Chapter 29 Wes
The bag is on the bed. I fold the shirt I wore on the plane four days ago and set it inside. Jeans on top of the shirt. The packing takes less time than it should because I brought one bag and wore the same three things.
Luca is in the kitchen. I can hear him filling Mouse's bowl, the dry rattle of the kibble against the ceramic, and then her scream. Definitely not a meow and has never been a meow. He says something to her, low and steady, and the screaming stops and the eating starts.
The apartment is not the apartment I walked into four days ago. The dishes are in the cabinet. The mail is in a stacked and sorted on the counter. The trash went out yesterday. The suit is at the cleaners.
I zip the bag. I leave it on the bed and go to the kitchen.
He is standing at the counter with a glass of water and his phone face-up beside the glass.
His hair is damp from the shower. The T-shirt is one of mine, the gray one with the soft collar, and it sits on him the way my clothes always sit on him, a little looser on him than on me.
He has been wearing it for two days and I haven’t asked for it back and I won’t.
"Your flight's at one?" he asks.
"One-fifteen."
"That's early."
"It's a two-hour flight. I'll be home by four."
He drinks the water. Sets the glass down. Looks at the counter.
"You could stay."
"I know." It’s what I want to do, but I know I can’t. For both of us.
"You could tell Kyle you need another day."
"I've already missed four days of practice and two game. Kyle bought me the time but I need to get back."
"I know." He picks the glass back up. Puts it down again. "I know it's done. I'm just saying…I don’t know."
I walk over to him, and pull him into my arms, still feeling how thin he is. He’s eaten more with me here and his appetite seems to be better.
Mouse finishes her food and crosses the kitchen floor and sits next to us, her tail curled around her paws. She looks up at me and then at him and then at me again, as if she is verifying that both of us are still in the room.
"Gwen is Thursday," he says. “Every Thursday. For however long she thinks I need to see her.”
“I think that’s up to you, Luca. You keep seeing her as long as you need to.”
He lets me hold him like this for a minute and then he speaks.
"I need to talk about us. With Gwen." His voice is steady but the steadiness is costing him something. "I don't think it will work unless I'm completely honest in that room."
It hits me. The sentence arrives and lands in the center of my chest. The space I made has been two people for two and a half years. Now Luca wants to talk about this in a room I will never be in, holding the thing I have spent fifteen years keeping out of every room I have ever been in.
He pulls back and looks at me. His eyes are the same blue-gray they have always been and the circles underneath them are still dark, though not as dark as when I first walked in four days ago.
His face is thinner than it should be and he is standing in my shirt in a kitchen that is cleaner than it was on Monday.
I watched him make the call. I heard his voice on the phone with Gwen, the sentences short, the pauses long, the effort of each word visible in his jaw.
Whatever started in that call is not finished but it started.
But it will never be finished if he has to hold back inside a room where the walls are supposed to come down.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
My hand is on his back. I can feel his ribs through the shirt. "I'm saying okay."
He searches my face. He is looking for the thing I am not saying, the cost of the okay, the part where the wall tightened and the tightening is still in my chest. He can see it. He has always been able to see it.
"It doesn't go further than Gwen," he says. "I'm not asking for more than that."
"I know you're not."
"But I can't sit in that chair and talk about my time here without talking about you. You're in all of it. The good parts and the hard parts and the distance and the reason I stopped picking up the phone. If I leave you out of it, I'm performing again just for a new audience."
The sentence is the truest thing he has said all week.
I know it is true because I have watched him perform for three years and I have watched what happens when the performance runs out and I am standing in the aftermath of the performance running out and the aftermath is this apartment and this kitchen and the suit on the bathroom floor behind a closed door.
"Tell her," I say. "Tell her whatever you need to tell her."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He nods. He leans back into me and his forehead is against my shoulder again and I hold him and the wall is still tight in my chest and the okay is still true. Both of those things are in the room at the same time. Both of them are mine.
