Escape Points (16 page)

I
told Brendan to go to school anyway, in spite of his insistence that he stay home. It was just a sore throat. Second semester senior year was my diagnosis. He had been accepted at four colleges already, and applied for early decision in November because of wrestling season. He had choices; I just wasn’t so sure he had an illness.

It was Wednesday so I went to campus for class and Colin and Brendan went to school. When Brendan showed up for practice after his last class period, pale and sluggish, Coach Powell told him to go home and get to a doctor; plenty of kids on the team had strep throat.

“Get the throat swab,” Powell told him.

Brendan texted me, “Powell said I should go to the doctor.”

“We’ll go when I get home from work,” I texted back.

Powell was a better mother than me.

We went to the drive-through immediate care site where there was at least a two and a half hour wait. We sat in the stiff chairs against the wall and watched a cooking show on the flat screen at one end of the waiting room as mothers of coughing toddlers and infants looked
exasperated and nervous. I smiled at them and they smiled back. I would be back in the same office exactly a week later for Colin, who would have impetigo on his left shoulder from wrestling.

Hours later, the doctor gave Brendan a prescription for antibiotics for what indeed was strep throat and a note that he could not go to school until Friday. Junior varsity conference was Saturday and it would be Brendan’s last wrestling event of the season, of his career. I wanted so much for him to have the chance to win there—another set of victories—but I didn’t say that because I didn’t want him to feel worse. Brendan looked vulnerable and sweet. It was funny how your children turned into cuddly five-year-olds when they were sick; no longer men but melting into softer versions of themselves, the sharp edges gone from their responses, a surrender to their circumstance.

“Will you feel able to wrestle Saturday?” I asked Brendan.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“It’s your last time.” As if he didn’t know.

I let him be, did a load of laundry, put out a can of soup for him on the kitchen butcher block island for the next day, and made sure there were enough leftovers in the refrigerator. There were turkey meatballs and penne. It was enough. He would have all day Thursday and Thursday night to rest. I hoped he would go.

“I’m good, I am definitely wrestling,” he said Friday morning as he packed three Clif Bars and two clementines in a paper lunch bag.

He definitely would wrestle the conference on Saturday. Most of his high school years he had Weldon’s shadow blocking his view of himself, and I knew he would regret missing the chance to be in first place on his own terms. Colin’s freshman conference and Brendan’s JV conference were at the same time, miles apart. I would go to Colin’s in the morning, and at noon go to Brendan’s. I had three more years to watch Colin wrestle, junior varsity and varsity. Besides, scheduling it this way showed Brendan I believed he would win and would be wrestling in the finals up until the end.

Anne picked up Colin before 5
AM
to get the bus at the high school; her son Mike was on the freshman team as well. Colin’s freshman conference tournament began at 8. He was wrestling at
112 now, the team needed him at the spot, and with the weight and growth allowance at this point in the season he needed to weigh 116. Trimming from 120 to 116 at that age was like picking meat off a boiled chicken. At some point, there was very little left to give up; it was all just bone.

“You taking first today?” I asked Colin as he gathered his backpack and passed me to get to the front door.

“Yes, I’m going to win.”

It’s one of the many things I loved about Colin. Unapologetic confidence.

“I’m winning, going for first,” Brendan texted me after his first match, which he won 2–0.

“How is Colin doing?” Weldon asked when he called my cell. “Do you know how Brendan is doing?”

I updated him and had to strain to hear him over the shouts and buzzer yelps of the gym. Colin won his first 22–10, a major decision. In his next match, I sat on the first row of bleachers just off his mat, apparently the father of the opposing freshman right next to me, his taunts and shouts, “Kill him!” a little more than I cared to hear at such proximity. Paul rushed in during the middle of the match and sat on my other side.

The score was 3–2 in the third period, Colin was up. With only a few seconds remaining, his opponent, who had only scored with two escapes, took Colin down, even though both were clearly off the mat and out of bounds. The referee gave no points at first, and the other coach kept screaming, “Two! Two!” to award his wrestler the two takedown points. The referee then raised his hands for two points for the Lyons wrestler. And the match was over. Colin lost.

