Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Varga
Before I typed my response, I held the phone up so Rook could see it. He read the text.
For half a second there was nothing in his face at all, no raised eyebrow or half-nod. I saw none of the faces I’d spent five years learning. This one was new.
I sat up. “Who is this Kovac guy?”
“Don’t answer it,” Rook said. “I’m doing the piece. He doesn’t need you.”
“Rook.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“He got my number and texted me. I’m not going to pretend a guy didn’t—“ I clenched my teeth to slow the words. “You said you’d tell me. Give me a few days. That was a week ago. Before that, it was tomorrow, in bed. You said—“
“I know what I said.”
“Then tell me the rest of it.”
His hand came off the back of the couch and moved toward my knee for reassurance. It was an old Rook reflex. I needed it. Then his hand settled on his thigh instead, fingers spread.
“Not tonight,” he said, quieter. “Please.”
I turned the phone over and said, “Okay.”
He stood without looking at me or the TV. He squeezed my shoulder once before leaving the room. It was the first real touch since the phone buzzed, and I leaned into it.
The office door didn’t slam. It clicked.
I went to the kitchen instead of upstairs. Going up meant going to bed alone, and I wasn’t ready for that.
I got a glass and ran the tap until it ran cold. Without turning on the lights, I drank standing at the counter with the range and microwave clocks glowing in the dark.
My phone buzzed again, and I almost dropped it. It wasn’t Rook or Kovac. It was the group chat, IRONHAWKS (NO COACHES). The title was a lie, since we added Coach Markel two years ago as a joke, and he never left. He read everything and said nothing, the most Markel thing a man could do.
Somebody dropped the schedule for our next long out-of-town swing. It was ten days in six cities, home the Sunday before American Thanksgiving.
Trier: ten days. who decided ten days
Trier: I have a cat. it needs me
Cross: the cat will live. hire somebody
Trier: the cat will NOT live, the cat has feelings
Mikkelsen: what’s the dress code for the team dinner in Pittsburgh?
Trier: rafe nobody’s gonna tell you. we want you to be the only one in a tie
Mikkelsen: ok so a tie
Cross: ignore Trier and wear the tie kid
I watched my teammate try to play the kid in real time and didn’t jump in to save him.
Any other night, I’d have been in there in four seconds.
Rafe, no, it’s a trap. Trier owns zero ties, and was raised by wolves in a Walmart parking lot.
The kid would’ve done his one quiet laugh, and I’d have felt useful.
Ten days. That meant ten nights. Ten times I’d send Rook back to his room and wait the thirty seconds for I’m back.
Then I’d lie there reading water stains on the ceiling, thinking about Heath and Kieran two doors down in one bed. It felt like a tax. It was what I paid to keep Rook.
I thought about knocking on the office door. I rehearsed it all, standing there with the cold glass sweating in my hand. After I knocked, he’d say yeah. I’d open the door and let him see me.
I didn’t knock. I rinsed the glass and checked the front bolt out of habit. Assume someone’s watching. The joke of it was that nobody was watching this house and never had been. All the watching was on the inside.
It was fourteen steps up, and I climbed them alone for the second time that month. I didn’t get into bed. I was tired, but getting into bed meant lying down alone, and as long as I kept moving around the room, I was just a man getting ready for bed. I took a very long time.
I brushed every quadrant of my teeth for the full thirty seconds, remembering a conversation from my last dental visit.
“You don’t floss, do you?” the hygienist asked while she scraped away with that hook.
“Every day,” I told her, sounding like I had a mouth full of cotton.
“Your gums say no.”
I was lying to a woman holding a sharp metal implement in my mouth. I’d flossed every day since.
After I spat and looked at myself in the mirror, I listened for Rook on the stairs. The house was silent.
I took off my shorts and put on different ones, which made no sense; the first pair were clean when I put them on after practice. I picked up the carved bird from the nightstand. It was a little wooden one my grandmother made.
I turned it over twice and set it back where it lived, beak facing toward the window. It had been with me every night since she gave it to me, in three different countries.
She carved the bird the winter before we left Slovakia, and she’s the one who told my father to take me to Canada.
“Take him where they have the leagues,” she’d said in Hungarian, and three months later we were in an apartment outside Toronto. I was nine-year-old Lucas, the only kid in the school who didn’t know the right words to ask about going to the bathroom.
You learn fast at nine what gets you hurt. Being the loud one on the ice got me picked first. Being the foreign one off of it got me followed home. So I split myself down the middle before I knew that was a thing a person could do. I was enormous on the ice and as invisible as possible off it.
My father said, “Jól van, Luki. Csak ne csinálj felt?nést.” That means, “Do well, but don’t make a scene.” My parents sold a house for me. They learned a new language for me. The least I could do was not be a problem in the new country that had let us in.
