An adult stories – The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 07 by RoyceFHouton,RoyceFHouton This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.
This is the last chapter in this series.
CHAPTER SEVEN – As Long As We Both Shall Live
The moist, balmy Gulf of Mexico breeze blowing down Canal Street as twilight gripped the Vieux Carre gave the feel of late spring rather than late December as Rance Martin got out of the taxi at the intersection with Bourbon Street. Where Bourbon and Bienville intersect, he was to meet his parents, Ed and Lorrie Martin, in the lobby of the Royal Sonesta Hotel.
Rance and the Fulbright Generals had finished a walkthrough 1.5 miles away at Caesar’s Superdome — the last practice before the Sugar Bowl game against Notre Dame — on New Year’s night, just over 48 hours from now. Gia Jones would join them shortly after finishing work setting up the team’s gear in the Superdome’s visitors’ locker room.
The French Quarter’s most famous street was already clogged with Notre Dame and Fulbright revelers and impossible for a motor vehicle to navigate. Rance enjoyed the walk. It helped him clear his head. The coaches had thrown a lot at Fulbright’s players ahead of their marquee bowl pairing against the most storied name in college football. Bowls in college football are supposed to be something of a holiday, a reward for an exceptional season, but this one took on the feel of a business trip.
Also on Rance’s mind was what was next for himself and Gia.
She had cleared out of her room at the Honors College — a space open only to undergraduates — three days earlier and stored her belongings in the apartment Rance and Gene Hurley shared. They had discussed — and swiftly dismissed — the prospect of getting their own place together. Not only did it seem inappropriate for a pair of almost 20-year-olds who aren’t engaged, one a grad student and the other a junior undergrad football player, there was also the fact that Rance was responsible for half of the cost of the one-year lease on their current apartment.
The dilemma the situation raised was when and whether Rance and Gia should get engaged. They loved each other without reservation, but both were aware that it was the first truly serious relationship of their lives and they were still so young. Neither could yet legally purchase alcohol or rent a car. Still, the question tugged on Rance. You don’t have to be 21 to buy her a ring and you don’t have to immediately set a date if she says yes, his conscience kept telling him. So if you love her, show her.
Maybe they should just discuss it. That would be the rational, businesslike and mature thing to do. But it’s not the stuff of good romance, and Rance was something of a romantic.
New Orleans was new to Rance. His eye was continuously distracted by the bizarre street life that is the French Quarter. The deeper you go from Canal Street, the stranger it gets, the drunker people get, and the more expensive it gets. Before him, he saw the Royal Sonesta with its balconies surrounded by wrought iron railings. On one of them, a man was being fondled openly by an overserved woman of college age whose shoulder straps had slid down to her elbows exposing her ponderous breasts with their areolae the size of poker chips. Rance broke his gaze, shook his head and walked inside the grand, luxuriously appointed lobby. He had been there only seconds when he heard Renee calling to him, waving him to a table just off the bar.
“I don’t know if this is the right place for an innocent young teen,” Rance told his kid sister who, aware that Rance would turn 20 in a few weeks, smartly shot back, “Look who’s talking.”
“Just water,” Rance told the waiter who stopped by the table where he had seen the largest man in the lobby — and clearly a football player — take a seat.
“Where’s Gia,” Lorrie Martin asked her son.
“She texted me in the cab over here. She’ll be done in the Dome in about 30 minutes and said we could save her a seat and just text her our location,” he said.
“You seem a little subdued. Anything on your mind … other than Notre Dame, of course,” Ed asked Rance.
“I guess that’s most of it. We’re treating this pretty much as a business trip, so we’re really keeping our distance from all the nightlife. At first I was bummed that we were staying in a hotel out near Lake Ponchartrain, but after walking the few blocks down here, I’m kind of glad we are where we are. Just saw a couple about to do the deed right out on one of the balconies just now,” he said. “We’d never be able to focus on the game.”
Lorrie, silently and perceptively surveying her son’s face, let him finish before adding in a tone of inquiry, “And …?”
“Well, the next 48 or so hours are scripted for us. But after that, everything’s in flux. There’s all the gossip about Coach Hemp maybe going to Auburn or A&M, and he’s not going to say anything til after the game. There’s the two weeks before classes resume and where Gia’s going to be living. There’s the whole intrigue over where her mom is going to relocate and how this thing’s developing with her new guy friend,” Rance said, staring at the glass of water that had been put onto the table before him. “It’s … just a lot.”
“You left out the most important part — you and Gia,” his mother said.
“What’s to say?” Rance shrugged. But he couldn’t make eye contact with his mother when he said it and she took note.
“Well, you each went your separate ways for Christmas even though it was less than three days: her to New Jersey with Callie and you home with us. Seemed odd as close as you’ve gotten that you’d let each other out of your sight that long,” she said. “Since you two became exclusive, the most you’d been apart was an overnight for a road game.”
“Eh. That’s not a thing for us. Might have been for y’all. Those holiday plans pretty much follow their long routines and you just don’t take Christmas on the road like that. Hopefully, we’ll have a lot more holidays together, but she needed to get home to see her big extended family and I didn’t feel I could bail on ours, either,” he said.
It was true as far as it went, but Lorrie knew there was something else beneath all of that, something she might have to excavate another time.
“I’m starved. Where are we going and when?” Renee said.
“I’ve got us reservations for five in about 45 minutes at Pascal’s Manale in the Garden District. Best Creole food I know of. Barbecued shrimp worth fighting a war over,” Ed said. “We can Uber or walk down to Canal and take the streetcar.”
“Streetcar,” everyone said, nearly simultaneously.
●●●
Gia had hurriedly changed from her green-and-gold Fulbright staff gear into a loose, ankle-length, floral-print cotton dress that would have seen garishly out of place in late December were this not New Orleans. Her hair slightly askew and the first hint of perspiration on her brow seemed to glow.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as Rance held her chair out for her to be seated — etiquette befitting the properly raised son of Chattanooga’s elite and a veteran of more cotillions and debutante balls in his high school years than he cared to remember.
“You’re not, dear. Perfect timing. We were seated not three minutes ago,” Lorrie said.
Rance couldn’t peel his eyes off her. Gia’s fresh, breezy beauty radiated into the fragrant steaminess of the Creole eatery. Heads turned when she entered Pascal’s and the maître d’ escorted her to the table.
This is why I couldn’t resist her in the swelter of August in Fallstrom, his inner voice told him. This is why I couldn’t tear myself away in October. This is what attaches me to her at the most fundamental, spiritual level — this whatever is within her. This is what I want more than anything, what I can’t live without. I know that now.
Then like a thunderbolt, the answer, almost in the form of a commandment.
Do it!
He was startled by the stentorian certainty of the command arcing through him from his heart to his brain and back, spoken by his soul/spirit/guardian angel … whatever the voice was. He swallowed hard and blinked, as though breaking free of a reverie, realizing that what had seemed an uncertain roadmap ahead was now a well-defined journey. For two.
Gia, noticing Rance’s uncharacteristic silence, turned her head and caught him as his internal reckoning drew to a close. “Earth to Rance,” she said with a curious smile and eyes that looked into his for reconnection.
“Sorry, honey. Zoned out for a moment,” he said, then smiled and planted a peck of a kiss on her lips. Gia beamed. Lorrie, Ed and Renee sat there wide-eyed: no one in the strait-laced Martin family could ever recall such a PDA at dinner, especially in a restaurant. To those who knew how to read such body language, it signaled an important turning point. And the universe of people who could decipher what just happened was Lorrie Martin.
After a sumptuous repast of barbecued shrimp, shrimp andouille and a special seasonal jambalaya (a steak for Rance for whom shellfish caused headaches), Ed Martin paid the check and they strolled the three blocks down Napoleon Avenue back to Canal to catch the next streetcar to Bourbon Street and the Royal Sonesta.
“Maybe it’s bad form to ask about anything beyond Notre Dame 48 hours from now, but what are you kids going to do with the longest stretch of downtime you’ve had since you began dating until the start of the spring semester?” Ed inquired.
That peaked Lorrie’s interest after what she had just witnessed in the restaurant between her son and Gia — Rance’s trance-like 1,000-yard stare at Gia followed by his sweet, unprovoked kiss in front of everyone, utterly unconcerned what anyone may think.
“Spend some time together doing … nothing,” Gia said. “That sounds so delicious.”
“Same here,” Rance said, equally tight-lipped. “Together.”
Lorrie was about to follow up and ask them where they planned to kill time together, but she wisely realized that it skated awfully close to prying. Just then, a New Orleans cabbie, intuitively guessing that someone in this obvious crowd of tourists at the Napoleon and Canal streetcar stop was going somewhere that streetcars did not.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Rance said ducking into the cab with Gia. “Free time is going to be pretty scarce.”
Rance directed the cabbie to the team hotel where the players and staff — including Gia — were billeted during Sugar Bowl week.
“Rance, what were you thinking about back there when you zoned out in the restaurant? Ordinarily, I’d think it was the game, but you were gazing right at me. It was odd but it was so sweet,” Gia said, snuggling against his massive frame as the evening bayou chill got to her.
“Oh, it was just pleasant thoughts – thoughts about you, angel. I was realizing how lucky the last few months have made me,” he said just above a whisper, his arm pulling her lithe form against him. “I may have looked zoned out but I was seeing things more clearly than I ever have.”
“Really? Like what?”
He kissed the top of her head softly.
“I’ll save that for another day. But soon, honey. Soon.”
●●●
Perry Hemphill worried that the bright light of one of the biggest stages in collegiate sports might overwhelm his team, traditionally an afterthought among the nation’s most powerful athletic conferences. There were many who, as recently as three years ago before Art Overshaw hired Hemphill as head coach of the perennially woebegone program, believed the university should move to a lower level of intercollegiate competition, perhaps abandon football altogether and focus on its academic reputation and its more successful basketball program.
During warmups, the players were looking all over the Superdome at the crowds, the bands, the celebrities. Just the venue, which had been home to so many Super Bowls and college national championship games and seemed to drip with history, seemed intimidating. The distraction seemed to be at odds with the all-business mindset the team had carried throughout preparation for the bowl.
“What do you think, Stark?” Hemphill asked his top assistant.
“I like it,” he said. “They’re taking it all in, and they should because they worked like hell to get here. They look loose but they seem confident and sharp,” he said. “Rather have it this way than to have their assholes so tight that they make sounds only dogs can hear every time they fart.”
