19. Theo
THEO
The latch clicks shut behind my father and the room becomes the smallest space I have ever stood in.
Maddox is in front of me. My hand is on the small of his back. I can feel his chest plate rising and falling through the team quarter-zip. He isn't breathing fast. He's breathing like a man about to work.
Paul doesn't look at me. He looks at Maddox.
“You piece of shit.”
Maddox's shoulders settle a quarter inch lower.
“Coach.”
“You… in my arena… with my son…”
Maddox's hands stay loose at his sides.
“Easy.”
“Easy?”
Paul's voice cracks on the word. I've never heard it crack.
In twenty years of being his son, I have never heard my father's voice crack, and it cracks now because he's looking at a condom wrapper on the carpet and putting it together with my hair and my mouth and the desk and his whole face shakes.
“Theo.” He finally finds me behind Maddox. “Come here. Now.”
My hand stays on Maddox's back.
“Theo. I said come here.”
I can't make my legs move. My body has become a weight. Something in my chest has taken all the air and held it hostage and my fingers are pressed into Maddox's spine and I can feel his heart through the fabric, steady, steady, steady.
“He's staying where he is, Coach,” Maddox says.
“You don't speak for him.”
“I'm not. He's staying where he is and I'm telling you what he already decided.”
Paul's head jerks like he's been slapped.
“You don't get to—”
“I'm going to say this once.” Maddox's voice has dropped into something I haven't heard from him before.
Not the locker-room bark. Not the dominance in bed.
Something flatter. Something older. “You have spent twenty years telling this kid he isn't enough.
You benched him. You humiliated him. You made him small so you could feel big.
I watched you do it for a month and I hated it.
Tonight, he played the best period of his life, and you couldn't clap.
Your own son. And the only thing you can think about in this room right now is how he embarrassed you. That's what you are.”
Paul goes white.
Then red.
“Get away from him.”
“No.”
It happens fast.
Paul comes at Maddox and Maddox turns, perfect timing, perfect angle, and takes the first punch on the pad of his shoulder. I hear the impact. I hear my father grunt. Maddox doesn't grunt. Maddox moves Paul off him with a forearm and steps sideways, between Paul and me, always between.
“Coach. Stop.”
“Get… away!”
“Stop. You don't want to do this.”
Paul throws another. This one Maddox catches on the cage of his forearm. I see Maddox's jaw set. I see the exact second he decides he's allowed to hit back. His right hand comes up, closes, loads.
He lets it fall.
It is the hardest thing I have ever watched a person do.
I have watched Maddox Creed drop gloves on three men bigger than him this season.
I have watched him bite through a mouthguard because he wanted so badly to hit somebody and couldn't. I have never watched him choose to eat a punch he could have answered.
He's choosing it now. He's choosing it because I am behind him, and my father is in front of him, and if he throws that right the video of it will be on every sports blog in North America by midnight and my life will be over in a different way than it's already over.
He puts both his hands up, palms flat, and he takes my father's third punch on his open hand like a catcher's mitt and he says, through his teeth, “I am not going to hit the coach's father of the boy I—I am not going to hit you, Paul. Do not make me.”
Paul doesn't hear. Paul is past hearing.
Paul throws a fourth and it glances off Maddox's cheekbone and Maddox's head rocks and blood starts in a thin line from his eyebrow and I think, that's it, now he has to, and instead Maddox turns his shoulder in and absorbs the next three.
His body rocks with each one. His feet don't move. His hands stay open.
I find my voice.
“Stop.”
Paul doesn't stop.
“Stop. Stop it. STOP IT!”
The door bangs open.
Tim Callahan owns this team. I have met him twice.
Once on day one when we were introduced to the front office, and once at a press dinner where he shook my hand and called me the kid.
He is sixty-two years old, five foot eight, wears a blazer with a pocket square even to hockey games.
He is the smallest man in this room right now and he walks in like every inch of it belongs to him, because it does.
“Enough.”
Paul stops mid-swing. His fist hangs in the air. Maddox turns his head a quarter inch, blood in his eyebrow, his hands still open.
Callahan takes it in. The desk. The wrapper. Theo with his base layer crooked. Maddox in gear. Paul with his knuckles split. He takes it in like a loss on the balance sheet.
“Out.” He points at me. “Son. In the hall. Now.”
I don't move.
“Theo.” His voice softens half a degree. “Please.”
I look at Maddox.
Maddox doesn't turn his head. He says, very low, “Go. I'm okay.”