Colin was furious; he had expected to win. He walked it off for a while, out of the gym and through the hallways, then retreated to the top row of the stands on the opposite side of the gym with his teammates, away from all the parents, away from me. He wouldn’t look in my direction. The father of the boy who beat Colin—an enormous furnace of a man—elbowed me as he gruffly lumbered
to his feet from his seat in the stands. I called Weldon to tell him. I left for Brendan’s tournament across town.

“I’ll talk to him about it,” Weldon said.

Colin would later win another match 18–10 and pin another wrestler to take third. Nancy e-mailed me the digital photo of Colin standing on the third-place soapbox, beaming. His final record for his first high school season was 29–10. This was his fourth third place at a tournament. He won the freshman takedown award for the year.

“I could have done better,” Colin told me later. “I could have wrestled the whole time, every time.”

“You weren’t wrestling the whole time?” I asked.

“Mom. No. I mean during a match, sometimes you just stop wrestling. And you can’t do that.”

You could tell a lot about a person from the way he won—or lost. Some of the young men from dual meets to state tournaments appeared furious only at themselves—like Colin. They shook the hand of the opponent, even embraced him, but were filled with a growling internal dissatisfaction that was almost palpable. Some were enraged at the referee or the opponent or the other coach, and they threw down the headgear or refused to shake the opposing coach’s hand at the end of the match. Some swore and were penalized. Some cried. Some pounded the mat with their fists when they bent down to take the Velcro red or green strap from their ankles and placed it on the mat. Some looked despondent and wounded as if this one loss swallowed the entire, unknowable future in one voracious, unforgiving gulp.

“Please get me an energy drink,” Brendan texted me.

I stopped at 7-Eleven and bought him two—just in case—on the way to the high school. I missed Brendan’s next match when he won by major decision, 16–8. Brendan was on to win first or second. For the championship match, I crouched closer to Brendan near the mat. Brendan looked incredibly strong but tired. Sweat was pouring from him, his skin slick and glistening everywhere; he looked pale but powerful, a gladiator.

What mother sends a son on antibiotics to wrestle all day in a gym? The answer is most wrestling mothers did.

Both wrestlers seemed evenly matched; Brendan had a takedown, plus an escape point. At the start of the third period, Coach Messer started screaming to Brendan, “This is your last two minutes!” The boys on junior varsity all sat cross-legged at the edge of the mat, cheering Brendan on.

“Go, Brendan, go, Brendan!”

“You can do it, you can win!” I screamed.

Both wrestlers scrambling, Brendan landed hard on his left knee; I saw him move sharply and wince mightily. He was injured. It was his knee, something happened to his knee.

It was over. What a bad break, what a shame he got hurt in the last few seconds of his final match of his high school wrestling career. I would talk to him about how great it was that he tried and what a tough break it was that he got hurt. And in my mind I was thinking about what doctors to call and how to fix his knee, and hoping it wouldn’t require an operation, maybe just ice for several days and a knee brace. We have knee braces. He can ice here after the tournament; the trainers had ice. I knew about ice. I knew about doctors. Just not from my own experience.

I have never had an athletic injury in my life. I broke my first bones at forty-seven—my left hand and little finger. It was a laundry injury. I was carrying an enormous basket of dirty clothes to the washer in the basement and could not see the ground in front of me. Normally this was not a problem. But one of the boys left the large red toolbox in the middle of the floor a few feet from the washer. I tripped on it, dropped the basket, and braced my fall against the cement wall with my left hand. It hurt so much I sat on the floor in the basement and cried. Went to the emergency room, got an X-ray, they gave me a brace.

I made an appointment with the hand specialist for Monday. The boys offered little sympathy. It wasn’t a real injury in their minds; it wasn’t like I was wrestling. Weldon prepared a bowl of ice and told me to keep my hand in it for five minutes. Right.