That loosened Hemphill up, allowing him to briefly break his stony façade to chuckle and shake his head at Stark Middleton.
The team got quieter when it finished warmups and retreated back into the locker room. When the players returned to the field for the national anthem, coin toss and the opening kickoff, they were quiet, within themselves, mentally ready for the game of their lives.
And that’s how it started out.
The Fighting Irish took the opening kickoff and the Generals’ defense throttled them, forcing them to punt after three snaps on a fourth-and-17. Fulbright’s offense, conversely, needed only five plays to score the game’s first touchdown — a 50-yard Mason Gerow bomb to Philando Fernandez on the first pass play by either team after the Generals’ offensive line had gouged Notre Dame for 32 yards on the previous four running plays.
Another three-and-out possession by Notre Dame and a second Fulbright touchdown, this one requiring all of seven plays and all but one of them on the ground. With less than six minutes elapsed, the Generals led 14-0.
A fumble early in the second quarter gave Notre Dame the football at the Fulbright 28, but that’s as close as the Irish got, settling for a field goal. And as soon as Fulbright got the ensuing kickoff, it commenced a 12-play ground attack behind the machine-like offensive line and the punishing running of Bookie Riemers to extend the halftime lead to 21-3.
“Y’all, I been in this situation before and came out losing. Just cause a snake look dead, he can still bite. We get the ball to start the second half and we gotta go out there and chop this muh-fucka’s head off,” Mojo Hale told his offensive teammates during the break. “We can’t go out there and fuck around with this team. They been there and they ain’t scared of being just 18 down with 30 minutes to play.”
Other than a few minor blocking and strategy changes, the coaches had little to add to Mojo’s wisdom. It was the defense that Perry Hemphill worried about. While the nearly four-week break since the regular season finale at Florida had given the undersized, battered and thin defense some time to heal, long games against large offensive lines were especially draining for the defensive front. With Notre Dame likely to pass often, Hemp wanted to rely on more quickness and stunts in the second half to get to the quarterback, wagering that it would more than make up for the yardage they might surrender on the ground.
Fulbright indeed marched smartly down the field with the first kickoff after halftime, but the drive mired down inside the Irish 10 and Gene Hurley kicked a field goal to push the Generals’ lead to 21 points.
True to Hemp’s prediction, Notre Dame opened up passing, and it proved hard to shut down. It was an up-tempo, quick-hit, intermediate yardage run-pass option attack that the Irish had shown little of during the regular season. Stunts were often useless against it because the quarterback got the ball out of his hands so quickly, sometimes on shovel passes between the two guards that were essentially running plays. Two of those produced first downs on a nine-play drive that took the Irish to the Fulbright 12 on third down and three yards to go. Hemphill, sensing a play that could be the turning point in the game, called the timeout.
From the pressbox, the defensive coordinator informed Hemphill that twice in the game, the Irish had run something of a quarterback draw option out of a shotgun formation. In other words, the quarterback, five yards behind center, took the ball, quickly set up as if to pass, then tucked the ball and ran upfield. If he had a clear lane, he kept it. If he didn’t, he’d flip the ball a back who had posed as a blocker. Both times, it resulted in a first down. “Keep the D-line and ‘backers home, Perry.”
Hemphill advised his defensive line not to sell out on the pass rush or stunts, to stay in position, and for the linebackers to stay close to the line of scrimmage.
When the ball was blown ready for play, Notre Dame’s quarterback lined up exactly as was predicted. Also, as predicted, he quickly hinted at a pass before tucking the ball and attempting to run. He found a mob of green jerseys around the line of scrimmage ready to devour him and the linebackers close behind them. But out of the corner of his eye, he also spotted his tight end breaking free on a flag route toward the right goal line pylon and heaved the ball blindly before he was inundated by those green jerseys. The wobbly pass got close enough to his receiver to catch it and extend it forward enough to overturn the pylon before he rolled out of bounds, good for a touchdown.
Mojo Hale’s admonition about the undead viper resonated loudly now in the minds of the Fulbright offense. A three-touchdown lead looms large and works on the trailing team’s psyche. Much different proposition when it’s just a 14-point margin and more than a quarter and a half to achieve it. As Mojo put it, the snake was still very much alive, had a fresh infusion of confidence and … well, mojo.
Mindful of how the last drive of the first half had bogged down, Hemp decided to open his offense up, using the whole playbook if necessary. The first three plays the coach had scripted after the ensuing kickoff were all passes, and only one of them — for just seven yards — was complete. On fourth and three, with Fulbright fans screaming for their Generals to go for it, Hemphill opted to punt rather than risk giving Notre Dame the ball less than 35 yards from paydirt.
The Irish offense returned with the same mix of up-tempo runs and short run-option passes that had resulted in the first Notre Dame touchdown. Four plays later, the Irish had crossed midfield. Three plays after that, they were in Fulbright’s “red zone,” which is sportscaster jargon for being within the opponent’s 20 yard line. And on the 10th play, the giddy Notre Dame band was again playing the famous fight song about “sending a volley cheer on high” and shaking down the thunder from the sky — stuff you’d expect from a school that considers God himself to be on the roster.
The mood for Hemphill and the Generals was tense to say the least as the fourth quarter began. The offense was having trouble moving the ball consistently, though it had notched a few decent gainers before having to punt. And Gene Hurley had parlayed the most successful second half drive into a 42-yard field goal during to stretch the lead back to 10 points.
It was during the break between the third and fourth quarters that Matt Gerow approached his coach and made his case.
“Coach, we can win this if you let Fulbright be Fulbright. Let us do what we do and that’s run the ball. We started passing when we didn’t need to. This offense can go out there and take over this fourth quarter if you let us play the game that got us here,” Gerow said as Stark Middleton looked on. “Coach, we’re playing not to lose. That’s no way to win.”
“He’s right, Perry,” Middleton told his boss. “The line is executing. Notre Dame put in a couple of stunts that slowed our running attack a little, but I talked to Martin and Crews and we figured out how to stop it.”
“Coach, you built this team. Now you gotta trust it to do what you built it to do,” said Mojo Hale, who had sidled behind Hemphill as quietly as a man that huge can sidle.
“Guys, this is your team and your game to win,” Hemphill told the offense clustered around him. “Now go do it.”
Instantly, tired legs found new vigor. Crews and Rance looked at each other and smiled as they fastened their chinstraps. And Mojo Hale put it all together: “Awright, y’all, our last 15 minutes together so make it something we don’t never forget!”
Stark Middleton’s plan to reinvigorate the team’s mainstay, the 38 read option, hinged on a new trap blocking scheme in which Rance went directly for the middle linebacker who was reading Bookie Riemer’s motion, not fighting with the defensive tackle over him. Disposing of the tackle would be left to Mojo Hale, who was about to allay any doubt among NFL scouts that he should be a first-round draft pick in April.
Since the Generals had been pass-happy during the third quarter, Gerow was pleased that the Irish kept looking for that. Maybe that’s why the draw play on first down gained 18 yards. The second play was the revised 38 read option, but with Mojo lined up where he had never been before for that play, Notre Dame was certain he would be Gerow’s target for a pass in the flat. That expectation allowed Mojo to crash into the unprotected flanks of the defensive tackle when the ball was snapped and demolish him, rolling him toward the center in a manner that resembled a dog being hit by a speeding cement truck. And the middle linebacker, accustomed to patrolling behind his defensive line unmolested, was not expecting Rance Martin to explode into him and buckle his legs. The hole the blocking created sent Bookie streaking back upfield for 62 yards before he was dragged down a dozen yards from a touchdown.
The Generals sprinted downfield and were over the ball the second the official spotted it. Gerow called the audible at the line: 31 dive, a pure, fast-hitting power play in which Bookie muscles into a gap between Crews and the left guard. The Irish defense was still in disarray when Crews snapped the ball and crashed into the nose tackle, blowing him 4 yards backward before pancaking him flat of his back as Bookie bulled his way into the end zone, dragging three Irish defensive backs with him.
The nervous Fulbright crowd began to believe again. The way it had in the season opener. The way it had against defending national champ Georgia. This was the offense they had come to know, that had defined this team.
The defense began to believe, too. While it seemed as though it took only seconds for the Generals to run the ball down Notre Dame’s throat, the drive bled more than five minutes off the clock. Now, the Irish were looking at a deficit of 17 points, meaning they would have to possess the ball at least three more times and score a minimum of two touchdowns and a field goal in less than 10 minutes.
The clock was now Notre Dame’s enemy. And for that reason, Notre Dame had to rely on passing for a comeback, not just for its ability to strike quickly but also for the fact that incompletions or plays that ended with a receiver out of bounds stop the game clock. The Generals knew that. Notre Dame knew it. The pope probably knew it.
Some of the most talented high school receivers in America had signed with Notre Dame the previous winter, and now these freshmen had matured and assimilated to the college game. Their speed was dangerous, and they could take the top off the best pass-coverage defenses. That nearly happened twice as the Irish attempted to answer the emphatic drive with which Fulbright opened the final quarter. Once the pass was just off a speedy flanker’s fingertips. The other resulted in a leaping catch 40 yards downfield, but a yard out of bounds. A short pass on third down netted eight yards, and the Irish faced the decisive fourth down. Time out, Irish.
“If it were me, I’d try to punch it up the middle for just two yards,” the defensive coordinator told Hemphill via his headset. But this was Notre Dame, the school that believes in gambling big with a heavy reliance on divine intervention. Hemp knew the Irish would give every appearance of a power dive up the middle, but probably try a jump pass. So he put in his “heavy package” of his largest defensive linemen but swapped out a linebacker for an additional safety.
For a moment, it appeared Hemphill had made the wrong bet. Notre Dame had a full backfield but lined the quarterback up several yards behind the center in a modified shotgun. When he took the snap, he charged forward instantly toward the line, but pulled up just before he got there and short-armed a pass to where his tight end should be but wasn’t. Instead, the pass found Hal Donovan who intercepted it, ran a few yards and then wisely dropped to the ground, using both arms to tightly clutch the ball to his belly and prevent desperate Irish players from punching it free of his grasp.
The reaction from Fulbright’s fans was reserved euphoria. Euphoria because their team held a three-possession advantage with half of the fourth quarter gone and the Generals’ offense returning to the field. Reserved because the other team was Notre Dame, the mother church of college football with more than a few miraculous, last-minute turnarounds in its history.
Fulbright could slam the door with another touchdown, but it could also lock away the game with a clock-consuming drive on the ground that would kill the next five minutes or so. Three first downs by the Generals and they would carry home the school’s first Sugar Bowl trophy.
