Chapter 19 Nate - May 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia
The café in the rink was down a corridor past the accreditation desk and it had four things on the board and a woman who ran it alone.
I learned it off a translation app in a bathroom stall and said it under my breath on a bus until it stopped sounding like nothing. I got the woman at the hotel front desk to correct my second vowel, and told her it was for a teammate.
On the fourth day of the medal round we were in the line together after an optional skate, and Riley was in the middle of a story about a customs agent in Helsinki, and he did not stop talking when we got to the front, because he never stops talking, so I ordered in Slovak.
The woman laughed, and made the coffee.
And behind me, Riley Kowalski stopped talking in the middle of the sentence. He never finished it, not then and not later, and I'd never in my acquaintance with that man heard him stop a sentence anywhere except at the end of it.
I turned around with two cups. His was the color of a hockey sock. He took it, and he looked into it, and then he looked at me, and there was nothing at all on his face, which is the rarest thing that face does. "Thanks."
"Sure."
We walked back down the corridor and he did not say a word for a while, and I felt it in the middle of my chest like a stitch, and then he started talking about a Latvian defenseman and we never referred to it again.
By the second week the towels on that balcony rail were doing more work than my phone.
A towel folded square and pushed all the way to the left end, which happened maybe four times, meant nothing operational at all.
It meant goodnight. The first time he did it I was down in the lobby with the communications staff, and I came up the outside stairs and read it off the balcony from the parking lot in the dark, and my whole body went warm in a way I had to stand still for.
Two grown men, twenty-one days, an entire language and not one word of it in any dictionary.
He got sick in the third week and it went through him like a truck. The whole tournament had it, a day and a half of fever and then a day hollow. Riley Kowalski went down in the middle of the night and within an hour he was shaking hard enough that I could hear his teeth.
"You need fluids."
"I'm fine. I've had a bug before. I'm not a child and I'm not doing this with you, and if you stand there another second I'm going to say something we'll both have to live with."
And that was the whole conversation, and it was the last one we had about it, because I understood at four in the morning in a hotel room in Slovakia that Riley Kowalski would rather lie there and freeze to death than be looked after by me on purpose.
So I did it sideways.
At six I had housekeeping bring up four bottles of an electrolyte thing and told him the hotel had sent them to every room because half the tournament was sick, which was an invention. He drank two.
At eight I told the coaching staff I had a stiff hip and asked whether the morning skate could be made optional for the group, which was not mine to ask and which they said yes to anyway, and then I told him the skate was optional, so he did not have to explain himself to anybody.
At noon I ordered soup from a restaurant three blocks over, had it delivered to the desk, carried it up, and told him team services was sending it around.
"Team services," he said, from under a duvet, with his eyes shut. "Team services sent soup? Team services is a 19-year-old girl with a clipboard named Zuzana and she has never sent anybody a soup in her life. She sent me a laminated card about hydration and I've still got it."
"They're very good. Eat it."
He got an arm out and took it. "This has got dill in it."
At three, two reporters wanted him for a feature. I did the feature. I gave them ten minutes on the tournament format and international ice, which is a thing I can do in my sleep, and they left happy and never asked where he was.
He slept most of the next day. At some point I was reading in the chair with one lamp on and he said, without opening his eyes, "You didn't have to do that."
"Do what?"
"Whatever you're doing."
"I'm reading."
"Sure," he said, and went back under.
Two nights later I came around the corner of the sixth-floor corridor at eleven and stopped. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall outside the equipment room, in shorts, with a stick across his knees and a roll of tape going, which is a thing he did when he could not sleep.
And he was humming. Three bars. Something old, something American, one of those ones with a whole highway in it. He had his head down and his hands going and he was humming it with his whole chest, easy, out loud, alone.
And then he heard himself. He did not see me. He heard himself, and his mouth shut on it in the middle of a phrase, and his hands kept taping and nothing else about him changed at all. He strangled a song in his own throat because he was in a hallway where somebody could hear it.
