Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Varga
”—the thing about a window seat,“ I said, “is that it’s a trap. You think you’re buying the view.
What you’re actually buying is three hours of not being able to stand up without climbing over two strangers, so you don’t, you just sit there and hold it the whole flight.
You’ve sentenced yourself, Rook. You did this on purpose. ”
“I like the window.”
“You like the wall. You like having something solid on one side of you so you only have to manage threats from a single direction. Sadly, Pratt isn’t here on the other side of you.”
“It’s a good seat.”
He had the Civil War book open on his knee. It was the one he’d been reading since August, and he wasn’t turning pages. We were in 14A and 14B on a Sunday morning flight out of O’Hare, one armrest between us, both of us using it. His forearm rested against mine from elbow to wrist.
“The seat cushion’s a flotation device. I’m taking yours, Rook. I’m two hundred pounds. It takes extra to make a man that size float.”
We’d done a thousand flights two rows apart, and now his arm was warm against mine, and nobody on this plane knew either of us. I kept finding reasons to shift my weight so the contact changed and connected slightly different parts of our bodies.
“You’re fidgeting,” he said.
“I’m settling in. It’s a process.”
We had a scheduled day off, and once Mark knew what the trip was for, he pulled levers to get us out of practice after it too. That bought us an overnight in Maine.
We talked logistics low, into the plane’s white noise, two heads tilted together over an armrest. We had a game on Tuesday, the day after our return.
“Mark says he’ll keep the beat guys off us until we’ve said it to the public Tuesday,” I said. “And Kovac?”
“Second session’s set. He gets me the morning after.”
The plane started down. We’d flown nonstop from Chicago to Portland. Below us, the coast materialized beneath the clouds, gray water broken into a thousand inlets by black points of rock.
Rook was quiet. He looked down at the place that had made him.
I put my hand over his on the armrest. He turned his palm up under mine and didn’t look away from the window.
***
The house didn’t run out to meet us.
That was the first difference. There was no golden retriever to knock me into the snow. Rook’s parents’ house sat low, gray, and shingled against the winter weather.
A woman opened the front door when we were halfway up the path. She was small and gray-haired with Rook’s piercing eyes. She wore a cream-colored cardigan. “You made good time,” she said.
That was it. She held the door open . Inside, she took our coats and hung them on pegs over other coats.
“She’s glad we’re here,” Rook whispered under his breath. “This is pleased.”
I looked at her again through Rook’s translation. She smoothed my coat and then touched her son’s face. It wasn’t a closed door. It was only a different dialect of welcome, with the volume set low.
Rook’s father entered the room. He was a big, almost bald man. He had sawdust on one sleeve of his flannel shirt. I shook the offered hand.
“Tide’s out,” he said. “Good drive up?”
“It was.”
“Okay,” he said, and let go.
Rook had told me his father would shake my hand and say one sentence. I thought he was managing my expectations. Standing in the entryway with the man’s grip still warm in my fingers, I understood I’d been shown the Maine equivalent of a marching band.
Rook’s parents had known for a week. He called his mother before the trip, standing in the kitchen while I watched a baking show.
They needed time to process the news. My family processed everything at full volume in real time.
These people took it in, recovered, and accepted me before I ever arrived.
Rook’s sister spoke my language. She came in late to dinner, stamping snow off her boots, and she was loud. She took my face in both cold hands.
“You’re real,” she said. “He brought you. I’ve known since the soup in your apartment.
” She smiled and laughed at the same time.
“I needed your name, and he wouldn’t give it to me.
For a month, I thought you might be Pratt, but I knew a goalie would be hard to love.
Since then, I had narrowed it to three options. Don’t ask me which.”
She probably thought I was Coach Markel. “Rook is very private,” I said.
“He’s a safe. He’s a beautiful Maine safe, and I’ve spent my entire life trying to crack him.” She let go of my face and hugged her brother hard around the neck and shoulders.
I focused my attention on the chowder in front of me. It was so much more than soup.
This was the chowder at its source. Rook had carried his version of it across the city of Chicago six years ago and set it on my coffee table next to my prescription pad and my crutches. It changed my life, but Rook’s was the franchise version. This was the original.
“It’s good,” I said. The two words undersold the event, but they were what I had.
