Chapter 14 Beckett
I sat in her lot that Thursday night with my hands on the wheel and did not turn the key. What I felt first was so big I could not find the edges of it. I've won two playoff series. It was not that.
And underneath it, arriving in the same second, was the other thing.
Because I know what a father is. I have one.
I got in a car at nine years old and got thirty minutes of the truth on the drive home.
By the time we pulled in I knew to the dollar what I had been worth that week.
The man was never once unkind about it. That is a system, and systems get passed down.
I fold my shirts to the same width. I keep a list.
And now there is going to be a person. I'm going to be the man in the car.
So I did what I do with a feeling, which is turn it into a project.
I read the eleventh week and then the twelfth and then the whole rest of it in order.
At one in the morning I was reading about newborn reflexes with a dog asleep on my feet.
I started a folder, green, from a drugstore.
Then I put it in a drawer and could not look at it for two days.
I've never been able to say one true thing to her.
So I did the other thing.
The foundation called about the charity skate every year.
They called the goalie, because goalies are cheap to put on a poster.
There was a beneficiary. It had been a hospital wing, and before that a food bank.
There was a woman named Denise on the phone asking what I cared about, in the voice people use when they expect me to say children.
"Animal rescue," I said.
"Oh, that's wonderful, we love that. There's a big one in Aurora that we've…"
"There's one on Federal," I said. "Reeves. It's a rescue and a clinic, one doctor. They take about eighty animals a year. It's been there since 1998."
"Reeves," Denise said, writing.
"They do the parvo cases nobody else takes because nobody else can eat it."
"And is there a connection there, or…"
"They fixed my dog," I said.
Everything I said to that woman was true. I've gotten very good at that.
It came back a week later with a yes. Then it became a thing with a hashtag. The franchise put out a graphic with June Reeves's name on it in the team's typeface. I looked at that graphic in a parking garage for longer than a man should look at a graphic.
I told her about it the way I would tell somebody about weather. I said the foundation had picked the clinic. She said, "Picked it how?" I said, "There's a committee." She looked at me for about four seconds and let it go.
The skate was Friday night. Six thousand people, players in half kit, a kid in a wheelchair who beat Auggie in a shootout to the loudest noise in that building all season.
The adopt-a-thon was Saturday morning at the beneficiary, which is contractual. The equipment truck came over with our gear in it because somebody in marketing had an idea.
Six chairs and a fish tank. By nine there was a table across the front with pucks on it and a line out the door into the cold.
Kittens in a pen by the window. A Saint Bernard named Duchess who weighed a hundred and forty pounds sitting in the doorway like a piece of civil engineering.
Skoglund on the floor with a beagle on his chest, being filmed.
Wheeler's wife Kim running the team's social account off her phone like a war correspondent.
And along the window, on a folding table, our gear was laid out so kids could put it on for pictures.
That was Kim's idea and it was a good one.
There was nothing funnier than a six-year-old inside a goalie chest protector.
They could not put their arms down. They stood there like a piece of furniture and everybody lost their minds.
Tessa was behind her own reception desk in a clean scrub top with her hair up, running an adoption queue with a clipboard. She did not look at me one time in two hours. I did not look at her, and both of us were extremely good at it.
Auggie found me by the kibble display with a puck in each hand and a small child holding the back of his jersey like a handrail.
"I've been in this building one hour and I've learned there is a cat on that cabinet who is watching me specifically."
"That's Margaret."
"Why do you know its name?"
"Everyone knows her name."
"Everyone," Auggie said, and looked at me a second too long. "You've had a face on for a week. It's a face like a man who won something and can't say what."
"Sign your pucks, Auggie."
There was a girl about seven in a purple coat. She had already done the chest protector and she wanted the blocker. The blocker was the one that got them, because it was a rectangle the size of a car door. It made a child look like a road sign.
She got it on her arm. Then she picked it up over her head with both hands, which is the shot her mother wanted. Kim was already filming. She turned in a circle with it so everybody could see.
The lining in my blocker has a gap up near the top where the wrist strap anchors. Everybody's gear has a place like that.
There are two things in mine. A folded exam form with a dog's medication schedule on it in a woman's handwriting, in there since October. And since Thursday, something else.
It came out when she turned it over, flat and slow, the way paper does. It went four feet down onto the concrete, face up, in a room with people standing in it.
I did not think. My hand was already going.
I got down and my glove closed over it before the second bounce. I put it in my jacket and stood back up.
And the room did the arithmetic.