Rance looked around the huddle. It hit him and everyone else in it at that moment that this would likely be the last drive that they would make together as a team. Crews and Mojo would both be gone after this season, and Mojo certainly would be playing on Sundays a year hence. Bookie had the option of declaring for the draft. And the captain and quarterback, Matt Gerow, was playing his final series for the green and gold.
“Fellas, let’s execute this one like it’s the last time we’ll ever do it together,” Gerow said in the huddle with a noticeable hitch in his voice. Then the offense did something it had never done on the field in a game huddle before. All 11 players extended their hands into the center of the huddle for a few moments.
“One more time,” Mojo Hale said, tears flowing from the big man’s eyes, “for us.”
The team broke the huddle, lined up with one back — Bookie Riemers — in the backfield with Gerow. The quarterback faked a dive up the middle with Bookie and kept the ball on a sprint around the right end of his line. The left guard had pulled and was Gerow’s escort. He crushed a safety who came up to stop Gerow as Rance sealed off the defensive end, giving a quarterback not renowned for his running ability a 17-yard gain on first down, the longest of his Fulbright career.
Content to continue huddling and allowing time to burn off the clock rather than run plays at the tiring Irish defense at the dizzying pace it had earlier, Gerow lined up in the same formation, but this time fed the ball to Riemers on a 31 dive through a crease between Crews’ left hip and the left guard, who had walled off the middle linebacker and gave Bookie room for a 12-yard pickup and another first down.
Seven plays later, with just two minutes left and the Generals on the 15 on fourth down with a yard to go for the first down, they faced a decision: field goal just to make the margin an even 20 points or get the first down and kill the clock in victory formation with the offense still on the field? Notre Dame had burned all three of its second-half timeouts and couldn’t stop the clock. Hemphill called timeout and brought his players to the sideline.
“Fellas, the book says go with the field goal here. Well, fuck the book. Guys, go out there, get this first down, win it with yourselves on the field and take the bow you deserve. Matt, the call is yours,” Hemphill said.
The offense, denied the same opportunity in that heartbreaking loss to Tennessee, roared its appreciation.
“Thirty-eight read option,” Gerow said. “We go with what got us here, right Rance?”
They lined up with Crews’ hand on the ball before the official blew the ball ready for play. An instant later, the ball was snapped. As he had since the opener when Rance came into the game in relief of the injured starting right tackle, Tyrone Harvey, he uncoiled with startling quickness and force into the defensive end across from him, instantly achieved leverage on the larger adversary and rolled him harmlessly aside as Bookie Riemer picked up the needed yard. And seven more yards after that before four Notre Dame players finally wrestled him to the turf.
Three more snaps with Matt Gerow taking a knee each time and the 2023 Sugar Bowl was in the books. Throughout the Superdome, the few remaining Irish fans were flocking to the exits as Fulbright fans at last experienced an unrestrained euphoria that had been pent up for decades. On the field, Generals players tearfully hugged one another as the last seconds of this remarkable team — the first ever to win 11 games at Fulbright — melted off the clock.
Gerow took the final snap, dropped to a knee and lifted the football skyward in his right hand, a football that would reside for posterity in a trophy case wherever Generals teams called home. Green and yellow confetti exploded from compressed-air guns on the sidelines. Mojo Hale lay on his back on the playing surface moving his arms and legs to create the confetti equivalent of a snow angel.
With the air full of falling bits of shiny green and gold mylar, it was difficult for Gia to find Rance and vice versa. Mindful of this remarkable denouement of their moving, bizarre and bloody story over the course of the season that just came to a storybook ending, ESPN cameras had been tasked in the closing minute of the game to follow each and chronicle their reunion in the celebratory aftermath. For the network and viewers at home, it was worth the wait.
Gia wasn’t sure what happened to her trademark visor in the chaos, but it was gone. And she didn’t give a damn. When she finally spotted No. 74 amid the swarming celebration, she ran to him, a cameraman close behind, and leaped with abandon into his arms. The world watched the two share a joyful, celebratory kiss live and up close.
“That’s Gia Jones and Rance Martin,” network play-by-play announcer Dave Pasch said in the voice-over. “Their amazing story, front page news worldwide, during this indescribable season all comes down to this – an impressive victory over Notre Dame in the school’s first Sugar Bowl, bringing the first 11-win season ever back to Fallstrom, South Carolina. They — and all of Fulbright University, and all of college football for that matter — earned this moment of joy.”
●●●
Rance had always heard that nothing rivals the hedonistic abandon of Mardi Gras, but Bourbon Street after a Sugar Bowl had to be a close runner-up.
Fulbright green and gold ruled the Vieux Carre in the hours after the Generals’ convincing victory over football’s most legendary college. Fulbright players, coaches and support personnel were greeted by joyful inebriants. But the adulation was, nonetheless, an unaccustomed moment of bliss for them, and they hung together quite remarkably in the crowd, perhaps clinging to the final moments when these individuals would still be recognized as the 2022 Fulbright Generals.
Some who recognized Gia and Rance tended to attach themselves to them like ticks, gushing over their sensational story of the season just ended and sometimes getting all drunk-weepy. They were gracious, even as they struggled to disentangle themselves from some of the more overwrought and determined well-wishers.
The mass of players was making its way slowly through the dense crowd in the direction of the most celebrated Bourbon Street venues — Preservation Hall, Pat O’Briens, Desire. Rance and Gia remained with them, though both doubted that they could enter drinking establishments having not yet turned 21.
An hour later, drained from the game, the excitement and the long day, Rance spotted the Royal Sonesta and recommended that they go in and just chill for a while with his family.
“Deal,” Gia said.
●●●
“Maaan, yaw played great,” the slim man with a Cajun dialect wearing only a embroidered, satiny vest over his dark, lean and hairless chest and belly. Immediately, his looks worried Gia as he seemed to slip like an eel through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd still jamming Rue Bourbon just after midnight. His eyes twitched quickly, wildly, focusing on no one more than a microsecond, it seemed, as he moved closer.
“Hey, maaan, you got a twenty I can baw for bus fare,” the short, wiry man said as he approached them.
“Sorry, friend, got no cash on me,” Rance said, wisely not making eye contact while pushing toward the Royal Sonesta grand entrance and its doorman wearing his tunic with gold epaulettes only a few more steps away.
“How bow’cho lady, maaan,” the sweaty street urchin said, now more insistent.
Rance said nothing, but made sure to keep himself between Gia, to his left holding his hand, and the troublesome man, now uncomfortably close on his right.
“So, dass how it is,” the man hissed.
It was a sudden burning, stinging pain in Rance’s right side. He bent protectively in that direction as his massive right arm instinctively swept in the direction of the attack to ward it off and knocking the much smaller man off balance. Gia grasped him and said, “Rance! What’s happening?”
Around them, the crowd momentarily froze and then recoiled from the sight as a stain of crimson expanded into a wet, black oval against Rance’s green Fulbright Football polo shirt. In the commotion, women shrieked and men cursed. One young man who had grabbed Rance’s assailant had been slashed across the arm by the butterfly knife he had just jammed into Rance’s right side about midway between his armpit and his hip.
“Oh God, Rance! Someone help! — call 9-1-1, get a cop,” Gia screamed as Rance slumped to his right and fell to his knees. Blood was now pooling on the filthy concrete beneath him.
The doorman was blowing his whistle, a signal to law enforcement — uniformed and undercover working the crowd — that something was badly wrong and help was urgently needed. The doorman cleared the crowd away from Rance as Gia persuaded him to lie flat. She raised his shirt, found the narrow slit of a wound and applied pressure in an effort to stop the bleeding.
Rance was looking around, stunned bewilderment evident in his eyes, wordlessly imploring, someone please explain what just happened.
A young man with salt-and-pepper hair kneeled over Rance. “I’m a thoracic surgeon. We need to get this man to the closest ER fast,” he said.
Now police officers were standing nearby pushing the crowd back. One was speaking into the radio mic clipped to his shirt calling for New Orleans Fire Department emergency medical techs to arrive “code 5.” He also called for additional police units for crowd control and to clear the packed streets for the nearest ambulance. In the distance, approaching sirens yelped to life.
Gia stood by screaming, trembling, weeping, pleading — with anyone in the crowd who could help, with first responders, with God himself — to somehow deliver Rance from this moment. She asked the doorman to inform his parents, guests on the hotel’s third floor, though she couldn’t remember the room number.
Half a block away, as word of the attack filtered through the street crowd, another commotion developed. A violent crowd had surrounded someone lying on the pavement and began cursing him. “Kill that motherfucker,” someone bellowed.
Rance began to shiver. The humid midnight air felt like an icy wind, particularly against the cooling blood covering his chest and belly as the surgeon struggled to assess the severity of the wound. He felt drowsiness overcome him and his eyelids grow heavy.
“Gia!” He called out in the strongest voice he could muster, now barely over the level of normal conversation. “Stay with me please … help me through this,” he said.
Gia knelt by his head and shoulders to his left and held his face in her hands, willing him to stay awake, to keep talking to her as help arrived.
“I will never leave you, baby … never ever ever ever,” she said in words that came out as sobs. “You make sure you don’t leave me, Rance. I love you.”
He smiled at her as his eyelids fluttered. “Not … leaving you, Gia. You’re my … life,” he said.
“Where are the EMTs, he’s going into shock. He needs blood now,” the surgeon yelled into the crowd, his arms, white dress shirt and the knees to his khaki pants now smeared with blood.
The searing pain in Rance’s right side was fading now. He felt a deep sense of peace as the periphery of his vision progressively narrowed into darkness. He could hear voices approaching, “Clear a path,” a woman was yelling. Something was covering his mouth and his nose, something plastic and cold. The last words he could make out, “You stay with me, 74! You hear me Rance? Stay … with … meeee!” were from the love of his life, Giacomo Jones.
●●●
It had been four and a half hours since emergency surgery began in a desperate attempt to save Rance Martin’s life. In a small waiting room outside the surgical suite at the Tulane University Medical Center about a mile from the site of the attack, Ed and Lorrie Martin sat mute on either side of Gia Jones, each holding her hand. They silently prayed, trying to balance fearful desperation with tenuous hope. The thin, pink hue of the oncoming dawn was visible through the windows to their right, facing the eastern sky.
