Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Kieran
The building didn't know what to do with itself.
Christmas week stripped the practice facility down to hum and echo. There were no equipment dryers cycling and no Varga's voice carrying through two closed doors and a concrete wall. It was a taped and tarped locker room, stalls sealed.
Most of the team had scattered. Varga posted a photo from Minnesota, a golden retriever in reindeer antlers, captioned with something about "the only teammate who doesn't judge my shot selection." Cross flew to Vancouver. Pratt went home to a mysterious goalie getaway.
I told Thompson's office I was staying to focus. The word sat comfortably inside organizational expectations. I didn't specify what I was focusing on. I hit the perfect balance: language vague enough that no one asked and specific enough that no one suspected.
I ran through my weight room routine. Halfway through my third set of pull-ups, I stopped. My body still had reps in it. The problem was the silence. In a full facility, noise was cover. Here, alone, every exertion echoed back to me off the cinderblock walls.
Heath was staying in Chicago too. He'd mentioned it three days earlier on a bus to the airport in Toronto, sandwiched between a Varga conspiracy theory about arena hot dogs and Rook's monosyllabic agreement. Nobody asked Heath why. I assumed. Travel home to Rhinelander would be expensive.
I sat in my car in the empty parking garage, hands on the wheel. Heath's apartment was fourteen minutes away. I hadn't told him I was coming. I hadn't decided I was going until I stopped lifting.
The front door stuck as it always did in cold weather. Heath opened it on the second pull.
"Door's worse," I said.
"Door's the same. You notice it because you're here more."
I walked in carrying a duffel packed with four days of clothes, a book on pelagic ecosystems, and nothing with a team logo. I set it next to his shoes by the wall—sneakers and the boots he wore when sidewalks iced over.
"You can put your stuff wherever," Heath said, already moving toward the kitchen. "Closet's got room. Bathroom shelf on the right is empty."
I'd been there often enough that tours were no longer necessary.
The kitchen counter held a short stack of bills, sorted by due date. Next to it, a handwritten grocery list on the back of a receipt. Chicken thighs. Rice. Frozen broccoli. Hot sauce. The handwriting was small and even.
I hung my jacket on the hook behind the door, next to Heath's. The hooks were adhesive, and one was already pulling away from the wall. My condo had a cedar-lined coat closet with brass hardware. I'd hung nothing in it I cared about.
I'd pushed the coffee table against the wall. It left more space between the couch and the bedroom.
I sat on the couch and opened the pelagic ecosystems book. Read the same paragraph three times.
"You're not reading," Heath said from the kitchen without looking up.
"I'm reading."
"You've been on the same page since you sat down."
I closed the book. "How's the onion?"
"Caramelized. Which means you've been pretending for about twelve minutes." He glanced over his shoulder. "You're allowed to just sit there. You don't have to be doing something."
I let my head fall against the back of the couch. The radiator ticked. Heath moved through his kitchen the way he moved through the crease, knowing precisely how much space he had and making sure he wouldn't waste a square foot of it.
Temporary, I told myself. Four days. A break in the schedule.
The couch immediately argued with me. I settled into a dip in one cushion that fit perfectly, like I'd been sitting there every day forever.
The first night was chicken thighs with rice. Heath seasoned without measuring; pinches and pours calibrated by internal instincts. When I asked what was in the marinade, he said, "Stuff."
The second night was pasta. Sauce from a jar, but Heath added things to it: garlic, red pepper flakes, and a dangerous amount of hot sauce.
"My mom's method," he said, stirring with a wooden spoon.
"She calls it 'improving the situation.' You take what you've got and you make it better without pretending it's something it isn't."
He served it in mismatched bowls. Mine was larger.
The kitchen was a two-person space only in the sense that two people could technically occupy it if one stood at the stove and the other pressed flat against the refrigerator. We'd developed a system by the second night. Heath cooked, and I stayed out of range until called.
The one time I tried to help, I reached past him for a colander and caught his elbow with my ribs. He said "behind" the way you do on the ice, except we weren't on the ice, we were in a galley kitchen and my hip was against the counter and his shoulder was against my chest.
After that, I stayed on the couch until the food was ready.
We ate on the floor in the living room. The television played a renovation show at low volume, with couples arguing about backsplash tile.
