2. Marcus
MARCUS
I have made my living for eleven years by reading bodies.
A shoulder drops, a player is about to cheat to his backhand.
A glove twitches, a fight is coming. I see the thing before it happens, and I put my body where the damage is going to land, and that is the whole of my job and most of who I am.
They pay me to be the one who sees it coming.
I did not see this coming.
I was alone on the main sheet at an hour when no sane man skates, working off a thing I couldn't name, the way I do every off-season, because an idle Kovalenko is a dangerous Kovalenko and I learned that lesson at my father's kitchen table before I was old enough to spell my own name.
So I skated. Edges, stops, the burn in the legs that drowns out the noise in the head.
And then the noise in the head went quiet on its own, because something moved in the corridor window, and I looked up.
A woman and a small boy.
I knew her instantly. That was its own gut punch, the way three years fell away to nothing, the way my body just said her before my mind could put up its defenses.
Sophia Ricci. I'd spent a long time training myself not to think her name and apparently the training was worth exactly nothing, because there she was in a corridor at seven in the morning and my chest did the thing it had done the first time I ever saw her, a year of slow burn and one night and then a hole in my life shaped exactly like her, a hole I'd told everyone, including myself, was a relief.
But I didn't stay on her. That's the part I keep coming back to. My eyes went to the kid.
Because the kid looked at me.
Small children don't usually look at me.
Grown men avoid my eyes in the tunnel before a game.
Cameras catch me and call it menace. But this boy in dinosaur snow pants stared straight down two hundred feet of ice and looked at me with a flat, frank, fearless interest, head tipped, taking my measure, and the look on his face was a look I have seen exactly one place in my entire life, which is the mirror.
His eyes were gray.
I want to be precise about this, because precision is the only thing keeping me upright in the memory.
There are a lot of gray-eyed people in the world.
Gray eyes prove nothing. But these weren't just gray.
They were my mother's gray, the Kovalenko gray, pale at the rim and dark at the center, the eyes my babushka used to say came down from some Cossack on a horse four hundred years ago, the eyes that had stared back at me out of every cheap bathroom mirror in every cheap apartment of my childhood.
I knew those eyes the way you know your own name.
They were looking at me out of a stranger's face, a three-year-old stranger, in a building where the boy's mother used to bring me coffee and stand a little too close and laugh at the things I said that weren't even jokes.
I should tell you about her, the woman in the corridor, because you can't understand what that morning did to me without understanding what she'd been to me before.
Sophia Ricci had been the team PA for a year before the night that ended everything, and in that year she'd done a thing no one else had managed in my entire career, which was to see me.
The whole organization treated me like a weapon, a thing you point at the other team and otherwise leave in its case.
Coaches managed me, teammates respected me at a careful distance, the front office calculated me.
And then there was this PA with a chin like a dare and a mouth that never stopped, who brought me my coffee every morning and looked at me like I was a person instead of a thing, who'd say something sharp and funny and wait, actually wait, to see if the wall would crack and let a laugh out.
Sometimes it did. She was the only one who ever got the wall to crack on purpose, and she did it daily, and I rearranged my entire morning to be in the room when she brought the coffee, and I told myself it was nothing, because nothing was the only thing a man like me was allowed to want.
And then one night, after the worst loss of my career, the nothing became everything, in a hotel room, the single best night of my life.
And the next morning I woke up so terrified of how much I wanted to keep her, so certain that a soft alive woman that close to a man like me would end up broken by the thing in me I couldn't control, that I did the only thing I knew how to do with a thing I was scared to lose.
I destroyed it first. I stood at a window and said the cruelest, coldest, most surgical things I could find, words chosen specifically to make her leave and not look back, and she left, and I told the hole in my chest it was for her own good, and I went back to being the weapon.
I never knew she was pregnant. That's the thing I have to make you understand, standing in a corridor doing math.
I drove her off to protect her from me, and I never knew that when she walked out of that hotel she was carrying the one thing that could have made me into something other than my father, and that my cruelty at a window hadn't just cost me a woman. It had cost me a son.
I started doing the math before I'd decided to.
Three years. I'd last touched Sophia Ricci three years ago, in a hotel room after the worst loss of my career, the single best night of my life, the night I let myself have a thing I knew I shouldn't and then woke up at dawn so terrified of how much I wanted to keep it that I burned it to the ground on purpose.
I'd said things that morning. Cruel things, surgical things, things designed to make her leave and not look back, because I am my father's son and I knew, I knew, what happens to soft things that stay close to men like us.
She'd left. Within the week she was gone from the building, gone from the city as far as anyone knew, and I'd told the hole in my chest it was for her own good and gone back to being the Reapers' favorite weapon.
Three years. A boy who looked three.
I was off the ice and moving down the corridor before the calculation finished, because my body always moves toward the impact, that's the job, that's the only thing I know how to do with a thing I can't stop.