"Call me after," I say, running my hands along his back. "Thursdays. After your sessions. You don't have to tell me what you talked about. Just call."
"I'll call."
"And eat something."
"I ate breakfast."
"More than a protein bar."
"You're going to manage my meals from Miami aren’t you?" The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Not yet but it’ll get there. “Wes, Thank you for coming."
"You don't need to thank me for that, Luca. I love you. I would do anything for you."
"Yeah, but you walked off a road trip and flew to Atlanta. You slept in my terrible bed for four nights."
"Your bed is not terrible. The mattress is fine. The pillows need work." I feel more of that almost smile against my shoulder.
"My bed is a six-three on a good day and we both know it."
He is doing his bit. I can hear it starting up the way an engine starts up after sitting cold, rough at first, catching, not smooth but running. The first time he’s rated something in weeks. The fact that it is starting while I’m still here is something I am going to hold.
We stay like that with my arms around him and his forehead against my shoulder and his hands are flat against my back for a while. Mouse threads between our feet and presses her head against my ankle.
"I'd be here next week if I could," I say against his hair.
"I know."
The ride is on time and he walks me to the door. I grab my bag, and he stands in the doorway with Mouse at his feet. I look at him, standing there in my shirt, in the apartment that’s cleaner when I arrived. I kiss him, and his hand comes up to my jaw, holding it there and I let it linger.
"Go," he says when he finally pulls away.
"I'm going.” I don’t make a move to leave even though we both know I need to.
"Go before I make it weird."
"You already made it weird. You rated my goodbye."
"I didn't rate your goodbye."
"You were about to."
"Fine. Seven-eight. Solid form. Slightly rushed on the dismount."
I lean in and kiss him one more time. "I love you, Luca."
"Love you too, Wes."
***
The apartment is the same apartment. The key turns and the door opens and the air inside is still and cool.
I set the bag by the door. The kitchen counter is clean.
The single mug on the rack. The coffeemaker with the carafe rinsed and turned upside down on the towel where I left it before the road trip.
I open the balcony door and the air comes in warm and heavy with salt and car exhaust. The ocean is flat tonight. I don’t see the green-blue line with the light fading. A boat sits on the water in the middle distance, motionless, its running lights just visible.
The phone buzzes in my pocket. Kevin. I'm outside. Buzz me up. I brought food.
I buzz him up. His footsteps in the hallway, the particular Kevin walk, unhurried, deliberate, the man arrives when the man arrives.
He comes through the door with a bag from the place on Calle Ocho. He sets it on the counter and looks at me.
"I thought you were bringing Thai?" I say.
"I lied about the Thai. It's Cuban. The Thai place was closed."
"You said you brought Thai."
"I brought food. The nationality of the food was aspirational."
He unpacks the containers. Black beans, rice, maduros, a pork thing I can smell from here. Two sets of plastic utensils that Kevin will not use because he will use my forks and leave the plastic ones on the counter where they will sit until I throw them away.
We eat at the table. The table I told him adults eat at, which he bought to shut me up, but this is my table in my apartment and we are eating at it because the table is where the food goes and Kevin is here because Kevin is always here when something has shifted and he can feel the shift from fifteen minutes away without being told what shifted.
"So," he says. He puts a forkful of pork in his mouth and chews. "Atlanta. What happened?"
“One of Luca’s teammates called me right after we got back from Aruba, worried about him. I started putting some stuff together that I saw when we were on vacation and I was worried."
"Like what?"
"He just looked tired. And not middle of the season tired, but life wearing him down tired." I take another bite of the rice and beans. “Like he was there with me, but not really present. Then, I tried calling a few times after his teammate called and he wasn’t answering and I didn’t know what to do.”
"So you left the team and flew to Atlanta." He picks up a maduro with his fork and examines it. "Is he okay?"
"He's working on it. He's seeing someone. A therapist."
"That’s good."
"Yeah. I just…”
“What?"
