30. Marcus
MARCUS
I signed my contract without an agent, which everyone told me was insane, and I did it in a way that made the front office sit very still, because for the first time in my career I walked into a negotiation knowing exactly what I wanted, and a man who knows exactly what he wants is the hardest man in the world to move.
I'd let Viktor steer me for twelve years because he knew what I wanted before I did, which was nothing, which was to be useful and unattached and portable, a wall that could go up in any city.
That man was gone. I knew what I wanted now, and it was small and specific and unmovable.
I wanted Chicago. I wanted to play out my last good years in the city where my son was learning to skate.
I wanted enough term to be there for the parts of Luca's childhood that mattered, and I was willing to take less money to get it, which is a sentence Viktor would have called career suicide and which I called, finally, knowing the price of things.
Going without an agent for the negotiation was the part everyone said was insane, and maybe it was, but it mattered to me for a reason that had nothing to do with the contract.
Viktor had steered my career for twelve years, and the steering had always been in one direction, the career-first direction, the maximize-leverage-stay-portable direction, the direction that had ultimately tried to make me trade away my own family for my market value.
Firing him wasn't just firing a man who'd betrayed me.
It was firing a whole philosophy, the philosophy that the career was the thing and everything else was either an asset to it or a threat to it.
And the cleanest way to prove to myself that I'd actually changed, that the philosophy was gone and not just the man, was to walk into the most important negotiation of my career and conduct it as the man I'd become rather than the player Viktor had built, which meant doing it myself, alone, knowing exactly what I wanted, which was the one thing Viktor would never have let me ask for. To stay. To take less. To plant myself.
I told Hendricks the truth, which is my whole strategy now.
I told him I'd take a team-friendly deal, short term, with a no-trade clause, because I wasn't leaving Chicago, not for any money, and that if the team wanted a veteran enforcer who'd protect their kids on the ice and mentor their young guys and be a steady hand in the room, I was their man, on those terms, and if they wanted to play hardball about it I'd walk away from the game entirely and go coach mites, because there was nothing in hockey worth being in a different city than my son.
Hendricks looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "Six years I've watched you, Kovalenko.
You never once cared about anything but the next shift.
And now you're sitting here turning down money to stay near a four-year-old.
" He almost smiled. "It's the best version of you I've ever seen.
Done. Short term, no-trade, you're a Reaper as long as you want to be one.
And for what it's worth, the way you handled all of it, the leak, the lies, sitting down on that ice, this city's fallen in love with you, you grumpy bastard. Try not to let it go to your head."
Tank found out what I'd done, the no-trade, the team-friendly term, the money I'd left on the table to stay, and he tracked me down in the gym and shook his head at me.
You absolute sap, he said, with enormous affection.
Guys spend their whole careers fighting for every dollar and the leverage to leave, and you walked in there and gave up money for a clause that makes you stay.
He clapped my shoulder. It's the best thing I've ever heard you do.
The room's gonna love it. You planted yourself, brother.
Six years you were a ghost we couldn't keep, and now you've made yourself a Reaper they can't trade.
Welcome home, for real this time. And I understood that the contract wasn't only a vow to Sophia and Luca, it was a vow to the room too, the brotherhood I'd kept at arm's length for six years, finally telling them I was theirs and not going anywhere, and Tank heard it as exactly that, and the whole room did.
I signed. And I walked out of that building a man who'd put his family in his contract, who'd chosen the chair even in the one room where I'd always chosen the door.
I told Beck first, of the players, which surprised even me, because Beck and I don't talk, we share ice at four in the morning and let the silence do the talking, two men who'd found each other at the rink in the dead hours because neither of us could be anywhere with people in it.
But I skated out that next morning and he was already there, alone in his crease the way he always is, and I told him about the contract, the term I'd left short on purpose, the money I'd left on the table, the clause that made me unmovable.
He was quiet a long time, the way Beck is quiet, working pucks into the corners of his net.
"You know what I notice," he said finally, not looking at me.
"You used to skate out here at four because you couldn't stand to be around anybody.
Same as me. And lately you skate out here and the whole time you're just waiting for it to be a normal hour so you can go be with them.
You're not hiding anymore. You're killing time.
" He shot a puck off the post, a small sharp clang in the empty building.
"I'm still hiding. I want you to know I can tell the difference, is all.
I can see you got out. I'm glad one of us did.
" And he wouldn't say anything else, and we skated the rest of it in silence, but I made a note of it, the way a friend tells you he's still drowning by telling you he's glad you're not, and I thought, your turn's coming, Beck, whether you want it or not, and when it does I'll be the one out here at four in the morning waiting for you.