Brendan limped backward and then lunged again, as if he was pushed from some invisible force behind him. He took down the
other wrestler and kept him on his back, winning three near-fall back points. The score was 7–5. Seconds were ticking, third period, it was almost the end. And then it was over. Brendan won his final match; sore and still limping, he took his first-place medal standing on the top box, holding the cardboard poster of his bracket and the word
Champion
under his name, a 27–6 record for his senior year, as part of the best high school wrestling team in the state. His was the team that would in a few weeks win the most points at the IHSA individual wrestling finals, with one wrestler each in the first, second, third, and fourth places. And the team that would win first in state a few weeks after that.

When it was all over, I asked Brendan, “Do you want to drive home with me?”

“Nah, thanks, Mom, I want to go with the team.”

Powell told Brendan he would be in the varsity lineup for team state a few weeks later in certain matches for the 171 varsity starter.

“I want him to have that feeling,” Powell said.

Two weeks later, after giving his knee time to rest and icing it every day, against all his strenuous objections, I got Brendan an appointment with Dr. Peter Tonino, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in athletic injuries and knees. My friend Sue was a nurse in that practice and helped me get him an appointment, just as she did when I broke my hand and Colin broke his collarbone.

The X-ray showed no bone or ligament damage.

“I need to wrestle in team state Saturday,” Brendan told Dr. Tonino in the examining room. It was Tuesday.

“We’ll need an MRI to be sure it would be all right,” he said. We scheduled that for 10
PM
that night. Dr. Tonino would wait until he had the MRI results before he could agree to let Brendan wrestle.

“I know this is important to you now,” Dr. Tonino said. “But you have to walk on those knees for sixty more years.”

Dr. Tonino’s nurse called Wednesday night with the news. “No wrestling Saturday,” she said. The MRI showed a meniscus tear and a cartilage break.

An hour later Dr. Tonino called. “He will need surgery in the next few weeks at the latest,” he said. “I know you understand he just can’t wrestle, he can’t risk it.” He explained Brendan could go home the same day after surgery, be on crutches for a few days, but would be out of sports for three months.

I called Powell.

“I will talk to him today,” Powell said. “He had a great season, wrestled real hard with a lot of heart. I’ll make sure he is OK.”

“I’m not being a wimpy mom,” I told him.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, I know, you’ve gotten much stronger over the years,” Powell said.

That Saturday we all went to team state; Brendan on the bus with the twenty-one–team roster, and me, Colin, Caryn, and Danne, Liam’s mom, in my SUV.

A few days before, Caryn ordered a plush Siberian husky online; it arrived the night before we left. It was about two feet tall and three feet long with a curled tail. We called him “Champ.” We went to Target to get him a blue T-shirt in the children’s section, size 5–6. I sewed the Huskies logo I cut from another T-shirt onto the back. We dressed it with headgear and a blue-and-orange scarf another mom knitted for all the wrestling moms a few years earlier. Caryn bought twenty orange and twenty blue bandanas for the parents to wear or wave in the stands. I bought a custom cake that read C
ONGRATULATIONS
, H
USKIES
. I thought inscribing F
IRST
P
LACE
would jinx the team. I was prepared to leave the cake in the car if they lost. I bought a tube of blue icing to write F
IRST
P
LACE
on it should the team win.

We carried Champ to the stands, after he spent a few miles of the highway with his head sticking out of the sunroof of my car.

“It’s a whole new level when the parents start dressing up animals,” Powell said with a smirk.

Our team won state. About fifty of us sat in the tidy stadium seats waving our bandanas and holding cardboard signs I made the night before. I
N
P
OWELL
W
E
T
RUST
was one. I screamed and cheered so much I was hoarse. We all were. The boys jumped and hugged
each other, passed Champ around, held him high above their heads. I ran to the car with Tom, whose son Charlie was on the team, and retrieved the cake; the security guard let us back in. Coach Giovanetti carefully wrote #1, S
TATE
C
HAMPS
in blue icing on the top.

Brendan was there on the gym floor with the team. Each member of the team was called to the center of the arena by name and handed a gold medal in the trophy ceremony. Because Brendan did not wrestle, his name was not called. He did not get a medal. I watched him smile, but I knew he was extremely disappointed. He had been injured, he didn’t wrestle. I could see why he did not receive one. That was fair.