Reconstruction - chapter 8 (free version) (Patreon)

The engine block clicks as it cools. I turn the ignition off and drop the keys into my coat pocket. The cab of the truck is still warm, but the December wind outside is blowing brown leaves across the dead grass of Mari’s front lawn. They scrape against the concrete walkway with a hollow sound.

I sit behind the steering wheel for a long time.

The sky is the color of old iron. It rained yesterday and the temperature dropped overnight, leaving a hard frost on the edges of the driveway. I watch a neighbor two houses down drag a plastic trash can out to the curb. The wheels rattle over the asphalt. The guy leaves the bin and walks back inside without looking down the street.

I reach over to the passenger seat. There’s a plastic sporting goods bag sitting there. I pick it up. The plastic is loud in the quiet cab. Inside is a pair of Uhlsport goalkeeper gloves. Professional grade, size seven, cut for a youth hand but built with the same four-millimeter German latex they use for the adult models. They smell like chemicals and new rubber.

I open the truck door. The wind hits me. I step out onto the driveway and shut the door behind me. My shoes crunch on the frozen gravel.

I walk up the path. The steps groan under me. I stand in front of the door and remember the click the deadbolt made the night she walked out of my apartment.

I knock twice.

I wait. The wind chime hanging from the corner of the gutter clinks. It’s missing one of its metal tubes.

The deadbolt turns. The door opens.

Mari stands in the doorway, wearing faded blue scrub pants and a heavy gray sweater pushed up to her elbows. She’s holding a ceramic coffee mug in her left hand. The porch light is off, but the gray daylight catches the dark circles under her eyes. She looks at my face, then at the span of my canvas coat, and then back to my eyes.

She doesn’t open the screen door.

“Hi,” I say.

It comes out wrong. Higher than I mean it, the bottom gone out of it. I’ve been hearing it all week, the gravel I used to bark at a back four with bleeding off a little more every day, less of the old register there to reach for every time I open my mouth.

“Cole.” She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t frown. She’s guarded, waiting for the data to tell her what this is.

“I brought something for Santi,” I tell her. I hold up the plastic bag.

She looks at the bag. “He’s watching television.”

“I wanted to apologize to you first.” I lower my hand. I keep my feet planted flat on the porch boards. I don’t lean forward. “I said things last week that were meant to hurt you. I attacked your life because mine was falling apart. It was cowardly.”

Mari takes a slow breath. The steam from her coffee mug rises between us.

“You told me I was visiting an exhibit,” she says.

“I know.”

“You told me my life was miserable.”

“I was wrong. I was drowning and I wanted to pull you under the water with me. You didn’t deserve it.”

I stop talking.

Mari watches me for a moment, then pushes the screen door open with her shoulder.

“Wipe your boots on the mat,” she says. She turns and walks back into the house.

I step over the threshold. I wipe the frozen dirt off the soles of my shoes on the bristled mat in the entryway. I shut the front door. The lock clicks into place.

The house is warm. It smells like vanilla soap and the dust burning off the heating elements in the floor vents.

I walk into the living room.

Santi is sitting cross-legged on the carpet. The television is loud. He’s playing a racing video game. A digital car scrapes against a concrete barrier, throwing pixelated sparks across the screen. The engine noise whines at a high pitch.

He’s wearing a blue t-shirt and shorts. He doesn’t look over his shoulder when I walk in. He knows I’m there. The floorboards shifted under me.

Mari walks into the kitchen and sets her mug on the counter. She leans against the granite and watches us.

I walk over to the sofa and sit down on the edge of the cushion. The springs compress. I set the plastic bag on the coffee table.

“Who’s winning,” I ask.

Santi jerks the controller to the right. The digital car spins out and hits a wall. The word FINISH flashes on the screen in block letters. He places the controller on the carpet.

“Nobody,” Santi says. He looks at the television. “It’s a time trial.”

“Right.”

He picks at a loose thread on the knee of his jeans.

“You missed the tournament,” Santi says. He keeps his eyes on his knee.

“I did,” I say. “I broke my promise. I’m sorry.”

He shrugs. A tight, defensive movement. “It doesn’t matter. We lost anyway. The other team was older.”

