Heart of Stone
SLADE
She shifts against me, propping herself up on one elbow. I can feel her looking at me.
“Tell me what it actually looks like,” she says. “The season. Day to day.”
“Regular season runs October through April. Eighty-two games. Half of them on the road. Road trips can be three, four, five days at a stretch. Sometimes longer.” I pause. “If we make the playoffs, it goes through June.”
“And the road trips?”
“Means I’m gone a lot,” I say. “Morning skate, film sessions, travel, games. It’s not a flexible life.”
Another silence. I can feel her thinking.
“Slade.” Her voice is gentle. “You’re asking me to abandon my business. My boutique, my staff, my clients—it’s not something I can just pack up and take to Denver. You’re asking me to leave the whole life I’ve just started building in Marble Falls.”
Shit, when she puts it that way, I realize how selfish I’m being.
“I know. I know it’s not simple.” I exhale. “We could do long distance. You stay here, I’m in Denver, we figure it out as we go.”
“What does long distance look like with your schedule?” she asks. “Realistically.”
Fuck, I don’t want to tell her. Because it doesn’t look good.
Hockey season means road trips every week. Different cities. Home for a few days and then gone again. The odd FaceTime in a hotel room at midnight. Flying her out when I can, which won’t be nearly often enough.
“It’s complicated,” I admit.
“And after Denver?” she says. “What’s the plan?”
I don’t answer immediately.
“Slade. After Denver, what happens?”
“Another team, probably,” I say. “That’s how I’ve always done it. Free agency, trades. You go where the contract is.”
“So another city,” she says. “And then another after that. For how long?”
“Until I retire.”
“Why a different team every season?” She asks it gently. Like she knows there’s not an easy answer to that.
I can’t give her the pat answer I give in press conferences: that a new team keeps my skills fresh. Can’t even give her the answer I give my family, which is only a half-truth: that I don’t like to be locked into anything.
Lila is my wife. She deserves the deepest truth.
“I don’t like to get attached,” I admit.
Even though I can’t see her expression in the deep velvety dark, I can picture the thoughtful look on her face. “Why?”
“Attachment is the root of all suffering.”
Her hand just strokes my hair and I relax into her touch.
“I learned that on a meditation retreat in Nepal,” I explain.
“I know I probably got a lot of it wrong. I mean, I’m the furthest fucking thing from a philosopher or theologian or whatever.
But when the monk said that, it made so much sense to me.
” I stroke her shoulder with my fingertips.
“My mom had just died and I was in a dark place. Didn’t know how I got there or how to get out of it.
And then I heard that. Attachment is the root of all suffering. And it all clicked.”
“You were very attached to her,” Lila says quietly.
“Mom was the only one who really got me. Who loved me and didn’t ask me to be different and liked me anyway. And when she got sick…”
I take a deep, steadying breath. “I was there when she passed. Dad got called away on an emergency. Walker was on tour. Tanner and Josie were at school. It was just me.”
My throat feels tight and the urge to shut down, to retreat inward, is almost too powerful to resist. I’ve never shared this memory with anyone before.
“I’d been reading to her,” I tell Lila. “She liked when I read to her toward the end. She couldn’t always follow the story but she liked the sound of a voice. I was mid-sentence when she stopped breathing.”
I have to work to keep my voice steady now.
“I just sat by her side in shock. Mom was always moving, always talking, so filled with life. And seeing her completely still, feeling her hand go cold in mine...” I swallow hard.
“I thought I knew what pain was. I realized I didn’t know a damn thing until then. ”
“I’m so sorry,” Lila says softly.
Her soft hand cups my cheek and I lean into it, nuzzling her palm. I continue, thickly, “But I did know I never wanted to feel hurt like that again. And that meant never letting myself love anyone or anything ever again.”
“So no commitments,” Lila says, moving her hand to hold mine beneath the blanket. “No team. No letting your house be a home. No pets or close friends or serious girlfriends or any real attachments.”
“It was always easier that way.”
I stare into the darkness, getting comfort from my wife’s fingers twined in mine.
A drop of liquid lands on my arm and I realize Lila is crying.
