Chapter 24 Tessa
Auggie had been lying to me about that bar for three weeks.
I knew something was happening. Violet had asked me twice what I was doing on a Saturday afternoon, in the tone of a woman conducting a survey. My brother has never texted me a question mark in his life, and he had asked me what I thought about balloons.
So on the twenty-eighth of May Beckett drove me to Tennyson, because Eli had allegedly done something to a walk-in cooler. I went in through the front. There were about seventy people in that bar and they all yelled at once.
I stood in the doorway at thirty-six weeks pregnant with my hand on the frame and cried immediately, which is not like me and has been happening constantly since March.
Eli had closed the bar for the afternoon, which for him is a Saturday. That means it cost him money. I got to him at the taps and said, "Eli," and he said, "It's a room, Tessa, it's not a personality transplant." Then he hugged me with his chin on the top of my head.
Violet and Auggie had done the rest of it.
I could see the seam where two people had planned separately and then stopped planning separately somewhere around week two.
There was a table of extremely tasteful little sandwiches.
There was a six-foot banner that said Welcome Baby Douglas-Reeves, with a photograph of Bear on it.
"The banner's mine," Auggie said. "The sandwiches are Violet's. She's been insufferable about the sandwiches."
"You have been at my apartment four times this week," Violet said.
"For the sandwiches," Auggie said. Violet looked at him for a second. I put my drink down and looked at the two of them and said, "Oh," out loud. Violet said, "Not today, today is about you," and took my arm in a grip like a bailiff.
The team came in civilian clothes, which is a strange thing to see. Skoglund brought his mother. Wheeler and Kim came with a car seat still in the box.
At about half past two a group of them got very serious and Wheeler made everybody be quiet. Skoglund came through the room carrying something on a towel with two hands, like a man delivering a document.
It was a pair of goalie pads, eleven inches tall. They were made properly by the equipment staff, out of the real materials and in the team's colors. There was a number on them. Something was stitched into the leather at the top of the right one, small, in white thread, Douglas
Beckett picked one up and turned it over in his hands and did not say anything for a while. The room let him not say anything, which is a thing that room does for him now.
"They're not regulation," Skoglund said. "If she's going to play, they're a violation."
"She's going to play out," Auggie said. "She's got a hockey mom and a goalie dad, she's going to be a winger out of spite." Beckett said, "Yeah," in a voice with something in it, and put the pad down very carefully.
Sofia gave a toast. She stood on a chair, which nobody asked her to do and two people tried to stop, and held a glass of soda water.
"I have known this woman four months. When I met her she had a blood pressure of one forty-eight over ninety-four and a stand-in vet she could not afford.
She had a face like a person who has decided to die at work.
I recognized it, because I did it for forty years and sold my building to a chain to make it stop. "
Somebody laughed and then understood and stopped.
"I have watched her, since January, learn to lie down.
It has been like watching a horse learn to use a telephone.
" She raised the glass. "Tessa. Your mother was a stubborn woman who built a good thing badly.
You have built the same good thing and you have finally got somebody else standing in it.
You will not lose it, because I have seen the accounts and I know what I am talking about. "
Two grown defensemen were openly crying. Wheeler had to leave the room.
Then the second-grade class's contribution arrived, which Miss Ansah drove over herself. It was a piece of poster board with a bar chart on it in crayon, because they had held a vote.
The ballot was baby names. Every option was a goaltender who has won a Cup.
"They were told it had to be a girl's name," Miss Ansah said.
"And?"
"They did not accept the premise."
Brodeur got four. Plante got six, mostly on the strength of Plante the kitten. Somebody had written Hasek over and over in the same box.
And with thirty-one votes, in a landslide, in green crayon, Roy.
The room came apart. Auggie went down on one knee. Beckett stood there holding a piece of poster board with both hands. He looked at it a long moment and said, "Absolutely not," in a completely flat voice. It was the funniest thing that has ever happened in that building.
"It's democracy," Auggie said.
"It's a cat."
"It's a mandate."
Violet went last, because Violet always goes last.
