Chapter 8 Tessa
The last appointment on a Thursday was a four-thirty ear infection that actually started at four-thirty, which never happens. It was out the door by five-ten.
Two inpatients, both boring. A dachshund on fluids, and a cat named Chip who had a dental cleaning that morning and was now furious in a way that indicated total recovery.
Fosters fed and down. Marisol went home at six because she has a kid.
Rosalie, who does Thursday overnights, called to say her sister's car had died. I said don't come.
So it was me and forty animals who were, that one night, all fine. Door locked at six-fifteen. After-hours line forwarded at six-sixteen.
And then I turned on a television. I had put batteries in a remote eight days earlier and left it on the counter next to a soup bowl. I had walked past it since and looked at it, conservatively, hundreds of times.
At six-forty I got a folding chair from the break room and put it in the middle of my own lobby. I sat down in front of six empty waiting room chairs and watched a hockey game. Margaret watched it with me from the desk.
His father did the pregame. He was very good at it, which is what nobody says.
He sat with his hands folded, calm and warm and specific.
He took his son apart in front of a country like a car he was thinking about buying.
And then the thing at the end. I've heard it over and over since in my own head, in his exact cadence:
He gets small. He will fold like a lawn chair.
I sat in a folding chair in an empty lobby and said, "You absolute monster."
Margaret looked at me.
"Not you."
Then Aubert scored on a shot my brother could have stopped. Then they scored again. I put both hands over my face.
Violet: I can see that you’re watching, you have never once left me on read at 7pm on a Thursday. His own father said lawn chair! I want to fight a 62-year-old man in a blazer.
I typed: I'm doing paperwork.
Violet: you left the remote on the counter last Thursday and I saw it and I have been waiting!
I put the phone face down.
Then, in the second period, nothing happened. In the first he had been going somewhere all the time, early, leaning. In the second he stopped going anywhere and let it come to him. It went nowhere.
There was a five on three where the camera was behind the net and I could see him breathing.
After the third save he did not celebrate and did not look up.
He scraped his crease and got back down.
Eighteen thousand people were screaming, and the man in the middle of it had a face like a bank building.
I said, "There you are" out loud, to a television in my mother's lobby.
They won. Then his father came back on after the horn and said, "Well, he answered the bell tonight, and I'm the first one to say it." I threw a pen at my own television. Margaret left the room in disgust.
I told myself I stayed for the dachshund, who had been fine for nine hours. I checked him at ten and again at ten-forty. I sat down at the front desk at eleven with the lobby lights on. Turning off the lobby lights would have been a decision about whether I was waiting for something.
At 11:30 I heard the pothole.
I put Bear on the mat in exam three and ran him through it properly. If I was going to lie, I was at least going to do the medicine. He grumbled at the left hip and leaned his whole weight on me the entire time, because Bear's position on being examined is that it's a hug with steps.
"It's arthritis," I said. "The same arthritis he had Tuesday and will have Friday. Add a gabapentin in the morning on the bad days. That's a phone call, Beckett. You know it's a phone call."
He was in the middle of the room in a gray hoodie with his hair still wet and his hands doing nothing at his sides.
"You won," I said. He looked up. "I watched it. So."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"I don't know what you want me to say about it."
"I want you to say anything. I watched a man on national television tell a country his son would fold like a lawn chair. Then I watched his son be the best player on the ice for forty minutes. Then I watched the same man say he answered the bell. I've never wanted to hit somebody I've never met."
Beckett almost smiled. It got a third of the way and stopped.
"He said the bell thing? He always says the bell thing."
"How long have you been listening to him talk about you like that?"
He actually thought about it, which was worse than deflecting, because I watched him go and count.
"Nine," he said. "I was nine the first time I remember it being about the position and not about me being a kid. He wasn't wrong tonight. The glove is at my hip. Everything he said was true."
"That is not what makes it all right."
"I didn't say it made it all right."
"You said it like it did."
"I said it because it's the thing I know how to say," he said, and it came out with something behind it. Then I watched him shut it down. Something in me went absolutely to war.
"Eight days ago, you sat on that bench and told me why you didn't ask me to stay."
