Chapter 26 Wes
The hotel room in D.C. is the same as every other hotel room on every other road trip in fifteen years of road trips. Bag by the door. Suit on the hanger behind the bathroom door. The game is tonight. Morning skate is in ninety minutes.
I call him. Three rings, voicemail. His voice on the recording is from September, the broadcaster at full volume, the cadence of a man who has opinions about the outgoing message's pacing. I listen to all of it. I hang up.
I called him yesterday before getting on the plane.
Voicemail. I called him the night before from the penthouse, standing on the balcony with the ocean flat and black.
Voicemail. Three calls and multiple texts in three days and the man who used to send me nine restaurant rankings in an afternoon has not picked up the phone.
I set it face-down on the nightstand. His feet on the sand. Gone.
Morning skate is at the arena. I ride the bus with the team because I have ridden the bus with the team for eight years on the Tempest and for six years before that on two other rosters. Paulson is across the aisle. He has been talking about the arena's pregame spread.
"Last time we were here the eggs were cold," Paulson says.
"The eggs are always cold in D.C."
"Not last March. Last March the eggs were almost warm."
"Almost warm is not warm, Paulson."
"Almost warm is an improvement. I'm tracking a trend."
"You're tracking a trend with a sample size of two."
"Two is the beginning of a pattern. You taught me that."
"I taught you that about hockey, not eggs."
"Eggs are hockey, Mercy. Everything is hockey."
I almost smile. The bus turns. The city passes outside the window, marble and granite and government buildings under gray sky. I am sitting in a window seat answering a man about eggs while Luca's phone rings in Atlanta and nobody picks it up.
The skate is clean. My legs work. The ice is fast beneath me and the puck finds my tape. I take my shifts. I run the drill. Coach nods from behind the glass.
In the locker room after, Reeves is retaping a stick.
"Mercy, you looked sharp out there. Twenty-nine tonight?"
"We'll see."
"That wasn't a we'll see kind of shift. That was a twenty-nine kind of shift."
"Every shift is a we'll see until the light goes on, Reeves."
"That is the most patient thing anyone has ever said about scoring goals."
"Patience is the job."
"Your patience is everyone else's torture. You know that, right?"
I pull my skates off. The tape comes off the shin pads in strips. The routine does not change. The routine has not changed in fifteen years. I have changed cities and teams and the tape comes off the shin pads the same way every time.
I shower. I change. I sit at my stall and look at the phone. His feet on the sand. No missed call. No text. Nothing with his name on it.
Marchetti's voice has been in every room I have walked into since the call. The word mercy sitting in the air beside me the way it has been sitting in the air around Luca all season, except he has been carrying it alone. I have been carrying the distance and thinking that was enough.
I go back to the hotel. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling and think about what I have been doing for six months.
Holding. Waiting. Being patient. Playing the best hockey of my life in an apartment where the second coffee cup sits behind the row of mugs I use.
Holding a line that I told myself was keeping him safe.
Atlanta is two hours from here. Two hours on a plane. Less than that if everything goes smoothly. I have been hundreds of miles from him and right now I need that distance to be zero.
I sit up. I call Kyle.
He picks up on the first ring. "Wes. What's going on?"
"I'm in D.C. on a road trip. Game tonight."
"I know you're on the road trip. What's up?"
"I need to get to Atlanta."
Silence. I can hear the office behind him.
"When?"
"Today."
"Today? You have a game tonight, Wes."
"I know I have a game tonight."
"Tell me what’s going on."
"Marchetti called me a few days ago. Kid from the Firebirds. He told me he’s worried about Luca. That he’s not himself. I noticed it in Aruba, but I didn’t think it was this bad.”
Kyle breathes out slow. He is quiet for longer than I have ever heard him be quiet on a call.
"I've called him three times since," I say. "He's not picking up."
"He’s not? I called him Tuesday about a media request and it went to voicemail. I followed up yesterday but nothing."
"You didn't tell me that."
"I didn't know anything was wrong. I thought he was busy. I thought it was the schedule."
"It's not the schedule."
The room is quiet.
"I'm going to Atlanta, Kyle. Not after the game. Instead of the game."
"Wes..."
"I know."
"Do you? Because I need you to hear me say this as your agent before I say anything else.
You have never missed a game. You walk off this road trip, it becomes a story.
By tomorrow morning every reporter on the Tempest beat is writing the sentence that Wesley Mercer left the team without explanation.
The front office is going to call me. I'm going to have to say something and I don't know what I'm going to say.
They could fine you. They could suspend you.
This isn't a personal day, Wes. This could be considered a breach of contract, and you have eight years of being the most reliable body in that organization and you're about to spend every bit of good currency of it in one afternoon. "
"I know what it costs. I'm still going."
There’s silence on the phone. When he speaks again, his voice has shifted.
Not softer. Closer. The voice underneath the agent voice, the one that belongs to the man who introduced the two of us in the first place because he thought a veteran and a Swiss kid on the same roster might be good for each other.
