Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Varga
Ireached for Rook before I was awake and hit the drywall.
The guest room. Right.
I lay there with my hand flat against the wall and ran through it again—the fight and the door I’d closed behind me. It was the first night in the house I’d slept without him, and it was my choice.
The carved bird sat on the nightstand where I’d set it last night. I grabbed it off my side of the bed the way you grab your wallet in a fire. I looked at it sitting there in the wrong room and couldn’t decide which of us should feel worse.
Downstairs, the dishwasher door opened. A cabinet closed. It was the one to the left of the sink, with a hinge that needed oil. I knew every sound the house made.
I got up. I made the guest bed, tucked it in tight, like my mother taught me.
My phone lit up on the nightstand. It was Mom with the photo on the screen I’d set years ago—her in the Minnesota kitchen, mid-laugh, with a wooden spoon held up like a baton.
You don’t not answer your mother. I sat back on the bed I’d just made.
“Anyu.”
“You’re home? You’re back?”
“Landed last night. Late.”
“Your father taped the game. He found a feed somewhere, I don’t know how; he’s got that dish pointed at half of Europe now. He watched it twice.”
There was a clatter in the background. “The dog went into the part of the lake that isn’t frozen and came back smelling like dead fish. Your sister’s washing him in the yard, she says hello, and she says you never call her. Are you eating?”
She doesn’t wait for responses. She never has. You don’t answer my mother so much as wait for a gap and put something in it.
“I’m eating,” I said. I pulled the wooden bird into my lap so I had something to hold. “I’m a professional athlete. Eating is part of the job.”
“Good food then,” she said.
“Eating, sleeping, doing laundry, and an hour or two on the ice. That’s the entire job. I did four loads of laundry last night. They send us on the road for ten days and I come home as a laundromat with a contract. I folded socks at midnight like a—“
“Mm.”
”—and the dryer in my building, I’ve told you, it doesn’t dry, it just tumbles things warm, so everything’s still damp and I’ve got shirts hung over every door—“
I kept going. She knew her son as an apartment dweller, not one with a long-term boyfriend and a house.
She let my stories run. Then, in a small voice, “You sound tired.”
“It’s early. You called early.”
“Hm.” I didn’t fool her. “You’re sleeping?”
“Like a baby.” I didn’t tell her I was sitting in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house she didn’t know existed, holding a bird my grandmother gave me because last night I’d shut the door on the man who was my world.
“Your bed’s still made up,” she said. “For when you come. The dog sleeps on it.” A pause. “Anyone you want to bring, there’s room.”
“Just me. You know me.”
“I know you,” she agreed.
I told her I had practice. She told me to eat something that wasn’t from a restaurant and to call my sister. We both said goodbye.
I sat there for another second with the phone dark in my hand. Then I went downstairs.
The kitchen was clean. It was beyond-normal clean.
The takeout menus that lived at the end of the counter were squared into a stack, and the junk by the fridge had been sorted into a drawer.
He’d put away the three spice jars that always lingered on the counter—garlic powder, cumin, and paprika.
At five a.m., he woke up and went through the kitchen, straightening things that didn’t need straightening.
Rook stood at the counter. The coffee maker was on. I’d gone to bed without setting the timer. He got up and made the coffee himself.
“Practice at ten,” he said.
“I know.”
He turned with his coffee, and his free hand reached out toward the back of my neck and stopped. He put it on the counter instead.
I was still mad, but I would have let him. I think he knew that, and that’s why he stopped.
I took my keys off the hook.
“I’ll go in first,” I said.
He said nothing.
I sat in my car waiting for the garage door to grind up, and when I pulled out, I started it back down before I was all the way clear. It was a trained move, automatic.
I had the Rook and Varga Show running before I hit the room.
”—and the thing nobody tells you about ten days on the road, Trier, the crucial thing, is that the laundry doesn’t end when the trip ends. The trip ends. The laundry is eternal. I did four loads last night. I’m a middle-six forward running an industrial laundry operation—“
“Uh-huh,” Trier said. He looked at me. “Are you sick?”
“Am I—no. Why?”
“You look off.”
“I look spectacular. I have a skincare routine and a smooth face that I’ve kept all season. You’re falling in love with my—“
“Sure,” Trier said, and went back to his laces. I stood at my stall with my bag still on my shoulder.
He saw it. Trier, who couldn’t find his own second glove without a search party, looked at me for three seconds and saw it. I dropped my bag and started dressing.
Rafe hovered. He walked toward my stall with his helmet in his hands, stopping a half-step short of where he usually stopped. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Pratt, taping his stick across the room, looked up at me once and went back to the tape.
I’d spent half a decade with Rook telling me to assume someone was watching. This was the first morning the watching was real. I couldn’t stand the weight of it.
Rook came in at his usual time and dressed at his stall two down. We didn’t look at each other. It was the normal system.
Markel ran breakouts. On the third rotation, I drew Rook’s side, and the puck came back to him on the half-wall under pressure.
He did what he always does when it’s me out there; he moved it to the spot where I was going to be.
Except I wasn’t there. I’d read the pressure a half-beat late, and the pass slid through the place where I should have been standing, dying against the far boards.
Coach blew the whistle. Everybody glided to a stop.
Markel stood at the blue line and looked at the spot where the puck had died, not at Rook or me. He focused on the empty ice between us.
“Again,” he said.
We ran it again, and I was where I was supposed to be. The puck arrived, and the drill moved on.
At the far end, during a water break, I caught Heath watching me.
It wasn’t a glance or a nod. He was watching. He stood by the bench with his helmet pushed up and his eyes on me. When I caught him, he didn’t look away fast like a man caught. He slowly turned toward Kieran.