Occasionally, they would see a nurse or someone else in scrubs, medical masks and scalp coverings enter and leave through the swinging double doors that opened onto a hallway and several operating bays. In one of them, doctors had fought through the wee hours to stop the internal bleeding that might have exsanguinated him if not for continuous blood and plasma transfusions.
“Six thirty-three,” Ed Martin said, glancing at the time displayed on his mobile phone. “That’s a long time, but that means they’re still fighting, that he’s still with us.”
Gia tightened her hold on both hands that clasped hers, a wordless affirmation of Ed’s optimistic conclusion. For her part, she was too frightened to break the hushed calm of the room where they were accompanied only by an attendant at a desk by the door. She dared do nothing now but breathe, nothing that might upset the fragile cosmic equilibrium of the moment for fear of the unbearable consequence that even the slightest shift might bring.
Just then, they were startled by the muffled trilling of the desk phone in front of the attendant. “Yes, doctor, they are,” she said, speaking into the receiver just above a whisper. “OK, I will.” Then she hung up.
“Mr. and Mrs. Martin, the doctor will be out to speak with you momentarily,” she said.
The words were like razor-sharp shards of ice filling Gia’s stomach. Ed and Lorrie could feel her hands tremble. The color had drained from her face and they saw her jaw quiver as they turned toward her. Both put an arm around her and pulled themselves close to her. As promised, the doors opened and a tall, thin man in lavender-colored scrubs walked toward them, drawing a deep breath as he did.
“The Martin family?” he said as the three rose from their seats to meet him. “I am Dr. DeFusco. I am the lead cardiovascular surgeon here and I was leading the surgery on Rance. We’ve done all we can, and they’re closing him up now. I think we’ve stopped the internal bleeding, which was the big thing, but there’s no way to really predict …,” his voice trailed off. “It’s going to be hour-to-hour for a quite a while.”
“This was a very serious wound. The knife nicked his hepatic vein and that is what caused the massive blood loss. Had the blade been longer or penetrated deeper, it would have severed the vein or maybe punctured his vena cava, and he would have died in minutes. It may be that the massive wall of abdominal muscle — I understand he’s a football player? — prevented worse internal organ damage. What we don’t yet know is whether he suffered any long-term damage to critical organs like his brain and kidneys when blood loss caused his blood pressure to drop to critically low levels. Sometimes, those organs shake it off, but occasionally …”
“Working in his favor is he’s young, he’s very strong and in excellent health and I can tell he’s fighting hard. We lost heartbeat twice during surgery because of the blood loss even with transfusions going in both arms simultaneously, but we were able to restart his pulse each time. That might not have been possible were he not so strong,” the doctor said.
“The challenges ahead are, of course, the threat of infection and how well the sutures to the hepatic vein hold and the damaged portion of his liver heals,” the doctor said.
Gia’s legs began to falter, and Ed and Lorrie helped her back to her seat and sat down beside her. In a feat of intellect, she had willed herself to listen analytically to the doctor’s words and understand through the prism of science what Dr. DeFusco was saying. And it worked for a while until it became empirically clear to her from what she had learned that her Rance might not make it. At that moment, her heart and soul took over and began to sap the physical strength and resolve she had used to face Rance’s surgeon.
“Miss Goines,” the doctor said, looking over his shoulder to the attendant at the desk behind him, “I think we need to get this young lady down to the ER. She seems faint and is showing signs of shock.”
Gia was breathing through her mouth, her head tilted toward the floor and her eyes lacking focus. “Is she your daughter?” DeFusco asked Ed and Lorrie.
“No, but we hope someday …,” Lorrie said, catching herself and realizing the doctor doesn’t need an account of the crazy past five months that just got crazier. “No, she’s our son’s … the girl our son loves deeply.”
The double doors behind them opened again, and an orderly backed through it, pulling a wheelchair along after him. He wheeled it over to Gia and the Martins and they helped her into it. The doctor held the main door open as the orderly guided Gia’s wheelchair to a bank of elevators leading to the ER on the first floor.
“Dr. DeFusco … when … when can we see our son?” Ed Martin asked.
“It’s going to be a while. There’s more work to be done to insert drainage tubes, close him up and then probably an extensive stay in the recovery room before he’s moved into the ICU,” the doctor said. “My work on his damaged vein is done but there are two more doctors and a team of nurses I there finishing up and suturing the incisions.”
Lorrie buried her face into the tweed of Ed’s jacket, weeping softly.
“Are you here for the Sugar Bowl and when were you planning to depart New Orleans?” DeFusco asked.
“We are. Rance played for Fulbright last night and we were planning to check out of the Royal Sonesta today and return home to Chattanooga, but …,” Ed said. “I suppose we could ask to extend our reservations.”
“If that’s what you wish. If that’s not possible, we have arrangements with several hotels nearby and a few extended-stay rooms here on the medical campus that you might use if they’re available,” the doctor said. “Miss Goines, can you check availability for the Martins right quick?”
Ed thanked the doctor and asked him whether he would be the chief attending doctor as Rance began his recovery. DeFusco said he would be one of them but there would be several: himself, an internal medicine doctor and a neurologist to assess how well Rance’s brain and nervous system endured the sharp blood loss.
“I wish I had a more definitive prognosis for you right now,” the surgeon said. “We just don’t yet know what we don’t know. For right now, I think it’s important that you take care of yourselves so you can be strong for Rance. There’s nothing you can do here for a while — several hours at a minimum — so I’d recommend you go take care of your lodging for the next few days, maybe a week, go get some food, take a nap if you can. Leave your cell numbers with Miss Goines and we will make sure it’s at the fingertips of the duty station in the recovery room and the ICU so you can be called instantly as needs dictate.”
“This isn’t going to be easy, but we will do all that medicine can do to bring your son through this.”
An aide showed Ed and Lorrie to the elevators and escorted them to the Emergency Room waiting area. Half an hour later, another orderly pushed Gia in a wheelchair out to where Ed and Lorrie sat. Gia said the nurse practitioner who examined her found that a combination of dehydration and physical exhaustion from nearly 24 unbroken hours without sleep that included triumphant highs and crushing mental trauma likely caused her near-fainting spell. She was given an electrolytic intravenous drip and a sedative that had flattened her speech so that she sounded almost like an automaton.
They hugged her as she stood, and they remained there, in one another’s arms in the middle of the Tulane Medical School ER/Trauma Center, for several long minutes before they walked outside, hailed a taxi and rode away in the hazy, early morning sunlight of New Year’s Day.
●●●
True to Dr. DeFusco’s word, Rance’s battle would be long, laborious and uncertain from the start. It was mid-afternoon, more than a dozen hours since surgery commenced, before Rance was moved to the ICU from the recovery room where he had been for five hours after leaving surgery.
During that time, Ed and Lorrie Martin and Gia, for the sake of convenience, had booked into a two-bedroom suite at the Sonesta ES Suites just a block away from the hospital. They had arranged for Renee to fly back to Chattanooga and for her grandparents to pick her up there and for her to stay with them.
They had taken Gia to the team hotel where they found Perry Hemphill surrounded by his players in the lobby, attempting as best he could to tell his players what little he had learned about the unprovoked attack and grave injury to Rance. Buses had just arrived to take the team to the airport for the flight back to Charlotte and the bus ride back to Fallstrom where plans for a celebratory parade had been scrapped when cable news outlets reported that Rance was clinging to life in a New Orleans hospital.
When they saw Gia enter the lobby with Rance’s parents, Art and Vangie Overshaw went directly to them and wrapped their arms around them. Within moments, the team, coaches and staff had surrounded them, many weeping.
Ed Martin, in a halting voice, explained what he knew from his most recent hourly call to the Tulane University Medical Center — that Rance was still in the recovery room, listed in critical condition with injuries to his internal organs. Gia informed the team that she would remain in New Orleans with the Martins while Rance fought to recover and that her mother was en route. She had no timetable for when or even whether she could rejoin the team.
“My life is like shattered glass on the pavement right now and I don’t yet know how I pick up all the pieces, much less put them back together,” she said.
They learned from Perry Hemphill that police told him that the alleged assailant, a 24-year-old petty hoodlum named Duarte Mélancon with a rap sheet that included burglary, robbery and aggravated assault, was not expected to survive a serious brain injury he suffered when he was captured moments after Rance’s attack. Police said Mélancon had yanked a purse from a young woman’s shoulder and tried to run away, but a large man who had also played in the Sugar Bowl as Notre Dame’s second-team defensive end caught Mélancon by the throat, lifted him off the ground and slammed him backward into the pavement of Bourbon Street, shattering the back of his skull in the process. In a pocket of Mélancon’s pants police found a butterfly knife with fresh blood. Detectives quickly determined he had been Rance’s attacker when the unconscious man was a perfect match to the person shown on security camera footage from the Royal Sonesta grand entrance approaching and stabbing Rance. Police were confident that tests on the blood on the blade would prove that it was Rance’s. Police had detained the Notre Dame player for questioning but released him to the team in the late morning for the flight back to South Bend. He had grabbed Mélancon utterly unaware that the Fulbright offensive lineman he had battled in the Sugar Bowl a few hours earlier had just been stabbed or that this was his suspected assailant.
“He needs killin’,” Mojo Hale said. “Tell me where the muh-fucka at and I’ll go finish him off.”
Gia interjected and addressed the team.
“Mojo, I appreciate the sentiment but that’s not what we need right now,” she said. “Nobody knows whether Rance is going to make it. He’s in real trouble, fighting through some very serious damage. Whoever did this to him, I don’t have the time or energy to hate or even care. What I do need — what we all need — is help from God, and your prayers that right now … because right now is all we’ve got.”
That was as much as she could say. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. The team rose and closed ranks around her.
From a distance, the hotel’s valet called out, “Coach, your buses are ready to board.”
Art Overshaw walked quickly over to the valet and, with one arm around his shoulders and in hushed but emphatic words, the university president asked him to inform the drivers that he’s paying for the goddamn buses and that the team would board them after some very important business is finished, and that the university would cover the costs of any delays.
It took another 40 minutes for Gia and the team to compose themselves, say goodbyes and go their separate ways. Now, in the middle of the afternoon, she stood there with the Martins in a lobby suddenly empty of the friendly faces that had abounded there for days. They decided to return downtown, eat an early dinner, then return to their room and await word from the hospital on … whatever.
“This is the really long, hard part ahead, isn’t it,” Lorrie said from the rear seat of the Uber carrying them and Gia’s luggage from her room in the team hotel back to their new quarters of indeterminate duration.
“I suppose so, honey,” Ed replied. “Wish I could say for sure but I have no experience with this.”
