1
AFTERTHE FIRE
A TOP THE GRAY CONCRETE WALKWAY outside the entrance to Kobe Bryant Gymnasium, a makeshift memorial garden was blooming with colors and remembrances: candles and wreaths and sneakers and jerseys, maroon and white for the Lower Merion High School Aces, purple and gold for the Los Angeles Lakers, orange and brown from the basketballs, yellow and red from the roses. It had been forty-eight hours since a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, its body white and striped in royal blue and periwinkle, had lifted off from John Wayne–Orange County Airport in Southern California, hovered in circles above a golf course, tried to slice through a fog bank as thick and blinding as gauze, and crashed into a hilly ravine, killing the nine people aboard: Kobe; his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gianna; the pilot; and six people involved in Kobe’s AAU basketball program, including two of Gianna’s teammates—all of them bound for a tournament at his Mamba Sports Academy, forty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles. That was Sunday, January 26, 2020. Now it was Tuesday, a crystalline afternoon in the suburbs west of Philadelphia, the middle of the school day, breezy and chilly. Students, heading from one class to another, stopped to gaze at the items and whisper among themselves. Middle-aged men and women parked their cars blocks away, then walked to the site, as quietly as if they were entering a church. A sixty-four-year-old Lakers fan from central New Jersey, Mark Kerr, drove ninety minutes that day with his wife and nephew, just to visit the memorial, just to feel a connection to Kobe. Three members of the school’s 2006 boys’ basketball team, which had won a state championship ten years after Kobe had led the school to one, set a framed photo there; in the photo was Kobe, sitting on a bench with them. A WNBA player had written a letter to him in lavender ink, in curlicued Palmer method, on lined notepad paper: “I feel selfish for just missing out on what else you would have done with your time with us…”
For those two days, Gregg Downer had not watched TV, had avoided listening to any radio reports, and had not stopped once at the site. How many times had he kept his head down and kept striding past it and into the gym? How many times would he have to contemplate what he had lost, what the world had lost, in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains? He couldn’t say, but he knew he couldn’t bear to spend any time there yet. There was so much of him blanketing that ground, too. He was fifty-seven now, his face finely wrinkled and more weathered than it had been when he and Kobe were together, when he was in his early thirties and so boyish that the two of them could have been mistaken for college roommates. They were so close, knew each other so well, respected each other so much, that they might as well have been.
In his kitchen on the morning and early afternoon of that Sunday, Downer had been overseeing a playdate between his daughter Brynn, who was seven, and one of her friends. Whenever Kobe saw Brynn, towheaded and pigtailed, he scooped her up, nuzzled her face, and squeezed her tight as if she were his own, as if she were his fifth daughter. Downer had not become a father until he was fifty, until after Kobe and Vanessa had already had two girls, Natalia and Gianna. There was always a gleam in Brynn’s eyes, Downer noticed, whenever she saw Kobe and the gleam in his when he saw her. But now Brynn and her friend were padding past Downer and his wife, Colleen, and Downer’s phone was buzzing. A reporter. Downer guessed why he’d be getting such a call: The night before, in Philadelphia against the Sixers, LeBron James had moved into third place on the NBA’s career scoring list, leapfrogging Kobe. The sportswriter must be looking for a quote from Downer on the nugget of news. That’s what he told Colleen. He didn’t bother to pick up his phone. But then, for the next ninety seconds his phone didn’t stop, buzzing and jumping so much it seemed possessed by a poltergeist, and finally he went online and read a TMZ post on Twitter, the first report that Kobe was dead, and after Downer prayed for five minutes that the gossip site had gotten it wrong and that some sick internet troll was guilty of a cruel hoax, Brynn’s playdate was over and the Downers’ kitchen was a vale of tears.
He walked upstairs, walked back down again, walked through his front door, and walked around the suburban development where he and Colleen had moved fifteen years earlier, past lawns gone brown and swimming pools shuttered for the winter, past the houses of friends, past all the people who had known for a long time that Kobe’s coach lived in their neighborhood. He could gain no mental and emotional traction. Had this really happened? Who else had been aboard the helicopter? Who already had heard? Would he have to tell people? The other men who had coached Kobe at Lower Merion—the long-ago players and teammates who had been Kobe’s closest friends when they were teens and now didn’t often hear from him once he became a star and Los Angeles became his home and they remained Guys Who Had Been Teammates And Friends With Kobe Bryant—Jeanne Mastriano, who had taught English at the school for thirty years, who had no formal connection to the basketball program but remained a mentor to Kobe nonetheless, who had coaxed and fanned the intellectual curiosity within him into a fire—who would tell them? Tears leaked from him in small, sporadic bursts. On a table in his house, his cell phone continued to hum with calls and texts, each one a thread in a web of horror and grief. He walked home, not knowing who he should reach out to first, or if he could pick up the phone at all.
* * *
THEIR FOUR children, all under age eleven, were bored, with pent-up energy to burn off, with nothing to do at home on a winter Sunday afternoon. So Phil and Allison Mellet took advantage of who they were and where they lived. The couple were Lower Merion alumni, members of the class of 1998—they had started dating as seniors and been together ever since—and Allison, who taught Spanish at the school and directed its world-languages department, could get access to the building even on a weekend. A quick bit of packing, a short ride to Bryant Gymnasium, and there they were—Allison on a treadmill in a room down the hall from the gym, Phil shooting a basketball or throwing a football with the kids. Mellet propped his phone against a wall in a corner of the gym, next to the lumpy mound of jackets and long-sleeved shirts that the children had stripped off once they felt the gym’s sticky warmth, granola bars and applesauce pouches stuffed in the pockets and piled nearby.
The gym—named for Kobe in 2010, after he donated $411,000 to the school district—was far bigger than the old one that he and Mellet had played in back when they were teammates in 1995–96, when Kobe was a senior supernova and Mellet, now a corporate attorney who hadn’t spoken to him in years, was a scrawny sophomore guard happy just to ride the bench. With the bleachers pushed in against the wall, as they were now, the place seemed even bigger. The kids’ voices echoed as if they were at the bottom of a canyon. The only other person in the school was a janitor. Still, Mellet managed to notice that his phone was droning and lighting up with text messages. They were from old friends bearing horrible news.
As he read them, he was filled with an odd emptiness. Though he had not maintained a relationship with Kobe—how many of those guys, even with those old friendships and a state championship binding them to him, really had?—Mellet had always considered himself lucky to have played with him, to have gotten to know him a bit. Whenever he met someone through his work, investors or stockholders or other attorneys, he had always found a way to loop his connection to Kobe into the conversation. It was a marvelous icebreaker, better than asking about kids or golf or the same-old, same-old. You were on the same team as Kobe? Well, tell me about THAT! They lit up, and to Mellet, there was a thrill, a tiny electric charge, in retelling and reliving the stories. Now that wire had been severed. Now a piece of his life, one that had significance, was gone.
Within twenty minutes, the janitor came by to tell him that he and Allison and the children would have to leave. The building was going to be locked down.
Copyright © 2021 by Mike Sielski
