Chapter 23 #2
The team hit us. Cross got there first, and he put one glove on the back of my neck and the other on the back of Rook’s. He pulled our two heads in against his for one second and then let go, skating off to avoid being crushed by our teammates.
Heath came in behind him and couldn’t speak. His mouth was moving, and nothing was coming out of it. He grabbed me by the front of the jersey and shook me. That was his entire speech.
Kieran had his phone and was filming. He knew we’d want to see this later, so he remained calm while the rest of us were losing our minds.
“For the archive,” he called, and kept filming.
Rook glanced over my shoulder as the team surrounded us in a crushing group hug.
“Go get your kid,” he said.
Somehow, I wrenched myself free of the mob and skated to the bench. I got both my hands into Rafe’s cage and pulled his wet face toward me. “Hey,” I said. “Hey. Look at me. You’re okay.”
He laughed, a huge, wet, broken laugh. “I’m sorry, sir—I couldn’t help it.”
“Don’t you dare be sorry.” I gave the cage a little shake, his head with it. “Not for this.”
He nodded and kept crying, letting me hold his head for a second longer.
***
The house was quiet.
The Kovac piece had gone live while we were getting ready for bed, and I refused to read it without him. That was a major feat of self-control.
“You read it,” I said, handing him the laptop. Then I took it back. “No. I’ll read it. You do voices badly.”
“You read everything better than me.”
“I do.” I propped it on my knees and pulled him over against me, reading aloud in the lamplight.
The headline was plain because Kovac wouldn’t do a loud one. What It Costs to Stay. And under it, in smaller type: Mattias Rook has played fifteen years by being impossible to notice. He’s decided to stop.
“He’s good,” I said, three sentences in.
“I hate that he’s so good.” There was a line about Rook’s game: how the best defensemen don’t make highlight reels, and how his entire job for fifteen seasons had been to make the night boring for the goalie.
Kovac said he was ruthlessly good at it.
“Ruthlessly. He called you ruthless. You’re the man who apologized to a basil plant. ”
“Keep going.”
Kovac discussed the room in his article. He mentioned Trier’s married-couple line and Rafe’s Saskatchewan politeness.
My voice slowed when I got close to me.
“He will tell you, if you ask him plainly, that he spent most of those fifteen years deciding he would wait for a life with someone he loved until after hockey. He will also tell you, now, that he was wrong about that.” I had to stop.
I grabbed Rook’s hand and held it to my chest while he took over the reading.
“He never wanted until after. He wanted now. I was slow to catch on.”
“You said that to a reporter? With a notebook.”
“He didn’t write it down. He said he’d remember.” Rook moved his thumb on the back of my hand. “He remembered.”
There was a last line, and Kovac had earned it. I swallowed hard and read it. “For fifteen years, the most reliable man in that room was also the most hidden. He has stopped being one of those two things. He will keep being reliable.”
I closed the laptop and reached over Rook to set it on his nightstand on top of his book. That annoys him, so I did it on purpose and settled down with my ear over his heart and was quiet.
He ran his fingers through my hair.
“Hey,” I said, after a while, into his skin.
“Yeah?”
“You did the thing this morning you said you couldn’t do? You let go of the wheel. How’s it feel?”
He took his time.
“You know the last shift of a back-to-back? The legs are gone, and when you finally get to the bench, you’re emptied all the way out, and it’s the best you’ve felt all night.
” His fingers continued to move through my hair.
“That. I keep waiting to feel like I forgot something on the ice. I know I didn’t. ”
He whispered, “Szeretlek.” He murdered it like always with his Maine mouth sliding the sz sideways.
“It means I love you, he told me, as if I didn’t already know from the hundred other times he’d said it.
“Say it again,” I said, my voice getting thick with impending sleep.
“Szeretlek.”
“Worse.”
“Yes, it’s the worst.”
“That means it’s perfect,” I said.
“Christmas,” I said, a while later. The word arriving out of nowhere the way words do when I’m halfway under.
“What about it?”
“It’s two weeks. We’re going to Minnesota, and my mother is going to put a bowl in your hands and Medve’s going to knock you in the snow. Then we’ll fly to Maine and your mother is going to set out five mugs and not say a word about it. Still two Christmases, but we’ll be there together for both.”
“I like Christmas,” he said.
“My dad will make you watch a documentary with maps in it now that he knows you like it.”
“I like maps.”
“I know you like maps; that’s the whole horror of it. I’m going to lose you to a Slovak fisherman and a Maine carpenter with a black Lab—“
“Go to sleep, Luki.”
“Make me,” I said, already most of the way gone, and before he could answer, I settled into soft snores.