Chapter 18
· · ·
Wes spent the morning of the day before the gala at the post, in his own quiet way, in front of nine kids.
He had been on the ice with the youth program at five-twenty, and run a fifty-minute practice with the same flat clear focus he ran every practice.
Set up the puck stacks. Stood at the post. Run Riley through the same butterfly drill they had been working on for two months.
He had given Riley one new note — Riley, you’re sliding the right leg before you’ve planted the left.
Plant first. Then slide. He watched Riley take the note, try the new sequence three times, and land it on the fourth.
He had said, “Good, kid. Good.”
Riley had grinned through their helmet.
The grin was the whole of his morning.
Riley, halfway through the second-to-last drill, had skated to the post and said, very quietly through the cage of their helmet, “Coach. Is the morning ice cut.”
“No, kid. Not yet.”
“You’d tell me if it was.”
“I’d tell you if it was. Joanna promised me. I promised you.”
“Okay.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay, Coach.”
Wes had not, for one half-second, looked at Riley.
He had looked, instead, at the boards. He had looked at the boards because if he had looked at Riley, in his helmet, with their grandmother in the running car in the parking lot at five-thirty for the four hundredth morning in a row, Wes was going to do, for the first time in his adult life, on the ice, in front of a nine-year-old kid in too-big pads, a thing he had not done in front of any human being in eighteen years.
He had looked at the boards.
He had said, very evenly, “I’m all right, kid. We’ll get through the weekend and then we’ll figure out the rest. Now go work on your stack.”
Riley had gone to work on their stack.
Wes had stood at the post for one more minute, in his pads, with his stick across his knees, and breathed.
Then he had run the rest of the practice, and the kids had filed off the ice at six-fifty, and Riley’s grandmother had come — for the first time in three months — up the front steps of the Barn in her boots to pick Riley up, because the front steps had been salted at five by Wes himself with the bag of rock salt he had bought, with his own money, on Wednesday afternoon at Frank Nakamura’s hardware store, because he had decided on Monday after talking to Riley that the steps were going to be salt-passable from now on or he was going to break some of his own rules about not making a fuss.
Riley’s grandmother had come up the steps.
She had given Wes a small, very dignified nod.
She had taken Riley by the elbow and walked Riley to the car.
She had not said a single word to Wes, because that was not the kind of woman she was, but she had, before she got into the car, turned back, briefly, and looked at the steps, and then at Wes, and then she had nodded to him a second time.
Wes had stood on the steps with both hands in his coat pockets.
He had said, very quietly, to himself, Henrik, I’m going to do a thing today, and I am going to do it on purpose.
He had said, fall on purpose. Fall like you know what you are doing.
He had said, I am going to be careful, Henrik. I am not going to be quiet about it.
He had not been speaking out loud.
He had been speaking out loud only on the inside, the way he had been speaking to his brother for ten years.
He had nodded once to the cold air, and gone back into the building.
He waited until eleven.
At eleven the morning had thinned out at the rink.
The youth program was gone. The learn-to-skate sessions were on a break before the noon class.
The Penalty Box was at its mid-morning lull.
Joanna was at the city — she had been at the city since seven a.m. — to handle a separate piece of the gala logistics.
Pete was, somewhere, on his phone. Marin was at her hotel in Portland, finishing the agency response that Pete had spent the previous afternoon helping her shape around the phrase misread footage.
Ada, at eleven, was at her stool in the staff kitchenette, drinking a thermos of tea, doing nothing.
Wes walked in.
He closed the kitchenette door behind him.
He did not, this time, sit down across from her.
He stood with his back to the door, with his hands at his sides, with the kitchenette light on his face. The kettle, on the counter, was on its base. The kettle was off. The kitchenette smelled, faintly, like cardamom, because Ada had brought in a tea Eilis had given her.
“Halloran,” he said.
“Berglund.”
She did not, immediately, look up.