●●●
Before Gia was a brilliant strand of pure, white sand and beyond that was an azure and turquoise sea, all pervaded by a pure, brilliant light. From everywhere and nowhere all came a voice — Rance’s voice — in a calm, even tone.
“It’s me, Gia,” it said.
“Where? I hear you and I can sense you near but I can’t see you?”
I am all around you. Even in you. I am in the light that flows through you now. Don’t be afraid, baby.
“How can I not be afraid, Rance? I don’t have you. I can’t see you, much less touch you, hold you.”
I am where I have to be right now. I wish I could explain in terms you can grasp, but I don’t understand it all myself. I … you … we … just have to … trust, for lack of a better term.
“Trust what? Who?”
The Plan. The Planner. That which created us, gave us life and each other. If I knew more, I’d tell you, but that’s where I am now. They’re taking care of me.
“Baby, you’re in the ICU at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. I left your bedside not two hours ago. Your mom and dad and I were there. We could only go in one at a time. You’re unconscious. I don’t know if you could hear or feel us when we held your hand or not. We’ll be there as long as it takes, baby.”
Yes, I am there and I can hear faintly, as if from a distance. But I am not confined there. Where you see me now has no physical coodinate. We meet for now in a psychic or spiritual dimension that those who exist in time rarely glimpse. They want me to let you know and to tell you that I am at peace no matter how this turns out.
“So you don’t know how … whether you will recover?”
They know over there, in the light beyond the blue, in the realm the living, those who exist in time, may never trespass. I know that they know, but I don’t know how. I’ve tried to approach their realm because I sense so much joy and peace over there, but the more I push toward it, the farther away it gets. I ask why I can’t come see for myself and they tell me because I still exist … in time.
“This isn’t making sense, Rance.”
Time is a construct of the physical realm — the elements of matter, energy and distance. Time is how we perceive the process of those elements interacting and affecting our physical existence. Those elements don’t exist in the realm I speak to you from, so time doesn’t exist. Tomorrow and yesterday, last year and next year, the beginning and end — they are all just the great, everlasting singularity of now.
“Rance, take me there with you. I don’t want you to be alone, and I want to be where you are.”
That’s not possible, baby. And I am not alone. Others come here. Some stay a while and go back into time. Others pass over beyond the blue. Nobody knows how long they will be where I am, but everyone will either go back into time or pass over into the light and beyond the blue. We have no control over it. Only the Planner does. And you have to trust, honey.
“If you say trust, I will because you’re all I have and if that’s what it takes to hold on, even to this … thing … this vision or whatever it is, then I will, but you’ve got to do everything you can to come back to me.”
Gia began to cry.
“Deal baby?”
Deal.
In that instant, Gia felt a reassuring warmth surround her, the kind of feeling she got when Rance pulled her nakedness against his as they drifted off to sleep. The bright light and the blue waters receded from her and she descended deeper into a dreamless, less troubled sleep.
●●●
By Monday, news or Rance’s stabbing and his struggle for life in a New Orleans hospital was among the top, trending stories. All three broadcast networks, the cable news outlets, ESPN and a battery of reporters from newspapers as varied as the New York Times and The State in Columbia, South Carolina, were encamped near or in the lobby for regular briefings from the medical staff attending Rance. This development along with the Geno Millions horror that had befallen Gia and him in October gave the story international reach.
Rather than walk the block from the Sonesta ES Suites to the hospital entrance two or three times a day to get swarmed each occasion by the paparazzi, they had developed a pattern of entering in the morning, remaining within the hospital throughout the day and into the evening to keep watch over Rance’s unconscious form when visitors were allowed.
On Monday, Gia was sitting with Rance holding his hand when her phone buzzed and the name CAROLINE AGOSTINELLI appeared on the screen. She answered on the second ring.
“Hi Caroline,” she said.
“Oh my God, Gia, I was on a plane all day yesterday and just saw the news late last night after we landed. How are you holding up? What can I do to help you,” she asked.
“Pray, Caroline. That’s all any of us can do right now,” Gia said.
“Already ahead of you,. Stopped by my parish this morning on the way to work, said six Hail Marys and lit a candle for Rance. I cried all the way here from the church,” she said.
“Thank you, Caroline,” Gia said. “What about the segment? Wasn’t it supposed to air soon? What do you do now? Hold it? Toss it? Rewrite it? I guess it pretty substantially changes the story, huh?”
“To say the least. We thought about airing it this weekend with a reference to the stabbing in the setup, but nobody liked that idea. Seemed wholly inadequate. At a minimum, we have to re-report and recut the whole segment. But a lot of that depends on you and Rance and how things turn out over the next few days, right? So I see no realistic way we can slot this for Sunday.”
“You can imagine how your colleagues are swarming this place, jamming cameras and mics in our faces every time we enter and leave the hospital,” Gia said.
“I don’t think of most of that swarm as colleagues or even journalists. They’re filthy scavengers there to bite off a piece of your identity and feed themselves on your pain. They don’t give a damn how people in circumstances like yours feel or what they’re dealing with. They just want tears or anger or something visceral they can feed their voyeuristic, moron followers,” Caroline said.
Gia fell silent in thought for a moment. Caroline Agostinelli worried that the call may have disconnected.
“Gia, you there?”
“Yeah, what you just said made me think. Rance and I chose ’60 Minutes’ and Whitaker first, then you because we wanted the story told well and responsibly and to take away the demand from the horde like those now outside this hospital. Because nobody wants to be second, right?” Gia said.
“Well, yeah. There’s some validity to that,” Caroline said.
“I was just wondering what it would take from me and maybe Rance’s parents for your team to have what it needs to recut this story and put it on the air, maybe not this Sunday but the Sunday after?”
Caroline clearly was not expecting that response. “Uuuuh, well … I suppose we could have a sit-down with you, maybe Rance’s parents. I mean you’ve gone through so much already, what I would want to know is how you’ve found the strength to hold up through it all and still excel, graduating as Fulbright valedictorian and celebrating a Sugar Bowl only to have this happen a couple of hours later.”
“Also, even if we do that, Gia — and forgive me, but this is a huge point we’d have to consider. What if we shoot new footage, recut the piece, get it ready for air and … well, he doesn’t make it?”
“I won’t allow myself to think like that, Caroline. Call me back in an hour. Give me a minute to talk to Ed and Lorrie Martin to see if they’re amenable to this,” Gia said, her fierce resolve overcoming the instinct to dissolve in tears. “If I give up, what’s to keep Rance from giving up?”
Ed and Lorrie had grown increasingly resentful of the media crush. Unlike Gia, they had been spared the spotlight during the Geno Millions horror. Now, they were in the midst of it, though they had refused to say even a word as they pushed their way through the rabble at least twice a day. They had been rendered virtual prisoners within the confines of their hotel and the hospital. But they were cool toward Gia’s inquiry about going on-camera with Caroline Agostinelli and “60 Minutes” to revise the upcoming segment.
They sat around a table in the corner of the Tulane Medical Center commissary discussing the idea when Gia asked them to wait a second while she dialed Mitch Glazer’s cellphone. He answered almost immediately.
“Mitch I am with Rance’s mom and dad. Caroline Agostinelli called this morning to see how I was doing and said they’d be holding the segment we taped earlier, which is understandable given this. Well, long-story-short, we’re being swamped here by a mass of media that dwarfs what we saw in October and we’re trapped. I remembered your strategy was to defeat the press pack by picking a trusted outlet for an exclusive and you recommended ’60 Minutes’ and your old buddy Mr. Whitaker,” she said.
“That’s right. Everyone wants the scoop, and if that’s gone, being second or third or … whatever … is not worth hanging around for,” he said. “So what’s going on?”
“Well, when I thought back to your original strategy, I asked Caroline what it would take from us for her team to update and re-cut the interview and air it sooner rather than later. Do you think it would still have the same effect of sort of immunizing us from this media pack?” Gia asked.
“Well, I don’t see why not, but the first question you have to ask is whether you’re up for it at this time,” the longtime sports media maven said. “I can’t answer that part. Only you can. So why do you want to do it now?”
“Well, I was sitting by Rance’s bed in the ICU talking to Caroline on the speakerphone and she voiced the concern about redoing the piece and then … Rance doesn’t make it,” Gia said. “In that moment, I decided that if I give up, what’s to keep Rance from giving up. And I told her that.”
Glazer was silent for a moment.
“If you and Mr. and Mrs. Martin decide to proceed, call me right away. I will fly back to New Orleans that day to help any way I can,” he said.
The part about not giving up on Rance as a way to help him keep fighting had moved his parents. When Gia hung up on Mitch Glazer, Ed and Lorrie were holding hands and had tears in their eyes. Lorrie’s eyes looked squarely into Gia’s, a fierce look of indefatigable determination now blazing in them.
“Honey, you get Miss Caroline on the phone. We’re doing this!”
●●●
It was 6:45 a.m. on Thursday, January 5th, and a custodial services box was backing slowly into the sally port at the rear of the Sonesta ES Suites in New Orleans. In the bay, outside the chill wind of the gray morning, stood Mitch Glazer alongside Ed Martin and Calvita Jones. Two men in jeans and hooded sweatshirts exited the cab of the truck, alighted the steps to the loading dock and unlatched the cargo bay door. Inside were large, silvery boxes of expensive camera equipment, rigging for lights, long rolls of wiring, tripods and camera mounts. They nimbly secured them on dollies that they had brought with them and took them to Suite 333, the VIP room that CBS had leased the day before using an unknown CBS producer’s name and a network credit card and where Caroline Agostinelli had slept in one of its two bedrooms. By 9:30 a.m. they had turned the elegant interior of Suite 333 into a perfectly lighted soundstage for the 10 a.m. interview.
Gia, Lorrie Martin and Caroline had arranged to enter the hospital at 6 a.m., before most media had reassembled outside the doors, and see Rance in the ICU. Neither the hospital nor the family would allow photos of Rance there, but then Caroline never asked. She just wanted to see him, to speak to him, to tell him she was praying for him. When they emerged, the cameras focused on Lorrie and Gia. Nobody in the press scrum noticed the woman several paces behind them. Even if they had, only those most intimate with the journalism scene in New York would have recognized her as that of a “60 Minutes” producer who was about to scoop them, making their editors angry and their lives miserable after the revised segment aired on Sunday night.