"How bad is he?"
"I think it’s bad. When we were in Aruba, I noticed he lost weight and didn’t eat much while we were there. I thought I was overthinking what I saw."
"Jesus."
"I cannot play the game tonight, Kyle. I cannot be here and not know if Luca’s alright."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I said okay. Book the flight. I'll handle the Tempest."
"What are you going to tell them?"
"I don't know yet. Family emergency. Personal matter. Something that buys you forty-eight hours before they start asking the kinds of questions I can't answer without your permission."
"Tell them family emergency."
"Is that what I'm telling them or is that what it is?"
"Both."
"Yeah." A pause. "Yeah, it is. Okay. Don't text Coach. Don't text anyone on staff. I'll make the call. Let me be the one who calls. That's my job. You just get on the plane."
"Kyle."
"What?"
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I represent both of you. I should have been paying closer attention."
"You couldn't have seen it."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Get on the plane, Wes. Let me know how he is when you get there."
I hang up. The phone sits in my hand. His feet on the sand.
I open the airline app. Reagan to Hartsfield, direct, departs at three-forty.
An hour and forty minutes in the air. I book it.
The confirmation arrives on the screen and for a second both things are there at the same time, the booking and the beach.
I get to the airport, through TSA, and I’m at the gate within an hour. I sit with the bag between my feet and call him one more time.
Voicemail. His voice, full and bright and from September.
I hang up.
The flight boards. I take my seat. The plane pushes back and the city drops away and the Potomac curves below and then the clouds close over it.
An hour and forty minutes. By five o'clock I will be in Atlanta. By five-thirty I will be at his door.
The phone is off. His feet on the sand in a device that is dark in the seat pocket. I close my eyes. The engine hums. Below me the East Coast is passing and the distance is shrinking and by tonight I will be with him. I am done holding the distance and calling it love.
The wheels touch down at five-oh-three. The phone comes on. No missed calls. No texts. The cabin dings and the seatbelt sign goes dark and I am already standing, grabbing my bag from the overhead.
The phone buzzes, I rush to check who it is.
Paulson.
Mercy, you good? Heard you left early.
Family thing. I'm good. Play well tonight.
You got it. Take care, man.
Paulson does not push. The team will not push today. Today the credit holds. Tomorrow Kyle will be answering questions I cannot answer and the credit will start to thin and it will thin for days and the thinning will cost me and I do not care. I do not care what it costs.
Hartsfield is loud. It is always loud. I walk through it the way I walk through every airport, quickly, head down, because I am six-three and sometimes people know the face. Nobody stops me. Nobody calls my name. I pass the baggage carousels and the rideshare signs and the sliding glass doors.
I give the driver the address. The highway is thick with rush hour. I sit in the back and watch the city come toward me, the skyline and the overpasses and the exits I learned across two visits, the move-in and Christmas, both of them short, both of them careful.
His street at five-fifty-four. I pay. I stand on the sidewalk with the bag on my shoulder and look up at the building. Third floor. The light in his window is off.
The lobby door opens with the code he gave me in September. The elevator is small and smells like carpet cleaner. I press three. The doors open and his door is the second on the left.
The key is in my coat pocket. It has been there since September, on the ring with my car key and my apartment key, the three of them sitting together all season like they belong to the same life. I put it in the lock. It turns.
The apartment is dark. The air is stale, the kind of stale that comes when the windows have not been opened in weeks. I set my bag inside the door and stand there.
Mail on the counter. A stack of it, envelopes and flyers, a postcard from Aruba on top with the resort logo.
Dishes in the sink. Four plates, three glasses, a mug with something dried to the rim.
The trash is full. The recycling beside it is full.
The light above the stove is the only light on and it casts the kitchen in a low yellow.
Mouse comes around the corner from the hallway. She stops when she sees me. Her ears go forward. She stands very still and then walks to me and presses her head against my shin and I reach down and her fur is warm and she is the only thing in this apartment that is where it should be.
Her bowl is in the kitchen. Water low. Food half gone. He has been feeding her. Whatever else has stopped, that has not stopped.
I walk into the living room.
He is on the couch. On his side, one arm hanging off the edge, the other tucked under his head.
A t-shirt I have never seen and sweatpants and bare feet.
His face turned into the cushion. The blanket on the floor.
The TV off. The laptop closed on the coffee table beside an empty glass and his phone face-down.
He is thinner even since Aruba. I can see it in his arm, in the way the shirt sits on his shoulders. His jaw is sharper than it was at Christmas. His hair is longer than he keeps it.
Mouse jumps onto the arm of the couch above his head. She sits and looks at me.
I cross the room. I crouch beside the couch. His breathing is even. His face is slack and still. He has been asleep for a while, the deep sleep of a body that has been running on nothing and has finally stopped.
I put my hand on his shoulder.
"Hey, sleepyhead."
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