Chapter 8
ELI
The list is posted on the board outside Coach Callahan's office.
Institutional cork, the kind that exists in every facility in every sport at every level, and the cork has held the names of men whose careers continued and men whose careers paused and men whose careers ended, and the cork does not care about the difference.
The cork holds the paper. The paper holds the names. The names hold the futures.
Players cluster. The clustering is the herd instinct, thirty men moving toward a piece of paper with the gravitational urgency of people whose lives depend on the arrangement of letters on a page.
Some men walk toward the board quickly, wanting the information like ripping off a bandage.
Some men drift, delaying the moment of knowledge because the not-knowing, while agonizing, is also safe, because the not-knowing still contains the possibility that you stayed.
I am the second kind. I drift. The drifting is the performance, of course. The drifting says: I'm casual about this. I'm easy. I'm the guy who grins and shrugs and says "whatever happens, happens" while his internal organs rearrange themselves with anxiety.
The Alberta defenseman (Tyson, whose last name is Bennett and whose personality is the personality of a golden retriever who has been told he's going to the park) is at the board already.
He turns around. He sees me. His face does a thing that golden retrievers' faces do not do because golden retrievers cannot read, but the human equivalent is: joy, relief, and the uninhibited enthusiasm of a person who has no emotional filter.
"MERCER!" he shouts across the corridor.
I walk to the board.
The names are alphabetical. I scan the M's.
Mercer, Eli.
I stare at the name. My name. On the list. On the roster.
I stay.
The grin arrives and for once the grin is not a performance.
The grin is the real thing, the underneath thing, the grin that exists when the performing and the earning are the same action.
I made the team. I earned the ice. The speed and the wanting and the five AM skates in Tampa and the years of juniors and the highlight reel that was half brilliance and half recklessness and the week of camp where I got hip-checked by a glacier and coached by a man who said "be effective" and kissed in an elevator and fed pasta at 10:30 at night, all of it compressed into five letters on a piece of cork.
Mercer, Eli.
Bennett hugs me. The hug is the Bennett hug, which is the hug of a man who does not understand the concept of personal space and who processes all emotions through full-body contact.
I accept the hug because the hug is real and because my body is vibrating at a frequency that requires grounding and Bennett is two hundred and twenty pounds of ground.
My new key card works on the player entrance now. My name is on the stall tag in clean black print. The room looks the same and nothing in my life does.
Coach Callahan finds me in the hallway. The fire hydrant stands in front of me with his arms crossed and his face in the configuration that means "I am about to say one sentence and the sentence is going to have to be enough."
"Mercer. You earned it. Don't make me regret it."
"Yes, Coach."
He walks away. The conversation is over. I have been praised and threatened in eight words. This is the Callahan experience.
I should call my mother. I should call my mother because Carmen Mercer has been waiting for this phone call since I was four years old on the Tampa rink and because the phone call is the thing she has earned through eighteen years of 5 AM drives and equipment costs and the relentless, Cuban-American-mother faith that her son was going to make it.
I should call my agent. I should call my sister. I should call every person who stood behind me while I chased this.
I go to the video room.
Room 3 is dark except for the idle blue screen.
Nikolai is in the chair nearest the projector.
He is not watching film. He is sitting in the dark with his reading glasses on the arm of the chair (not on his face, the glasses have been migrating off his face with increasing frequency, the control deviating) and his hands folded in his lap and his posture the posture of a man who has been waiting.
He was waiting for me. Not at the board. Not in the corridor. In the room where the teaching happens. In the room where the looking happens. In the room where his hand found my jaw and the inch between our mouths was the most populated inch in Atlanta.
"You stayed," he says.
"Yeah."
"You knew?"
"Yeah."
"That's arrogant."
"It's pattern recognition."
He looks at me. The reading glasses are off. His face in the blue light is the underneath face. The face I saw in the kitchen when I fisted his shirt. The face I saw in the bedroom when the control was gone and his hands were on my body and his mouth said "mistake" and his hands said "stay."
"I should call my mom," I say.
"Yes."
"I should call my agent."
"Yes."
"I came here first."
The sentence lands. I can see it land because his posture changes. The change is small: a loosening in his shoulders, a shift in his hands, a softening around his eyes that the control does not authorize and that the control, apparently, can no longer prevent.
"I noticed," he says.
"What happens now?" I ask.
I am not asking about the roster. I am not asking about the season or the contract or the training schedule.
I am asking about the ten feet between the guest room and the bedroom and the six inches between our bodies in the dark and the word "mistake" that came from his mouth while his hands said the opposite.
Nikolai stands. He walks toward me. The walking is the Nikolai walk: measured, deliberate, each step a decision.
