JEREMIAH
Chapter playlist:
Fire — Barns Courtney
The elevator doors open and Jake Twiles is standing there in a Nebraska T-shirt and a goofy grin on his face.
“Precio.” He gets a hand on my chest before I can step past him. “Two blocks from here. Coffee Loft. Best matcha in the District. I would not lie to you about this.”
Jake plays for Nebraska, but I met him when we were both selected for the U.S.
Olympic team. Now we get the opportunity to play for the West Stars together for the Semiquincentennial Tournament.
And even though our home teams will go against each other in the fall, something like winning Olympic Gold together will give you a friend for life.
“Matcha,” I repeat, because is this the same guy who spent half his time in the Olympic Village explaining, unprompted, why espresso was the only honest drink a man could order?
Something happened to him since Milan. I want to know what.
“Don’t judge me.” He’s already walking backward toward the lobby doors, pointing at me like one of those inspirational speakers. “Meet me there.”
My phone buzzes against my hip. MARISELA, the screen says, because in twenty-six years that’s the whole extent of what she’s been to me.
I should let it go to voicemail. But I’m too nice for my own good.
“Give me a few,” I call after Jake. “I’ll find you.”
He gives me a thumbs up and disappears toward the lobby, humming a tune which I don’t quite place. I step into the elevator and press my floor. The doors are still sliding shut when I answer.
“Mijo!” Her voice arrives at full volume, the way it always does when she’s decided the phone works better if she yells directly into it. “You landed, finally, I call you four times already, Jeremiah. Four times.”
“Hi.” The elevator lurches upward. “Just got in.”
“And you didn’t call your mama first? After everything?”
Here we go.
She knew I was in California all last week for the press tour.
She also decided the drive from her place to Irvine wasn’t worth making.
Apparently traffic on the 405 was my fault.
But she wants to make it perfectly clear she would have been there, etcetera etcetera.
By the time the doors open on my floor, I’ve got a headache and she’s still going.
I took the red-eye straight from the press tour in California to DC this morning.
I don’t have the energy to tell her the other boys on the team don’t have their mommies tagging along for media stuff.
Then again, the other boys don’t have Marisela Beltran for a mother.
They have normal mothers who don’t want to take advantage of all the cameras and social media coverage to resuscitate a dying telenovela career.
She goes on about her latest botox. There is a strong possibility I will not get off this call before I die of natural causes.
I find my room, key card, door, the little green light, and step inside still holding the phone an inch from my ear to save my eardrums. That’s when I see the fish.
Not one fish. A colony. Orange and black plushies lined along the headboard like a tiny, furious parade.
A gift basket the size of a kayak, wrapped in cellophane, stuffed with candy in the same two colors.
A hoodie with PRECIO stitched over the heart.
And a bouquet of marigolds so enormous I may need to request a bigger room just to reach the air conditioner without turning sideways.
“Mijo, are you listening?”
“I’m listening.” I am looking at a small orange civilization but I’m listening. Sort of.
“Because what I’m saying is, Newport Beach to the Hills, that’s nothing, that’s nada. Twenty minutes.”
“It’s over an hour. With traffic, more like two.”
“You’ll have a car, mijo, you’ll figure it out. The point iiiis…” She draws the word out ‘is’ like it’s a title card. “We’re basically going to be neighbors. Practically family, all over again, like when you were little.”
We were never neighbors when I was little. She was in Miami and I was a six-hour flight away. She sent a card on my birthday that one time, the year she remembered.
I don’t say any of that. I never say any of that. I set my bag on the luggage rack and start unpacking, and that’s when I step backward directly onto a stuffed fish.
It honks. A deep rubber-duck honk no fish has ever made in the recorded history of fish.
“What was that?” Marisela says.
“Nothing. A fish.”
“A fish?”
“It’s a long story.”
“With you it’s always a long story, mijo, I don’t know where you get this from.” A beat. “Probably your father.”
Probably.
