23. Chapter Twenty-Three
Stanley
The back half of the night went easy, and that was the part that should’ve scared me.
And I sat in the middle of all of it, full of pie that wasn’t mine and warm off one glass of wine, and watched Aspen Linwood be a person in her own house.
Somewhere in there, the lie just went. I couldn’t tell you the minute.
One second, I was running a con on a roomful of people, and the next, I was a guy at a holiday next to a girl, laughing at her uncle, and there was no seam between the two, no place where the acting stopped, and the rest of it started.
It all just felt like the truth, and I didn’t go looking for the spot where it wasn’t.
Then Carolyn found me on the couch and put her hand flat on the top of my head like I was eight.
“Bed, Stanley. You’ve got a plane in the morning and a game tomorrow night, and I am not sending you onto the ice tired.” She said it the way she’d say it to one of her own. “Go on. Up.”
So I went up to Aspen’s bedroom and set up the trundle.
I turned off the light, expecting that to be the end of the night.
Then I heard footsteps, and Aspen apologizing as she walked into her own bedroom.
She turned on the lamp to get ready for bed.
I triple checked that all my alarms were on and ready for the morning.
Then the lamp went off, and the room fell silent.
I figured she had a few glasses too many and that she’d fall asleep much faster than me.
“When did you know?” she asks through the darkness.
My eyes are still open, looking around at the dark. “Know what?”
“That you’d play. That this was the whole life. Not if you’d be good enough. When you knew it was yours.”
“There wasn’t a when, Linwood.” I’ve never said this out loud.
Maybe to anyone, ever. The dark makes it cheaper, somehow — easier to spend.
“That’s the part nobody believes when I tell them.
My old man won the Cup the year I was born, took one look at the purple, screaming, seven-pound disaster they handed him, and decided right there.
Name him after the trophy. So I was the trophy before I could hold a stick. It was decided for me.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“And everybody figures it’s this big certainty I’ve got going.
Like I came out of the womb knowing.” I drag a hand down my face in the dark.
“I didn’t know a single thing, Linwood. I got told.
That’s the whole difference, and nobody ever hears it.
I have never once gotten to find out if I’d have picked it for myself, because nobody ever slowed the train down long enough to ask.
There was no morning where somebody went, hey, Stan, you want this one?
It just got handed over. Here. It’s yours. Don’t drop it. Smile for the photo.”
She’s quiet for a long minute.
“I started writing reports when I was fourteen,” she says. “Box scores first. Then zone time. Then whole games — ten pages, broken all the way down, on the kitchen table on a Sunday. You want to know why a fourteen-year-old does that.”
“Tell me.”
“Because if I set a report down next to his coffee, he’d look up.
He’d read the whole thing. He’d ask me a question about it, and I’d have the answer, because I’d stayed up making sure I had the answer.
” Her voice is very level in the dark. “I couldn’t play.
I was never going to play. So I learned the whole thing cold instead — every system, every tendency, every line in the league — so I could be useful in the one room in that house that mattered.
Useful was as close to that room as I was ever going to get. ”
She breathes out, slow.
“I built an entire career off of the thing my father loves most. Adjacent. That’s the word for me. I have been professionally adjacent to being loved.”
“So your whole life,” I say, “is one long campaign to get one specific guy to look at you a certain way.”
“Yeah.”
“Mine too, Aspen.”
Neither of us says anything for a while.
“But you got it from the inside,” she says finally. “The pressure. The whole thing aimed straight at you — your name, your dad, every person in a building waiting on you. I only ever got it from the outside. The wanting in. Standing at the glass.” A pause. “I don’t know which one’s worse.”
“It’s the same machine, Linwood,” I say it up at the dark, because I can’t say it at her.
“We’re just standing at opposite ends of the thing.
One of us is getting fed into the gears.
One of us is out in the cold with our face on the glass, wanting in so bad it aches.
Same house. Both of us lonely as hell inside a family that’d swear up and down it loved us — and they’d be telling the truth, that’s the kicker.
They do love us. They just never once worked out how to make either of us feel it. ”
I don’t follow it with anything. There’s nothing to follow it with. The room holds it. A car goes by somewhere outside. The light slides across the ceiling and leaves.
“This is the most anyone’s ever understood me,” she says, eventually, up at the dark.
“And it’s you. Somebody I’ve known my whole life and really can’t stand.
You’re on my trundle bed, and we’re in a relationship we made up on a Saturday.
” A small breath that isn’t quite a laugh.
“That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. ”
This is where I’m supposed to make the joke. We’ve done this dance enough times tonight that she’s braced for it — the easy out, the deflection, the thing I reach for.
I don’t reach for it.
I let the quiet go on long enough that she hears the joke not coming.
“That’s not sad, Linwood,” I say. “We see each other now.”
She doesn’t answer.
I don’t say goodnight, and neither does she, and we both lie there in the dark a long time, awake, listening to the other one pretend to be asleep.
It’s still dark when the alarm goes off. I kill it before the second buzz. The house under me is dead silent.
Aspen’s asleep. Actually asleep now — flat out, one hand open on the pillow.