The taping lasted for two hours, all totaled. Caroline interviewed Gia, her mother and the Martins together in one part of the room set up around a table. She interviewed Rance’s parents by themselves. And then she interviewed Gia, one-on-one. At noon, Caroline took all four of her interview subjects to lunch at Galatoire’s – sneaking them out of the hotel and past the press contingent to a waiting limousine — as the crew finished dismantling the set in Suite 333 and loading back into the custodial services box truck for the trip back to New York.
As they parted after lunch, the limo took Caroline to a private jet to whisk her back to CBS headquarters in Manhattan for at least 72 hours of unbroken work rebuilding her segment and racing the clock to prepare it for broadcast. The rest headed once more to the hospital where, after five days, Rance remained in a coma.
A fever from the infection his wound caused seemed to come and go on a cycle – topping 102 degrees on odd days, dropping to just below 99 on even ones. Kidney function was improving, but still not where the doctors wanted it to be. There were no further signs of internal bleeding, indicating that Dr. DeFusco’s intricate needlework was holding up. It wasn’t unusual for someone who had suffered so grievous a wound and its associated complications to have an extended time of unconsciousness, so doctors weren’t alarmed … yet. But the longer a coma persists, as practitioners know, the longer the odds become that a patient will pull out of it soon. Or maybe ever.
“He’s been having a fitful day,” the ICU chief nurse informed the family after they arrived there. “He’s making a sort of moaning sound. That could mean he’s feeling some pain, or it could mean he’s fighting through whatever keeps him from regaining consciousness. We have no indications of anything that would be an apparent source of pain. We checked him for bedsores and found none. So I don’t know what it means.”
Ed Martin was the first to sit with Rance. Other than holding his hand, saying “The Lord’s Prayer” and telling him he loved him, Ed had saved several stories about the upcoming college football championship game between Georgia and Texas Christian University.
“Vegas favors Georgia by 12 points, the same Georgia whose ass y’all kicked a couple of months ago,” he said.
Next at his bedside was Lorrie. She didn’t believe in protracted vigils. She sat beside him for 20 minutes, read him verses from the Bible, said a prayer — all the while with her hand on his — and then kissed his forehead and was gone.
Gia’s visits were the longest. She never sat. She would stand at his bedside, leaning over the railing. She took pains not to crimp the tubing or delicate electrical wires connected to various parts of Rance on one end.
She would speak as close to his ear as she could, softly in a register barely higher than a whisper, the hushed voices they used when they would talk, face-to-face just before dozing off or just after waking in each other’s arms. She spoke of the times they’ve shared, of what they would have to do when they returned to Fulbright for the next semester, of places they should go together to relax, to enjoy some scenic splendor, to make love. Sometimes she was wistful, occasionally hopeful. Inevitably, she fought off crying at every visit, and she concluded each time by saying, “I love you, Rance Martin. You come back to me.”
●●●
The television in Rance Martin’s room in the Tulane Medical Center Intensive Care Unit had not been turned on in the week that he had been there. No one had even noticed it until Sunday morning when the family visited him, one at a time as was hospital protocol. That day, they had asked the hospital chaplain to join them and take a turn in the room with Rance to say a prayer in his presence. That he was a Roman Catholic priest rather than a pastor of the Martins’ protestant denomination — Presbyterian — was of no matter to them. It was Sunday and Rance needed his moment with the Lord.
It was also Sunday, the day Caroline Agostinelli would make her on-screen debut for “60 Minutes” with the newly announced and much-anticipated segment scooping the world on the heroic and tragic saga of Gia Jones and Rance Martin.
Buzz about the segment had been immediate. It instantly began trending on all social media platforms when CBS began teasing it frequently on all its network programming, including a few excerpts on the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell. It was big enough that it generated chatter on rival NBC’s “Today” show and repeatedly on CNN, MSNBC and Fox.
In front of the hospital and surrounding the Sonesta ES Suites, the spurned rabble of media who had been encamped for days and come away with nothing turned surly and more aggressive. They were now desperate to provoke some reaction from the family and interject themselves into the narrative in the hours leading up to the scheduled airtime after Sunday’s late NFL game. Mitch Glazer had seen it firsthand before, and he met with his counterpart at Tulane’s athletics department and the university’s top administrators to arrange for increased security for the family through the long weekend.
Only one person could sit with Rance during the telecast. The others would have to watch the program on a television that would be brought in for them into the ICU waiting room. Ed and Lorrie Martin discussed it in advance and both felt that Gia should be that person. They would watch in the waiting room along with Callie Jones and now Emmett Burson, who had flown into New Orleans to be with Callie over the weekend.
“Gia,” Lorrie said over a late breakfast in the hospital commissary that morning, “we’ve spoken and we agree: we think it’s best for you to be in the room with Rance when the segment airs tonight.”
She was relieved at the decision, but the toll of worry and sleep loss was evident in the fatigue etched on her face. “Thank you. I always pictured all of us watching it together, back before … when it would have been a much different story.”
“You see — and I hope I am not being presumptuous here — but I think of us, I think of all of us these days. It feels right. And you’ve accepted me as family since the first, so …” she said, joylessly picking at the eggs and sausage on the plastic plate before her. “I suppose being there with Rance for right now is as close as we get to … family.”
A phalanx of two dozen New Orleans police officers, some with nightsticks drawn, formed a wedge through which Gia, Ed and Lorrie Martin, Mitch Glazer, Callie Jones and Emmett Burson advanced, enduring the shoving, yelling, cursing mob of people with cameras and microphones. Once safely inside, hospital personnel escorted them to the ICU waiting room where a 52-inch TV that had been placed on two end tables and wired up during the afternoon was playing the fourth quarter of the season’s final regular season NFL game between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Denver Broncos.
Per custom, Ed and Lorrie, in that order, would enter the room with their son first, spend perhaps five minutes with them and then yield to Gia. Ed made sure the television in the room was on and tuned to CBS where he watched a few moments of the game, commenting on the teams’ strategy and talking football with his son. Lorrie came in, read a few verses from Psalms, told him that Gia would watch their “60 Minutes” segment with him and kissed his forehead.
Gia entered just as CBS was wrapping up its abbreviated postgame show. She grasped Rance’s hand and sat beside him. A few minutes later, chills ran down her spine as the trademark stopwatch sound signaled the start of the CBS telecast. The first segment teased was theirs. Footage of herself and Rance, of the postgame Sugar Bowl celebration, of the pending interviews, of Geno and Duarte Mélancon raced by, but the voice narrating it was Caroline Agostinelli’s.
Two other stories were previewed — one about the problems artificial intelligence presented for professions such as law, journalism, music and art and another about the extreme weather California was experiencing tied to climate change.
“Those stories and more tonight on ’60 Minutes,'” said correspondent Scott Pelley.
Gia’s grip on Rance’s hand tightened. Maybe it was just a reflex. Maybe it was her imagination. But did his grip tighten almost imperceptibly in response? She looked at his face. Still blank. The moment passed.
“60 Minutes” saved the segment about Gia and Rance for the final 20 minutes of the program, the hook to keep viewers tuned in for the duration to see two preceding segments.
Finally, there it was. On camera, a perfectly coiffed Caroline Agostinelli sat on a stool in front of a screen designed to look like a magazine page. It showed a photo of Rance and Gia celebrating in each other’s embrace as green and yellow confetti fell around, flush with the joy of winning the Sugar Bowl. Superimposed in white type over the top of the page was the title of the piece, “The Education of Giacomo Jones.”
“When a multistate murder spree by a psychopath released without warning from a New Jersey juvenile lockup ended in his gruesome death on the campus of an elite southern university in October, it was already a huge story. That it involved an honors scholar and her new boyfriend, a player on Fulbright University’s most successful team ever, it became a global sensation. Their perseverance and their romance became America’s favorite love story. A week ago in New Orleans, just after Fulbright won its first Sugar Bowl, it took a dark and tragic turn. Now, with the player, Rance Martin, battles for his life in a hospital as we tell you about the education of Giacomo Jones.”
The report began with a scene of Fulbright’s campus, with footage from the Charlotte CBS affiliate of the Generals practicing in the dog days of summer and Gia nearly unrecognizable in her uniform, shades and visor. There was a clip of Stark Middleton instructing No. 74 on the fine points of offensive line footwork. There were brief clips of Rance playing against Wake Forest, Georgia, Tennessee and in the Sugar Bowl. Then suddenly — with jarring effect — still photos of Gennaro Millientello as a juvenile offender, news footage from murder scenes in Prince William County, Virginia, from North Carolina and from an apartment in Fallstrom, South Carolina barely an hour before the Millientello’s fatal confrontation with police rifles in Fulbright’s Honors College dorm.
Rather than risk confusing viewers, Caroline and the producers and editors of the piece chose to initially walk viewers through the story chronologically. There were interviews with Capt. Robert Blanding of the South Carolina State Police, with Perry Hemphill and Art and Vangie Overshaw. And of course, the interview with Gia and Rance in the president’s residence when they spoke of now they had overcome the trauma of being at the center of such gothic violence and managed to balance their academic, athletic and romantic lives. Caroline explained that Gia’s masculine given name was a tribute to her grandfather, a hero of the Italian resistance in World War II. There was a lengthy cutaway with the most memorable lines from Gia’s valedictory address and her running into Rance’s arms as she led the graduating class in its recessional off the coliseum floor.
Caroline explained how that horror could be traced back to a pattern of negligence and worse at the highest levels of New Jersey’s juvenile justice and correctional system and how numerous examples, brought to the attention of the governor and the legislature, had fallen on deaf ears. It had emerged as the dominant issue in an upcoming election that would determine partisan control of the legislature, she said.
“Two weeks after we taped our first interview with the couple, Rance was gravely wounded in a knife attack on Bourbon Street after celebrating for a while with their teammates,” Caroline said. “A Gulf of Mexico oil rig worker and career criminal named Duarte Mélancon, allegedly stabbed Rance after he refused to give Mélancon money. Mélancon died two days ago from a fractured skull he received when, ironically, a Notre Dame football player who had just played against Rance captured him and slammed him to the pavement after he allegedly tried to steal that player’s girlfriend’s purse. The Notre Dame player was unaware that Rance had been stabbed moments earlier less than 100 feet away. He has not been charged in the incident.”
Gia braced herself for what Caroline and her team had selected for broadcast from her emotional interview three days earlier. The camera was focused tightly on Gia, perfectly lighted, in the darkened set of the VIP suite in her New Orleans hotel.
After all she and Rance had endured together, in a moment of triumph, for this to strike suddenly, Caroline asked her, “where do you find the strength now to regroup?”