“Did you play in goal?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you use the ground?”

He stops picking at the thread. He looks at me. His dark eyes are his mother’s. “I used the ground twice. I stopped a low shot in the first half. But they scored four times. I couldn’t reach the high ones.”

“Some shots you aren’t meant to reach,” I tell him. “You cover the angles you can cover. If they hit it into the top corner, you let it go and get ready for the next one. A goal goes on the scoreboard, but you don’t have to carry it home with you.”

I lean forward and pick up the plastic bag from the table. I pull the Uhlsport gloves out.

They’re bound together with a piece of cardboard and a plastic zip tie. The latex on the palms is white. The backhand is dark gray with bright yellow trim.

Santi stares at them. The defensive posture in his shoulders starts to crack.

“What are those,” he asks.

“Tools,” I say. I pull a pocket knife from my coat and cut the zip tie. The cardboard falls away. I hand the gloves to him. “Your plastic replicas are fine for the backyard. But if you’re playing in tournaments, you need real latex. It absorbs the impact.”

He takes them. His hands are small, but he handles the gloves like they’re made of glass. He runs his thumb over the sticky palm.

“They feel wet,” he says.

“They’re treated with a chemical from the factory to keep the foam alive. Latex isn’t plastic, Santi. It’s a natural material. If it dries out, it crumbles. You have to maintain it.”

I point at the gloves.

“Every time you finish a game, you take them to the sink. You wash the dirt out with warm water. You don’t use soap. You squeeze the water through the foam until it runs clear. Then you wrap them in a towel and squeeze the water out. Never put them in the dryer. Never leave them in the sun. You let them dry in a dark room.”

He nods.

“If you take care of the gear, the gear takes care of you,” I tell him. “Put them on.”

He slides his left hand into the glove. A tight fit. He pulls the velcro strap across the wrist and locks it down. He does the right hand. He flexes his fingers. The latex makes his hands look massive. He claps his hands together once. The foam makes a dull thud.

He looks up at me. Whatever he was carrying when I walked in, it’s not there now.

“Thank you, Cole.”

“You’re welcome. Next time we go to the park, we’ll break them in.”

I stand up. The sofa groans. Santi turns back to the television, picking up his controller with the gloves still on his hands. He hits a button and the digital car resets on the track.

I walk into the kitchen. The linoleum floor is cold. Mari is standing by the stove. She has a wooden spoon in her hand. She’s stirring a pot of soup. The smell of chicken broth and celery fills the small space.

I stop a few feet away from her.

She taps the spoon against the edge of the pot.

“Bribing my son with sporting goods,” she says. Her voice is low so it doesn’t carry into the living room.

“He needed better equipment. The plastic spines in his old gloves were going to snap his fingers backward if he took a hard shot.”

“He went outside every day this week to look at the yard,” Mari says. She doesn’t look at me. She watches the soup simmer. “He stood by the back fence and waited to see if your truck would pull up.”

“I won’t disappear again,” I say.

Mari turns her head. “You can’t. If you’re going to be in his life, you have to actually be in it. You can’t vanish when your own reality gets too hard to look at. Santi doesn’t care about your soccer matches. He cares that you promised to be here.”

“I know.”

She searches my face.

“Are you okay, Cole?”

“I’m benched,” I say. “Doyle gave the starting job to Danny. I’m training with the reserves.”

Mari sets the wooden spoon on a paper towel. She crosses her arms. “And the rest of it?”

“The rest of it is permanent,” I tell her. I keep my voice level. “The door is shut. I just have to figure out how to live inside it.”

She nods.

“Dinner is going to be ready in twenty minutes,” Mari says. “You can set the table. The plates are in the cabinet next to the sink.”

“Yeah. I can do that.”

I walk past her to the cabinets. I pull three ceramic plates down from the shelf. They’re mismatched. Two are white and one has a chipped blue edge.

I carry them to the small wooden dining table. I set them down. I go back to the drawer for the silverware. The forks and knives clatter against each other in my hands.

The heater kicks on, blowing warm air across my ankles. From the living room, I hear the digital car hitting the wall again, then the heavy muffled sound of Santi clapping his latex gloves together.

