Chapter 27 Riley - February 2024, Toronto
I was on the bed with my shoes on at eleven at night with nothing running, which was not a thing I did.
They had screened a montage of my own life at nine that morning with the man in it sitting to my left. Somebody in an edit suite had put a graphic over two balconies and called it Sealed City. Everybody in that ballroom clapped when the lights came up.
At three minutes past midnight my phone went off on the nightstand.
I sat up so fast I put my heel through the corner of the bedspread.
I built that language. I designed it in a Courtyard Marriott off exit fourteen for one reason, which was that nobody had ever read a man being vicious to a rival and thought romance.
Insults were camouflage. For six years he never broke it, not when I won a Cup.
Then at midnight he sent an honest offer in the format, which was the one thing the format could not survive, and put a second message under it that said he knew.
That was a man setting fire to his own building so somebody eight floors down could see where he was.
I typed what are you doing. Deleted it. Typed sinclair do I have to file a grievance. Deleted that too, because it was a joke, and I'd handed that man a joke every time he put a real thing on the table. Typed I'm on eleven. Deleted it, because I was already standing up.
I took the stairs two at a time and came out on nineteen furious. Hope made me angry. It always had. It arrived as rage, because rage I knew what to do with, and I went down that corridor with my coat half on like a man going to a fight.
He was standing outside his own door with a key card in his hand and he had not put it in the slot. I knocked anyway, on the frame, twice, hard, in front of him, which made no sense at all.
"Riley." He looked at the card and then at me. "You took the stairs."
"Open the door."
I went past him into the room and turned around and did not take my coat off.
"Seven years," I said. "And don't do the thing where you agree with me in the calm voice before I've finished, because then I've got nowhere to stand.
Seven years, Nate. I gave you my number on a napkin at a banquet.
You've made me do every piece of the reaching since.
And tonight, after a day where they cut our whole life into a promo, you fire that at me from eight floors up.
So say it. Now, out loud, while I'm standing here in a coat, because I've been in rooms with you for seven years and every single time you've had one hand on a door. "
And he said it. He did not sit down first and he did not do the quarter breath. He stood in the middle of a hotel room with his tie still on and said it low, because the corridor was six feet away.
"I can't run the friends lie anymore. And I can't run the other one, the nothing lie.
I've been running one or the other since October of 2017 and I've got no version left that I can say out loud without lying in it.
" He put the key card down on the desk, flat, and left his hand on it.
"Let me get through it. In a laundry room in this city I told you it was costing too much and proposed we be friends.
That was true and it was the most expensive thing I've ever said.
I told you nobody did anything wrong. I told you there was nothing to unwind.
" He looked up. "I did all of that so I would never have to say the part where there are feelings attached. "
The room went quiet. Traffic nineteen floors down, sounding like the sea.
"There are feelings attached. Not since Vegas and not since Bratislava.
Since a rubber chicken dinner in April of 2017 where you took my dessert off the table and I let you, and then I lay in the dark and wrote a scouting report about it.
I've perjured myself about that in every room I've been in since.
To you, to my family, on camera. And I'm done. "
I stood there in a coat. And what came out of my mouth next was the cruelest fluent thing I've ever done, and I heard myself do it while it was happening and did not stop.
"Careers," I said, and put my hands up before he could get in front of it.
"You opened it, so we're doing it properly.
You're a captain of a storied franchise at twenty-eight with your name in the rafters of two buildings and your father in a booth.
I'm eighteen months off a negotiation in a city that decided who I was before I got there. That's the first column."
"I know the first column."
"Then here's the second. Cameras. There's not one room either of us walks into that doesn't have four phones in it, and half of them belong to people who like us.
" I was going now and could not get out of it.
"And the sport. This sport, Nate, not a sport, this one.
You've heard what gets said at a card table when everybody's had two. "
"I've heard it. I've sat at the table while it got said and I've said nothing, which you already know, because you've done the same thing in a different city on the same night."