She did not, immediately, look up because she had not, since yesterday at four o’clock in the green room, looked at him.
She had been, for nineteen hours, very carefully not looking at him.
He had not, in those nineteen hours, knocked on any door, or sent any text, or interrupted any rhythm.
He had been in the building.
He had been in the building doing the building’s work.
He had been in the building waiting, because his body had told him to wait, because the play in front of him had not yet, in his hands, taken its shape.
The play was taking its shape now.
“Ada,” he said.
She looked up.
She looked at him, and her face — her face was — her face was the face he had been hoping not to see today, which was the face of a woman who had been performing brightness in front of a town for twenty years and had spent nineteen hours not looking at a man she had reached for on a bench because she did not, herself, know what she was going to find on his face when she finally let herself.
She looked.
He kept his face very still.
He said, “I have a thing to say, and I am going to say it once, because I have been turning it over for nineteen hours and I do not, otherwise, know how to start. Ada, please. Sit.”
She sat.
She had been sitting. He meant stay sitting. She stayed.
He took a slow breath in.
“I heard,” he said, “from the hallway outside the green room, the version of the corner you gave Pete. I did not, on purpose, listen at the door. I was walking past on my way to the humidifier. I heard a part of it. I heard the part where Pete pitched the Wes was filling in, Theo said no, Wes helped, he was doing the rink a favor, he was the backup plan line, and Joanna said Pete, stop, and there was a silence, and then I heard you agree to it. I heard you agree to yes, Pete, that’s the story.
He was the backup plan. I heard you say it in the voice you use in the staff hall when you are choosing words in real time to end a conversation.
I have heard you use that voice three or four times before.
I — I know the voice. I am not mistaking the voice for any other voice you have. ”
“Wes —”
“Ada. Let me finish.”
“Okay.”
“I am not angry. I am not here to be a man who has been hurt and is doing a thing with the hurt. I am here because I have a thing to say, and it has to be said today, before the gala. If I do not say it today, I will not be able to do the gala. That is the only reason I am here. I am going to ask you for one thing. You are going to give me an answer. Then we are going to get through the weekend. I am not coming for a confession.”
She looked at him.
She did not, this time, say anything.
She waited.
He said, “I have been the backup goalie for four years.”
“Wes —”
“Let me say it.”
“Okay.”
“I have been the backup goalie for four years.
I have been a backup goalie my entire adult life.
I have made my peace with it. I am not a man for whom being the backup is a small word.
Being the backup is the shape of what I do.
I am a backup goalie. I am not ashamed of it. I am not running from it.
“I can be a backup goalie. I cannot be the backup man in a person’s life.
I cannot be a man you reach for on a bench on Thursday and a backup plan in front of Pete on Friday.
I have spent eighteen years being the backup in a building.
I have made my peace with the building backup. I cannot do the person backup.
“I am not asking for the speech, or for my name in front of the room, or for the corner made public. The corner can stay ours forever.
“What I am asking is this. Between now and Sunday at six, do not call me the backup plan in any room I am not in.
Do not let Pete put that sentence in any document, any agency response, any Bay Beacon sidebar.
You can not-name me. You can keep what is ours ours.
But you cannot, in any room I am not in, say Wes was the backup plan.
“That is the ask. If you cannot give it to me, I will not be on the rink floor on Sunday at six. It would unmake me. Yes or no. Today. Now.”
He stopped.
He took a long breath in.
The kitchenette was quiet.
The kitchenette was so quiet he could hear the building’s heat through the duct.
Ada’s hands were in her lap. She was sitting on the stool by the counter. The thermos was beside her. The thermos was — he saw — capped. She had not, in nineteen hours, been drinking from it. She had been holding it.
She did not, for a long beat, speak.
When she did, her voice was the voice from the rec center on Friday night, in the car after, when she had said I am going to cry, Wes, in a moment.
She said, “Wes.”
“Yes.”
“I — I am sorry.”