The concrete block wall at the back of the indoor training facility is painted a flat white. It has a single crack running jagged from the halogen light fixtures down to the black rubber baseboard. I aim for the crack.

The medicine ball weighs fifteen pounds. The leather is scuffed brown and the laces are fraying at the edges. I hold it at my chest, drop my weight into my hips, and push it outward with everything I have.

It hits the cinderblock with a dead sound. Dust shakes loose from the impact. The ball drops, bounces once on the green artificial turf, and I catch it on the rebound. I reset my feet. I throw it again.

I’m alone in the building. It’s the week after Doyle dropped me to the reserves. The first team is out on the frozen grass of the main pitch running transition drills. Danny is in goal. Doyle’s blowing the whistle. I’m on light duty, managing a phantom hernia that the locker room knows is a polite fiction for a captain who lost his legs.

I catch the heavy ball. I’m wearing the black neoprene vest under a gray club hoodie. The vest doesn’t flatten the soft breast tissue completely, but the oversized hoodie hides the bulk. It still squeezes my ribs like a vice.

I throw the ball. The effort pulls at my lats. The fast-twitch fibers in my upper body are softening. I can feel the lack of wattage. A throw that used to take thirty percent of my energy now takes seventy.

I drop the ball. It rolls a few feet away and stops against the wall.

I put my hands on my knees and breathe. The indoor air smells of ozone and the black rubber crumb that fills the artificial turf. My chest heaves against the neoprene. The bruised glands ache with a dull heat.

“You’re rotating your hips early.”

The voice echoes in the empty cavern of the facility. I stand up straight.

Tasha Pruett is standing twenty yards away near the entrance of the equipment cage. She’s wearing a blue Arkana Women’s tracksuit, the club crest on her left breast. She holds a paper coffee cup. Maybe forty-five, built like a former holding midfielder. Her dark hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail.

She walks toward me. Her sneakers make no sound on the turf.

“I’m doing upper body maintenance,” I tell her. I keep my voice flat.

“You’re throwing a fifteen-pound ball against a wall,” Tasha says. She stops a few feet away. She looks at the crack in the concrete, then at me. “Your release is late because you’re fighting your own pelvic tilt. You’re loading the throw the way you always have, but your center of gravity’s dropped out from under it.”

I stare at her. The air in the room feels cold.

I’ve known Tasha for three years. We pass each other in the corridors. We share the physio room occasionally. We have a distant professional respect. She runs the women’s side of the club with a brutal, pragmatic efficiency.

“My center of gravity is fine,” I say.

“Your Q-angle is wider,” Tasha says. She takes a sip of her coffee. The plastic lid clicks against her teeth. “The angle between your hip and your knee. It dictates how the femur tracks. I watched you playing with the reserves on Tuesday through the fence. You plant your right foot differently than you did in August. Your knees fall inward when you brace for a shot.”

I look at the floor. The black rubber crumbs are scattered everywhere. I don’t say anything.

“Doyle benched you,” she continues. “He benched you because you lost your vertical leap. You can’t explode off the line anymore to cut down the angle. The striker chips you, and you can’t get off the grass to reach it.”

“I’m recovering from a shattered femur.”

“Your femur is fine,” she corrects me. “You aren’t favoring the bone. You lost some of the fast-twitch muscle fiber in your thighs.”

I cross my arms over my chest.

“What do you want, Tasha?”

She looks at me. She really looks. Her eyes track the softened line of my jaw where the stubble used to be. She looks at the slope of my shoulders, the way the denim pulls tight across hips that have widened over the last three months.

“I need a goalkeeper,” Tasha says.

The heating units hum overhead. The only sound.

“I play for the men’s first team,” I say. The words taste like ash.

“You’re a designated reserve on a men’s team that doesn’t trust you,” she says. “You’re bleeding out on the pitch because you’re trying to play a game built for a physiology you don’t have anymore.”

She points a finger at the goal frame on the far side of the turf.

“The men’s game lives on explosive verticality. You used to throw your body through the air in a fraction of a second to win it. That gear’s gone. But you’ve still got the wingspan and the best hands in this building, and you read the flight of a cross better than anyone I’ve coached. That travels. The launch doesn’t.”

