Chapter 21 Wes
The penthouse is the temperature it was when I left for Aruba.
I dropped the thermostat because I always drop the thermostat before a trip, and the apartment held it, the way the apartment holds everything I set and leave.
The camera bag goes on the counter. The suitcase stays by the door.
I stand in the kitchen with the overhead off and the ocean steady through the glass and the apartment is exactly what I left and nothing in it has changed and I cannot breathe for a second, which passes.
The balcony is warm. January in Miami. The water is flat and gray and the light is wrong, overcast, the sky pressing down on the surface. I bring a coffee out and lean on the railing and the railing is the railing and the water is the water and none of it is Aruba.
The water in Aruba was a different color.
It was clear and shallow near the shore, and the sand felt warm beneath my feet.
He walked ahead of me on the beach, his shoulders bronzed from three days in the sun.
His voice had that familiar cadence it takes on when he’s performing for an audience, but there was no audience here.
Just the beach, the ocean, and me. He was performing for me.
I did not say anything about it on the island.
I noticed it the first morning when he rated the lime in the water glass and the verdict was right and the voice was right and the timing was a half-beat late.
He rated the ceviche and the bread and the shower pressure and the sand. He rated it all lower than last year.
I take the coffee inside. The laptop is on the desk in the bedroom. I plug in the camera's memory card and the import window opens and three hundred and nineteen photographs load in a slow grid across the screen.
Luca on the balcony. Luca at the fish place with a fork in his hand. Luca walking the beach road with his face turned toward the water, his jaw set, his mouth closed. Luca asleep on the second morning with the sheet at his waist and the light from the window across his shoulders and his face soft.
I took these. I stood two feet from him with the camera and he let me take them because he has always let me take them, because the camera is the one way I have of saying what I do not say out loud.
I took three hundred and nineteen photographs across five days and in every one of them he is beautiful and in twelve of them he is actually there.
The twelve are the ones where he forgot.
Where his face dropped the broadcast for a second because he was looking at the ocean or because I said his name from behind the lens and he turned before the performance caught up.
In those twelve his eyes are the eyes I know from two years of sleeping next to him and the eyes are tired and the not from the sun and beach.
I scroll through the grid slowly. A photograph of his hands on the railing.
The restaurant at night, the ceiling fans turning, the table where we sat.
His hand was alone on the tablecloth and my hand was alone on the tablecloth and the camera saw both of them and I am sitting here in Miami looking at the distance between them.
The phone buzzes on the desk. His name on the screen.
home
One word. I pick up the phone and call him.
It rings four times. He picks up.
"Hey."
"Hey. You’re home?"
"Yeah. Just got in." His voice is flat. Travel-flat, maybe. Or the other flat, the one that has been getting louder for weeks.
"How was the flight?"
"Long. Charlotte layover again. The coffee was worse than last time."
"Worse than a three-eight?"
"Probably."
I hold the phone. He didn't rate it. I file that next to the ceviche and the lime and everything else I started to notice on the trip.
"How's Mouse?" I ask.
"Good. She's on the counter. I think she's mad at me."
"She's a cat. She's always mad at you."
"She's not always mad at me. She has a range. This is specifically directed anger."
"How can you tell?"
"The tail. The tail is communicating displeasure."
"You're reading the tail."
"The tail is readable. You just have to know the index."
I almost smile. The bit is running. The bit is running and I can hear the other thing underneath it, the frequency that is not the bit, the one I heard on the island when he rated the lime and the timing was late and the laugh reached his mouth and stopped there.
"Wes? I'm going to go. I need to unpack and feed the angry cat."
"Okay."
"Talk tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Talk tomorrow."
"Love you."
"Love you, baby."
The line cuts. I sit with the phone in my hand and the screen goes dark.
The photographs are still on the screen.
I scroll back to the beginning of the grid and start over.
First frame: the villa, the blue shutters, the bougainvillea on the wall.
I took it before he arrived. Before the door opened and he was standing there with his bag and his voice doing the lime bit and his face carrying the thing I spent five days trying to read.
I am reading it now. In the apartment, alone, with the photographs on the screen and the ocean outside the door, I am reading what I was looking at in Aruba and couldn’t figure out while I was standing next to him.
He was performing. Not for a locker room or a team dinner or a road trip hotel bar.
He was performing for the beach. For me.
The one week each year when we’re both supposed to be free from that.
I close the laptop.
***
Practice is at ten the next morning. The facility lot is half-full when I get there. I park in the same spot I have parked in for eight years and sit in the car for a minute with the engine running.
Paulson finds me in the weight room.
"Mercy. You're back. How was the break?"
"Good. Quiet."
"Quiet. You went somewhere warm and you came back with quiet. That's very you."
"Aruba was warm and quiet. Both things."
"I went to Sarasota and ate my weight in grouper. I have opinions about grouper now."
"You've always had opinions about grouper."
"These are new opinions. Refined opinions. My grouper index has expanded."
"You don't have a grouper index."
"I have a grouper index now. Berger's thing is contagious." He towels his neck. "You hear from him lately?"
"No."
The word comes out before I choose it. I said no.
Paulson asked if I heard from Berger over the break and I said no.
We spent five days in the same villa in Aruba.
I had his body against mine in the shower and his hand in my hand on the beach and his voice across the table at every meal and I said no because no is what the answer has to be.
"He's having a year," Paulson says. "The kid is everywhere. Points, ratings, the whole media thing. Atlanta got lucky with that pick."
"Yeah, they did."
Paulson moves to the bench press. I pick up the thirty-fives and start curling because my hands need a place to be that is not the phone.
The ice is clean for morning skate. I take my shifts.
The puck finds my tape in the slot and I put it where it needs to go.
The release is right and Coach nods from behind the glass.
The best stretch of a career that has lasted fifteen years, and the stretch is happening in an apartment where the second coffee cup has not been used since August.
I drive home after practice. The pictures are on the laptop, but I’m not opening it.
So I grab my camera and head to the balcony, but the ocean and light are still off, totally flat, and the sky won’t cooperate for a picture.
I press the shutter anyway. The image on the screen is gray water and gray sky and the railing in the foreground and nothing in the frame is alive.
I should call Kevin. Kevin would sit on his patio and let me talk and not say anything until I was finished and then he would say the thing I should already know, which is the thing I have been carrying since the island.
I should call him. I pick up the phone and open his contact and look at it and close it.
Luca was performing for the beach. He was performing for me.
In three hundred and seven photographs I can see a man I love and in twelve of them I can see the real Luca, and the distance between those two things is the distance between Miami and Atlanta.
I have been standing on this side of it for five months telling myself the distance was fine.
The distance is not fine.
I am going to do something. I don’t know what yet.
The not-knowing is new. For five months I have known exactly what I was doing, which was holding, which was waiting, which was playing the best hockey of my life in an apartment where the coffee is for one.
I have known what I was doing. Standing on the balcony in Aruba watching him rate a lime with the wrong timing, I stopped knowing.
?