Nobody said anything. The room went quiet in a very particular way for about a second and a half. Then Skoglund said "whoa" from the floor with a beagle on him. Wheeler turned to look at his wife. His wife had her phone up and had had it up the whole time.
Tens of thousands have now seen a small white rectangle on grey concrete, then a glove closing over it, then a goaltender standing up with a face on him.
Nobody can see what it is. That is the worst part. If they could see it, it would be a fact. What it is instead is a hole, and a hole gets filled in by whoever is standing nearest.
Auggie made a noise like a man being shot and went over backward into the kibble.
He had time to choose. There was a pyramid of forty-pound bags and he went into it from six feet with his arms out. A bag split, and chicken and rice went across that floor. Duchess got up out of the doorway for the first time in two hours.
"I'm fine!" Auggie said, from underneath. "Everybody's fine! Nothing happened!"
That bought me a few seconds and I did not use them well.
Because I looked up, and Tessa was behind her own desk with a clipboard in her hand and a woman in front of her holding a cat carrier.
She had her face completely under control.
She was better at it than I was and she was doing it in front of a queue in her mother's building.
But she was looking at my jacket where my hand was.
The color had gone out of her from the neck up.
I've never in my life wanted so badly to be somewhere else with somebody.
I took one step toward her.
That is when my head went sideways.
I did not see it. Eleven years and I've never once been hit by something I did not see. A twenty-one-year-old bartender got a clean right hand on me in a room with two hundred people in it. I never saw his arm.
I went down on one knee into the kibble.
There was noise then, a lot of it. Somebody screamed, and about four people got there at once. By the time I had my eyes working there were three volunteers on Eli. Duchess had put herself sideways across his shins, which is a hundred and forty pounds of dog deciding a thing is over.
"Get off me!"
"Eli."
"You get him out of here!"
"Eli, honey, no."
He was not shouting at me. He was shouting at the room. "She's had you in this building four months and you couldn't…"
Then Tessa said his name, one time, from behind the desk, and he stopped like somebody had cut a wire.
I got up. My mouth was full of blood and my jaw felt like a bell.
Everybody in that lobby was looking at me, waiting for the thing that happens next. They had all seen a hundred fights and they knew the shape.
"I'm all right," I said, to the room.
"You're bleeding," Kim said.
"It's a lip."
Two of my teammates were coming across the floor with their chins down. That was the moment. If I had said one word in a certain tone, that kid would get hurt in his sister's lobby in front of a camera.
"Nothing happened," I said. "He's family. Sign the pucks."
I got a bag of frozen peas out of the break room freezer, because that is what was in there. I stood in the parking lot with it against my face and watched a rescue adopt out nine animals in one morning. That is more than they do in three weeks.
Auggie came out with kibble in his collar.
"You want the good news or the medical news?"
"The medical news."
"Your face is going to look incredible tomorrow. Now the good news. Everybody in there thinks you took that on purpose."
"I didn't take it on purpose. I didn't see it."
"I know," Auggie said. "That's why I said it's good news."
He stood next to me a while, chewing his thumbnail, which he did when he was deciding.
"Beckett. What was on the floor?"
"Nothing."
"Okay," he said, and did not ask again.
The clip was up by eleven. By one it had a caption that was a question.
By four there were three accounts that hate this team running it with a different question.
By dinner a man on a national afternoon show said the words personal situation and moved on to a hip injury in Nashville.
My father's producers do that show. My father has never once in his life let a thing go by because it was mine.
I did not care about any of that. I've been trained since I was seventeen to care about exactly that. It was so far down the list I had to go looking for it.
What I cared about was that her private life hit the floor of her mother's building in front of a camera, four days after she told me. I was the one who put it there.
I did not go back in. The lobby was full of people, and the last thing that woman needed was me standing near her desk with a bleeding mouth.
I went home, did the fluids, and sat with the dog.
"He's got a good right hand," I told Bear.
Bear's tail moved twice.
"I'd have hit me too."
I turned it over the whole way home looking for the part where I was owed an apology. It is not there. He was eleven years old. He came into a kitchen and found his sister on the floor and could not get her to say why. I'm the why, and I've been the why for ten years.
At six I got the green folder out of the drawer.
I had a game Monday, a face like a bruised peach, and a folder of printouts about a blood pressure I had no business knowing anything about. There is one language I speak. I've never been able to speak any of the others.
I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal with a bag of peas on the passenger seat and a dog behind it. I parked in her lot at seven forty. The lights were on.
I did not have a sentence.
What I had was this. I had it all the way down in the part of me that does not put things into words. Whatever this turns out to be, whatever she lets it be, she is not doing it on her own, not one hour of it.
I got out of the truck.