21. Theo
THEO
Iwake up in my clothes on top of the duvet with my phone under the pillow and for three seconds I don't remember, and then I remember.
The remembering is the worst part of my day and it's not even six in the morning.
I lie there with my face pressed into the cotton and I feel the way my jeans have cut a seam into my hip bone from sleeping in them and I feel my mouth gummy and sour from the crying and I feel the phone shape under my pillow like a small cold animal, and then I hear the footsteps in the hallway outside my door and my body comes all the way awake.
Paul. Not walking to the kitchen. Walking to my door.
I sit up. I push my hair off my face. I look at the doorknob. It doesn't turn. He stops outside. He stands there. I can hear him breathing through his nose, the patient-and-not-patient breathing. Thirty seconds. A minute. I don't move.
He knocks. Once. Light. Not the knock of a man trying to come in. The knock of a man telling me he's there.
“Theo.”
I don't answer.
“I'm going to make coffee. I'm going to be in the kitchen. Come down when you're ready.”
I don't answer.
His footsteps go back down the hall. They go down the stairs.
They go to the kitchen. I listen to the distance of him opening the cabinet and running water and clicking the machine on, each small domestic sound like a nail driven somewhere in my chest because this is the house I live in and it is making its normal morning sounds and I am a prisoner in it.
I slide my hand under the pillow and pull the phone out.
Battery: four percent.
I plug it in. I sit with my back against the headboard and I stare at the thread with Maddox.
I'll wait. I love you. I'm not saying it yet because the first time I say it I want it to be to your face. But I love you. Wait for me too.
Still a draft.
No new messages from him. No missed call. Nothing.
I hold the phone against my chest and I cry for a minute without noise. I've learned this kind of crying growing up with my father. The crying you do in a house where the other person can hear a floorboard creak two rooms away.
I stay in my room until nine.
I do it on purpose. I make him wait. I don't shower. I don't change. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed and I scroll the hockey news on my phone because my phone is plugged in and I can't help it.
The first headline on the league page is Creed, Huskies Part Ways; Personal Conduct Cited.
No photo of Maddox. A stock headshot of Callahan.
A two-paragraph item. The Frosthaven Huskies organization announced today that veteran defenseman Maddox Creed will not return to the club.
Sources close to the situation cited a personal conduct matter; the team is expected to waive its remaining contract obligations and pursue a mutual separation.
A press conference is scheduled for Monday.
I put the phone face-down on the carpet. I put my forehead on my knees. I count breaths. Four in. Four out. Four in. Four out.
Finally, at nine, I hear him put the coffee machine back on for a second pot and I go, because I am starving, and because he has the car keys, and because I am twenty years old with no money of my own and a guard on my lawn and I cannot stay in the room forever.
He's at the island.
The kitchen is full of light. Sunday-morning light, the kind this house gets in the winter when the trees are bare and the sun comes all the way in across the hardwood.
He's in a clean button-down, cuffs rolled.
The bloody one from last night is gone. His knuckles are taped.
He's made eggs and toast and has a plate waiting at the stool across from his with no fanfare, the plate a silent admission that he knows my body needs to eat even if I'd rather starve to spite him.
He doesn't greet me. He doesn't look up. He waits until I'm in the room.
“Sit.”
I sit because my legs are shaking and if I don't sit I'll fall, and I'd rather sit than fall in front of him.
He pushes coffee across the island. I don't touch it.
“I spoke to Callahan at nine.”
“I don't care.”
His mug lowers to the marble.
“I need you to listen, Theo.”
“I don't care what you need.”
My voice comes out flat. I don't recognise it. Paul's hand tightens around his mug.
“Maddox is going to Blackridge.”
The toast in my throat goes sideways. I haven't eaten the toast. The toast is on the plate.
I mean, the air in my throat goes sideways.
“What.”
“Blackridge Reapers signed him. Two-year deal. It'll be announced Monday. He's flying out tomorrow morning for a physical.”
I stare at him.
“How do you know.”
“I know because Callahan knows. Because our league is small.
Because his agent called Matt Orrick last night from the arena parking lot, and Matt Orrick called one of our scouts who played with him in college, and the scout called Callahan at seven this morning.
I know because it's been decided. He'll be four hundred miles from here by Monday night, Theo. He is not coming back.”