Gia began the interview determined to be reasoned and cerebral in her responses. She had focused her awesome intellectual might on forcing emotion deep down and bottling it up during this interview. She did not want the world to see her as a weepy, hopeless mess. She did not want to give the criminal element that had tormented her mercilessly for the last four months confirmation that it had any quarter in her soul.
But the camera captured everything — the tiny facial expressions, the tightening of her lips, her eyelids batting during the pause after Caroline’s questions to frame her most cogent answer.
“It is difficult. I can’t allow the more negative prognoses to override the hopeful signs I see every day. It’s gradual, it’s slow and it’s incremental, but there are data that point us toward hope, not despair,” Gia said. “It also helps that Rance’s mom and dad have been at my side in full support the whole way. And my own mother flew in the very next day to be with me. Fulbright has gone above and beyond the whole way, and I have always felt that the university has had my back all the way to the highest levels.”
Next came an establishing shot back on the Fulbright campus: the building housing the university’s music department, then a woman playing the piano in a room that looked like a recording studio. It was Susan Morton. The camera focused on Susan and her fingers as they played a soft, haunting melody. Caroline, in voice-over, introduced her as the young woman Geno Millions had held at knifepoint in his desperate attempt to reach Gia in the Honors College.
“I would not be talking to you right now if it weren’t for Gia Jones,” Morton told Caroline. “Had she decided to play it safe that morning and not come downstairs to help the police and effectively turn herself into a human shield … for me, I would be dead. Simple as that.”
Caroline picked up the narrative again: “So Susan, an Honors College student who, like Gia, lived one floor below in the dormitory, chose to use her gift to thank Gia. She wrote this in Gia’s honor and played publicly for the first time for us.”
Titled “A Higher Call,” it never mentions Gia by name but, rather, heroes who offer up their own lives for the sake of others. It salutes firefighters, police officers, everyday bystanders who instinctively come to the aid of others when they see them in distress. And troops who advance into gunfire for their buddies and their country. In a low, smoky voice with a trace of her soulful Kentucky drawl, Susan Morton moved gracefully through her chorus, her piano her only accompaniment.
“She didn’t know me, could have kept herself safe,
but with my life in danger, she rushed into place,
to barter her own life by risking it all,
an everyday woman meets life’s higher call.
The heart of a hero, and life’s higher call.”
Both of Gia’s hands clasped Rance’s right hand as she began softly weeping, struggling not to progress into full-blown sobbing that might trouble Rance, alarm the nurses watching the same telecast at the duty station and so she could hear what was next.
The camera returned to her Thursday interview in the hotel.
“Gia, your IQ is off the charts. You were the valedictorian of the graduating class last month and are supposed to be entering your first semester as a graduate student in microbiology. You’ve seen more in just — well, almost — 20 years than most people see in a lifetime. What have the past few months taught you?”
With the camera focused tightly again on Gia’s face, she swallowed hard in a clear attempt to compose herself. She fixed her eyes on Caroline’s for strength.
“I learned that you never let a day go by without telling those you love that you love them,” she said, a slight falter creeping into her voice.
“I learned never to miss the opportunity to help someone — whether it’s a friend, family, someone you never met — because the only antidote to all the evil out there, some of which I have seen firsthand, is love,” she said.
Her lip noticeably quivered as she paused briefly.
“I learned that when love finds you, you grab it and hold on for dear life and you live every single minute of every day like there’s no tomorrow,” she said as her words poured forth and tears spilled from her eyes, “… because there just might not be.”
The camera lingered for a beat on the image of Gia’s face before the image of the ticking stopwatch again filled the screen, denoting the end of the segment.
Gia abandoned all restraint and cried openly. She stood and leaned over Rance, pressing her chest into his as she sobbed. Over the soft tones of the EKG monitoring Rance’s slowly increasing heartbeat, she heard sniffles and hands clapping from the nurses and doctors who had gathered around a laptop to watch the livestreamed segment just outside.
It was several minutes before Gia’s weeping abated enough for her to softly mutter into Rance’s ear, “I hope I did OK, baby. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”
That was the moment she heard a rattling sound from Rance’s chest and throat. His EKG was accelerating. She stiffened momentarily in panic. What had she done? A nurse scurried from the central control pod to the door of Rance’s room.
She felt a slight sensation to her left. She gasped and looked down. Rance’s right arm was reaching toward her, slowly, haltingly. It continued until his hand found her long, silky black hair and let it thread through his massive fingers.
“Rance! Rance!” she shouted. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
Another gurgling sound, then a cough. Then he swallowed and inhaled.
“Gia … I love you …,” he said as his eyelids fluttered and then slowly opened. “Whe … where are we?”
She shrieked for joy before realizing where she was and that critically ill people were just a few feet away in rooms on either side of this one. Now doctors and nurses were streaming purposefully toward the room and the commotion therein.
“Rance, baby, you’re back — oh, thank you God,” Gia said, tears streaming from her face and spilling tonto Rance’s cotton hospital gown.
“You’re in the Tulane University Medical Center Hospital ICU in New Orleans. You’ve been here for going on eight days,” Gia said. “Your mom and dad are right outside in the waiting room. ‘Sixty Minutes’ just aired a segment on what has happened.”
“I know. I could hear, and I kept … fighting toward it, through the dark. I could hear your voice and make out what you were saying and then I felt you on my chest and … that helped me … break through,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Ma’am, we’re going to need to do some checks on Mr. Martin right now and we’ll need you to wait outside while we do,” a nurse practitioner told Gia.
“No, he just came back to me,” Gia said, clinging to Rance’s hand as he clung to hers.
“Can you let her stay?” he rasped.
The nurse practitioner cut his eyes toward the other two white-coated professionals in the room. One nodded. The other shrugged.
“OK, it’s against policy but this is … we’ve never had anything this unusual, so if you can stand over in the corner out of the way because we’ll need to access and move a lot of tubes and wires.”
Just then, “60 Minutes” returned to the screen high on the wall of Rance’s ICU room and everything came to a momentary standstill. Scott Pelley noted letters the show had received in response to segments aired on previous Sundays. Then, he closed with this.
“And finally, meet our newest ’60 Minutes’ correspondent. Caroline Agostinelli is a veteran producer and the genius behind writing and editing many of our award-winning segments. Tonight, on a very tight deadline, Caroline reported and produced the segment you just saw. You will see her on-camera reporting many more.”
The camera pulled back to show Caroline sitting alongside Pelley. Her words were the last before the show signed off: “Join us again next week for another edition of ’60 Minutes.'”
In the waiting room outside the ICU, a crowd had gathered. The hospital’s executive director, the president of Tulane University and an assortment of white-coated medical professionals and relatives of other ICU patients congratulated Ed and Lorrie Martin as the program went off the air. Moments later, a courier entered the room with a large floral bouquet. It was addressed to Gia Jones. Then, as if choreographed, a nurse practitioner burst through the double doors leading to the ICU, found Mr. and Mrs. Martin and led them back through the double doors. Expecting the worst, the color drained from their faces momentarily, before the practitioner smiled and delivered the good news that their son had just emerged from his coma.
“I wanted to tell you privately because we don’t want this gathering outside to turn into a pep rally and startle the other patients. Miss Jones was with him when he came to. We’re doing a few tests right now and we will bring you back to see him shortly,” he said.
Ed and Lorrie Martin embraced each other as tightly as they could. Together, they shed tears of relief and thanksgiving.
When Lorrie and Ed were allowed briefly to walk into Rance’s room — another small breach of ICU protocol — to see him there with Gia’s hand in his and a weak smile on his pallid face, composure eluded them again. Gia stood to the right of Rance’s bed, his parents to his right.
“I like to think the Bible verses and prayers worked because for a while, that’s all we had,” his mother said.
“I’ve never been happier to see those eyes of yours, son,” Ed Martin said.
Now they stood largely wordless for an awkward minute, just gazing at Rance.
“OK this is getting a little creepy,” Rance said in a scratchy, weak voice. “Maybe somebody could find me some Gatorade? I am parched.”
Ed Martin bolted from the room, passing the request along to nurses, attendants, anyone he could find.
“Oh, Gia, this enormous arrangement of flowers arrived for you out in the waiting room right after the show. They won’t allow it in here because it’s too big, but this card on it is for you,” Lorrie said, handing the palm-sized card to Gia.
She opened it and pulled out the cream-colored folded card with “Thank You” engraved on the front. She read the message inside, printed in a plain font..
“Guess you saw by now I made it! I am a correspondent! I will always be grateful to you and Rance and will hold you in my heart forever. Love, Caroline.”
Gia smiled and nodded. She gently slid the card into her purse, pulled her iPhone from it and opened a text window to Caroline.
Congratulations! I watched the segment in the room with Rance. It was beautiful, At the end of it, he regained consciousness!!! He had heard the segment as he was fighting his way back.
Three minutes later, the phone rang. It was Caroline, but Gia could barely hear her over the commotion.
“We’re at a bar in Manhattan around the corner from CBS headquarters.” Caroline said, shouting into the phone to make herself heard above the din. “They took me out to congratulate me, but when I got your text just now I read it out loud, it became a celebration about Rance. You can hear it still going on around me.”
“Like Susan’s song said about you, ‘the heart of a hero.’ That’s you, my friend.”
●●●
A white Lear jet with green and yellow piping down its sides and a green tail with yellow numbers had reached cruising altitude of 28,000 feet somewhere over southern Alabama streaking northeast toward the airport just outside Fallstrom, South Carolina.
Two seats along the right side of the fuselage had been removed to accommodate Rance Martin’s gurney and several portable machines that monitored his vitals and an intravenous drip that kept his fluids and the proper amount of antibiotics flowing into his bloodstream.
Rance had made steady progress in the three days since he regained consciousness. He had been moved to a regular room at the Tulane Medical Center Hospital the day after emerging from his coma. Now, he would continue the next phase of his convalescence at Fulbright University’s hospital. At his rate of recovery, doctors projected that he could be released in as soon as a week. A nurse and an internist were on the flight with Rance. Gia, Lorrie and Ed had departed earlier on a commercial flight to Charlotte where a Fulbright van would meet them and return them to Fallstrom in time to meet Rance at the hospital.
Rance never could sleep during air travel and this was no exception, even though he was flat of his back for the whole trip of nearly two hours.