She gave me a frame. Inside it was the rescue's own letterhead, on the form we use. She had filled it out properly in her handwriting with all the boxes ticked:
Certificate of permanent placement. Animal: Baby Douglas-Reeves. Intake date: pending. Foster period: none. This placement is final. Foster fail. No returns.
Signed and dated, and in the corner where the adoption fee goes, she had written paid in full.
I said it to her in November on a supply room floor. I said that if I could just register the baby as a long-term foster, the paperwork would feel survivable. She told me human children do not come with foster contracts. Then she went and made one.
That is when it happened, and it only lasted a second.
Somebody had put me in a chair by the window.
Sofia had my drink and Kim had my coat. Eli had brought me a plate I did not ask for.
Violet had her hand on my shoulder. Beckett was across the room with his back to me, talking to Miss Ansah about crayons.
I had not done one single thing for anybody in two hours.
I sat in that chair and let seventy people hold me up, and I did not put a stop to it.
I had a headache when I woke up.
I noted it at eight in the morning the way I note weather. Water, I thought. You are thirty-six weeks pregnant and you have not sat down since Tuesday.
At the party it was still there.
By half past three the lights in that bar had gone soft around the edges, not blurred.
There is a difference and I have been describing it to clients for nine years.
Every bulb in the room had a small clean ring around it, like a streetlight in fog.
When I looked away from one, a pale shape stayed where it had been for a second.
I sat in the chair and did what I do, which is build the case. Fluorescents. Not enough water. A long week. The noise. You are fine.
Sofia was on the other side of the bar with a plate in her hand, and she stopped.
She did not ask me anything. That is the part I keep thinking about. A sixty-eight-year-old woman looked at my face across a room with seventy people in it and put the plate down.
She came around the bar and picked my bag up off the floor. She took out the cuff that lives in it, took my arm and put it on. She did it right there, sitting down in a bar with a banner up.
"Sofia, it's…"
"Be quiet," Sofia said.
The machine did its thing. She read it and did not say the number. She put it back on and did it again on the other arm, which nobody does unless they want to be wrong.
Then she said, "Tessa," in a voice I have not heard her use.
"Say it."
"One seventy over one hundred and eight."
Mateo drew a red circle on a piece of paper in November and wrote a number in it. I have looked at that paper twice a day for six months.
"Where is he?" Sofia said. Beckett was already coming across that room, because he had turned around. That man has been watching me since October and I have never once caught him at it.
Beckett crouched down in front of my chair so his face was below mine, which I have watched him do to frightened dogs.
"Say it to me," he said.
"One seventy over one oh eight."
Nothing in his voice moved. "Mateo said call the service and go in. Not in the morning."
"That's what he said."
"Then that's what we're doing." He put one hand on the arm of the chair. "Can you walk out of here or do you want to not walk out of here?"
"I can walk."
"All right."
"I don't want the room to…"
"Nobody's going to know anything," he said, and stood up, and put his hand out.
And that is exactly what happened. He walked me out of the front of that bar with a hand on my back, like a man taking a woman out to look at something.
Behind us Auggie's voice went up over the whole room, saying he had an announcement about the sandwiches.
Violet had a phone to her ear before we were through the door.
Sofia came out behind us with my bag and my chart and got in the back seat without being asked.
Eli was in the doorway of his own bar with a dish towel in his hand and his face gone.
"Go back inside," Sofia said to him.
"That's not…"
"Eli," Beckett said, and my brother stopped. "Bar first, then Federal. Feed everything. Then come."
"Okay," Eli said.
He did not speed. I have thought about it since.
He drove exactly the way he drives. At every single light he put his right hand flat on my knee, and at every green he put it back on the wheel.
He talked the entire way in a low even voice about nothing at all.
He talked about the schedule, about who was doing the four o'clock, about Margaret being in the clean towels again.
I understood after a while that he was doing the voice he does at four in the morning to a four-week-old cat.
"You're doing the kitten voice. On me."
"Yeah," Beckett said.
"Don't stop," I said.
They had me in a gown in nine minutes, which told me everything about the number.