I shake my head. I take a step backward. Something cold drops through my stomach.

I’ve lived my life inside a male identity.

“I’m not a woman,” I tell her. My voice is harsh.

Tasha doesn’t flinch. She looks at the gray fabric of my hoodie.

“I don’t care what you call yourself, Cole. That’s your business. I care about the physics. The muscle’s gone where my keepers carry theirs, low, off the hips, and you load a dive the way they load it. I watched it through the fence.”

She takes another drink.

“My squad doesn’t win games off explosive verticality. We win on positioning. On reading it early. We use the ground.”

I look up. We use the ground. The words I told Santi in the dead grass of his backyard.

“The eligibility rules for the league haven't changed yet, they're still based on blood testosterone levels and hormonal baselines,” Tasha says. She says it to the concrete wall, not to me. “If a player falls within the biological parameters of the female category, they’re eligible for the roster. I already pulled the league bylaws and called the state office last week. The blood panel’s the easy part. You’ll clear it. But I can't say whether that panel is still the rule in six months. Boxing already scrapped theirs for a cheek swab. Track's about to. Nobody's telling me soccer's next, but it's possible.”

She turns towards me and looks me straight in the eye.

"I could be wrong," she says. "But I think that gap gets you a season, maybe most of one. After that I don't know." She shrugs. "I'm not going to pretend it's a coin toss you're likely to win forever. It's a window. I think it's open right now. I don't know how long. The hard part is your face was on a billboard six months ago, and the first time a beat reporter does the math there’s a season of noise coming. That’s mine to manage, not yours. But I’m not going to stand here and pretend it’s a vial of blood and a roster spot." 

I stare at her. “You want me to play for Arkana Women.”

“I want a keeper who doesn’t panic when the box gets crowded,” Tasha says. “I’ve got one named Riley. Great reflexes and arms longer than yours. No idea where to stand. She gets burned on set pieces every week because she won’t organize her back line. You ran a championship defense for five years. You know how to scream at people until they stand in the right place.” She lets that sit. “You’d be taking her shirt. I’m telling you now so you don’t get to act surprised about it later.”

I picture the women’s locker room. The exposure of walking into a space filled with female athletes and claiming a peg on the wall. I spent months hiding in bathroom stalls to conceal a menstrual cycle from my own teammates.

“They wouldn’t want me there,” I say. “Everybody in that building knows who I used to be.”

“You look like a person carrying a lot of secrets,” Tasha says. “The dressing room is my problem. If you can stop the ball, they’ll adapt. Athletes are pragmatists. If you save them points on the weekend, they don’t care what your background is.”

She crushes the empty paper cup in her hand.

“You think you’re a wrecking ball,” she says. “You think you’ll step on a pitch with women and hurt somebody. You lost that body weeks ago. You’re tall and you’ve got long arms and that’s the whole of it now. I’ve got defenders who’d out-muscle you in a fifty-fifty. You’re a tall, technical keeper looking for a team built for the body you’ve actually got.”

I reach down and pick up the medicine ball. The leather is cold. I hold it against my stomach.

I spent every hour of the last hundred days fighting this body. I taped it down, starved it, punished it in the gym, and I lost everything anyway.

“Arkana Women hold open tryouts the first week of January,” Tasha says. She turns and starts walking toward the exit.

“We run two days of technical drills, one day of full-field scrimmages. The medical staff runs the blood panels on day one to verify league eligibility.”

She stops at the edge of the turf. She looks back over her shoulder.

“Stop throwing the ball against the wall, Cole. You’re going to tear your rotator cuff. Start dropping your knee and working on your lateral slides. Let the hips do the work.”

She walks out. The heavy metal door bangs shut behind her. The sound echoes in the cavernous room and then dies away.

I stand on the plastic grass.

I look at the crack in the cinderblock wall. I look at my boots.

I shift my weight, relaxing the rigid posture I’ve been holding for an hour. I let my shoulders slump forward. I let my knees fall inward.

