Brent got up. Kim was saying something to him, and he was shaking his head. He came over to the bench with his hand still over his eye, and he sat next to me, because the seat next to me was the only empty one, and he leaned toward me and said, under the noise of the crowd starting up again:
"There's a curtain."
"What?"
"There's a curtain. Like at fourteen. Coming down from the top. It's bigger, Teddy. It's way bigger."
He'd never called me Teddy before. I looked at him. He wasn't crying. His good eye was perfectly dry and absolutely terrified.
I stood up and turned around to Dombrowski and said, in front of the whole bench and the trainer and the Siena man and Gil Callahan, too loud, my voice cracking like a freshman's, "Coach, he needs to go to the hospital. Right now. It's his retina. It's been hurt since he was fourteen and it's worse and he needs Albany Med right now."
Dombrowski didn't ask me how I knew. That was the thing about Dombrowski. He looked at me for one second and then he looked at Brent, at the hand over the eye, and he turned around to the scorer's table and said, "Callahan's out. Kim, get his coat. Pratt, you're at the four," and then he walked up two rows into the stands, to Gil Callahan in the red blazer, and bent down and said something in his ear that I never heard and that Brent told me later his father never repeated.
Mrs. Callahan drove him. Not his father. His mother came down out of the stands in her good coat and took Brent's arm on the left side, the blind side, so he wouldn't walk into the door, and they went out through the lobby while the game went on behind them.
We lost to Shaker by nine. I played the whole fourth quarter, because Leon got in foul trouble and Dombrowski had no one else, and I had eleven rebounds in eight minutes, which was a school record for a quarter that nobody had ever thought to keep until Petey Gaffney looked it up. I don't remember any of them. I remember looking at the doors to the lobby every time there was a stoppage.
The Siena man left at the end of the third quarter. Gil Callahan stayed until the final buzzer, sitting alone in the third row with his blazer buttoned, smiling at nothing.
* * *