Chapter 8 Kieran #2
That could have been the end. Two people confirming the other was intact. Heath added one more line.
Heath: Glad you had a good night.
I started the car.
***
Heath's apartment was becoming familiar.
I knew the front door stuck in the cold, and I knew the third stair from the top creaked.
We were sharing Thai food this time. We sat on the floor because the kitchen table was too small for containers, and the couch was too narrow for two people eating cross-legged. Heath explained, without embarrassment, that the floor was where food happened in his apartment.
November pressed against the windows. The radiator ticked. The building's heat had two settings: insufficient and tropical. Tonight it was tropical, and Heath had opened a window an inch.
I had my back against the couch. Heath sat across from me with his legs folded and a container of pad see ew balanced on one knee.
"You want the last spring roll?" Heath asked.
"It's yours."
"I'm offering."
"And I'm declining."
He ate the spring roll. No further negotiation.
I shifted my weight, and something on the side table caught my peripheral vision. I'd been in his apartment three times now. I knew the placement of the few decorative items. This was new.
Next to a half-empty glass of water and a phone charger with a fraying cord stood a figure made of red pipe cleaners.
I set down my chopsticks.
It was approximately six inches tall. A hockey player, body twisted mid-stride, stick extended. The hockey stick was a black pipe cleaner. The helmet was a coil of red. And pasted onto the head, a little off-center, was a cutout photograph of Heath's face. Grinning.
A Post-it note was stuck to the figure's torso with handwriting that looked like it had been produced during a minor earthquake.
Takes up space. Hard to knock over. — Pickle
"When did that arrive?" I asked.
Heath's eyes opened wider.
"Yesterday. He mailed it priority. The tracking number came with a six-paragraph text about postal infrastructure in northern Ontario and a conspiracy theory about how Canada Post is secretly run by geese."
I leaned closer. The pipe cleaner legs were slightly uneven, giving the figure a forward lean. Aggressive. Like it was driving the net.
"Somebody made this?"
"Yeah, my friend, Pickle. He gets ideas the way other people get colds. They arrive without warning, take over his entire system, and produce results—like this."
I looked at the uneven legs and the helmet coil. Whoever Pickle was, he'd built it fast.
"Two weeks ago he decided he was going to learn to whittle. Bought a knife and a block of wood. Within an hour he'd nicked himself, bled on Hog's dog, and produced something he insisted was a salmon."
"Hog's dog?"
"Biscuit. Rescue mutt. Looks like someone used spare parts to put a dog together.
" Heath gestured at the pipe cleaner figure.
"This is one of Pickle's better efforts.
He was on a pipe cleaner run last month.
He told me he made one for everyone on the team.
Hog's had a tiny knitted scarf, because Hog knits, and Pickle thought that was—" He searched for the word and then spoke in a dramatic, deep-throated tone. "Thematically appropriate."
"A special phrase?"
"Oh, Pickle's a true-crime fan, and he tries to sound like his favorite crime podcasters when he's wanting to italicize with his voice."
I looked at the Post-it again. The handwriting slanted upward and to the right, like the words were trying to leave the note behind.
Takes up space. Hard to knock over.
Heath set down his container. Wiped his hands on a napkin.
"Pickle's the reason I'm here."
"In Chicago?"
"In hockey." He paused. "Not like—he didn't teach me to skate or get me drafted. But Thunder Bay was where I figured out what kind of player I could be. And Pickle was the reason it worked for me."
I waited for him to continue.
"In Thunder Bay, mistakes were loud. You fucked up, and everyone saw it. But everything was forgivable, too."
"And Pickle modeled that."
"Pickle modeled something I didn't have a name for until I got to Chicago and lost it.
" Heath looked at the pipe cleaner figure.
"He takes up space. Not by being loud, even though he's the loudest person in any room he's ever entered.
By being there. Fully. Without apologizing for any of it.
He fucks up constantly. Spills things, breaks things, says the wrong thing at the wrong volume.
He also recovers constantly. Gets back up. Every time."
Heath was quiet for a moment.
"When I got called up, Pickle said, 'You're going to want to disappear up there. Don't.'"
The radiator ticked, and I heard the clatter of the L three blocks away.
"I didn't listen. I spent a lot of time making myself as small as I could." He looked at me. "You saw it."
I had. His drawn shoulders. The permission-seeking in every shift. How he flinched after good plays, like he couldn't afford visibility.
"Now, this shows up in the mail. Priority. Bubble-wrapped inside a shoebox, which was inside another shoebox, because Pickle doesn't trust the postal system and also doesn't understand proportional packaging."
Heath picked up the pipe cleaner hockey player.
"Takes up space. Hard to knock over." He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. "He's telling me what's already there when I get out of my way."
I looked at the Post-it. The pipe cleaner figure leaning forward. The grinning photograph.
"He sounds like a lot," I said.
"He's a disaster." Heath said it the way other people said he's family. "He got his hand stuck in a Pringles can twice in one month." Heath paused for a beat. "He is the best person I know."
Heath gathered the empty food containers and stood. He put some leftovers in the fridge and tossed the rest in the trash.
When he came back, he sat next to me, shoulder to shoulder, backs against the couch. His knee settled against mine, and I forgot to breathe for a second.
"Your turn," he said.
"My turn what?"
"I just gave you the whole Thunder Bay origin story. Your turn. Tell me something."
I could have offered anything. The contract meeting and Shedd would be safe territory.
But Heath was still holding the pipe cleaner figure, turning it absently in his fingers, and his shoulder was warm against mine. For a half-second, the distance between safe and honest felt small enough to step across.
"In juniors—"
I stopped.
Heath, of all people, would understand. He wouldn't flinch. He'd listen the way he listened to everything, directly, without requiring me to manage his reaction.
Still, if I said it, if I told Heath about the kiss that counted, it would become part of the record.
Evidence.
"In juniors, what?" Heath asked.
"Nothing. Lost the thread."
He didn't push.
"Okay."
His shoulder was warm against mine. The pipe cleaner Heath, now on the coffee table, leaned forward into a stride he would never complete, frozen mid-motion, permanently committed, hard to knock over.
We talked for another hour. Nothing important.
A podcast Varga had recommended that turned out to be conspiracy theories about airline food.
Whether Pratt's pregame ritual actually worked or was only a raft of goalie superstitions.
How Chicago winters compared to Wisconsin's.
At one point Heath laughed hard enough that his shoulder shook against mine, and I pressed into it instead of moving away.
He didn't ask about juniors again.
When I returned home, my laptop sat on my desk where I'd left it that morning. Lid closed. Marine biology journals flanking it. Grad school brochures underneath, deadlines underlined in black.
I grabbed it and sat on the couch.
Three browser tabs. Scripps. University of Miami. URI. Application portals partially completed.
I had a personal statement draft saved in a separate document. Four paragraphs that read like a cover letter for a life I hadn't started living yet.
I read the first line.
My interest in marine biology began during volunteer work at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, where I discovered that the patient, measurable work of animal care offered something my professional career could not: the experience of choosing to be present.
Accurate. Well-constructed. No longer the entire truth.
The experience of choosing to be present.
I thought about Heath's apartment. His knee against mine.
Nobody had ever described me the way Pickle's Post-It described Heath. I was the opposite, a person who occupied space so efficiently that no one noticed the occupation. Present the way furniture was present. Functional. Expected.
I closed the laptop. The screen went dark. My apartment was silent in a way Heath's never was—no radiator or L clatter.
The applications stayed where they were. Open. Untouched. Waiting for the me that was getting harder to describe with each passing day.