My whole body wanted to do the thing it always does, which is move toward the impact at speed, because that's the job, that's eleven years of training, you see the danger coming and you put yourself between it and the people who need protecting, fast, before it lands.
And some animal part of me had already decided this small boy was mine to protect, had decided it in the half-second I clocked his eyes, and the protect-instinct was screaming at me to do something, fix something, control something, the way it always screams.
And I made myself slow down instead, which is not a thing I'm built for.
Because the boy didn't need protecting, not from anything in that corridor, and the thing the protect-instinct wanted, to sweep in, to take charge, to make the situation mine, was exactly the wrong thing for a four-year-old meeting a strange enormous man for the first time.
So I overrode eleven years of training and a lifetime of inheritance and I got small, slow, careful, the opposite of everything my body wanted, because the first thing I ever did right as a father, before I even knew I was one, was understand that what this particular small person needed was for the biggest man in the building to make himself smaller.
I made myself slow down. I made myself crouch, get small, get down to his level, because whatever this was, it was not the kid's fault, and the last thing I wanted was to be one more enormous frightening man looming over a small person.
I know what that's like. I have a whole childhood of what that's like.
"Hey, kid. What's your name?"
"Luca. Luca Ricci. I'm three. I'm gonna drive the Zamboni when I'm big."
He shook my hand with two fingers, business-like, and I have taken slap shots to the face and skated on a torn-up knee and once finished a fight with a separated shoulder, and not one of those things hurt the way it hurt to shake that small mitten, because three is the number I'd been afraid of since the second I saw his eyes, and he'd just confirmed it himself, proud as anything, three.
I looked up at Sophia.
She'd gone the color of the ice. She had a hand on the boy's shoulder, gripping, the grip of a woman bracing for a hit she's known was coming for three years, and her dark eyes were huge and wet and full of a fear I recognized because it was the same fear I'd built my whole cold life around, the fear of losing the thing you love most. And underneath the fear, fury.
At me. For being here. For figuring it out.
For existing in the same building as her secret.
"Sophia," I said. "We need to talk."
"He has a skate lesson." Her voice came out steady, which told me exactly how hard she was working. "Trevor's waiting. We can do this another..."
"Sophia."
"Not here. Not in front of..." She didn't finish.
She crouched too, between me and the boy, and put her body there the way I put mine in front of skill players, a blocker, a shield, and the sight of her doing it, defending our son from me, broke something loose in my chest I didn't have a name for.
"Let him have his lesson. Please. He's been talking about it all week.
Don't take a thing from him just because you're angry at me. "
It landed exactly where she aimed it, because she has always known precisely where to aim.
"I'm not angry at the kid," I said, low, so Luca wouldn't hear. "I could never be angry at the kid. Look at him." My voice did something I didn't authorize. "Look at his eyes, Sophia. Tell me whose eyes those are. Tell me to my face."
She didn't answer. She didn't have to. The not-answering was the whole answer, and we both knew it, crouched on either side of a three-year-old in a freezing corridor while a Zamboni ground its endless loops on the far side of the wall.
"Mama, can I go now?" Luca tugged her sleeve, oblivious, blessedly oblivious, to the fact that his entire world was being rearranged eighteen inches above his head. "Trevor's gonna do the cones."
Sophia stood. Smoothed his hair with a hand that shook. "Go, baby. I'll be right here. I'm not going anywhere."
I'm not going anywhere. She said it to him but she looked at me when she said it, and there was a challenge in it, and a plea, and three years of something I'd spent a long time pretending I didn't owe her.
The boy clomped off down the corridor in his skate guards, and the two of us stood there in the cold, and I felt the entire architecture of my carefully empty life come down around my ears, and the strangest thing was that I didn't reach to catch it.
"I have a son," I said. Not a question. I was done with questions.
"Marcus..."
"Three years. You ran three years ago and you were already...
" I couldn't finish that one either. "You let me think I'd just driven off a woman I slept with.
And the whole time you were..." I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, hard, like I could push the thing back in. "Does he know? Does he know who I am?"
"He knows you're a man who skates like the TV men.
" Her chin came up, that Ricci chin, the one I'd fallen for across a year of carrying coffee.
"And that's all he's going to know until you and I have a very long conversation somewhere that isn't a hallway, Kovalenko, because I have raised that little boy alone for three years and I will not have his whole life blown up at a skate lesson by a man who's had the news for ninety seconds.
You want to talk? We'll talk. On my terms. When my kid is not in the building. "
Our kid, I almost said. I didn't. I'd burned enough down for one morning.
But I watched her walk away down the corridor toward our son, spine straight, shaking, magnificent, and I understood two things with the cold clarity I usually save for the ice.
The first was that I had a child, and I'd missed three years of him, and someone was going to have to account for that, and I had a sick feeling the someone was partly me.
The second was that whatever I'd told myself for three years about the hole shaped like Sophia Ricci, it had just stopped being a hole, because she was standing in it again, and I was already, God help us both, doing the thing I do.
I was already deciding to never let either of them out of my sight again.