"It’s been difficult seeing him like this. He was thinner and quieter in Aruba and I didn’t question it. Or at least not enough. I got to his place and it was a mess. He’d been keeping up with the kitten but that was about it."
I take a few more bites and then say what I am really thinking. "I feel guilty, Kevin. I know him better than anyone and I didn’t press. I didn’t ask enough questions. Maybe if I had, I could have stopped it from getting so bad."
"Maybe, but maybe not. You can’t think like that. Think about what you did do. You left the team, you went to him as soon as you figured out how serious it was." He says it with the particular Kevin way that means he’s looking at the whole picture. "How was it when you left?"
"Better. Not good or fixed. But better."
He nods his head and eats. The Cuban food is good. The pork’s better than usual, and the maduros are perfect. I’m eating but not really tasting it. I’m still feeling the weight of the last four days.
"You missed the game," Kevin says. "I'm not saying it as a criticism. I'm saying it as a fact. In fifteen years of professional hockey, Wesley Mercer has never missed a game, and then he missed one. And the reason he missed it was a kid in Atlanta who needed him."
"He's not a kid."
"No. He's your person. That's what I'm saying." Kevin sets his fork down. The fork on the plate is Kevin about to drop a truth bomb. The fork up is conversation. The fork down is something else. "What did it feel like?"
"What do you mean?"
"Being off the ice. Four days, no practice, no game, no schedule. Just you in an apartment doing being there for someone. What did it feel like?"
I look at the table. The fork on my plate. The container of black beans between us.
"It felt like the right place to be," I say.
Kevin nods. He does not pick up his fork.
"Can I ask you something else?" he says.
"You're going to ask me regardless."
"I am. But I wanted to be polite about it.
" He folds his hands on the table. The lawyer posture, except it is not the lawyer.
It is the man who has been sitting at my table for years and has never once asked a question he did not already know the answer to.
"What does next season look like for you? "
"I have a contract. Next season looks like playing."
"That's what next season looks like on paper. I'm asking what it looks like in your head."
"It looks like playing, Kevin."
"Okay." He picks up the fork. The register shifts back to conversation mode.
We clear the plates and he helps clean up. When he goes to leave, he turns. His hand is on the frame.
"You know what I noticed tonight?" he says.
"What?"
"You didn't check your phone once. The whole meal. Not once." He looks at me. "I've been eating dinner with you for seven years. You always check your phone. Scores, schedule, team texts. Tonight you didn't touch it."
"I didn't have anything to check."
"That's not why." He grips my shoulder. The Kevin grip, brief and firm, the same one from a hundred doorways.
"For the first time in as long as I've known you, I think the thing you care about most is not on the other end of a score update.
And I think you already know what that means even if you're not ready to say it out loud. "
"Good night, Kevin."
"Good night, Wes." He closes the door behind him.
I go to the balcony. The ocean is dark. The boat from earlier is gone. The running lights along the shore make a line that I have photographed a hundred times and that has never come out the way it looks.
Kevin asked what next season looks like in my head. I told him it looks like playing. The answer was true. I am not sure it is the only answer anymore. For the first time in fifteen years, I am not sure the ice is where I need to be.
I go inside, brush my teeth, and get into bed. The bed is made because I make the bed every morning even when there is no one to see it, which is most mornings. Every morning except the ones in Atlanta where the bed was his and the sheets smelled like him and we made the bed together.
The phone buzzes on the nightstand. Luca.
mouse is screaming at nothing. thought you should know.
tell her I said good night.
she says good night is insufficient. she requires an apology for your departure.
tell her I'll be back.
I set the phone down. His feet on the sand. I lie in bed and think about what Kevin said and what Kevin saw and what I haven’t said out loud yet.
The ice will be there in the morning and I will be on it. But the question Kevin asked runs through my head. I am not ready to answer it and that’s fine. I don’t have to answer it tonight. I just have to know it is there.
?