I hoped.
Even with the hard work I put in last night, Ben remained steadfastly guarded and quiet in between those small bursts of emotion, letting Jack and I do the bulk of the talking. Whenever the conversation drifted back toward him, he managed to expertly steer it away from himself. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was worried I’d somehow slip-up and reveal his fame to Jack, or if he didn’t want to tell me anything because he thought I might race home to blog about it, or if that was just how all celebrities had to be to protect themselves.
Not that I could blame them. It must suck to spend your days hounded by paparazzi, unable to even go to the grocery store for yourself. Or make a new friend without fearing that they were only using you to further themselves in some way. Then there was the digital aspect of it, allowing both fans and detractors an outlet to comment on every single moment of a celebrity’s life, as it happened.
I read somewhere that it takes a hundred positive comments to overcome the emotional damage that a single negative one can wreak on your psyche. I believed it. I had ten thousand followers on Instagram and got trolled at least once a week. For painting whimsical watercolors of chipmunks and raccoons and moose. Like, seriously? The span of the moose’s antlers is somehow morally offensive to you?
And yet I’d found myself looking closer at my paintings afterward, inspecting the distance between those antlers and wondering if theyreally wereoff in some way that I just couldn’t see because I created them.
That was nothing compared to what Ben had to put up with. He had well over two million followers – I checked before going to bed last night – and posted about controversial issues like taking a knee during the National Anthem, the societal repercussions of idolizing large, violent men while denigrating any male who shows vulnerability, and the class-action lawsuit that he and a slew of other former players had recently filed against the USFL for downplaying the dangers of the sport to those who played it.
Some of the comments on his feed were so enraging that I almost hulk-smashed my tablet. The kind of vile, racist, bigoted vitriol spewed through the filter of anonymity that makes you lose what little faith you have left in humanity.
No wonder he was so guarded.
It made me that much more determined to get him to loosen up around me. If I ever saw him again. For once, it wasn’t because of some need of my own. It was because of him. Because it must be terrible to feel like you can never relax. To always be worried that some small detail about your life that you accidentally let slip might appear on a celebrity gossip site the next morning. The man deserved a break from it all.
The sound of barking pulled me from my thoughts. I went to the door and let the boys back in. They waited patiently on the tile floor of the entryway while I toweled off their feet and legs. Afterward I gave them each a treat from the jar of biscuits on the upper shelf of the coat rack, then left them to demolish them as I went to get coffee.
My kitchen was small, like the rest of the cabin, but it didn’t feel cramped thanks to the bright white paint and open shelving. I eyed the shelf containing my mismatched collection of mugs and opted forthe largest. I think it was supposed to be a soup bowl, but I’d never used it for that. Instead it served as my coffee version of “we’re going to need a bigger boat”.
I added a dash of cream and then poured it to the brim. My first sip was heavenly.
A snuffling noise came from the living room, followed by a low, playful growl. The dogs. Sometimes it felt like I was raising two toddlers. Every time I heard an unfamiliar sound, I rushed over to make sure they weren’t getting into trouble (they were usually getting into trouble). With so little sleep, my rush this morning was more like the shambling of a freshly turned zombie.
I rounded the couch and found the source of the scuffle. The dogs were sprawled out on the rug near the fireplace, playing tug-of-war with each other over one of their favorite toys. That was one of the good things about having two of them; they could entertain themselves in the morning until my brain came online.
I set my coffee down on a side table and stepped over them. Up here, you had to plan your life around the weather. I kept enough firewood in the house to get me through a week without power, just in case a tree came down on a line from the weight of the snow.
I grabbed a few pieces and stacked them over the kindling already laid out in the fireplace. Five minutes later, a merry glow filled the room, the dogs had ended their game – Sam won – and I was sprawled out on the side of the couch that had the chaise lounge, sipping my coffee and searching through the internet.
Okay, cyber-stalking Ben.
He was still active on social media, with three posts on Twitter from last night after I’d left Jack’s. They were retweets. One was from a study by Johns Hopkins on TBIs in the USFL, another was from The Concussion Foundation, and another was fromThe New YorkTimeson something called CTE. I clicked on each link and spent the next forty minutes reading through the articles. Then I spent another God-knows-how-long clicking on still more links, falling fully down the rabbit hole of brain-related medical research.
It was light outside by the time I picked my head back up. I stared out at the sun glancing off the snowbanks, trying not to feel overwhelmed. This was a lot of information to unpack.
I had known about TBIs, but CTE was a new term for me. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. It was a degenerative brain disorder associated with repeated head trauma. Like, from years of playing a contact sport like football. From what I could decipher through all the medical jargon, your brain cells just started dying off.
The most troubling study showed that nearly all of the brains posthumously tested from former USFL players showed signs of CTE. The author cautioned that there was a bias in the tests, as CTE was suspected in many of the cases, but still. Ninety. Nine. Percent.
Another study examined a large number of ex-USFL players still living, using a combination of brain scanning technology and written and verbal exams. The results were…not great. The scans revealed that 40% had abnormal brain structures, 43% had damage to white matter in the brain – which, thanks to Google, I now knew connected nerve cells between the brain’s regions – and 30% had damage to the structures that neurons communicated through. The other tests showed 45% had difficulty with memory and learning. And it didn’t even get into the behavioral aspect of CTE.
Altogether, it was a devastating disease, one that couldn’t be properly diagnosed until an autopsy was performed. Among the symptoms associated with it were mood swings, memory loss, suicidal thoughts, problems with impulse control, and violent outbursts. Then therewere headaches and seizures. The onset of symptoms could vary between just a few years after the trauma, to decades later.
If Zach Kakoa had it, did that mean…
Oh, God. Ben.
I immediately dove back into my phone and tried to find out if he was one of the living players who’d been tested. No luck. They didn’t publish names. Next, I searched out interviews he’d given since Zach’s death. Again, they were a no-go. Then I stumbled across a video interview with his mother.
The journalist questioning her asked if their family had concerns about Ben.
“Of course we do,” she answered. “He’s 28 years old. God forgive us, we put the boys in the pee-wee league when they were eight. That’s twenty years of brain trauma.”
“But at the time you had no knowledge of the increased risk of CTE in players that start before the age of twelve,” the interviewer said.
“We didn’t even know what CTE or TBIs were back then. You think that helps me sleep at night? You think that helps my dead son? You think that helps my still-living son deal with the fact that in five years, or ten, or twenty, he might start to lose himself to a degenerative brain disease that could have been prevented by more awareness, or stricter rules, or better protective equipment?”