"They're going to pick the subway tile," Heath said.
"Everyone picks the subway tile."
"It's functional and inoffensive. It's the Mattias Rook of kitchen design."
I almost choked on my pasta.
I learned, over the course of the first two days, what Heath Donnelly looked like without worrying about his permanence on the roster.
On the ice, he lived inside a permanent audition. Here, on the floor with sauce on his chin, he spoke without editing himself. Stories from Rhinelander, loose and lacking in self-consciousness.
"It's drier. Wisconsin's cold is honest about what it is. Chicago's cold pretends to be reasonable and then gets you with the wind."
"You're assigning moral qualities to weather."
"All weather has moral qualities. That's not a controversial stance."
"Name one person who agrees with you," I insisted
"Any meteorologist."
"Meteorologists are cowards."
I said it with a forkful of pasta suspended midway to my mouth. Heath laughed. It was a genuine laugh, starting below the diaphragm.
The third morning, I woke before him. He lay on his stomach, one arm off the mattress, mouth open. While sleeping, he sprawled. Arms wide, legs splayed diagonally across the full-size bed, overlapping mine where necessary.
I made coffee with his machine. When he appeared in boxers and a frayed t-shirt, he poured a cup and drank half of it standing before turning toward me.
"Morning."
"You've been awake for twenty minutes."
"Coffee comes first. Then language." He leaned against the counter. "What do you want to do today?"
I had to think. Nobody asked me that. My days arrived pre-loaded: practice, film, weight room, media, recovery. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a block of hours with nothing scheduled.
"I don't know," I said.
Heath sipped his coffee. "Good answer."
We did nothing. At least nothing of note. Heath read on the couch. I sat at the other end and didn't read. We existed in the same room without an agenda.
Heath picked up the TV remote. He flipped channels until he found something acceptable.
A black-and-white film settled on the screen. Cary Grant in a suit.
“You ever seen this?” Heath asked.
“Yes.”
“You like old movies?”
“I like precision,” I said. “Old movies tend to have it.”
He considered that. “He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”
Onscreen, Grant was lying to a woman with calm efficiency, smiling like the lie was a courtesy.
“He does,” I said.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I am. He always knows what he’s doing.” I watched Grant cross a room without wasted motion. Every gesture deliberate. Nothing extraneous. “That’s the appeal.”
Heath shifted on the couch, one socked foot nudging mine. “You move like that. On the ice.”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, you do. Like there’s a right version of everything and you’re already in it.”
Onscreen, Grant paused just long enough to make the room wait for him.
Heath glanced at me. “Is that a learned thing, or a born thing?”
I watched the screen for another moment.
“Learned,” I said.
At some point, I started talking about octopuses.
I don't remember what triggered it, probably nothing at all.
I was three minutes into explaining how the mimic octopus impersonates lionfish and flatfish before I realized Heath had put his book down and was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
"What?"
"Nothing. Keep going."
"You're looking at me like I'm —"
"Like you're excited about something. Yeah." He picked his book back up. "It's a good look. Keep going."
I kept going. Talked for another ten minutes. Heath read, or pretended to, and asked a question now and then that proved he was listening. When I finally wound down, he said, "So they just become a different animal when they're stressed?"
"When they need to, yeah."
"Sounds familiar."
He said it mildly and turned a page. I didn't respond. I wasn't sure which one of us he meant.
Midafternoon, Heath got up to make tea. Filled the kettle and set it on the burner.
A few seconds later, a song started playing from the small speaker on the windowsill—Modern English, "I Melt With You." His parents' music, I assumed, the way certain songs get passed down like recipes.
He didn't sing along exactly. He hummed the verses and caught fragments of the chorus — I'll stop the world and melt with you — off-key, doing violence to the melody with cheerful incompetence.
While the kettle built toward boiling, he shuffled across the linoleum in his socks. A slow, aimless circuit of the three feet between stove and refrigerator. Hips moving. Shoulders loose. No rhythm to speak of, and no self-consciousness.
He didn't know I was watching. Or maybe he did, and it changed nothing.
I held my book open and didn't turn the page.
Heath's body was occupying space for the sole purpose of being alive in it. He danced in his socks because the floor was there.
We went out after 10:00 PM because Heath said Michigan Avenue looked different when the shopping crowds were gone.