“You're—”
“Go, sweetheart.”
I go. My legs finally work. I step around my father, who cannot look at me, and out into the corridor. The door shuts. The fluorescent buzzes. My back hits the wall. I slide down it half an inch and catch myself.
I can hear voices through the door. Callahan's low, controlled. Paul's louder. Maddox's almost silent.
Four minutes. Maybe five. I lose track. Two men from security walk past me and enter the room. More talking.
Then the door opens and Callahan comes out and he walks straight to me.
“Theo.”
My spine straightens against the wall.
“Yes, sir.”
“You're going home with your father tonight.”
“No.”
He blinks. Just once. I don't think anyone at this organization has told Tim Callahan no in a decade.
“Son—”
“I'm not going home.”
He presses his tongue against the inside of his cheek.
“Your father and I are going to sort this out. You are a minor on a roster contract, Theo. You're going home tonight and nothing further happens until the morning. Do you understand me?”
“I'm twenty. I'm not a minor.”
He holds my gaze. “You are twenty. You are on this team because I took a personal risk on your father's recommendation. You are going home tonight or I am calling your contract dead by morning. I would rather not do that. Do you understand me?”
My mouth is dry.
“Where is he?”
“He'll be escorted off the property.”
My throat closes.
“Where is he?”
“Theo.”
The office door opens again. Two uniformed security guys, the standard rink staff, men I have nodded at a thousand times, come out with Maddox between them.
Not dragging him. Not yet. But each of them has a hand on one of his arms and Maddox is letting them, and I know he is letting them because if he were not letting them, both of those men would be on the floor.
He sees me.
His eyes go to my face and stay there.
“Hey,” he says.
My body comes off the wall.
“Maddox…”
“I'm okay.”
The blood reaches his jaw.
“Where are they taking you?”
“Out.” He doesn't break his gaze. He's walking backward, letting the guards steer him, because he refuses to turn away from me.
“Listen to me. I'll find you. Do you understand?
I will find you. Don't do anything tonight.
Don't sign anything. Don't say anything to him. Just go home, go to your room, lock the door, and wait. I will find you.”
My hand comes up and doesn't know where to go.
“How?”
“I don't know yet. I'll figure it out. Wait for me.”
The corridor stretches longer between us with every step.
One of the guards squeezes his arm, not unkindly. “Sir.”
Maddox doesn't look at the guard. “I'm coming. Theo. Wait for me.”
I'm already crying.
“I'll wait.”
His jaw locks.
“Say it.”
“I'll wait for you.”
“Good.”
Then they turn him. And he walks. His hockey gear squeaks on the tile. His blood has run down his cheekbone and dripped onto the shoulder of his quarter-zip. He doesn't look back. He can't, because if he looks back I think he'll turn around and start a fight he can't finish.
Phoenix is at the end of the corridor with a towel around his neck, watching the whole thing. His jaw is going. As Maddox passes him, Phoenix says one word, low. I don't catch it. Maddox tips his head in a nod. Phoenix looks at me across the hallway and I watch him mouth I've got him.
Then they're gone.
The corridor is suddenly too quiet. The arena is still dumping out.
I can hear cheers a hundred yards away through the walls, people who are still celebrating a win and have no idea what just happened in the staff wing.
Somebody's kid is probably asking his dad for a game program and a pretzel.
Somebody's dad is probably saying, After the goalie signing, buddy, we'll swing by the tunnel.
The normal world is forty feet away and I don't know how to be in it anymore.
Paul comes out of the office. Callahan behind him. Paul's knuckles are split. His tie is loose. He doesn't look at me; he looks at Callahan.
“I'll take him home.”
Callahan nods once, slow.
“See that you do. And Paul, tomorrow. Nine. My office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Callahan looks at me one more time. His mouth does a small, tired thing. “Son. Do what your father tells you tonight. For your own sake.”
He leaves.
I am alone in the hallway with my father.
“Let's go,” Paul says.
I don't move.
“Theo. I will carry you out of this building if I have to.”
“You won't.”
“Try me.”
I look at him. Really look. His eyes are red. His nose is swollen where one of his own punches bounced off Maddox's pad and back into his face. There is a small cut in his upper lip he got from his own teeth. He looks destroyed.
I don't feel sorry for him.
That's the thing that lands first. That I look at my father in the worst state of his life, knuckles bleeding, mouth torn, and I don't feel sorry for him. I feel free, for one bright second, and then the second ends and the fear comes back.
“Car,” he says.
I walk.