Chapter 27 Beckett
I was in the yard with a hose. I've had that number in my phone for two years and I've never once used it, on purpose. A man calling is a thing that has to be answered. I did not want to be a thing he had to answer.
"You sound like you're outside."
"I'm doing kennels."
"You're doing what?"
"Kennels," I said. "It's a long story."
"Yeah, I've read some of it." Neither of us said anything for a second.
"Okay. I'm going to do this fast, because I've written it down and if I stop I'll lose my place.
I'm playing. Bakersfield, for next year.
I've been well over a year. I've got a person I see on Wednesdays and I'm going to keep seeing her.
" He took a breath. "And I know what April cost you.
I've known the whole time, and I've sat on it for two years like a coward. "
"You're not a…"
"Beckett, I'm going to write about it," Renner said. "That's the call. I'm not asking if I can, because I've spent two years working out that I don't have to. I'm telling you the reason, because you're going to try and take it off me."
I stood in a gravel yard with the hose running on my boot.
"It's not yours to spend," I said.
"That's what you've been saying to yourself for two years."
"It's true."
"It was never yours to spend," Renner said, "because it was always mine. You've been sitting on my night like it belonged to you. It doesn't. I want it back, and the first thing I'm going to do with it is put your name in it."
I did not have anything for that.
"Say okay," he said.
"Okay."
"Say it like you mean it or I'll call your wife."
"She's not my…"
"Everyone in the American Hockey League thinks she's your wife," Renner said. "There's a lady in Tucson with a spreadsheet."
It went up three days later with his name on it and a photograph of him at nineteen in a stall.
He called it The Save, which is a goalie's title. I've read it once.
It is eleven hundred words and it is not about me for the first eight hundred, which is correct. It is about a twenty-year-old in a new city with the curtains shut. It says the true parts plainly and leaves out the parts that are nobody's business.
The part about me is four paragraphs. A man got a four-word text at twenty past midnight and drove.
He sat in a hallway from two in the morning until a woman got in from Kelowna.
He missed a curfew and a skate. He gave up four goals on nineteen shots eighteen hours later and lost a series.
He let a market call him finished for two years rather than say the sentence that would have fixed it.
The last line is: he made the save on the 11th of April and then stood there and let everybody boo it.
In September they buried me. In May they wrote retractions. In the last week of June they went for the third one, which is the confessional. Fenner wrote a column that opened with the words I was wrong. He did not put a but in it anywhere.
I stopped reading after the first day. On Wednesday Tessa took my phone off the counter and put it in a drawer in the clinic. She said, "It'll be there Friday," and I let her.
It is the same machine. It is the same men and the same certainty, pointed the other way. From the inside it does not feel like justice. It feels like weather, and I've already had one man in my life teach me to stand out in it.
I said that in the kitchen and Tessa said, "That's the most sense you've ever made." She made me say it again to Sofia. Sofia said, "Yes, obviously," and went back to her crossword.
My father called on the Friday morning. Then his producer called, which is how I knew what it was.
It is always eleven minutes. It would be a sit-down with both of us, the father and the son. There would be a chair each and a soft light and the word redemption in the second sentence.
I sent my father four words. No. Not doing it.
He came at two o'clock on the Saturday.
I knew the car before it stopped. I got to the porch before he got to the steps, the way I did in January. In January there were two inflatable snowmen on that path. In June there is a stroller and a bin of kennel toys and a hose reel. My father came up past all of it with his jacket over his arm.
"Hell of a week." He put his hands on his hips and smiled. He has a very good one. "I want to say something and I want you to let me get to the end of it. I did not have all the information. I know what I said on air in Minnesota that spring and I've thought about it."
"Okay."
"Don't say okay." He came up one step. "Two years ago I stood in front of a camera and said my own son quit on a room.
That's on my ledger. And now there's a chance to put it right in front of the whole country.
I've got Halloran offering us the eleven and the desk and full control of the questions. "
Behind me, through the screen door, my daughter started up in the front room. She did about four seconds of it. Tessa said something low and it stopped.
My father heard it. I watched him hear it. He did not look at the door.