“That is — that is not what I am asking for.”
“It is — it is also true.”
“All right.”
“Wes. I am not going to give you the version where I did not know what I was doing. You deserve the other one. I knew. In the half-second before I said it, I heard the sentence the way you would hear it, and I said it anyway. Because it would end the meeting. Because Riley has morning ice on Monday and Joanna had the bridge in her hands and a room had handed me a sentence, and my body has known for twenty years what to do with rooms. For one second, saving the rink mattered more than protecting you. That is the truth. I have hated it for nineteen hours. It is still the truth.”
The kitchenette did not, for a long moment, make a sound.
“Ada.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a long time.
“Thank you for not handing me the soft version,” he said, finally.
“It is worse, and it is better, and I do not yet know which one it is more of. I am going to need a while to find out. What I need today is the ask. The sentence is in the room. Take it out before Sunday at six. Not me into the speech — that sentence out of the campaign. That’s the ask. ”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“I will take the sentence out of the campaign.”
“All right.”
“Today. By six p.m. tonight. I will go into Joanna’s office.
I will tell Pete the sentence is dead. I will tell Marin.
I will get on the phone with Marin’s agency partner if I have to.
The sentence will not be in any document.
The sentence will not be in any deck. The sentence will not be in any Bay Beacon sidebar.
The sentence will be — the sentence will be — Wes, the sentence will be retired.
I will — I will personally retire the sentence.
By six tonight. You have my — you have my word. ”
“All right.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“Will you — will you be at the gala.”
He thought.
He thought for longer than a beat. He thought for long enough that she had to sit inside the thinking, on her stool, with her capped thermos, and take it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He watched the answer land on her face. He hated that he noticed it land. He hated more that he did not fix it.
“I will be in the building,” he said. “I will not perform the corner, and I will not be the man on the platform — Pete will have to find another body for that. But the building is where I am. I am not leaving the building. That is the best answer I have today.”
He did not cross the kitchenette to her.
He did not touch her.
He did not, in the room, perform the closing of the gap.
He stood with his hands at his sides, in his coat, by the kitchenette door, and he said, “Halloran.”
“Berglund.”
It was the first time in six weeks that the exchange had not been a door opening.
He opened the kitchenette door. He went out into the staff hall. He walked past the equipment closet, into the lobby, out the front door, into the cold parking lot.
Pete caught him halfway across it.
“Wes. Hey. Wes.” Pete was holding a clipboard he did not need, with both hands, like a railing. “I wanted — about yesterday. The backup thing. I didn’t mean backup like backup.”
Wes looked at him.
“Pete,” he said. “There is not a good version of that sentence.”
Pete opened his mouth.
Pete closed it.
Pete stood in the parking lot holding the clipboard, and for once in his loose-limbed, fast-talking, white-out-correcting life, did not try out a replacement sentence on the room, because there was no room, there was only a man he had hurt in the exact place the man kept his whole life, and Pete had just now, visibly, at the age of thirty-four, understood that.
Wes did not, this time, get into his truck.
He walked.
He walked all the way down the harbor road to the small unloved town pier where Ada had stood ten days ago in the cold and admitted to herself, on the kind of pier where her father used to drink the wrong coffee, that she had stopped being able to think about Wes Berglund as a campaign.
He did not know, on the pier, that she had been there ten days ago.
He stood, with his hands in his pockets, at the end of the pier in the gray February light, and he watched a gull turn over the cold water.
He thought Henrik, I asked. I asked out loud.
The harbor did not answer.
Neither had she — not the part underneath the ask, the part he had not said and she had not reached for, which was not about the sentence at all.
The sentence was retirable. The other thing was not.
The other thing was a question with no clean yes in it: whether a woman whose body had spent twenty years saving rooms could ever, with a room actually burning, save him first.
He did not know.
She did not know either. That was the honest weather of it.
He stood on the pier until his hands were cold.
He walked back.
He went to work.