I pick up the fish and look it dead in its enormous plastic eyes. It looks back at me with a blank expression. I set it down on the table very gently, and that’s when I notice the card propped against the gift basket.
Heavy stock. The Irvine team logo embossed across the top. Inside, handwriting that slants hard to the right, all caps:
Welcome to the aquarium. Orange power!—M. Laakso
Just a few days ago I was standing on a boat out of Newport Harbor watching a pod of dolphins surf the wake while a producer told me to look “more amazed, Jeremiah, like you’ve never seen the ocean before.”
I was born in Miami. I have seen the ocean.
The day after that, I spent six hours at Disneyland with some of the other newly announced players. We took photos in front of the castle, on the carousel, and rode in a parade float. Then I ate a turkey leg the size of my forearm per the recommendation of our plaid-wearing escort.
I have never had a stranger week in my professional life. It was awesome. Or, as I told my father later that day, “Muy padre.”
But here’s the part I haven’t said out loud to anyone, not even my agent…
When I was eight, my father took me to see a movie about an underdog hockey team coached by a guy who’d already given up on life.
There was a kid on that team, smallest guy on the bench, wearing eleven because it was the only number left in his size.
By the end of the movie, he’s the one who scored the winning goal.
I rewound that scene so many times the tape wore thin in that exact spot.
I told my father I wanted to be that kid.
My father, who does not have a sentimental bone anywhere in his body, said, “Then be better than him.” End of conversation.
When I played for Corpus Christi, I wore 29. A nod to the biblical book with my name. It’s a good chapter. It’s a good number.
But then a bunch of guys out of Toronto decide to create a team inspired by that classic movie…
and recruited me to play for them. Me! So when they asked if I had a jersey number preference, I said I wanted eleven, and didn’t explain why.
They didn’t ask why. Maybe they already knew. That underdog kid from the movie.
“Mijo. Mijo, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“I was saying, the studio thinks the new pilot could be very Dynasty. Very glamorous. They’re not sure yet if I’m a lead or a diversity hire, but I told them, I said, my son just won an Olympic gold medal and now he’s going to be five minutes from my door, can you imagine the story there, the press would eat it up… ”
She rattles on about posing together for a big social media push, scripted reels, some kind of reality TV nightmare.
She has said more words to me in the last four minutes than in the previous twenty-six years combined.
I let her talk.
“I just think it’s a beautiful coincidence that it’s also an incredible photo opportunity, no?” She goes on. “Reunited with my baby boy. I already wrote the caption.”
“I can get you tickets,” I say finally. “If you want to come to a game.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “Well, of course, I would love that, it’s just my schedule right now is so, you know how it is, with the pilot. I’d have to check…”
There it is.
I knew exactly how she’d react to game tickets. I offered anyway.
She’d been baffled by hockey from the start. Not annoyed. Baffled, the way you’d be baffled if your kid came home and announced he wanted to wear nothing but togas to school. Hockey was a sport for “los güeros,” not Mexicans.
Yet she’d spent years trying to transform herself into whoever the casting directors decided “American” looked like that season. The hair a shade blonder every year. Blue contact lenses. Accent coaching that never seemed to help much.
My father, meanwhile, a man who considers a loss by the Mexican national team in the World Cup a personal tragedy requiring several days of mourning, never tried to talk me out of hockey. Not once.
“No problem,” I say, and I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do if my mother actually did show up for one of my games.
“You’re so understanding, mijo. You get that from me.”
I really, really don’t.
“Anyway, I should…”
“Ay. Mijo.” Wounded. Gentle. Theatrical and completely sincere at the same time, a trick I have never once figured out how she pulls off. “How many times do I tell you. Would it hurt you to say Mamá every now and then?”
I don’t answer that. I have never called her Mamá.
Mamá is a word for someone who shows up, and showing up was never really her thing, not until I started winning things and the wins came with cameras attached.
That’s when the calls started. That’s when I became mijo, every single time, like the word had been sitting in a drawer for years waiting for a reason to come back out.
I never called her by her first name, either.
My father raised me not to call an adult by their first name out of respect.