The kitchen gets very quiet.
My hands are in my lap. I am looking at the toast I haven't eaten.
I am thinking about how Maddox's voice sounded when he said wait for me, backward through a corridor, with security hands on his arms, and I am trying to match the voice that said wait for me with the man who is apparently on a plane to Blackridge tomorrow morning.
I breathe. Four in. Four out.
“Was he going to tell me?”
“He can't tell you, Theo. He knows better than to call you.
My guy outside has orders to turn him away if he shows up.
He knows it. His people know it. This is the cleanest exit for everybody, and the cleanest exit means you don't say goodbye.
I'm sorry. That's the part that hurts. It's the part that's going to heal.”
My face is wet. I didn't know it had started. I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand and I look at my father.
“You don't get to tell me what's going to heal.”
“Theo—”
“You don't get to tell me anything. You don't know anything.
You don't know him. You don't know me. You don't know what we are to each other.
You have been wrong about me my whole life and you are wrong about me now and I am never, never, going to sit in this kitchen and let you be the voice that tells me what's real.”
He opens his mouth. He closes it.
I stand up. The stool scrapes.
“I'm going to call Aunt Diane.”
“Theo—”
“I'm going to call Aunt Diane, and she's going to come over, and you are going to be here when she does.”
His jaw tightens.
“Theo, I'm not...”
“You will be here, Dad. If you leave, I will leave, and we both know you can't carry me. You'll be here.”
I take my plate. I take the coffee. I walk out of the kitchen with both, and I do not turn around.
I call Diane from my bedroom floor.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Sweet boy.”
I start crying the second she says it. Not small.
The full-body kind I kept swallowed in the kitchen.
She lets me go for thirty seconds, a minute, without saying anything, and when I can talk, I tell her.
All of it. The game. The office. Paul bursting in.
Maddox eating four punches. Callahan. The security on the lawn.
Blackridge. Maddox flying out tomorrow. The draft in my thread I haven't sent.
I tell her I'm in love with him.
I tell it to the carpet. I tell it to my aunt.
It's the second time I've said it out loud and the first time I've said it to another person, and she hears it how she's heard everything I've ever needed her to hear, which is quietly and without reaction, like a person who hears a thing and keeps it instead of grabbing at it.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I'm getting in the car.”
“Di—”
“I'm getting in the car, Theo. I'm forty-five minutes from your door in traffic and it's Sunday so there's no traffic. I'll be there in thirty-two.”
I press the phone harder against my ear.
“He's going to say you can't come in.”
“He's going to try. It won't work.”
I hear a car door open on her end. The jingle of her keys.
“Aunt Di?”
“Yes.”
My throat does a small thing and recovers.
“Thank you.”
“Baby. You have been thanking me for breathing for a week. Stop thanking me. I am your aunt. I get to be in this with you. That is my job, and one I’ve been wanting to do for years. Put on clean clothes, drink some water, eat the toast he made you. I will be there in thirty-two minutes.”
She hangs up.
I sit on the floor for another second. I breathe. I get up.
I eat the toast.
She knocks at the front door thirty-one minutes later.
I hear Paul answer. I hear her voice. I hear her walk past him without stopping, which is something only a sister can do, and then I hear her in the front hall calling up the stairs.
“Theo. Come down.”
I come down.
She's in her trench coat with a tote on her shoulder and her hair pulled back and her reading glasses on top of her head and she looks like she's been up for nine hours, which she probably has.
She sees me on the stairs and her face does the thing it does, the small crumple-and-recover I have known my whole life, and have missed desperately for years, and she opens her arms and I go into them and she holds me for a count of maybe five seconds, which is the maximum she'll allow in front of Paul, and then she pats my back twice and turns me toward the living room.
“Kitchen, Paul.”
“Di—”
“Kitchen.”
She takes the stool I was on this morning. I take the one beside her. Paul stays standing at the sink. His arms cross and uncross. His arms don't know where to be.
Diane sets her tote on the island.
“Paul. I'm going to talk. You're going to listen. When I'm done, you can speak. If you interrupt me, I'm going to walk Theo out that door and he is going to live with me and you will spend every day wondering if he picks up your call. Do you understand me?”
Paul's mouth opens.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She folds her hands on the marble.