Helpless

Chapter 2

Shilo, New Hampshire, late August

“I’ve got ball!”

Jill Hawkins closed in to apply pressure on her opponent. It didn’t matter that Jill played striker for the Shilo Wildcats girls’ varsity soccer team. Being the player closest to the ball goal side made Jill her team’s first defender. Jill’s teammates, each of whom wore the same colored orange mesh practice jersey, sprinted into position to get compact behind the ball. The girls moved as a team and kept their opponent from pressing the ball forward.

Jill covered her gap at precisely the right time, and Lindsey Wells couldn’t play the angled ball she had wanted. Lindsey faked left, but Jill wasn’t fooled. Jill made a perfectly timed tackle and was dribbling the ball downfield before Lindsey even knew what had happened.

“That’s how you attack the ball!” Jill’s father, the girls’ varsity soccer coach for the past ten years, shouted as he followed his daughter’s progress down the sidelines. “Well played, Jill! Well played!”

Jill Hawkins lifted her head and flashed her father a bright smile. Tom stopped running and choked back his emotions. An outsider wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual in the exchange between father and daughter. But Tom knew not to read too much into Jill’s beaming face. Despite the warmth of her expression, he suspected their frigid relationship was no closer to thawing.

Battles.

Tom Hawkins understood from personal experience that soccer was a game of battles. He had been an all-American soccer player for the Shilo Wildcats boys’ varsity soccer team. He also understood that soccer was a lot like life. Both were just a series of battles, each constrained by a time limit—a whistle to end one, and death the other.

At forty-three, despite a full head of dark hair, blue eyes that still reminded people of a husky, the same waist size from high school, and a muscular physique visible even through his Windbreaker, Tom Hawkins had essentially arrived at the halftime of his life. He had spent the last ten years teaching the girls to battle until the final whistle blew. He would do the same. It was why Tom had fought so hard to win back his daughter.

Tom blew his coach’s whistle to signal it was time to practice set pieces. In soccer, corner kicks often decided who got the championship trophy. Coaches picked the drills, but it was the captains who ran them. Team captains Chloe Adamson and Megan McAndrews got the girls into action.

“Hey, orange, ball does not get past us!” Hawkins demanded of the girls with the pinnies on.

“Up, out, and far!” somebody yelled.

The girl’s kick came at Tom low to the ground and did not travel nearly far enough.

“Nice try, Becky!” Lindsey Wells exclaimed.

“No, Lindsey,” Tom scolded her. “It’s not a nice try! That stunk, and you know it.”

Tom’s expression darkened. The girls nearest to him looked at the ground and kicked at the dirt with the toes of their cleats. They understood perfectly well why their coach had snapped at Lindsey the way he did. They had been taught to pound their teammates on the pitch. Outwork every player on the field. There were rules against Bobby Talk (talking about boys). Phrases like “Nice try” and “I’m sorry” were treated with the same disdain as curse words.

Tom had coached both boys and girls at the high school level, so he knew the inherent difference in their style of play. His first priority as coach for the Shilo girls’ squad was not to accept those differences, but to change them. He began his coaching tenure by asking the girls as a group, “Why are you here?” Not a single player volunteered an answer. Tom prodded until at last one shaky hand rose and a girl meekly replied, “Because I have good foot skills.” Just as Tom had expected, the other girls soon chimed in and offered supporting evidence of their teammate’s brave claim.

“No, you have great foot skills!” one said, before then offering several examples.

Boys got their confidence from bravado. Girls seemed to get it from their teammates. Good, because it showed a respect for the team. Bad, because they tended to be less selfish players. They’d look to pass before they’d look to shoot.

“Play like you’re six years old again,” Tom often instructed. “Remember? My ball! Mine!”

Transforming his players into instinctive, selfish, smart winners depended on his ability to enhance their individual resourcefulness, while teaching them how to work effectively as a team. He applied many of the techniques he’d learned from his time with the Naval Special Warfare Command. Tom often quoted one of his favorite SOCOM mottos: “Alone I am lethal. As a team I dominate.”

Tom might have gone on to become a collegiate all-American soccer player if not for the career day event organized by the faculty of Shilo High School. At that event, a young Tom Hawkins had stopped by a metal folding table manned by a navy recruiter. A small television set on that table played a looped video depicting the physical demands and mental fortitude required to become a Navy SEAL. Two minutes into the three-minute production, Tom was hooked.

The recruiter never gave Tom the hard sell. He’d caught the excitement exploding like fireworks in Tom’s eyes. Tom enlisted in the navy the day after he had his diploma in hand. College could wait, he explained to his somewhat surprised parents, but the youthful endurance and strength required to become a Navy SEAL could not.