He stops in front of me. One foot of distance.
The successor to the inch in the video room and the zero in the elevator and the six inches in the bed.
The distances have been shrinking since the corridor.
The relationship measured in physical space.
"Now you stop sleeping in the guest room," he says.
I stare at him. "That's your move? That's the big emotional speech? Relocation?"
"You asked what happens."
"I want more than logistics, Nikolai. I want more than you giving me coffee and hockey advice and then looking at me like I'm a structural weakness in your moral code."
"You are a structural weakness in my moral code."
"That's not the compliment you think it is."
"It is not a compliment. It is a fact." He pauses. "I want more than pretending this is only about camp."
"This isn't just because I made the cut?"
"No."
The certainty settles something in me. Not the wanting - the wanting does not settle, the wanting is the speed and the speed is permanent.
What settles is the fear. The fear that the pasta and the film sessions and the elevator and the bedroom were hospitality, generosity, the kindness of a veteran toward a rookie.
That the wanting was one-directional. That the mistake was real and not the cover story for something bigger.
The certainty says: the something bigger is real.
He steps closer. He touches the side of my neck. The touch is warm and brief and the brevity is the control, but the touch is the underneath, and the underneath is winning.
"You should not have come here first," he says.
"Where should I have gone?"
"To your mother. To your agent. To anyone whose opinion of you is professional and appropriate."
"I came to the person who told me to be effective instead of impressive. I came to the person who cooked pasta at 10:30 because I couldn't sleep. I came to the person whose hands are more honest than his words."
His jaw flexes. The flex is the control processing information that the control cannot categorize, because the information is emotional and the control does not have a filing system for emotion.
The control has a filing system for hockey and routine and the management of proximity.
The control does not have a file for "a man came to me first."
He takes my hand. He turns it over. He presses his mouth to the center of my palm.
The gesture is so brief and so quiet that my entire nervous system shorts.
I stare at my hand. I stare at him.
"Oh," I say. "You're in trouble."
"Why."
"Because that was adorable."
"It was not."
"It absolutely was. Nikolai Sokolov just kissed my palm like a man in a period drama and I am never letting him live it down."
He catches me around the waist and pulls me in before I can get more mileage out of it.
The pulling-in is the answer to every question I asked.
The pulling-in says: stop sleeping in the guest room.
Stop pretending the distances are defensible.
Stop measuring the space between us and start closing it.
I press my forehead to his chest. His chin rests on top of my head.
The configuration is the first configuration that is not a kiss, not sex, not a fight, not a film session.
The configuration is a hold. Two people standing in a dark video room after a cut list, holding each other because the holding is the thing they both needed and neither one asked for.
"I made the team," I say into his chest.
"I know."
"I'm staying."
"I know."
"In your bed."
"I know."
I laugh. The laugh vibrates against his chest and his arms tighten and the tightening is involuntary and the involuntary is the underneath and the underneath is becoming, slowly, the surface.
Later, I call my mother. Carmen Mercer screams. The scream is the scream of a Cuban-American ER nurse who has been containing her emotions in professional settings for twenty-three years and who does not contain them in personal settings and whose personal settings include a phone call from her son telling her he made an NHL roster.
"MIJO! AY, DIOS MIO! DAVE! DAVE, VEN ACA! YOUR SON!"
My father gets on the phone. "That's great, buddy." The Dave response. Consistent, warm, insufficient, genuine.
Ava texts: I knew. Obviously. Don't get cocky. Too late. Love you.
I text back: Love you too. Also I'm seeing someone.
Ava: I KNEW THAT TOO. Call me immediately.
I do not call her immediately. I will call her later. For now, I carry my overnight bag twelve feet from the guest room to Nikolai's bedroom. The twelve feet is the symbolic crossing. The guest room is the temporary. The bedroom is the staying.
I drop the bag by his dresser like I'm trying to act normal about crossing a line I've been staring at for a week.
"This is symbolic movement," I say.
"It is movement."
"You're ruining the moment."
He steps in, takes my hand, and kisses the center of my palm again.
I stare at him. "You're going to keep doing that."
"Yes."
"Okay." I swallow. "Okay."
The apartment is quiet. The quiet is different. Not the controlled quiet of a man living alone. The shared quiet of two people in a room who do not need to speak because the speaking has been done and the staying has been decided. Enough.
Gerald's desk. The lobby. The building settling into evening.
Gerald picks up his phone.
The rookie stayed.
Lorraine: On the roster?
Gerald: On the roster. And in the building. And in the apartment.
Lorraine: You're collecting them, Gerald.
Gerald: I just watch the door.