Chapter 9
Alyssa filled the tub she used for washing sweaters with hot water and fragrant salts and carried it carefully to her small dining room. She was wearing rolled-up sweatpants and had her hair in a high ponytail, and she sat at the table, which was scattered with sketchbooks and fabric and wood stain samples. She lowered her feet into the tub and sighed with pleasure. She had once thought this was a luxury only for older women. Then she’d tried it.
She picked up a colored pencil and tapped it against her chin. The design for Nick Sorensen’s apartment was almost done. The living room was a cool blue with big dark furniture. She added a little industrial swank in his open dining room with a steel table with rivets showing. It was masculine but playful in a way. The lamps in the living room carried over the industrial steel look.
The kitchen was a streamlined, modern space. She was going to get him a better coffeemaker than the twenty-dollar box-store brand he had now. And what was with that? She sort of understood not bothering to decorate his apartment. Weird, but okay. But if you were going to buy a coffeemaker, why wouldn’t you get a good one? The guy had money.
She’d chosen sleek, modern flatware. The plates were round and white, but he was going to get square dessert plates. The stemware was chunky glass. She could remember the feel of his hand on her back when he’d pulled her in for a kiss—he’d have no trouble wrapping those strong fingers around the glasses.
She was going to paint his bedroom a midnight blue with grommet-top curtains on a steel pole and blackout shades underneath. Most of the Red Wheels’ games started in the evening, and by the time he showered and drove home, it was probably pretty late. He might sleep in in the morning and would appreciate a dark bedroom.
As for the art, she was going to put a hockey stick up on the wall, and the Bobby Orr print. That was probably enough hockey. She had generically masculine duck prints to go in his bedroom. She didn’t like them—they seemed like something you’d find in a law office or a bank, but he needed something, and she couldn’t take a chance on a Rothko reproduction. She’d found some cute, framed vegetable prints at one of her favorite stores that would go in the kitchen. She was going to put a neutral landscape over his sofa. Then it got tricky.
Alyssa believed there should be a human face in every room—a photograph of a loved one, a reproduction Roman bust, a Modigliani print—something with eyes, whether it was two- or three-dimensional. Rooms without them were lonely, and you didn’t know why—it didn’t rise to the conscious level. If there were ever a guy in need of art with faces, it was Nick Sorensen. But she couldn’t tell him that—she could just see him roll his eyes. The thing was, on the floor beside his mattress, he had a small framed photo of people who were obviously his parents, and that was it. No team photos, no friends, no vacation selfies. His living space was sterile. It was desolate.
This refusal to reveal anything of himself was what earned him the ducks. He had no one to blame but himself.
She had checked with Vanessa, and the Red Wheels were getting back from their road trip today—they were probably back now. She had gotten in the habit of checking the sports news and earlier that day had called her stepdad to ask if Detroit was off to a good start. Her mom answered and sounded relieved when Alyssa asked for Bill.
Her mother, Linda, hadn’t always been so stiff. When she’d had to sell their house after her husband left, she’d had a giant garage sale. She’d bought price stickers and had told Alyssa and her brother, Ryan, to put one on everything. Alyssa stuck one on her dollhouse last, and she put it on the bottom, hoping no one would know it was for sale. That hadn’t worked out.
When a neighbor walked over to the sale and turned one of Linda’s mother’s china plates in her hand and asked why they were selling everything, Linda had told her. She had debts. She was losing the house. And the neighbor had said, “Well, you really need to unload these, then,” and had given Linda a lowball offer. Alyssa had watched as her mother smiled brittlely and boxed the china for the woman. Then she had left Alyssa in charge while she went in the house.
When she came back out, her mascara was gone and she was … older. It was like she had duct-taped herself back together, and now she could never pull the tape off without falling to pieces. Of course she was stiff—she was taped together.
Alyssa’s stepdad, Bill, came on the line, and when Alyssa asked about the Red Wheels, there was silence at the other end. Then he said, “I’ve waited for this day.”
“Ha ha,” Alyssa said. “Nick Sorensen is doing pretty well, isn’t he?”
“His plus–minus rating is good,” Bill said. “His shifts are short right now, so his TOI isn’t very high, but when—”
“Enough, enough!” Alyssa said. “I’m not actually a fan.”
Her stepfather was silent for a moment, then said, “Someday I will sit, brew in hand, flanked by my children, discussing Leif Bjorkland’s save percentage, and you will listen to me with bated breath.”