"Yes."
"I've been running my entire life on the other version.
For ten years I've had one sentence, and the sentence is he chose the ice.
Men like that always do. I built everything on it.
I got through school on it. I ran this building on it.
When my mother was dying and I was twenty-two with a twelve-year-old in the back seat of my car, I used that sentence like a floor. It was the whole floor, Beckett."
He didn't move.
"And you took it out from under me in about ninety seconds. You were honest. It was the truth, and it was worse. Because what I have now is a twenty-one-year-old kid at Walt's kitchen table getting handed a prophecy by the one man he'd been trained to believe."
"Tessa."
"And I cannot be angry at you. I've gone looking for it in the shower and in the car and at two in the morning with a light on. It is not there. I need you to understand that is not a gift, because anger was the last structural thing I had."
The oxygen concentrator kicked on in the next room and kicked off again.
"I've been driving here," he said.
"I know."
"Six weeks in this city. Games, off days, the night we flew back from Dallas at two in the morning. I've made a hundred reasons. The dog's back end. The soup. A strike plate." He looked at the floor. "There's no reason. I want to be where you are."
"Beckett."
"You told me it was professional and I said understood. I meant it. I've been failing at it since about four hours after I said it."
"I set that rule."
"I know. I've thought about it every day."
I stood there with a stethoscope around my neck at midnight.
"Say something else," I said.
"Like what?"
"Anything. Talk about the dog. Talk about the weather. If you stop talking right now, I'm going to do something."
And then he did the thing that man always did, which was nothing. He stood absolutely still in the middle of my exam room. He did not look away and let me stand there in it.
"That's not fair," I said.
"No."
So, I crossed the room.
I got a fistful of his hoodie and pulled. He came down all at once and without a sound. I've thought about the first two seconds of that kiss more than I've thought about most years of my life.
Because it was not new. There was no learning in it.
My hands went where they used to go, up the back of his neck into the short hair there.
His hand came up and covered the whole side of my face the way he used to, thumb along my jaw.
It was ten years ago and it was also now. Both were true in the same second.
He made a sound against my mouth like something being set down.
"Tessa. I'm not saying stop."
"Then don't say anything," I said, and he didn't.
I got him out of the exam room and down the hall by the front of his sweatshirt. He came. In my building he did what he was told, and it did something to me.
The break room had a couch my mother bought secondhand in 2003, a shelf of clean fleece blankets, and one window up high. I put my hand on the light switch and did not turn it on.
"Sit down."
He sat down. The couch was four feet long. He was not.
"This is a bad couch," he said. "I'm not going to fit on it."
"It's a terrible couch. Beckett, I'm going to lose my nerve in about ninety seconds and you are describing furniture."
He got a hand under my thigh and put me in his lap. That was the end of the couch discussion.
I got his hoodie off over his head and he let me, arms up like a kid. Then I stopped. I had not seen him in ten years, and there was more of him than there had been.
"You're allowed to laugh."
"I'm not laughing." I put my palm flat in the middle of his chest. "There's a hole in you here."
"Puck."
"That's a chest tube scar."
"Puck first," he said, "chest tube after."
I made a noise.
He said, "It was five years ago, I was fine in a month."
"Nobody is fine in a month."
"Tessa."
I said, "I know. Shut up," and kissed him with my hand still flat over it.
He got the scrub top up and off in one motion and went completely still, both hands on my ribs, looking at me like a man being handed something across a counter.
"What?" I said. "You stopped."
"Nothing. I'm looking at you."
"You can look at me later."
"No," he said.
That was the whole man. Two syllables, no argument possible. I sat in his lap in the dark and let myself be looked at for the first time in a decade. I did not survive it especially well.
Then he put his mouth on my collarbone and the inside of my arm. Then the exact place under my ribs on the right side that nobody has ever found on purpose. My whole spine went, and he stopped there.
"You remember that."
"I remember all of it," he said, into my skin. That was the sentence that finished it.
We ended up on the floor on a stack of clean fleece blankets that were going to have to be rewashed. I made that calculation in real time and did not care.