“Doc, can I see my travel bag over there,” Rance asked the physician. He handed it over to Rance, who unzipped it, felt around inside it and grasped the velvety, blue pouch his father had handed him just before he left his hospital room in New Orleans to catch his flight to Charlotte. Rance zipped his travel bag and asked the physician to again stow it away for the remainder of the flight.
His father’s words seemed to ricochet off every corner of his mind. It was sober advice, dispassionately given, neither affirming nor dissuading his son in the decision now before him. He spoke slowly, thoughtfully, honestly.
“Again, Rance, that’s not something I can answer for you,” Ed Martin said several times.
He could feel the plane lose air speed and the descent begin. Lying prone, the sensation that one’s stomach is taking flight was even more pronounced as the aircraft dipped 10 or so feet per second. When the plane’s nose tilted slightly upward and the rear landing gear tires screeched on the concrete of the runway, everything in the cabin seemed to rattle. The jet taxied swiftly to a waiting ambulance into which four strong men hoisted Rance and his gurney. Fifteen minutes later, the ambulance arrived at the emergency room receiving bay of the Fulbright University Medical Center, the rear doors opened and Rance was wheeled to a patient access elevator and into a luxurious room on the fourth floor. It was already filled with flowers.
In the hallway just outside the doorway to the room was a “welcoming committee” consisting of his parents, Perry Hemphill, Stark Middleton and Art Overshaw. They applauded softly as the attendant guided his gurney toward them. Rance asked if the head of the gurney could be raised so he could interact with them.
“Rance, you are a sight for sore eyes, young man. I’ve never been so happy to see a player come home late from a bowl game,” Hemphill said.
“Feels good to be home. Getting better every day, but it may be a stretch to be ready for spring practice,” he said. “Where’s Gia.”
“She wanted to stop by her new apartment and freshen up a little, change clothes. She’s been living out of a suitcase for nearly two weeks,” Lorrie Martin said. “She’ll be here in a bit.” Rance nodded.
“Son, you just focus on getting better. Anything you need, you let us know. The hospital here has been told to do everything it can to make you comfortable, to expedite your recovery and to take care of Gia and your parents,” President Overshaw said.
The orderly asked the dignitaries to excuse him as several aides and nurses gathered to help move Rance from the gurney into his bed. He had recovered enough that he could move his legs and arms as needed to assist the medical professionals straining under his weight. As they prepared to leave, he asked if his catheter would be reconnected, a prospect he despised.
“Naw, hoss,” the orderly — a large, sandy-haired country boy — drawled back over his shoulder. “You on your own now. Either you use that beaker there,” he said pointing to a cylindrical plastic bottle with a narrowed neck just large enough for a penis, “… you get up and go to the bathroom over there,” he said, pointing to a closed door, “or you piss the bed.” He departed the room chuckling.
After the medical staff had departed the room, Perry Hemphill and Ed Martin stepped inside the room.
“Well, I think President Overshaw pretty much spoke for all of us, Rance. We just wanted to see you, see you smile. And it’s beautiful. We’ll be checking in on you and … well, you got my number if I can do anything for you,” Hemphill said. He shook Ed Martin’s hand and excused himself.
Ed approached the bed, his face serious yet benevolent. He put his hand gently on his son’s shoulder.
“Son, you sure this is what you want to do? If you’re comfortable with the decision, your mom and I will be there with you,” he said.
“Yeah, dad. Thank you. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the right and necessary thing I have to do,” Rance said. “Thanks for understanding.”
“OK. Your mom and I will be in the hotel just across the street for the next couple of days if you need us,” he said. He hugged his son, turned and left. He opened the door and stopped momentarily. He looked back at his son.
“She’s coming down the hall. Want me to send her on in?” Ed said.
“She by herself?”
“Looks that way.”
“OK,” Rance said. “Send her in.”
Gia entered the room wearing jeans and Rance’s oversized white No. 74 jersey, the one with green numerals that he wore in the victory over Georgia. She was smiling, but the creases on her forehead and bags under her eyes betrayed two weeks of unrelenting fatigue.
“Hi baby. Seeing you here makes me so happy,” Gia said as she bent over his bedside and kissed him, not even minding the heavy stubble, now approaching beard length.
Rance sat silent for a moment, just gazing at Gia, before he spoke.
“Baby, I don’t know how to do this. And, considering the circumstances, I … well, I haven’t really had much time to ask friends for advice on something this … important,” Rance said.
“I called Crews, and I you know I trust him. He told me to think long and hard about it and that he wouldn’t recommend it. Then I called Gerow, and he didn’t really have much advice one way or another,” Rance said.
“So I asked dad and he was, well … concerned. He told me that ordinarily he would advise against it. He warned me not to do anything that could possibly … hurt you,” he continued.
By now, Gia’s smile had curdled. In its place was a look of concern bordering on fear.
“What, Rance? What are you talking about? Your dad would normally advise against .. what?”
“Yeah, I’ve probably said too much already and not gotten anywhere close to my point, so … just let me do it,” Rance said.
She saw his left hand fumbling beneath the bedsheet and brought forth an empty blue velvet pouch with a drawstring that he laid to one side. Now, both of his hands were beneath the sheet again, manipulating some object only by sense of feel.
“There … finally,” he said. “Give me your hand, please.”
She cocked her head to one side, eyeing him suspiciously, but she complied, placing her right hand in his.
“Sorry, your other hand,” he said.
She blinked in confusion, but again complied.
“I know we’re not in our twenties yet, Gia, but will you marry me?”
Her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. His left hand emerged from beneath the white hospital sheet. In it was a gray box opened to reveal a gold band with five small diamonds.
Gia gasped, waiting for several long seconds to exhale.
“We don’t have to do it, like, immediately. I know we have a lot we have to do and we probably need a few more years under us before making it official,” he said.
“It’s just that … what you told Caroline in that interview … that when love finds you, you better hold onto it with all you’ve got and live like there’s no tomorrow because there just might not be,” he said, “… that’s when I knew I had to fight like hell to get back to you and when I did, not ever let you go because I was close to having no tomorrow.”
Gia was still speechless.
“Baby, it’s a little early. Maybe a lot early by some folks’ timelines, but … I don’t ever want to be without you. So will you? … Marry me, that is?”
She took the ring and slid it onto the third finger of her left hand, a look of wonderment on her face. It had been part of Rance’s grandmother’s set. Ed Martin had held onto it since his mother had passed away four years earlier. Now it fit, albeit a bit loosely, on Gia’s lean, long finger. She stared at it for a moment longer, awestruck, before she found her voice, bent forward and kissed him. In a clear voice, she said, “Rance Martin, you are mine and I will marry you anytime, anywhere.”
She climbed onto the bed alongside him, careful not to displace or crimp any of the wiring or tubing still connected to him. She put her arm across his chest and stroked his hair and his right temple as she pressed light kisses onto the other side of his face.
It had been a demanding day that had begun before sunrise almost 650 miles away in New Orleans, and the weight of it had taken the steam out of Rance. He allowed her gentle kisses and caresses to carry him gently into a peaceful slumber. And now, with the wear of the past two weeks’ tumult now finally lifting, Gia fell asleep a few seconds later, her cheek on his mighty right shoulder.
A nurse who entered the room to administer Rance a mild painkiller and sedative saw them in peaceful sleep and, for once, tossed the rule book aside and let them sleep. He, too, had watched the “60 Minutes” segment and knew the depth of their relationship, their unique situation. There are some things, the nurse reasoned to himself, that love can do far better than pharmaceuticals.
●●●
Epilogue
By April, Rance Martin had slowly regained full use of his frame. He had to fight off the damage lapsed blood supply and low blood pressure had done to his organs and muscles in the hours after his near-fatal stabbing. He had walked with the assistance of a walker until the middle of February. He had begun physical rehabilitation in March, realizing the long and difficult road he faced if he were to ever regain the power and speed he had as an All-Southeastern Conference football player.
Cognitive tests showed that he had suffered no brain damage, at least not to the higher-functioning areas of the brain that controlled memory, reason and learning. Whether the neural pathways that control movement, balance and coordination would fully return would not be known for months.
Rance had moved into the apartment with Gia. They were engaged and very much in love, but there was a more practical reason for the living arrangement. Gia knew his body better than anyone alive and could recognize when he needed help with things as simple as changing socks or as complicated as pairing his Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to his new Apple iBook and the large screen they had purchased to help him do class assignments at home. But his progress continued at a quickened pace to the point that, by May, they were ready to travel together to the Martins’ Tennessee lakehouse for a long, relaxing Memorial Day weekend.
Rance’s right side featured a small area of jagged scars set at right angles, only one of which was the initial wound caused by Duarte Mélancon’s butterfly knife. Rance lay shirtless on an outdoor recliner beside the Watts Bar Lake shoreline, allowing the sun to restore some of the color lost to a lengthy hospital convalescence and months indoors. There, by themselves, one of Rance’s most profound worries disappeared when Gia also chose to go shirtless in the late May Tennessee sun. She could see Rance stiffen beneath the loose gym shorts at the sight of her. When Rance’s hand tweaked her already-turgid cocoa-colored nipple, a shiver raced down her spine directly to her crotch.
She stood, wriggled out of her bikini bottoms and then tugged Rance’s shorts off before climbing atop him and kissing him deeply. The feel of his full hardness pressing against her navel completed the checklist for them both. He was as erect as he had ever been, and the satiny, black hair framing her cleft and her mons pubis were already slick with her arousal. She slid his shaft against her labia to wet it and then sank fully, satisfyingly downward on his entire length. If anyone was on the lake fishing or boating within eyesight, neither of them cared. Within minutes, they were climaxing together on the chaise lounge in broad daylight.
After a long respite of languid postcoital repose and passionate, lazy kissing, they gathered their towels and clothes and retreated to more private environs inside the cabin for a full afternoon of unhurried lovemaking.
The world had shown Gia and Rance at the dawn of their long life of love together how brutal and unsparing it could be. It did all it could to crush two young lovers, pushing them together over their first four months to the edge of death, making fear and despair their unshakable attendants for a time. But they persevered, and they prevailed.
Hardship would call again over their time yet to come. Loved ones would pass away. Sickness would threaten them. Enemies would attempt to steal from them, even to separate them, one from the other. But the future Giacomo and Rance Martin had mastered the art of strength in the face of adversity early on. They would not be broken.
Years lay ahead. The summers would remind them of the germination of their love. The fall and winter would evoke triumph and tragedy. And spring would always bear the promise of new growth and reawakening.
The years would turn into decades. And the decades into forever. The forever that awaits beyond the blue.
THE END