She laughed. “Maybe you can be flanked by Ryan and a cardboard cutout also of Ryan.”
“I love your brother,” her stepdad said, “but he’s already a hockey fan. You’re the one I have to work on.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She might not be interested in hockey, but she was becoming interested in Nick Sorensen. Purely for professional reasons. In order to give him a more functional design.
Alyssa pulled her feet out of the little tub and let them drip back into it, then wrapped them in a fuzzy lavender towel. She would text Nick the next day and ask to meet him at his apartment to show him her sketches and plans. She didn’t expect much reaction out of him, but maybe he could muster a “Looks comfortable” for the furniture. Something.
Without thinking through why she was doing it, she typed his name into her browser’s search bar and scanned the results that came up. A box on the right of her screen contained a brief biography: birthday, height, contract amount—dang, that coffeemaker did not make sense—draft pick, current and former team affiliations, and a montage of photos. One of them was a tiny picture of a crumpled plane. She clicked and a story opened—six friends taking what was meant to be an evening trip. Six dead—five passengers and the pilot—and one survivor. There were thumbnail photos of all the guys, plus the pilot. It had been a mechanical failure, the article said—nobody’s fault. The pilot had done everything he could, played it out a long time—which meant they’d known they were going to crash for several minutes.
What would that have been like?
She clicked her back arrow, stared at the Red Wheels’ publicity shot of Nick—a handsome young man with an easy smile. Then she scrolled further and clicked on a site that offered photos posted by fans. Many were blurry restaurant photos taken by people who didn’t want to be seen snapping his picture. Some were street shots. He was using a cane in some of the photos and was pale and in a wheelchair in a few of them, his left leg extended straight in front of him.
But others were fun photoshopped images and memes. Someone had used a professional photo of Nick taken straight on as he headed down the ice, a fierce look in his blue eyes. On it, they had superimposed the words “Me heading for the last piece of cake the way Nick Sorensen heads for the net.” And there was a five-second video of him standing in a suit, waiting by a bus, sunglasses suspended in his left hand. He swung them slowly back and forth and looked like James Bond. Someone had posted, “You’re never going to be as cool doing anything as Nick Sorensen is waiting for a bus.” He had such an effortless elegance—a sense of style in his clothes and the way he held himself. How could he have let his home be so … nothing?
She was ready to close the laptop, when she saw three photos that had been uploaded in the past week, according to their time stamp. They showed Nick in a suit, his hair wet, one arm around a gorgeous woman and the other holding a baby. They looked completely comfortable together, and the way they were looking at each other—there was real familiarity there. Old friends? His sister? She ran an emergency search: Nick Sorensen AND sibling. He was an only child. Maybe he was married, and the woman his wife lived in a different city, and they were keeping it quiet? Maybe it wasn’t quiet, and Alyssa was the only one who didn’t know. After all, she hadn’t known about the plus–minus thing. But his online bio said he was single, so this was probably his Boston mistress. He traveled all the time—a guy that good-looking? And rich? He’d have one in every city. She’d felt the muscle in his chest, and that was a thing a person could want to lean against. Probably everyone in every city did. Of course he wasn’t available.
And there was no reason at all why that should bother her, so obviously it didn’t. It’s just that she had a backup plan to make the second bedroom a very generic guest bedroom if she could get him to approve it, but if it should be a child’s room—well he should have told her that. And then she realized why he didn’t have any photos in his home—he had a network of mistresses and couldn’t risk forgetting to switch out their pictures. What if Margot from Los Angeles flew in and saw a photo of Angelique from New York on his bedside table? The only way to avoid a mess-up was to pretend he couldn’t be bothered to decorate at all.
If she was right, he would let her do this design to placate his team and Devin, and then quietly cancel their agreement. He’d pay her for the work she’d done so far, but not let her actually buy the damn duck prints. Because that could upset Margot from Los Angeles.
She looked again at the photo, at the look of deep understanding between Nick and this tall, beautiful woman, of the way he cradled the baby—protective, with his head tilted onto the baby’s silky crown. This wasn’t a random encounter with a fan. This was a woman he loved, a baby he cared for. That surely was his. And that was perfectly fine. What did she care? She did not care. “I do not care,” she said out loud, to make it more official.
Then she added a third duck print to his bedroom, because screw him.