What I’ve landed on instead is nothing. I just don’t address her, not that I’ve had many conversations with her.
I open with “so” or “anyway” or whatever filler buys me half a second.
“I’ve got a team thing,” I say, deflecting. “I have to go.”
It’s not exactly a lie. I need to sort out all these plushies.
“Of course, go, go.” Warmly. She’s rehearsed that warmth. She’s an actress, after all. “I’m so proud of you, mijo. Tell everyone hello from me.”
Everyone? I picture myself in the lobby, flagging down the bellhop. Hi. My mother says hi. It’s not like she knows anyone in my life.
“I will,” I say, because it costs nothing, and I hang up.
I stand there in the sudden quiet, surrounded by roughly forty stuffed fish and a bouquet that belongs in the Rose Parade, and breathe out slowly through my nose.
Then I pull out my phone and type a message to Mikael.
Me: Got your gifts. The fish situation is intense. In the best way.
Me: Thank you for all this. Means a lot.
The reply comes back fast enough that I wonder if Mikael ever sleeps, until I remember he mentioned flying to Finland to see his parents this week. Which means it’s the middle of the afternoon for him.
I picture Mikael checking his phone between whatever it is co-owners of brand new NHL franchises do on a trip home. Sauna breaks. Reindeer.
Mikael: lol the merch team got a little carried away, not gonna lie
Mikael: Hendrix Ellis wanted to send an actual fish tank. With actual fish. I had to be the voice of reason
Mikael: Welcome to the fish fam for real though man. Genuinely thrilled to have you. Go win a tournament, then come win us a Cup
I huff out something close to a laugh, alone in a hotel room full of plush animals, and send back a thumbs up.
Out of all the owners, Mikael’s the one who texts most. He’s the one who called me himself the night the deal closed, instead of having someone else do it.
There’s a whole list of others, Owen Jablonski, Hendrix Ellis, Sawyer O’Malley, Griffin McGregor, and a handful of other names engraved on the Stanley Cup.
Several of them are still playing for Toronto.
A few years back, a group of those Toronto players pooled their own money to buy the franchise outright after the previous owner turned out to be running a Ponzi scheme big enough to make the actual news, not just the sports section.
I was a rookie in Corpus Christi when that story broke, and I remember thinking even then that you don’t see players do that. They did it anyway.
All of them somehow found time to build a franchise from nothing because, from what I can tell, they wanted it to feel like that movie. An underdog story with a happy ending.
I’m moving the gift basket when I see a creamsicle colored hat wedged under a scarf. Orange embroidery, block letters across the front.
GILL POWER
I hold it up. Turn it over once. I put it on. Check the mirror. Take it off. Put it back on.
Jake is never going to let me live this down.
Oh no, Jake! Coffee Loft. Matcha. I haven’t even changed out of the white dress shirt I flew in.
I grab the key card and head out, hat still on, mostly to hide the hair.
That matcha better live up to the hype, because I flew red-eye, I’ve been awake for twenty-four hours, and my body is running on a turkey leg high and hallucinations of that pickpocket every time I close my eyes.
I subconsciously run my right hand over my watch band.
I don’t do this. I have never once let a stranger take up space in my head, not in college, not my rookie year, not the Olympics, not ever. I built a career on the idea that focus is a finite resource and you don’t waste it on people you’ll never see again.
And yet. Here she is in my head. Her wrist under my hand. The look on her face when she realized I wasn’t letting go.
It’s the lack of sleep. Has to be. Nobody thinks straight after a red-eye, and my brain is filling the empty space with whatever it can find, the way static fills a channel with no signal.
I press the call button for the elevator and let it go.
There’s a tournament to win. A roster full of guys who already feel like a team. And back in my room, forty stuffed orange fish that need to go. The children’s hospital, maybe. I’ll ask the concierge. Okay, maybe I’ll keep one plushie.
The elevator arrives. I step in, already thinking about matcha and fish tanks and anything that isn’t freckles and brown eyes, and let the doors close behind me.