Chapter 8 #2
The apartment was sixty-three degrees and dark and the certificate was squared to the laminate and Shane turned on every light as if brightness could fill the place, and got Theo onto the edge of the bed, and knelt to take his shoes off without being asked, and Theo let him.
This was what Theo had been most afraid of his whole life, more than the flight to Stockholm, more than the shoulder, more than any of it: the inventory when the column emptied.
A defenseman who couldn’t take hits was a defenseman who took no ice, and a defenseman who took no ice was an entry in the roster that didn’t justify its line, and Theo Lindgren had spent twenty-seven years making sure his line justified itself, and right now, in a sling, the column was blank.
“I can’t pay for it now,” Theo heard himself say, stupidly, the painkillers loosening something. “The treatment. Your mother. I already paid it, it is paid, it is done, but if you are thinking I am still useful to you, the money is already—”
Shane went still, both shoes in his hands. “What?”
“I am saying the deal is safe. Even like this. You do not have to—”
“Theo.” Shane set the shoes down. He came up onto the bed, careful, slow, getting in front of Theo so Theo had to look at him. “Is that what you think? That I’m sitting here doing the math about whether you’re still useful to me?”
“It is what everyone does,” Theo said, simply, because it was true, because it was the truest thing he knew.
“It is what I do. I do it about myself. Right now I am doing it. I am a man with a recurrent shoulder and fourteen games left and no contract and a visa that ends in spring, and I am worth less tonight than I was this morning, and I know it, the number going down, and you should know it too, you should be—”
“Stop.” Shane’s hand came up to Theo’s jaw, the bad-in-the-cold hand, warm now, and Theo stopped.
“You absolute idiot. You. Okay. You have to let me say this, because you let me do everything else, you let me tie your shoes and lie to nurses and you let me take the bed for a month, so you can let me say this.” He was close, his forehead nearly against Theo’s, his eyes wet again.
“I don’t care that your shoulder’s wrecked.
There’s no number. I stopped doing the number on you a long time ago and I didn’t even notice when.
You’re not worth less tonight. You’re—” His voice did the clean break, the one from the trainer’s room, all those weeks ago.
“You scared the absolute shit out of me tonight. That’s what tonight was.
Not a depreciation. I sat in that game and I couldn’t see you and I thought I was gonna come out of my skin.
That’s not what you feel about a guy whose value went down. That’s what you feel about—”
He didn’t finish it. He couldn’t, and Theo couldn’t, and so the sentence hung there, unfinished, and Theo, who never asked for anything, who had built a life out of not asking, heard himself say, in barely a voice at all:
“Will you look at it.”
Shane blinked. “The—”
“The shoulder. The scar. I have never let anyone. Pete tapes it with his eyes somewhere else because I make him. My mother has not seen it since the surgery.” Theo’s hand moved to the hem of his own shirt and then stopped.
The arm wouldn’t go up. He sat there with his fist in the fabric and his arm that couldn’t lift and the shirt going nowhere, and the silence stretched one beat, two, and then he said, “Help me. And look at it. I want someone to see it and not — I want it to be you.”
Shane helped him out of the shirt slow and careful, both hands, easing the fabric over the sling one inch at a time, and then it was bare: the shoulder, the long pale seam of the old surgery and the fresh angry swelling blooming purple-black around it, laid out under the apartment’s hard light, and Shane looked at it.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t wince in the performative way people did.
He just looked, steady, memorizing it, and then he leaned in and pressed his mouth to the scar, the same press Theo had once put to his bruised rib the night the napkin tore, soft, reverent, no heat in it at all, and Theo Lindgren, who had not cried since he was twelve years old in a hospital corridor in Gothenburg, put his good hand over his eyes and shook, silently, without sound, and Shane held him, careful of the arm, and didn’t tell him to stop, and didn’t make it a thing, and turned off the lights so Theo could fall apart in the dark like he needed to.
They lay down together after, Theo on his back so the shoulder was safe, Shane curled against his good side, one hand resting light over Theo’s heart, and neither of them said the word, the unsayable one, but it was in the room, it had been in the room for weeks, and now it had a body and a scar and a sling, and they both lay awake as it became real, and outside the season clock ticked down: fourteen games, a recurrent shoulder, a marriage that wasn’t fake anymore, a call-up coming for one of them, and Theo thought, with no math in it at all for once, just the bare terrified truth: I am going to lose this.
It has become what I cannot afford to lose, so it is exactly what will be taken.
And he held on anyway. For the first time in his life, knowing the cost, he held on anyway.
* * *
The recovery was its own slow torture, and the torture was not the shoulder.
The shoulder Theo knew how to suffer. He’d suffered it before; he had a whole curriculum for it, the ice and the bands and the careful incremental coaxing of a joint back toward trust. What he did not have a curriculum for was the watching.
He was a healthy scratch and then an injured one, in a suit in the press box, watching the Blaze play without him, and the thing about watching was that it showed you, in real time, how replaceable you were.
The team did not fall apart. That was the cruelty of it.
Mercer slotted Tripp Vandenberg up into Theo’s minutes, and Tripp, God help them all, was good, was visibly good, made plays Theo could not make at twenty-seven on a bolted shoulder, and the room adjusted, and the wins kept coming, and Theo sat in the press box in a suit and watched his own erasure proceed without friction.
“You’re brooding,” Shane said, on the drive home from one of these games. He was driving the Volvo, Theo’s one arm in the sling, strange and intimate, being driven in his own car. “I can hear you brooding. It’s very loud for a quiet guy.”
“Vandenberg looked good tonight.”
“Vandenberg’s a child.”
“Vandenberg is twenty-one and his shoulder works and the org owns his future.” Theo watched the dark highway.
“This is what I mean about the number going down. I am in a suit and the team is winning and a rookie is playing my minutes better than I played them, and every person in that building did the math tonight, the same math I did. Maybe we do not need Lindgren.” He said it flat, a report.
“It is not bitterness. It is accurate. I have been the replaceable necessary thing my whole career. I only forgot it for a few weeks. The shoulder reminded me.”
Shane was quiet for a mile. Then he said, “You know what I did tonight? In the third? We were up one and they pulled the goalie, chaos in front, and I dropped back and I covered, I just — I sat in the lane and I ate a shot and I cleared it, boring, ugly, no points, and you know what I thought?” He glanced over.
“I thought, Theo would be proud of me. That’s it.
Not the coach, not the scouts, not Chicago.
You. I played the most Theo Lindgren shift of my life because I wanted you to see it.
” He looked back at the road. “So don’t tell me the number’s going down.
The number went up tonight, in my net, and you didn’t even play.
You’re not replaceable, you idiot. You taught a guy who used to think defense was beneath him to take a slapshot off the chest to protect a one-goal lead.
That doesn’t go in a stat sheet. But it’s the realest thing I did all year. ”
Theo did not say anything. He could not.
He looked out the window at the highway and let the headlights blur, and Shane reached over with one hand and found Theo’s good one in the dark and held it the rest of the way home, driving one-handed down ninety miles of nothing, and neither of them mentioned it.
The kindest lie anyone had ever told him, Theo thought, except that Shane Novak did not lie. So it was just true.