Chapter 28
ELI
The season continues.
This is the thing about hockey: the season continues regardless of what happens in the rooms where people live.
The ice does not care about the crisis or the resolution or the teaspoon in the mug.
The ice cares about edges and timing and whether you are fast enough and smart enough and brave enough to play.
I am fast enough. I am getting smarter. The brave is the new part, and the brave is the part that changes everything.
We make the playoffs. The Reapers finish third in the Eastern Conference with 102 points and the 102 points are the franchise's best season and the best season was built by thirty men who play hockey and who love each other (some literally, some fraternally, all in the committed, irreplaceable way that a team loves when the team has decided that the loving is ordinary).
Nikolai has the best defensive season of his career.
The numbers are the numbers. Mars could recite them.
I cannot. But the number that matters is the one that is not a number: Nikolai plays differently now.
Lighter. The absence of the weight. The weight was the wall.
The wall is gone. What remains is the hockey of a man who is not defending anything except the blue line.
I finish the season with twenty-six goals and fifty-one points.
The points are the points. The thing the points do not measure is the thing Callahan identified: I stopped asking for permission.
The asking-for-permission was the performance applied to the ice.
The performing-on-the-ice stopped because the performing-off-the-ice stopped and the two stoppings are the same stopping.
The grin is still there. It will always be there because the grin is mine and the mine is real. But the grin is no longer the first tool. It is a tool. The first tool is the honesty - harder and slower and less charming and infinitely more useful.
The apartment is ours. We said the word.
We said the word on a Tuesday in March when Nikolai was cooking (pasta, always pasta, though the sofrito has been incorporated into the rotation and the incorporation has produced a fusion that Carmen would describe as "acceptable" and that Nikolai describes as "an experiment in cultural negotiation").
I said: "This is our apartment." He said: "It has been our apartment since the teaspoon.
" I said: "The teaspoon was the lease signing?
" He said: "The teaspoon was the commitment. The lease is paperwork."
The reading glasses are on the nightstand. The reading glasses go on for reading and come off for everything else. The glasses are glass and wire and a prescription for mild astigmatism. The glasses are no longer a wall. The glasses are just glasses.
My mother sent a second package. This one contained rice, beans, sofrito, a bottle of hot sauce, and a pamphlet.
The pamphlet is titled "Understanding Bisexuality: A Guide for Parents" and it has been annotated in my mother's handwriting with notes like "this is what mijo said" and "Dave read this part" and "Luisa says this page is wrong.
" My father's contribution to the pamphlet is a sticky note on the back that says: "That's great, buddy. Love, Dad."
The sticky note is on the refrigerator. The sticky note is the Dave monument. The Dave monument says two sentences and means them completely.
Ava visited in February. Ava met Nikolai.
The meeting lasted forty-eight hours and involved Ava asking Nikolai approximately one hundred questions with the prosecutorial zeal of a second-year law student who considers the cross-examination of her brother's boyfriend a professional development opportunity.
Nikolai answered every question with the flat, precise, unintimidated calm of a man who has been hip-checked by Mik Volkov and considers a Georgetown law student a modest threat by comparison.
"He passed," Ava said on the phone after she left.
"Was there a rubric?"
"Of course there was a rubric. He scored highly on emotional intelligence, culinary skills, and jaw structure. He lost points for the T-shirt folding, which I maintain is a symptom of a larger organizational pathology."
"He's not pathological."
"He alphabetizes his spice rack, Eli."
"The spice rack is efficient."
"The spice rack is a cry for help. I love him anyway."
Irina called the following week. Irina and Carmen have exchanged numbers.
This fact is the most terrifying development of my adult life.
A Russian figure skating coach and a Cuban ER nurse communicating directly, without the buffer of their sons, is a geopolitical alliance that the world is not prepared for.
"Your mother is very loud," Irina said to Nikolai.
"She is Cuban," Nikolai said. "Volume is cultural."
"I like her. She has opinions about food. I also have opinions about food. Our opinions are different. This makes the conversation interesting."
"Mama, please do not form an alliance with Carmen Mercer."
"Too late. We are exchanging recipes. She is sending me something called picadillo. I am sending her blini."
The alliance is formed. The alliance produces weekly phone calls and recipe exchanges and the unstoppable, mother-to-mother connection that occurs when two women who raised difficult sons discover that the sons have found each other and that the finding is the best thing the sons have done.
Gerald knows. Gerald has always known. Gerald's text thread with Lorraine, which I imagine as the most comprehensive emotional archive in professional sports, contains the full record: "Another one.
" "Different Russian. Same story." "The rookie stayed.
" And now, the latest, which Gerald showed me one evening when I was leaving the facility late and Gerald was at his desk and the lobby was quiet and Gerald looked at me and decided that the showing was appropriate.
Gerald's phone. The text thread. The latest entry:
Gerald: Different ending this time.
Lorraine: Better ending?
Gerald: Better ending.
I looked at Gerald. Gerald looked at me. The looking contained thirty-two years of watching and the watching contained every couple who walked through this lobby and the couples contained the culture and the culture contained me.
"Thank you, Gerald," I said.
"For what?"
"For watching."
"That's the job, kid. I just watch the door."
I am sitting on the couch in our apartment on a Sunday evening in April.
The playoffs start Tuesday. The apartment is warm.
Reading glasses on the nightstand. Sneakers by the door, left upright, right on its side, the asymmetry permanent and perfect.
Teaspoon in the mug. Sofrito next to the pasta. Chekhov on the side table. Lamp amber.
Nikolai is beside me. His arm is around me. The arm is automatic, the automatic is the ordinary, the booth is ours.
"Nikolai."
"Yes."
"Rookie mistake."
"What."
"Falling for you. The whole thing. The parking deck and the coffee stain and the pasta at ten-thirty and the reading glasses and the elevator and the lamp and the teaspoon and the fight and the game and the crying and the coming back."
"Those are not mistakes."
"Best mistakes I ever made."
"Also yes."
I lean into him. He holds me. The holding is the ordinary, and the ordinary is the revolution.
The season continues. The playoffs start. The ice is waiting.
We are ready.