Chapter 20 #2
It was 6:47 p.m. The game was at 7 p.m. I had forty minutes to change, to tape my shoulder, to do all the preparations that a man did when I was going to sit on the bench and watch other men do the work that I would never do again.
Tape my shoulder because the mobility was still compromised from the old concussion, tape my shoulder and walk out onto the bench and stand there and watch the team play while my body ached with the desire to be on the ice, to be doing something, to be anything other than a passenger watching life happen.
At least on the bench I could see the game, could concentrate on something other than the silence coming from Frostbite Falls.
My phone was on the nightstand.
I picked it up.
I dialed her number.
She did not answer. I listened to the ringing, listened to the particular Minnesota silence that existed between rings, listened to the moment when her voicemail greeting came up—professional, diner voice, the voice of a woman who was trained to be polite to strangers.
I heard her voice on the voicemail greeting—“You’ve reached Maple’s Diner, we’re open 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.
Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” Professional voice.
Diner voice. Not the voice she used when she was alone with me, when her defenses were down, when she let me see the inside of her.
That voice was softer. That voice said my name like it meant something.
That voice laughed when I said something that was not funny, laughed like she could not help it, laughed like I had surprised her into happiness.
I did not leave a message. What was there to say? I had said it. I had told her the truth. She had closed the door. There was nothing left but the waiting.
I called again at 7:03 p.m., before the game, hoping that maybe she would pick up, hoping that maybe the time had shifted something, hoping that maybe five minutes had changed her mind about the man in the apartment over her garage.
I had learned hope from her. She had taught me what it meant to believe in something by the way she moved through the diner each morning, by the way she checked the pie case before the sun came up, by the way she kept her grandmother’s diner alive even when it was trying to die.
She did not answer.
At 8:47 p.m., after the game (they won, 3–2, the goaltender played like I had something to prove, like my desperation was visible in the way I threw my body in front of the puck), I sat on the edge of the hotel bed and I picked up my phone for the third time.
My hands were shaking.
I understood that my hands were shaking because the game had been physical and I had been on the bench the whole time, understanding that I was a man who had retired, understanding that I was a man who would never skate in front of a crowd again, understanding that I had chosen this, had chosen to come to Frostbite Falls and take the job and build this life, and now the life was imploding and I could not even get back on the ice to work out the anxiety.
The bench had been a particular torture.
Sitting next to Beckham, watching the team play, unable to be in the game.
Helpless. That was the word. Helpless was the only word for what I was.
I texted.
I’m sorry. I will keep being sorry. Tell me when to come home.
I watched the message send. The text bubble appeared, small and blue and entirely inadequate.
Three words were not enough. Sixty words would not have been enough.
You could not fix five days of silence with a text message.
You could not restore trust with a series of carefully chosen words.
You could only send the message and then you could only wait.
I watched the three dots that meant she was typing.
The dots appeared at 11:31 p.m.
My heart jumped.
Then the dots disappeared.
No reply came after. No response. No not yet.
No I don’t know. No confirmation that she had even understood what I was asking.
Just the three dots showing that she had thought about answering, that she had started to compose something, that she had deleted it all and decided that silence was what I deserved.
I lay on my back on the hotel bed and I stared at the ceiling. My phone was in my hand. The text said Read 11:47 p.m. but there was nothing after that, no further communication, no indication that she was going to respond at all.
I understood that Tell me when to come home meant Tell me that I still have a home. Tell me that I am allowed to come back. Tell me that you are still there.
The silence that came back was the answer.
The absence of reply was a kind of language all its own.
It was the language of a woman deciding whether to let a man back into her life.
It was the language of someone weighing whether love was bigger than betrayal.
It was the language of someone choosing herself, protecting herself, deciding whether the risk of trusting me again was worth the potential cost.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark hotel room in Duluth, Minnesota, 165 miles away from the woman who would not answer her phone, and I understood that Wilder had been right—sometimes you fucked up and you could not fix it, you could only stay, you could only wait, you could only hope that staying was enough.
I understood that I had bought my way into this situation by keeping a secret, and now I was going to have to wait my way out of it, hour by hour, day by day, until the woman across the distance decided whether the man in the apartment was worth the second chance.
I thought about the fact that I had told her I loved her in front of the entire team on Day 22.
I thought about the fact that I had picked her up off the ground with my hands on her hips and my eyes on hers.
I thought about the intensity of that moment, the visibility of it, the way I had announced my love to everyone at the rink like it was a thing that could not be hidden.
And now she was hiding from me.
Fair was fair.
I deserved to sit in the dark. I deserved to wait by the phone. I deserved to feel the weight of the distance between them. This was the cost of my silence. This was the price of deciding to protect someone by lying to them.
To stay meant to wait.
At 3:47 a.m., I was still awake.
I had been counting the hours the way I counted everything else—by threes.
Three hours since the text. Six hours since the game.
Nine hours since I had left Frostbite Falls.
The darkness outside the window was absolute, the kind of darkness that only existed when you were far enough from civilization that the light pollution disappeared.
I could see nothing. No lights. No movement.
Just the particular weight of the Duluth night pressing against the glass.
I thought about the apartment. I thought about the space heater in the bedroom.
I thought about the fact that she was probably asleep, probably warm under her grandmother’s afghan, probably not thinking about me at all.
That was the worst part. Not that she was angry.
That she had moved past anger into indifference.
That she had moved past me into a place where I could not follow.
I picked up my phone again.
I watched the text. I’m sorry. I will keep being sorry. Tell me when to come home. It looked pathetic now, typed out in the middle of the night, a desperate reaching toward a woman who had given me no reason to believe she was reaching back.
I put the phone down.
I closed my eyes.
I understood that sleep was not coming. Sleep was for men who could forgive themselves. Sleep was for men who had not lied to the women they loved. Sleep was for men who deserved rest.
By the time dawn came, I would have counted approximately 14,400 seconds of waiting. I would have thought about her approximately 4,800 times. I would have looked at my phone approximately 67 times. And she would have sent no reply.
This was the architecture of penance. This was what staying meant.