Tom wasn’t the only Shilo youth to forgo college for military service. Roland Boyd, Tom’s childhood best friend and fellow soccer teammate, followed Tom’s lead and enlisted on the very same day. While Tom had surprised his parents by deciding to serve his country, Boyd had enlisted to spite his father’s wishes. But motivation didn’t matter for shit once you signed on the dotted line. Tom was dead set on the navy, and Roland, who was somewhat prone to seasickness, decided to enlist in the army, same as their other military-bound classmate, Kelly Kavanagh.

Kelly and Tom had dated for most of their senior year in high school. Tom’s decision to enlist might have influenced Kelly’s choice as well, but not because she wanted to keep their relationship going. Unlike Roland, Kelly didn’t come from money and claimed she needed the promised college financial assistance when she got out. Tom hadn’t spoken with Kelly since graduation and assumed she’d followed her “go to college” plans. He certainly hadn’t expected to see Kelly again when he arrived at a military base in Germany for training exercises with his SEAL platoon. He had no idea she’d re-upped for another six years with the army. It was a chance encounter for the two former sweethearts that altered both their lives profoundly and forever.

Their reunion in Germany might have been the first time Tom had laid eyes on Kelly since graduation, but his attraction to her had never waned. Less than a year after rekindling their romance, Kelly got her requested discharge, gave birth to a daughter, married the baby girl’s father, and changed her last name to Hawkins.

The marriage lasted only six years.

The divorce turned uglier than any battle Tom ever fought with a gun.

Unable to get what she had wanted from Tom, Kelly took every opportunity to poison the father-daughter relationship and drive a permanent wedge between them. Kelly believed Tom would eventually cave in to her demands—even if it took years to accomplish her goal. From the age of six on, much of what Jill learned about her father were the lies her mother told.

“Is it true, Daddy?” Jill had cried into the phone one evening from her home in Shilo. “Did you beg Mommy to have an abortion?”

Jill took in every falsehood Kelly drummed up about him and believed it to be true. Every lie and slanderous insult became Jill’s reality. On occasion, Jill would confront Tom about these stories.

“Did you do drugs?”

“No.”

“Did you ever hit me?”

“No.”

“Did you ever beat Mommy?”

“Never.”

Tom could fend off whatever Jill sent his way. How successfully? Well, he couldn’t know that for certain. But at least Jill cared enough to keep the questions coming. She had asked Tom, on many occasions, why her mother would say such terrible things about him if they weren’t true.

“Sometimes people just do and say hurtful things because they’re angry,” Tom would often say.

Unable to reveal to Jill the secret of her parents’ acrimony, Tom was forced to counterstrike Kelly’s bitter campaign to discredit him in other ways. After the divorce, he moved to Westbrook, much farther north, but also affordable given his hefty alimony and child support payments. He kept his guidance counselor job with Shilo High School, despite offers for better-paying gigs with substantially shorter commutes. He wanted to maintain close ties with Shilo, where he had bought a house, and where Kelly decided to remain after the divorce. He did this to stay as connected as possible to Jill. He also wrote to Jill, letters and cards, almost every week. Tom never missed an opportunity to acknowledge a birthday, graduation, recital, or other milestone event in Jill’s life. He had kept those letters coming, though they always went unanswered. In each he encouraged Jill to call him whenever she wanted, or needed. He reminded her that he’d be there for her—always.

His choice to invest the extra hours required to run a championship-caliber girls’ soccer program was made with the hope that he’d one day get the chance to coach his daughter, convinced the experience would strengthen their tenuous bond. When Jill shunned soccer for field hockey her freshman year, the standout middle school soccer star had sent him a very clear message: I won’t play for the Wildcats if my father is the coach. When Jill had shown up unexpectedly for soccer tryouts the summer before her sophomore year, Tom had turned his head so that other girls wouldn’t see him tear up.

Tom couldn’t explain his daughter’s sudden change of heart. Perhaps she had become curious enough about him to try out for the team against her mother’s well-verbalized wishes. Whatever Jill’s reasoning, coaching his daughter proved to be a healing step forward, but not the leap Tom hoped it would be. Jill was now heading into her junior year, but to Tom’s continued disappointment, their relationship still remained mostly stuck in the past.

Battles.

With the Wildcats’ first game of the new season only two weeks away, time to prepare was in short supply. There were seventeen ponytails on the field, each chatting constantly with the ball in play. Tom listened to them talk. They sounded ready to win.

“Organize! Get to where the ball is going!”

“Crash the net!”

Tom blew his whistle and signaled the start of the day’s last drill. The summer sun stood high in the sky as the captains worked quickly to get the players into position.

A few girls had turned their attention elsewhere, stopping to watch a police car as it turned onto the road beside the practice field. Tom looked too. The cruiser’s lights were flashing, but the siren was silent. A pit formed in Tom’s stomach.

Even after all these years, police cars still gave Tom a sinking feeling.

They know what I did, he’d think.

They’re coming for me.

The secret is out.