“Mattias makes it close,” his mother said. “But he uses the wrong clams. They don’t have the right ones in Chicago.”
“I’ve driven to every store,” Rook said.
There was a Maine dog too. It was an old black Lab who’d come over and set his gray chin on my knee without ceremony. I sat with his head’s weight on me and ate my chowder.
After dinner, Rook caught my eye and tipped his head toward the door. “Want to show you something,” he said.
The shore in December was hard sand below the tide line and frozen ridges above it.
The water washed in slowly and was the color of a nickel.
Wind off the ocean found every seam in my coat.
Rook walked me down a path through bent pines to where rock jutted out into the waves. I listened to them crashing around us.
“Used to come down here when the rink was closed,” he said. “It’s the only other loud place in town.”
He took me to the rink after, the actual one, a low cinderblock building twenty minutes up the coast with a hand-painted sign and a half-dozen cars in the lot.
A learn-to-skate class was just coming off the ice, a dozen kids the size of fire hydrants getting scraped up off the sheet by their parents.
They had helmets that were too big, and one of them was crying about a mitten.
The man at the desk looked up and knew Rook on sight.
We stood at the glass. The ice was chewed up by the little ones, with shavings shoveled into the corners, and a couple of orange cones knocked on their sides.
“Six in the morning,” Rook said. “My dad would drop me here and go to work. I’d be the only one skating for an hour.”
The gate at the far end opened, and five men in beat-up gear clumped onto the ice, sticks over their shoulders.
They were dads we’d just seen and a coach who’d run the kids’ class.
One of them dropped a mesh bag of pucks that scattered like roaches.
Somebody hollered down the bench for anybody who wanted in on a pickup game.
Rook watched them skate out.
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’ve got the face. You want to play.”
“I don’t.”
“You have the face. I can see it. They have rentals, sizes nine through thirteen, and you are dying to get on that ice.” I was already moving toward the desk. “We’re renting skates. This is happening. You can’t take a man to a rink and make him watch.”
He didn’t argue. He gave the desk man his size and pulled out a card. The guy waved the card away. “I recognized you when you walked in the door,” he said. “This one’s on us.” We sat on a cold bench, lacing rentals, and I felt twelve years old.
We skated out from the gate. The ice was bad, and the boards were soft. It was the best rink I’d been on all season.
The coach skated over. He was middle-aged. He’d been a skilled player in his prime. It was obvious from the first three strides. He looked at Rook, then looked again, longer, the recognition coming up slow.
“You’re the Hawks’ D-man,” he said. “Rook.” Then he looked at me, and a grin started. “And—get out. You’re Varga. We watched you score Saturday at my brother-in-law’s. The two of you—“ He looked between us. “You came up together? You’re on the same team.”
Rook said, “Yeah. We’re together.”
The coach heard teammates. It was the only thing the sentence could mean to him. He clapped his glove against Rook’s shoulder and said, “Good, we’re short a couple, so you’re with me. Your buddy’s on the other team. That keeps it even.”
“You good with that?” Rook asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Prepare for burial, old man.”
It was a beer-league scrimmage with no goalies. The dads were gassed after two shifts. The coach was the only one out there who could still really skate, and it was the most fun I’d had in months.
Somebody’s kid kept score wrong on purpose. They put me on the other side from Rook just to make it fair. That lasted about four minutes. They gave up and put us together to watch.
Rook’s a defenseman through and through, but here, on true home ice, he joined the rush.
I dropped the puck to him at the line and cut toward the goal. He passed it to me, and I sent it back, knowing exactly where he’d be. He buried it five-hole on a forty-year-old dad who never had a chance.
Everyone whooped. Rook turned around with a wide, dumb, unprotected grin. He pointed his stick at me, and I pointed mine back.
We played until the dads were done. We gave the coach his sticks back, and he only asked for autographs in return.
Rook bumped his shoulder into mine on the way to the bench, and we sat unlacing rental skates, breathing hard and not talking.
***
Rook’s father’s recliner had a permanent dent in the man’s shape.
I found that out because I went to sit on the couch, and he stopped me with a hand and a tilt of his head toward the big chair in the corner. It was angled at the TV, with a lever on the side and worn leather on the arms.
“Sit there,” he said.