“Baby,” I say, voice husky, “what’s wrong?”
“I’m so sorry you lost her. I’m so sorry it hurt you so badly.” She hugs me tightly.
I stroke her hair. Feel her soft body pressed to mine, inhale her familiar scent. “Time heals all wounds.”
“I’m not so sure you’re healed.” She sniffles and takes a breath. “I get it now. This marriage. It was an easy yes because it was fake from the start. An ending already built in. No real attachment by design. Not built to last.”
“That’s not what I want,” I tell her fiercely. “Maybe that’s what I convinced myself of when we met, but I think I was lying to myself even then. Trying to give myself the excuse to do what I really wanted to do, which is be with you.”
The words come easily to my lips even though I’ve never said them before.
“I want to make this work,” I say. “I want this for real. If you can’t come to Denver, we can do long distance. Please.” I hear the desperation in my own voice and don’t try to hide it. “I’ll come home every chance I get.”
There’s a long pause.
At last, she says, “What will that be? A few days every couple of months? For an indeterminate amount of years?”
My silence is answer enough.
“When will you retire?”
“I… I don’t know.”
She exhales, deflated. “Slade, I care for you. So deeply. But that’s not the kind of marriage I want. I don’t want to settle for crumbs. I want all of you. “
Her words hit me directly in the chest.
“You would have it,” I whisper. “I would give you everything.”
She kisses me softly in response. I can taste the salt of her tears on her lips.
“Have you ever heard this saying?” she asks.
“It goes, ‘children spell love as t-i-m-e.’ You know I was raised by a succession of nannies. My parents never gave me their time. I learned what that meant eventually. It’s not a relationship dynamic I want to repeat.
” Her cool fingertips stroke along my cheek.
“I just want to be with you. I just want time. It’s the most precious resource any of us have. Can you promise me that?”
My throat feels tight. “You have all my time right now.”
“Until you go to Denver.”
“Yes.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath. At last, she says, “Then that’s what we’ll share. And when you go back to your normal life, you’ll be free of attachments. No suffering.”
My fist clenches where it’s balled into the sheet. “So that’s it? I have to hold you and care for you and be with you, all the while knowing someday it will end?”
“That’s life.” She kisses me softly. “But I promise it will hurt so much less if we end it six months from now instead of sixty years from now.”
I hold her tight and think, I don’t want to let you go. I can’t let you go.
The words are right there.
I love you.
I’ve loved before. My mother, my family, this land. But even the deep love I had for my mother was the love of a child, pure and dependent and devastating in its loss.
The love I feel for Lila is different from anything I’ve known. It’s being in love. It’s adoration and passion and need and choice all intertwined. It’s the kind of thing that alters you on a molecular level. I feel it changing me.
And it’s love that’s a choice.
I fell in love with my wife because of who she is: her warmth, her courage, her spirit. I fell in love with her because she saw me, not the jersey number, not the Rhodes name, just me. And she liked that man.
She’s the love I wasn’t looking for and didn’t expect. The only love I’ll ever want.
The words stay in my throat.
Because I know what happens when you love someone that completely. I’ve held the hand of the person I love and felt it go cold and I swore I’d never put myself back in that position. Never love anything so completely that losing it could break me.
I can’t survive building my whole world around someone and then watching them go.
I don’t know how I’m going to survive Lila leaving me as it is.
“So we stick to the plan,” she says quietly. “Right?”
I don’t answer.
But she settles back against my chest. I put my arm around her. We lie in the dark and I stare at the ceiling and feel the wrongness of that idea sitting in my chest.
People always told me I have a heart of stone, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel like it right now. It feels like my heart is a tender and bruised thing, something that got badly broken and never healed right.
Stick to the plan. I almost let out a bitter laugh.
What plan? We get a divorce? And then what?
I have to spend the rest of my life pining for my ex-wife?
Knowing the one who got away lives in my hometown and for years I’ll see her around, with a new man, with children of her own someday.
Children with beautiful brown eyes and radiant smiles and I won’t be the father. I won’t be her husband.
I’ll live in the house she made a home and the ghost of her will haunt me all my days.
Some fucking plan.
Time to get started on a better one.