"That's her," he said. "Beck."
"There's no segment," I said. "No sit-down, no eleven minutes, no piece where you get filmed knocking on this door." I had my hands in my pockets, because otherwise they were going to do something. "You want it off your ledger, that's a good instinct and I'm not going to insult it. Do it off air."
"Off air is nothing," Roy said. "Off air doesn't exist."
"I know," I said. "That's what I've been trying to say to you since I was nine."
He stopped.
"Forty years on television," I said, "and you've got it into your head that being watched and being loved are the same transaction.
I don't think you did it on purpose and I don't think you're a bad man.
I think somebody did it to you. But I grew up inside it, and I was the footage, Dad.
Every good night I ever had, you were on a desk telling people what it meant about me.
Every bad one too. I never once got to just have a night. "
He did not say anything. He is extremely good at the silence and I grew up in it. I've spent eleven years in a job where the goalie does not move first.
"So here are the terms, and they're not going to change," I said.
"You don't get a version of my family with a camera in it.
Not now, not when she's four, not if I win something.
And when you can come up that path with empty hands and nothing to sell afterward, and knock on that door, it opens.
I'll put the coffee on. It's not a trick and there isn't a test at the end of it. "
"And until then?"
"Until then it doesn't."
My father stood on the path of a rescue on Federal Boulevard and looked at the sign with a dead woman's name on it.
"You had a line in January," he said. "Now you've got a door."
"Yeah."
He moved the jacket to his other arm and went down the steps, and at the bottom he stopped, and he did not turn around.
"Game six," Roy said.
I waited.
"That was the wrong result."
And then he got in the car and sat in it about twenty seconds before he started it. He went up Federal.
There is no version of that sentence, in the language my father actually speaks, that means anything except one thing. He has never in his life said the words you played well to a goaltender, on air or off it. It is not in the vocabulary he was given. What he has instead is the result being wrong.
It means I watched it. Taken all the way down, it means I saw you.
That is not the other sentence. It is not near it, and I've stopped waiting for it.
But I sat down on the step for a minute. Tessa came out and sat down right next to me, not one down and over. She put her hand on the back of my neck and did not ask me one single question. After a while she said, "Coffee's on anyway." I said, "I know," and we went in.
The bath happened on the Tuesday.
The dispute is procedural. Tessa's position is that the tub gets filled first and the baby comes second. My position, which is correct, is that everything goes into position first. Then the water is introduced, because water is the variable.
We were both in the bathroom. That is where it went wrong. There were two adults and a nine-week-old in one bathroom that already contains a dog bed I've never been able to get anybody to move.
"You're holding her too…"
"I'm holding her the way the folder says."
"Beckett, the folder is for a newborn. She's nine weeks, she's got a neck now."
"She has a partial neck."
"She has a full neck."
"Tessa, she does not have a full…"
And then Willa, who has never once agreed with either of us about anything, arched her whole back like a fish and went out of my hands. I got her. That is what I do for a living. I got her the way I get a puck I did not see until late, which is with everything.
The bath went over, all of it.
I went down on one knee in about four gallons of water, holding my daughter above my head in two hands like a trophy. She was fine. She was in fact delighted. It is the first time she has ever laughed and it was at me.
Tessa had to sit down on the closed lid of the toilet.
"You're soaked."
"I'm aware."
"Get up," she said, and she was not able to speak properly. "You're kneeling in it."
"If I get up she goes back down and this happens again."
"Beckett."
"This is a stable position," I said. "I could hold this for an hour."
And Tessa Reeves put her hands over her face and laughed until she had to lean on the sink. Then she got up and took Willa out of my hands. Then she leaned down and kissed me while I was still on my knees, wet through, on the floor of her mother's bathroom.
"You're a lunatic," she said, against my mouth.
"The variable was the water."
"Shut up."
There is a grey cat in that house called Roy. He came in with the first litter in October. He fell asleep against my leg in an exam room before I knew anything about anything. I've quietly failed to let anybody adopt him out for nine months.
Nobody in that building has ever said a word about it to my face.