Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Halston
Now . . .
By the ninth block, I have no destination.
By the twelfth, I’m pissed about it.
At myself, mostly. The fact that I left the building before I did something stupid, which should count as restraint but feels a lot like retreat.
New York doesn't care. A cyclist slams his palm against the side of a delivery truck and curses the driver in a way that makes me feel like I should be doing the same to my family. A dog barks from an apartment above me. I keep walking.
Past a closed bakery. Past a tailor. Past a florist with buckets of dying roses out front. Past a private club where the doorman recognizes me and straightens before I look away.
Smart man.
Tonight, recognition is the last thing I want.
Tonight, anyone is the last thing I want to be.
Then the roar hits.
Men shouting from inside a bar up ahead. A goal horn blasts through the open doors, loud enough to make a couple on the sidewalk stop mid-argument. The sign over the entrance is green neon, scratched brass, and a cartoon bear on skates grinning.
It’s ridiculous and loud.
It has nothing to do with me.
So naturally, I stop.
I stand there in a tailored suit and consider walking on. That would be the smart move. Go home. Shower. Pretend that a normal life is possible.
I step inside.
The bar is hot, packed, and filled with noise. Beer. Fried food. Bodies shoved too close together. Hockey on every television. Men in jerseys screaming at referees who obviously can’t hear them and would not be afraid of them if they could.
A woman at the bar slaps the counter and yells, “That was interference, you blind fossil.”
I take the far stool, back to the wall, eyes on the door. Old habits. Useful ones. The bartender is broad. There’s gray in his beard, and he has a towel over one shoulder. He clocks the suit, the face, and decides not to get cute.
“What can I get you?”
“Water.”
His brow lifts. “You need to buy something if you’re staying.”
“Sparkling water.”
“Dangerous night for you, huh?”
Despite myself, I almost smile. “You have no idea.”
He sets the glass down and points his chin at the screen above me. “Hell of a game. You ever been to the arena?”
Me at an arena? I almost snort, but instead, I look up because it’s easier than thinking—or answering.
A player in a Night Hawks jersey cuts across the ice in slow motion.
Number nineteen.
Lafontaine.
He takes a hit near the boards that should put him on his ass.
It doesn't. His shoulder slams into the glass, his body folds into the impact. I flinch, as if it hurts to look at him being hurt. It angers me that someone dared to hurt him. Suddenly, I see myself at an arena. She’s screaming, “You fucking asshole. Try that again, and our guy will fuck you up.”
I remember laughing at that and shaking my head. I instead hug her and kiss her neck, assuring her he’s okay. He lives for that. I don’t know where all that comes from, but I’m back at the bar.
On the screen, number nineteen keeps the puck like pain is an inconvenience he refuses to dignify.
The bar erupts around me.
On-screen, Lafontaine drives behind the net with a Blackbirds defenseman riding him hard.
Another man closes in. Lafontaine waits half a second too long, which means he is not panicking.
He is baiting them. Then he threads the puck through a gap no one else saw, takes the second hit, and watches his winger bury it.
Goal.
The place loses its mind.
A man three stools down nearly spills beer on my sleeve. “That’s why you don’t bench nineteen.”
Someone else yells, “Lafontaine’s got no quit.”
I stare at the screen.
No quit. The period is over, and the players leave the ice. Then, the chyron flashes beneath the replay.
Creed Lafontaine refuses retirement talk after overtime win.
Everything in me goes quiet.
On-screen, the highlight cuts to a post-game interview. He stands in front of sponsor logos with wet hair, a split near his mouth, and the clean, expensive composure of a man trained to bleed off-camera.
A reporter asks, “After tonight’s overtime win, there’s still speculation about whether this is your final season. Any comments on retirement?”
Creed doesn’t blink. “People have been retiring me since I was twenty-eight.”
The bar laughs.
His expression barely moves. “I’m still here.” He shrugs. “I got nowhere else to go.”
His face fills the screen. The last sentence sounds like sadness. As if whatever place he could’ve gone to has disappeared.
Something about him feels . . . familiar.
Recognizable.
Not in the way one recognizes a famous athlete. Not in the way one remembers seeing a face online or on billboards or in a newspaper left on a table.
My body recognizes him like a room recognizes fire.
My hand rises before I decide to move.
Fingers touch the back of my own neck.
A memory strikes.
Not cleanly.
Not enough.
A kitchen at night. The man I always remember, but now—now the face is Creed’s.
Creed’s head bowed. My fingers in his hair. His breath against my mouth. A woman nearby, breathing too fast and pretending she is not. Creed turns enough to kiss her fingertips. My own voice, low, saying—
Never.
The glass of water trembles under my other hand.
The bartender snorts. “Lafontaine’s a machine. Guy’s got no pulse. He’s cooler than ice.”
That is not true.
The thought is immediate.
Violent. Also, mine.
I turn my head slowly toward the bartender. He is wiping down the counter. He doesn't know he has said something impossible. He doesn't know my world has just tilted around a stranger’s name.
Except he is not a stranger.
He can’t be.
Because I know, with no memory to justify it, that Creed Lafontaine has a pulse.
I know he pretends he doesn't, because stillness is safer than wanting.
I know he tastes like rain and anger. I know his laugh is rare enough to feel stolen.
I know there is a place at the back of his neck where pride becomes surrender if touched with enough patience.
The knowledge is intimate.
Indefensible.
Mine.
The screen changes to another highlight. Creed skating. Creed checks another player into the boards. Creed on the bench, jaw set, eyes forward. Creed wipes blood from his mouth with the back of his glove as if blood is an administrative inconvenience.
Her voice surfaces in me, bright and edged with tears.
My beautiful, impossible Creed.
Mine.
Ours.
The bar sways.
I stand too fast.
