beautiful watching them together.

  We sang “Happy Birthday” to Shay and the group enjoyed a cake that Aaron and Shay had ordered for the special occasion. I walked downstairs, wanting to see if the pool table was available. Odin was there, sitting on a tall bar stool. We played a game. He was very friendly and soft-spoken. As I was chalking my pool stick, I heard my brother say from upstairs that a limousine would be picking everyone up later that night.

  When the time came, about ten of us loaded into the limo for the ride to a club in downtown Boston, about forty-five minutes away from Aaron’s. After taking our reserved seats on the stage and getting our drinks, we toasted Shay. For a few hours we enjoyed the music and danced.

  Around 2 a.m. the limo took us back to Aaron’s house. I went downstairs to the guest bedroom. Minutes later, I heard loud voices and bangs from the upper floor.

  Thinking someone might have fallen, I jogged up the stairs. When I got to the living room, I looked up to the second-floor balcony and noticed there was a king-size mattress outside my brother’s master bedroom, pressed up against the railing. Then I saw Shay’s mother come out of the second-floor guest bedroom in her pajamas.

  I walked up to the second floor. Shay’s mom asked her daughter, who was standing in the doorway to her and Aaron’s room, what was going on.

  “Aaron can’t find his cell phone,” Shay said.

  I wanted to talk to Aaron, but I sensed that something was going on between him and his fiancée. It wasn’t the place to pry, so I called it a night.

  Early the next morning I started packing my bags, excited to begin my internship. As I was making the bed, Aaron appeared at my bedroom door. He leaned his left shoulder against the trim in the doorway as he spoke.

  “Good morning, D,” he said.

  “What happened with you last night?”

  “I couldn’t find my cell phone,” he said.

  “But Aaron, what happened? Your mattress was thrown in the hallway.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Aaron said. “I need to work on that.”

  THE NEXT DAY, I walked into the team meeting room at One Patriot Place. I sat in the back of the auditorium and saw Tom Brady take a seat in the front row and his teammates fill in around him. When Aaron came in, he spotted me in the back and gave me an upbeat head nod and sat in his assigned chair. Wow, my brother is a Patriot, I thought.

  Coach Belichick entered and stood behind the podium. I had a notebook, an orange and yellow highlighter, and three pens—I was worried about running out of ink—and I tried to write down every word he said.

  “What type of improvements have you made as a player this off-season?” Belichick asked the team. “What type of player are you? Has your performance declined? Has your performance inclined? Are you a roller coaster? Are you consistent? . . . Do things right all the time. Be consistent.”

  I helped the quarterbacks and wide receivers coaches as needed. In staff meetings, I sat in a chair off to the side and against the wall; I was just thankful for the experience and I planned to take what I learned back with me to Iowa. One of my assignments was a red-zone study in which I analyzed the Patriots’ most productive plays inside their opponents’ twenty-yard line from the previous season.

  One afternoon Aaron joined me in the tight ends’ meeting room and together we continued studying the film. He shared with me everything he had been taught and the goal of each play. For a few minutes, it was like we were back in high school together.

  The next day, I spotted Aaron during practice. He wasn’t participating due to a shoulder injury and was walking behind the offensive huddle. He had such an angry look on his face. It was the Aaron of the failed Christmas photo, and it caused me to do a double take.

  I immediately asked him, “Are you okay?”

  He nodded and said, “Everything is cool.”

  I thought he was frustrated because he couldn’t practice at full speed. We both carried on with work.

  On my final day of the internship, I took a photograph of my locker and my nameplate that read D. HERNANDEZ. I then took a picture of Aaron’s locker and his nameplate: A. HERNANDEZ.

  On the plane ride back to Iowa, I couldn’t stop looking at these pictures. I thought about how proud our dad would have been that his boys were together. Not only that, but for a few days at least, we were on the same team—the team Aaron grew up rooting for.

  Chapter 26

  JUNE 2013

  ON SATURDAY, JUNE 15, my mother was scheduled to have breakfast with Aaron, Shay, and the baby. But when my mother arrived at Aaron’s house, he was nowhere to be found. Around 11 a.m. Aaron and Odin Lloyd pulled into the driveway in a black Suburban, a vehicle that Aaron had rented. My mom saw Aaron hand Odin the keys.

  “I don’t need it,” Aaron said to Odin. “Just bring it back to the rental car place on Monday.”

  Aaron was intoxicated. “Drunk as a skunk,” my mom said. “He was wearing different clothes than what he went out in the previous night. He didn’t come home.”

  The next day, June 16, was Father’s Day. Aaron had a picnic with Shay and Avielle. When my mother asked him how it went, Aaron said he enjoyed the day. “The picnic was a stepping-stone in the right direction,” my mom said. “I didn’t think Aaron was the father he needed to be. He was always staying out late with his buddies and he wasn’t treating Shayanna with enough respect.”

  Late in the workday the following Tuesday, I was sitting at my desk in Iowa City when my phone rang. It was Aaron.

  Over the phone, I was a motormouth, going on about how much I enjoyed my internship with the Patriots.

  Aaron finally interrupted. “D, will you please stop talking.”

  Something in the tone of his voice made me feel that something was terribly wrong—a brother’s intuition. For a split second, I thought maybe something happened to our mother or our grandmother, or our father’s twin brother, who had been battling cancer. Aaron continued.

  “Listen,” Aaron said, “Do you remember Odin?”

  “Sure.”

  “Odin is dead,” Aaron said. “I just want you to know, because you’re my brother and I love you. He was found, and they’re trying to investigate, and my
name is being thrown around.”

  I felt frozen in my own body.

  “So did you do it?”

  “D, I swear on everything I didn’t do it,” he said.

  He told me he couldn’t talk and said, “I love you, D.”

  As soon as I hung up with Aaron, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. Odin is dead. My name is being thrown around. Odin is dead. My name is being thrown around.

  I heard the nob to my office door begin to rattle as I saw it rotate before opening. One of the coaches on staff asked if everything was okay with my brother.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He said he had just seen something about Aaron on television.

  Surely, I thought, what Aaron had told me wasn’t already making national news.

  The coach left and shut the door. I grabbed a black rain jacket from my closet and placed it on the hook on the backside of my door, covering the one small window. I didn’t want anyone to see my face.

  I turned on the television. Then I saw the words crawling across the bottom of the screen:

  POLICE ARE INVESTIGATING AARON HERNANDEZ IN CONNECTION WITH A POSSIBLE HOMICIDE. ODIN LLOYD HAS BEEN FOUND SHOT TO DEATH IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK NEAR HERNANDEZ’S HOUSE.

  I wanted to hide. I wanted to disappear. But more than anything, I wanted to hug my brother and tell him everything would be all right.

  As I tried to process what had happened, my mother called. All I could hear was her sobbing so hard that she was out of breath. “What did I do wrong?” she finally said.

  I continued to try to comfort her. As I spoke, my phone beeped at least a dozen times—calls from concerned friends and family members, as well as reporters.

  We hung up. I couldn’t bear to watch any more television—Aaron’s face was now on ESPN—so I turned it off. I removed the raincoat off the hook and peeked out my window to see if any coaches or players were nearby. It was all clear. I bolted out of my office, into the parking lot, and into my car.