Rook helped me follow Dad’s advice. I was still loud on the ice, but Rook bought me a place to do the thing I’d been doing since I was nine. Being quiet for him was the easiest thing anyone ever asked of me.
Finally, there was nothing left to get ready, so I got into bed.
I rolled my head back to look at the Bobby Orr stick hanging over the headboard. It was the only object in the house with both our names on the paperwork.
I don’t want this anymore. The sentence ran through my head three times.
It wasn’t about him. I wanted him, but I didn’t want the closed office door, the two Christmases, and the Rook and Varga Show in the locker room. I wanted us to be boring like Heath and Kieran were boring.
I’d never said it directly to him. In five years, I never once said I want more than this. I decided early that he was carrying enough. Rook was a gift, and I shouldn’t rattle what was working.
He was my sun. I didn’t ask the sun to come closer. I orbited and was grateful for the heat.
I closed my eyes but didn’t sleep.
When I finally heard him on the stairs, I checked the clock on my phone. It had been two hours since I’d climbed into bed.
The door eased open, and a bit of hall light spilled inside. Rook undressed in the dark: belt, jeans, and the shirt pulled over his head. The mattress dipped on his side.
He didn’t reach for me. He lay flat on his back.
“Luki,” he whispered.
I held my breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the ceiling.
That got me. He was a man who apologized maybe once a year. When he did it, the entire locker room would go quiet. Now, he was lying in the dark, apologizing to me.
“For what?”
He didn’t answer. He exhaled and reached across the bed until his hand landed on my belly. It was his way of saying I’ve got you without speaking.
I covered his hand with mine. I didn’t say it’s okay because it wasn’t. We’d agreed a long time ago that we didn’t lie in bed. I held his hand against me so he’d know I heard him.
***
I’d reached for him before I woke.
I was still under, dreaming about a Minnesota lake with ice you could walk all the way out on. My arm went across the bed the way it did every morning, reaching for Rook without looking.
His absence woke me up. His side of the bed was cold. He’d spread the duvet flat and even.
I grabbed my phone. It was 9:18. I never slept until 9:18. On a no-skate morning, Rook let me go until seven-something, and then there was coffee on and something sizzling in a skillet.
9:18 meant he’d let me sleep through his exit. I checked my phone for texts. The group chat had forty-one unread messages . There was nothing from Rook.
The kitchen was clean. If he’d made himself breakfast, he’d also washed and put everything away.
The coffee maker held a full pot with the stay-warm light on. Beside it was a note. He printed it in the hard, small capitals he uses because he says nobody can read his cursive.
BACK BY LUNCH.
That was all. No name, I love you, or I’ve gone to the rink.
My cell phone rang, and I jumped. It was Heath.
“You’re awake,” he said. “I had a bet with myself.”
“I’m a professional athlete, Heath. Morning is my time.”
“It’s 9:30.”
“How do you know I haven’t been awake for three hours?” I turned the note over in my fingers, then set it down.
“Intuition. Have you?”
“No. What do you need? Instructions for braising duck?”
“Laser tag. The Tuesday before the long road trip. I’m bringing Kieran, Pratt, Sully, and Mikkelsen. I’m telling you now so you get it on a calendar and can’t say you had plans.”
“Oh, no. Can’t do it. Absolutely not.” I started pacing in the kitchen.
“Why not?”
“You know what you did to me last time. Do you think I forgot? Four of you. Four. Pratt, Sully, Kieran and you. All of you came around the corner by the fog machine like a firing squad. Pratt even laughed, Heath. He’s an assassin in another life. What you all did was a war crime; I looked it up—“
“You walked into the open.”
“I walked into the open because I trusted my people. It was a betrayal-of-trust situation, and I have not healed. I’m still wounded.”
“So you’re coming.”
I sighed. “Obviously I’m coming; I have to earn my dignity back. I’ve been strategizing for months, with training for evasive action.” I filled a mug with coffee. “Who all is it again?”
“Same crew. Kieran’s in. Pratt and Sully. I talked to Rafe, and he might come, which means we have to teach him the whole thing. He’ll lose, but that’s fine.” A slight pause. “Do you think Rook would want to come?”
There it was. Heath was asking me questions about Rook again, like there was a reason I would know something about his preferences and his daily schedule.
Rook didn’t go to laser tag. He didn’t go to team dinners unless they were mandatory. Everyone on the planet knew Rook stayed home when he could.
Heath was holding the door open again. He wouldn’t ask directly, but he had it ready in case I wanted to walk through.
I looked at the note on the island again. BACK BY LUNCH.
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Yeah, figured. Tuesday then. Wear something you can move in. And Varga—watch the corner by the fog machine.”
“I will end Pratt.”
“Sure you will.”
He hung up. I set the phone next to the note, and the kitchen was quiet again. I sipped my coffee and waited.