"So here's the arithmetic. It takes one lens.
One guy at a curb in Philadelphia at seven in the morning, and that's both of us, that's everything either of us has bled for since we were seven.
" My voice had gone somewhere I did not authorize.
"We can't be anything. Not because I don't want it.
Because the job will not let us have it, and you know that, because you're the one who taught it to me, in a basement, in your captain's voice. "
And then I heard what I had just done, and I stopped.
"Two nights before you said that to me you were on a bathroom floor in that building and you could not breathe," I said. "You told me it was food. I have had four years to think about that sentence and about eleven months in I stopped believing it."
He did not say anything.
"So do not hand me the arithmetic in your captain's voice. You did the arithmetic on a tile floor at three in the morning with your hands numb, and it came out the same as mine, and neither of us has been able to live inside the answer."
He stood there and took all of it. It was a good argument. It was a good argument in a laundry room in August of 2020 and it was still a good argument.
And Nate Sinclair, who had never once won an argument by raising his voice, picked his gear bag up off the luggage rack.
"What are you doing?"
"You're right," he said. "Everything you just said is correct. I'm not going to argue with it. I'm going to enter evidence."
He unzipped the outside pocket and got out a bubble wrap pouch, and I knew it before it was all the way out of the bag, because I had had my hand on it once, in a bathroom in Bratislava, for about a second and a half, in the back compartment of a toiletry case that a man crossed a room to take off me.
He turned it upside down over the covers and shook it once.
The first thing bounced. A $2 keychain from a college bookstore in Duluth, Minnesota, with a bulldog on it, the enamel gone off the face of the dog because it lived in a pocket with my keys for four years.
I put my hand on the end of the bed. "That's mine."
"It was in a suit pocket in Philadelphia in October of 2017.
I couldn't mail it. An envelope with my handwriting going to your house is the exact object that ends up in somebody's hands, so it went in a bag.
" He was looking at the bed. "My equipment manager has moved it between bags for seven seasons, taped down on two sides so it wouldn't shift.
She has never once asked me a question about it, and I got halfway through telling her to leave it home one year and could not finish the sentence. "
The next thing was a cocktail napkin, soft the way paper goes when it's lived in a wallet, with my handwriting on it, big, the ink gone brown.
"April of 2017. Loading dock. You put it in my breast pocket."
"I remember where I put it."
"It was in my wallet until the following spring." He nodded at the bed. "That's a phone number I've had memorized since the second week of October of 2017."
Then a travel adapter with a wrap of duct tape around it. I picked it up before I could stop myself.
"That's mine too."
"It came out of a laundry cube in Philadelphia eight days after Bratislava. There was a correct way to handle it. An envelope, a note, a courier. Ten minutes." He put his hands in his pockets. "I took it upstairs and put it in a drawer instead."
Then he put his phone on the bed, face up, open on a folder with no name on it and one thing in it. A screenshot from the 28th of January, 2019, at 11:51 at night.
Notice of Withdrawal. pursuant to article nine of the constitution of the kowalski-sinclair invitational, the undersigned hereby withdraws his franchise from the league.
"I took that with both thumbs about four seconds after it landed," he said, "because there's a function on a phone that takes a message back, and I did not want you to be able to take it back. That's the entire thought that was in my head that night."
Then he put down the last one, and the last one did it.
Six hundred words on real paper, dated in the top right corner in pen, July of 2018, addressed to a coordinating producer at a national network.
It argued, with entry numbers and time stamps, that describing Riley Kowalski as a product of effort was not a compliment with a limitation attached but a factual error.
I read the first paragraph standing up and could not do the second. The folds were soft, not creased, the way paper goes when a man opens it and folds it back up and does that for six years.
"You never sent this. Nate, this is your father's network."
"I know whose network it is."
"You wrote six hundred words defending my hockey IQ to your father's employer, you dated it in pen, you never sent it and you never threw it out."
"Sending it was impossible," he said. "Destroying it turned out to be more impossible than that."