The bartender says something. I leave a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. The street air hits cold, damp, merciful. I walk half a block before stopping beneath the awning of a closed pharmacy.
My phone is in my hand.
I don't remember taking it out.
I search the name.
Creed Lafontaine.
Thousands of results.
Hockey profile. Interviews. Career stats. Injury history. Retirement speculation. Photos. So many pictures. Creed on ice. Creed in a suit. Creed, younger, smiling with a woman whose face is partly turned away from the camera at a charity event years ago.
My heart stops.
Not because of Creed.
Because of her.
Only half her face is visible, blurred by motion, but I know the angle of her jaw. The dark sweep of her hair. The way her hand is lifted as if she were about to make a point and expected the world to take notes. I see the tattoo. The Celtic knot on the inside of her wrist, just like mine.
Pain splits behind my eyes.
I lean against the brick wall, breathing through it. Rain starts in earnest now, tapping the awning above me. People hurry past. No one stops.
Manhattan is kind that way.
I put the phone away. I hail a cab.
I am surprised when my mouth says, “Chelsea” instead of heading home to Park Avenue.
The driver neither asks why nor understands my hesitation. He pulls into traffic the way New York drivers pull into traffic. When we stop, the cab is parked outside a building I have never seen and have always known.
Pre-war. Six floors. Brick, the color of old wine. A Mexican restaurant on the ground floor that was not always Mexican. A canopy that was green when I am sure it should not have been green. A doorman I have never met, whose face doesn't look up at the cab.
I sit there for almost a minute.
I don't get out.
I can’t tell the driver why.
What I know is that whatever is upstairs in that building, or what was upstairs in that building, is not for the version of me sitting in this cab right now.
The version of me who could walk into that lobby is not a version I have access to yet.
The version of me who could ride that elevator and stand at that door and knock is a man who has not been inside this body in a long time.
That man is trying very hard to come back, but he is not back yet, and I will not knock on a door I don't have the right to knock on with hands my family has been signing paperwork for.
“Sorry,” I say. “Take me back uptown.”
The driver shrugs, mumbling something about it’s your money, buddy. He pulls away from the curb.
The building gets smaller in the rear window.
I don't look at it.
He drops me a few blocks away from my place.
By the time I reach my apartment, my shirt is damp from rain and sweat.
The doorman says good evening. I nod, resign to come back to a life I don’t want.
Upstairs, the rooms are lit the way my stepmother prefers: lamps warm, overheads dim, art positioned to imply history instead of taste.
There is too much happening in my head, and then I hear it.
Talk to the lawyer, son.
Cornelius’s voice. Not in the boardroom this time. In my own apartment. Behind the bookcase, behind the lamps my stepmother arranged, behind the careful museum-piece that has been built around me for ten years.
Talk to the lawyer.
For a second, I don't know which lawyer he—or my mind—is referring to. I take a shower, change, and that’s when I know.
Nine years ago, at the first hearing of my conservatorship—the hearing I'm not supposed to remember and can only remember in pieces—there was a man at the back of the courtroom in a brown suit who was not on my family’s payroll.
Fitzhenry Everhart. He had been hired by someone.
He left the case three weeks in. The reason given to the family was personal conflict.
The reason he gave to me, in a hallway, three minutes before he walked out of my life, was: Call when you’re ready—tell no one about this.
I open the drawer. The one that looks like a trash can.
No one cares to look into it. There are notebooks, loose pages, photographs, napkins, receipts, medical appointment cards—anything I have collected in nine years when memory arrived faster than explanation.
I have told no one about any of it. Not Everett.
Not my stepmother. Not the neurologist my family likes because he uses words like “stability” and “management” with spiritual conviction.
I spread the fragments across the desk.
A sketch of a ring, another of a wedding band.
A sentence in my handwriting: She hates the word gentle.
Another: He laughs only when startled.
Another: Orange tab = betrayal.
My breath stops.
Orange tab.
The memory from the boardroom. The woman with the ring. The legal papers. The sweatshirt.
I find a photograph next. Old. Folded once, then smoothed flat.
My grandfather Cornelius standing outside the foundation archive, much younger than I remember him, one hand lifted against the sun.
This is the picture Everhart gave me when he quit.
A memento he was able to get from the evidence my family was using to claim I needed a caregiver to handle me.
On the back, in my own hand: a phone number.
Beneath it: Call him when you stop being afraid.
I sit down because my legs are no longer trustworthy.
Him.
There is no name. It is probably Fitzhenry, with answers. It has to be Fitzhenry, with answers.
My hand doesn't want the phone when I lift it. I enter the number digit by digit. Twice, I stop before pressing call. Once, I stand and walk to the window, like distance from the desk might make this less insane.
Rain moves down the glass in silver lines.
Somewhere in the city, Creed Lafontaine exists. Tired after a game. A man, I am sure I know, but how? He’s not a dream. Nor a figment. He’s not some highlight reel I watched while browsing my phone. Not a memory my family would call confabulation if I were foolish enough to ask.
Maybe Fitzhenry can tell me about him.
But what if this phone is no longer available?
What if no one answers?
I pace around my apartment, write stupid things in my journal so my therapist sees I’m doing the work. He reports to my family. There’s no such thing as patient/doctor agreement between us.
It’s way past midnight when I press call.
The line rings once.
Twice.
On the third ring, someone answers.
A voice, rough and impatient and so familiar that my hand closes around the phone until my knuckles ache.
“Yeah?”
The word ruins me.
I should have prepared a sentence. A reasonable one.
I should explain that I found his number.
That I have spent a decade living inside a life that now feels staged by people who knew exactly where to hide the exits.
I should ask him if he knows when everything got broken. Or why I remember Creed Lafontaine.
Instead, I close my eyes.
Rain taps the window.
The city moves below me, and I’m not sure what to do.