I went back the way I came and took the stairs, and I stood in the stairwell for a while with my hand on the rail. Because I knew that reflex. I'd had it since I was a kid and I'd run my entire life on it. I had just never watched it happen to somebody else from the outside.
And what came up in me on those stairs was not sympathy. It was want. A specific, physical want, and what I wanted was to be somewhere with him where that reflex does not fire. Not a room. Not a rink at one in the morning. Somewhere.
I made a note. A half-finished song, outstanding, payable.
We won the semifinal in overtime and it cost us.
Tucker Pyne took a puck in the face and came back in the third with a row of stitches and his eye going purple.
Riley got cross-checked in the numbers in the first overtime and stayed down for a while, and got up, and won the puck that started the play that ended it.
We got back to the hotel at one thirty in the morning with a gold medal game in front of us, and the Accord did not survive that night.
It did not go the way it had ever gone before. There was no wall. There was no door with a back against it. The lights stayed off. We came in and he sat on the end of his bed to take his shoes off and I sat down on mine, three feet apart, and neither of us said anything for about a minute.
Then he said, quietly, "Article two."
"I know."
"Just so it's said out loud. I'm not going to be able to say afterward that I didn't know what I was doing, and I'd rather not have the option."
"It's said. And it stopped mattering to me about four seconds ago, and I'm not going to put up a fight about it, and I'd rather you knew that going in."
"Noted," he said, and came over, and put his hands on the sides of my face and kissed me, slow, with his thumbs on my cheekbones, and I got a fist in the front of his shirt and pulled him down.
There were teammates in the room on the left and a member of our coaching staff two doors down on the right, the walls were four inches of nothing and a poster, and Tucker Pyne, nineteen years old, with stitches in his eyebrow, was asleep directly across the corridor.
So it was silent. Everything about that night was built around the fact that neither of us could make a sound, and it turned out that silence did not reduce anything, it turned the volume of everything else all the way up.
I put my hand over his mouth about four minutes in, flat, and he made a noise into my palm that I felt in my wrist, and then he bit down on the side of my thumb and held on there for the rest of it.
I had one forearm braced against the headboard the entire time, arm locked, holding it still so it would not touch the wall. I'd never concentrated on anything that hard, not a shootout, not an overtime, not one thing. My whole arm shook with it and I did not let it move.
It was slow because it had to be. Every single thing had to be slow, because fast makes noise. And then, somewhere in there, necessity got satisfied and it stayed slow anyway. It stayed slow on purpose.
I could hear everything. His breathing through his nose, and the sheet, and my own heart, and the sound he makes right at the back of his throat when he is not allowed to make any other one, and every one of those things arrived about four times louder than it ever has in a room where we were allowed to be loud.
He got his hand off my mouth at the end and put his forehead against mine instead and did not move it, and I felt the whole thing go through him from six inches away, in the dark, with a national team asleep on both sides of the wall.
We lay there afterward on our backs, both of us wrecked, not touching, breathing.
And I waited for the horror. I'd just committed the single most reckless act of two careers, and I waited for the thing that has arrived every time since October 2017: the heart going, the cold hands, the list of charges, the exit strategy composing itself.
It did not come. I did an inventory and got back an entirely different set of numbers.
His breathing slowing down beside me, going from a sprint to a walk.
A coffee order that I now own in two currencies.
A song that stopped in a corridor, which somebody owes me.
And the iron on the desk, unplugged, cord wrapped, turned so the handle faced the other bed, because at some point I'd started leaving it pointed his way so that if he wanted it he would not have to ask.
Four items, none of them worth anything to anybody. The word that came up out of me when I put them together was home, and I'd never used that word about anything, and I had lived in buildings that people were paid a great deal of money to decorate.
So I did what my family does, which is put a number on it. I asked myself what I would trade for this to be ordinary. Not secret. Not stolen out of a schedule. Ordinary. A Tuesday, with the lights on, with nobody asleep on the other side of the wall.