I hold the medicine ball in both hands. I don’t try to anchor myself like a two-hundred-pound wall. I bend my knees, dropping my center of gravity low, sinking the weight into the female hips the mesh built.

I take a quick lateral step to the right.

The movement is smooth. Without the forced, unnatural tension of fighting my own anatomy, the joints glide.

I stop. The ball is heavy in my hands.

The men’s game left me behind because the fast-twitch wattage is gone.

But the body I’m standing inside is not broken. Not ruined. It’s just different.

I drop the medicine ball. It hits the turf with a dull thud and rolls away. I don’t pick it up. I walk toward the exit, the neoprene vest biting into my ribs, and push the door open into the freezing daylight.

I stand in the kitchen drinking tap water from a glass. The water is so cold it hurts my teeth.

Santi is at a youth league lock-in at the community center until tomorrow morning. Mari texted me the schedule at four o’clock. She didn’t ask if she could come over. She sent the itinerary. I texted back and told her the door was unlocked.

I’m wearing loose gray sweatpants and a thin cotton t-shirt. I threw the neoprene vest into the dumpster behind the apartment complex on Wednesday.

Without the binding, the breasts pull at the skin of my collarbone. The yellow bruising from the ball impact on the training pitch has finally faded, leaving just the pale tissue and the dark areolas pushing against the gray cotton. I don’t cross my arms over them, don’t try to hunch my shoulders to hide the contour. I just let the weight settle.

The deadbolt turns.

Mari pushes the door open. She brings the smell of woodsmoke and freezing rain with her. She drops her canvas tote bag on the floorboards. It hits the bare wood with a heavy thud. She kicks her boots off.

She looks at me standing in the kitchen.

“The roads are turning to glass out there,” she says.

“The city never salts the side streets.”

She walks over to the kitchen island. She’s wearing a sweater and jean shorts. Her cheeks are red from the wind. She rubs her hands together.

“I talked to Tasha Pruett at the training facility,” I say. I set the water glass down. The condensation leaves a wet ring on the granite. “The coach for Arkana Women.”

Mari stops rubbing her hands. “What did she want?”

“She watched me through the fence. She told me my center of gravity dropped. She said I move like a woman.” I look at the wet ring on the counter. “She wants me to try out for her squad in January. She pulled the league bylaws. If my blood panel falls within the female biological baseline, I’m eligible for the roster.”

Mari watches me.

“Are you going to do it,” she asks.

“I stopped throwing the medicine ball against the wall,” I tell her. “I stopped trying to force my shoulders to do the work. I tried a lateral slide off my hips instead. Used the way it’s built now. The joints didn’t fight me. It worked.”

I look up at her.

“I’m going to the tryout.”

Mari lets out a slow breath. The tension in her jaw dissolves.

She reaches across the granite counter and puts her hand flat over mine. Her skin is freezing.

I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through hers.

We walk down the short hallway to the bedroom. We don’t turn on the overhead lights. The streetlamp outside throws an orange rectangle through the blinds, casting long shadows across the mattress.

I stand at the foot of the bed. Mari stands in front of me. She takes off her sweater, then reaches out and grabs the hem of my gray t-shirt. She pulls it up. I raise my arms and let her take it off.

She drops the shirt on the floor.

I’m bare from the waist up. The breasts shift and settle against my ribcage as I lower my arms. I don’t look away. I stand there and let her read my body.

We lie sideways on the bed facing each other. The streetlamp outside flickers once.

I roll onto my back. Mari shifts her weight and rests her head on my chest. Her cheek is pressed against the slope of my left breast. She doesn’t seem to notice the pillow she chose.

My chest rises and falls. I run my hand through her dark hair.

“You set the table on Tuesday,” she says. Her voice is heavy with sleep.

“I did.”

“Santi asked where you were tonight. I told him you were working.”

I look up at the dark ceiling. The swirling texture of the plaster.

The old career is dead. The male body I built is gone. I can’t go back to the men’s locker room and I can’t undo the biology.

But the apartment is warm. The woman next to me is asleep, her breathing a steady rhythm against my skin.

The illustrated version of this chapter includes images of Cole with Santi, using the medicine ball, then nude with Mari. The paid versions of this chapter also include more explicit content.