There was a brief exchange. Kieran said something short, and Heath answered shorter. Then Kieran nodded, and they both skated back into the drill as if nothing had happened.
They could see the fight in my face. I’d spent my whole life being unmissable in front so nobody looked in the back, and now the back was showing.
Heath drifted past my stall after practice with a towel wrapped around his neck.
“Rough flight home?” he asked. He was cracking the door open.
“Slept like a baby,” I said. “Woke up every two hours crying.” I watched the joke fail in his eyes.
I was one of the last to leave the room. I listened to my footsteps echo off the concrete in the parking garage. As I passed Heath’s SUV three spots from the elevator, I saw him inside with Kieran. They were talking. Heath’s hand movements illustrated his words.
They didn’t see me. I kept walking.
***
The house was quiet. We’d come home in separate cars, as always. Rook was in the office. The door stood slightly ajar.
I stopped in the hall and looked at it. He never worked with the door open. The gap was for me.
I went to the kitchen because I wasn’t finished being angry. I wanted to walk through that door, but I didn’t know how to hold my ground and make up at the same time.
The doorbell rang. The front door.
I froze. Nobody used that doorbell. The cleaner had keys. Deliveries were left on the step. Rook’s parents were a thousand miles east in Maine. The bell had rung maybe five times since I’d moved in.
The office door opened all the way. Rook came out, and across the length of the hall we looked at each other. The fight was gone, and we were both rattled.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
I moved out of sightline of the door without being told. Rook opened the door.
“Hey, Rook. Sorry to just show up,” Heath said. A beat. “We were hoping to borrow a few minutes with both of you.”
I stepped out where they could see me. Rook didn’t look at me. He just opened the door wide.
“Living room?” Heath asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He was already moving through the house.
Kieran looked around as he followed, the way he read a zone entry on the ice. He saw the two sets of shoes by the garage door and my road bag at the foot of the stairs.
He sat in the armchair nobody ever sat in. Heath remained standing. Rook came as far as the end of the couch and stopped there, using the blue-line stance.
And I couldn’t stand still in the room. I said, “I’ll get water,” as if we were hosting. I went to the kitchen because my body needed a job.
I was filling the second glass when Heath started talking.
“I won’t make a speech,” he said. “I’ve been watching for three seasons, but I’ve said nothing because it wasn’t my place to speak out, and Kieran told me to wait. He was right. So we waited.”
The water ran over the top of the glass and onto my hand. I shut the tap off.
“I’m going to tell you one thing,” Heath said, “so you know I’m not guessing.
The road rooms. Three seasons of them. When the travel coordinator sends the rooming blocks around for input, I look.
Buffalo last week, you were in 914 and he was in 911.
Philadelphia, across the hall. Detroit, across the hall.
It’s not luck, Rook. It’s never been luck.
I check the blocks, and when the geometry’s wrong, I suggest a swap.
Nobody questions me because nobody questions room assignments. ”
I stood in the kitchen holding two glasses of water. The hotel hallways had been short for a long time. They were that way because Heath had been quietly bending the travel sheet for three seasons. The floor beneath me moved an inch.
“We’re not here to push,” Kieran said. “We’re here if you want help, and only if you want it.
If you tell us to go, we’ll go, and it’ll never come up again.
That’s the whole offer.” He paused. “But I want to say one thing first, because I’m the one in this room who’s qualified to say it.
I ran my life the same way you’re running yours.
I contained everything and handled everything, building a bubble around myself.
And I was good at it, but it had a cost. It costs more than you think. ”
I came down the hall with the glasses, and I stopped in the doorway. Rook was coming apart.
It started small. He stood at the end of the couch with his arms folded and said, “Three seasons,” and then stopped.
He tried again. “I kept you both at—I did that on purpose.
The distance. I thought—“ The sentence broke off, and he put his hand over his mouth.
His shoulders dropped and started to shake.
They had protected him. He had held them at arm’s length to keep the secret safe, and the whole time they had been defending the secret, redrawing the travel sheet and asking for nothing. They merely waited to be needed in any other way.
Kieran got up from the chair and put his hand on Rook’s shoulder.
Heath crossed the room and touched the back of Rook’s neck.
He didn’t pull away.
I stood in the doorway and watched my man cry in front of other human beings for the first time. It was nearly silent and moved through his body in long shudders.
Heath’s hand stayed at the back of his neck.
I had never seen anyone other than me hold him up.
I’d thought that was because I was the only one who understood the real man.
I lived with him every home night—the warm, verbal Rook, the one nobody at the rink would believe.
It hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t a question of understanding; it was a question of being allowed inside.
He’d built a castle that not only protected us, it cut him off from the rest of the world.
I didn’t cross the room. I stayed where I was.
If I went, he’d rush to put himself back together. Staying where I was gave him room to let Heath and Kieran inside for once.
It didn’t last long. The shudders slowed, and he straightened. Heath and Kieran stepped back.
“Okay,” Heath said.
Rook nodded. His face was wrecked, and nobody in the room pretended otherwise.
They didn’t stay. I’d expected something else. Maybe stay for coffee, or conduct a summit, a planning session with bullet points. Instead, Kieran picked up his jacket and said, “You know where we live.”
Heath passed me on his way to the door and put a hand on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything.
They let themselves out the front door, like it was nothing. The latch clicked.
Rook stood by the couch, wiping his face with the heel of his hand. He looked at me, eyes wet, and he was more visible than ever.
I set the glasses down on the bookshelf and crossed the room to him.