My mother was the first person I told about the contract, before Sophia even, because Irina had earned the first telling, thirty-one years of earning it.
I drove out to the house I'd bought her and I sat at her kitchen table and I told her I'd re-signed, in Chicago, on a team-friendly deal, less money, a no-trade clause, that I'd planted myself in the one city where my son was growing up.
She was quiet for a long moment, my mother, and then she said, in Russian, your father could not keep a job for two seasons or a marriage for ten years or a single promise he ever made.
He went where the next thing was, always, the next job, the next bottle, the next town, and he called it freedom, and it was just running.
And you have just signed a paper that says you cannot run, that ties you to one place for your son.
She'd taken my face in her hands. Do you understand what you have done, Marcusha?
You have made it impossible to be him. You have made running against the rules, in writing.
I have prayed for thirty-one years and here it is on a contract.
And she'd wept, and fed me, and I'd understood that the contract wasn't just a deal or even just a vow to Sophia and Luca.
It was a vow to the frightened boy I'd been, the one who watched his father run, finally putting it in writing that the running stopped with him.
I started to believe her. That's the thing.
Somewhere in all of it, the chair and the half-second and the contract and sitting down on the ice, I started to believe I was not my father, not because Sophia told me or my mother told me, but because I'd watched myself, over and over, choose the thing he never chose.
The evidence had piled up until even I couldn't argue with it.
A man is what he repeatedly does, and I'd repeatedly stayed, repeatedly chosen, repeatedly put my hands down, and you cannot do a thing a hundred times and still call yourself incapable of it.
Which left the gesture.
Because Sophia had cracked the door, and she'd told me, in so many words, that she needed me to choose her out loud, in the light, on purpose, something that proved to her and to Luca and to a whole city that I was all in, and I'd spent every day since the conversation turning it over.
The old me, the Viktor-managed me, would have done something expensive and grand and a little bit about myself, a billboard, a stadium announcement, the kind of OTT gesture the tabloids love.
And I almost did. I almost reached for grand.
And then I sat in the chair with Dr. Osei and I figured out the thing that mattered, which is that the gesture couldn't be about proving I was a big enough man to claim her.
It had to be about proving I'd become the specific kind of man she needed, which is a man who stays, a man who shows up, a man who chooses the chair in public the way he'd learned to choose it in private.
The gesture couldn't be a one-time grand thing, because a one-time grand thing is just another way of being the guy who swoops in.
It had to be a public version of the boring forever thing.
It had to say, in front of everyone, not look how much I love her, but look how much I intend to stay.
I figured out what it was going to be. And I went to the brotherhood, to Tank and Beck and the room, because a man doesn't do a thing like this alone, and I'd spent my whole life doing everything alone, and the not-alone was the whole point now.
I told them the plan. Tank grinned the captain's grin.
Beck, who never smiles, smiled. Cole the rookie volunteered for a job before he even knew what it was.
"It's about time," Tank said. "We've been waiting all season for you to do something stupid and romantic. The whole room's in. Just tell us when."
I told them when. And I went to Irina, and to Sophia's mother Rosa, who had decided months ago that I was hers now and brooked no argument about it, and I let the two grandmothers in on it, which meant it was definitely going to happen, because nothing on this earth stops two grandmothers who've agreed on a wedding.
And I went to the one person whose blessing mattered most, the smallest one, the one with my eyes. I took Luca for ice cream, just the two of us, and I asked him, with a question mark, the most important question I'd ever asked anyone.
"Hey, bud. I want to ask you something, man to man.
" He looked at me, gray eyes serious over a cone dripping down his fist. "How would you feel if I asked your mom to marry me?
So we could all be a family, all the time, in one house, forever.
Would that be okay with you? It's a big thing.
You get a vote. You get the biggest vote, actually. "
Luca thought about it the way he thinks about everything, with his whole face. Then he said, "Would you still teach me the stops?"
"Every day for the rest of your life."
"And basketti on Sundays?"
"Every Sunday."
He nodded, the matter settled with the gravity only a four-year-old can bring. "Okay. You can marry my mom. But I get to hold the ring. That's the rule. The kid holds the ring."
"The kid holds the ring," I agreed, and I had to look at the ice cream menu for a second so my son wouldn't see his father cry, and I understood that I had everything in place now, the contract, the brotherhood, the grandmothers, and most of all the smallest, most important yes, and all that was left was the woman, and the door she'd cracked, and the out-loud in-the-light forever thing I was finally, after thirty-one years, brave enough to do.