I dress in the dark, and I’m quiet about it. I’ve gotten good, this fall, at being quiet in rooms with her in them. I stop on the way out and look at her a second longer than I’ve got any business looking at her.
I fold her father’s shirt over the back of her vanity chair, the tie laid over the top of it, where she’ll see it.
And there’s a notepad on the vanity, one of those little ones with a grocery list half-started in her mother’s hand, and I tear off the back sheet, and I write one line on it and set it on top of the shirt.
I’ll make you another pie.
Then I leave. I shut the door quietly and walk down the stairs. Nobody’s awake in the house, so I leave the front door and call for a ride.
The locker room sounds like summer camp somebody handed a sound system. There’s a tape gun going off in bursts like a stapler with dreams. Rowan’s re-lacing skates while listening to Benson talk about Thanksgiving. Somebody’s playlist is a hate crime. Percy’s half into his pads in the corner.
I come through that door loud. I have been awake since five this morning.
I have flown two legs on about ninety minutes of trundle sleep.
Four hours ago, I left a girl asleep in a bed in another state with my whole chest cracked open over her, and you could not prove a single second of any of it in a court of law, because the volume is back up to eleven where it belongs and I’m on Blue before the door’s even shut.
“Blueberry! New haircut?”
He looks over at me like he hates the new nickname. “It’s the same haircut, Sterm.”
“It’s a bold haircut. I respect the commitment. Melly let you out of the house like that?”
“Melly likes the haircut.”
“Melly’s being supportive. That’s what love is, brother. You hold onto that girl.”
The room rolls on, loud and stupid, which is the most comforting thing I’ve felt in twenty-four hours.
Benson is across the room at his stall, half-dressed, not chirping.
Just watching me. Captain’s eyes. And Percy, who has not said a word and will not, has me marked from the corner the same flat way he tracks a shooter coming in two-on-one like he’s already done the math on which way I’m going to break.
Benson doesn’t push it in front of the room. He just tips his chin at me, easy, and says it flat, “Good Thanksgiving?”
Two words, and it means something happened up there.
“Incredible,” I say, grinning, lacing a skate. “Ate my body weight in brisket. Met a man named Hodge. Charmed an entire NHL front office. They’re going to name a wing of the building after me.”
Benson looks at me, then he lets it go.
I grin.
I played the best sixty minutes of my college life on no sleep, and I did it with my mouth shut about a thing I swore in a dark room I would never say, concerning a man I had decided, somewhere over Pennsylvania, I wanted to put through the boards.
He let her sit alone in torment for a week.
He asked her through a door if she was sure it was his.
He went to the draft and never once looked back at what he’d left bleeding behind him.
And I can’t say a word of it to anyone — not the boys, not my dad, not a soul — because it isn’t mine to say.
It’s hers. She handed it to me in the dark.
So I don’t say it.
I skate it.
The whole thing goes into the ice. I forecheck like I’m being paid by the hit.
I score in the first. I score in the third.
We beat a top-ten team in their own building, and the bench is losing its mind.
The scouts in the press box are scribbling, and I’d put money down that my dad’s somewhere texting Coach Linwood about it right now, but none of that is important.
I’m not playing for the scouts tonight. I’m not playing for my dad. I’m barely playing for the boys. I’m playing a name out of my own chest, and I can’t tell anyone whose, so I just play.
After, I’ve got Selena Gomez going on somebody’s speaker and I’m working the room while everyone packs up — swaying my hips, rolling my shoulders, narrating my own goals to anybody who’ll pretend to listen.
Benson whips me with a towel and asks what the hell’s wrong with me.
I answer him in song. Blue films a verse and loses it when I get up on the bench.
I let my pants slide off my ass, and the room comes apart.
One by one, the guys take off toward the bus, still laughing, shaking their heads, until the bench is empty and the last guy props the door.
Blue unplugs the speaker on his way out, and the music just stops.
And then it’s me and Benson in the quiet of a locker room after a win, which is its own kind of loud.
He’s got his bag packed. He’s not looking at me.
“You good?” he says.
“I’m phenomenal, Reeve. Just scored twice in a building that hates me. I’m gonna sleep like a king and wake up even more handsome. Genuinely worried for the rest of you, long term.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Pretty sure it’s word-for-word what you asked.”
He zips the bag. He stands. And he looks at me the way he looks at me — flat, patient, a man who has watched me run this exact routine since we were freshmen and knows every gear in it.
“Connecticut,” he says.
“Was lovely. Crisp. The brisket alone—”
“Stan.”
“—was a religious experience, Reeve, I’m not going to apologize for a good brisket—”
“Stan.”
I shut up.
He doesn’t say anything for a second. He just looks at me. I look back, and I give him the grin. The full one, the one that’s walked me out of every room I’ve ever needed walking out of.
He nods slowly, like the grin told him exactly what he wanted to know, which it didn’t, because I didn’t let it, and he slings his bag over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
He claps me on the shoulder on the way past.
“Bus in ten,” he says, and he’s gone.
I stand in the empty room for a second.
The grin held.
I’m almost sure the grin held.