Chapter 9 Beckett
I woke up on a floor and knew where I was before I opened my eyes, which did not happen to me. I've woken up in cities not knowing which one.
I knew because of the smell. Disinfectant and clean laundry and, under that, her.
There was a blanket over my legs that had not been there when I fell asleep. There was no woman on my chest and a light on in the hallway.
She was standing in the doorway with two mugs.
Different scrubs. Hair up and off her neck, tight, the way she did it for surgery. Face washed. And she was standing in the doorway and not in the room. I've been read by defensemen for a living for eleven years. I read that doorway in under a second.
"Hey," she said. "There's coffee. It's the clinic coffee, so I want to manage expectations."
I sat up and took it and she stayed where she was.
"Okay," I said.
"Don't say okay yet, I haven't said anything."
"You're going to, though."
She looked at the mug in her hand. "Yes. That was a beautiful mistake."
I put the coffee down on the floor beside me because I wanted my hands free. There was nothing to do with my hands.
"I'm going to say all of it at once, because if I say it in pieces, you'll get one in and I'll fold." She had her back against the doorframe. "It was a mistake and it was beautiful. It's a closed parenthesis. It happened. It's finished, and it isn't going to happen again."
"Okay."
"You’re playing for your career on a one-year deal that anybody can move at any time. In February somebody could call and you'd be in Ottawa by Thursday. There is nothing either of us could do about it."
"That's true."
"I'm running a clinic on $141 and a ground lease. I haven't slept a full night since spring. I have a brother and forty volunteers and a hundred animals, and I have exactly nothing left over. There's no room. Neither of us has room."
There it was. It did not feel like a knife. It felt like a schedule, like a man who has been told in advance what day the truck comes and then hears the truck.
Neither of us has room. Every man who gives it up for a woman spends the rest of his life making her pay the bill.
He said it in a kitchen in September when I was twenty-one. She said it in a doorway in October when I was thirty-one. They were the same sentence. The only difference was she was kind about it.
She was right. She had a building with her mother's name on it and a hundred animals and a brother. I had a duffel bag, a one-year contract, and a father who could describe my failures from a national desk. She deserved a man who was not perpetually a few days from being somebody else's problem.
Agreeing cost me nothing I hadn't already been told I'd lose.
"Understood," I said.
"That's it?"
"What else is there?"
"You could fight with me about it. You could do literally anything else."
"Would it work?"
She opened her mouth and closed it. "No."
"Then no."
She didn't sneak out. It was her building, so she couldn't. I don't think she'd have wanted to. She did the other thing.
She said, "I have to feed," and drank a third of her coffee standing up and went.
I heard the door to the runs go, and then I heard forty dogs find out it was morning.
I got dressed on a break room floor listening to that. Found one sock, found the other under the couch. Folded the fleece blankets and put them on the wrong shelf.
Bear was asleep in the hallway outside the door where he'd put himself at some point in the night.
"Come on," I said.
I went out past the oxygen cage. The light was on inside it with nobody in it, blue and humming. I stopped for a second, the way I would in front of a house I used to live in.
The paper was on the front counter. An exam form, turned over, written on the blank side in her handwriting. It slanted hard to the right and got faster as it went.
Bear / Douglas. Recheck 4 weeks. Hips: add gabapentin AM on bad days, 300mg, do not stack with the evening dose inside 8h. Continue fluids under the skin, 250ml every other day. Recheck creatinine and phosphorus at that visit. Weight check. Bring the med list.
Then a date, four weeks out, a Wednesday.
Then, at the bottom, her name. Not printed but signed, the way she signed a chart.
I stood at that counter with my truck keys in my hand and understood what it was. It was a receipt. A woman had made a night look like medicine in ink and in her own hand, in case anybody ever asked, including her.
I could have left it. It was for the file. I took it.
I folded it in half and in half again and put it in my jacket. I sat in the lot with the engine off for a minute. Through the front glass I could see the lobby and six chairs and a fish tank and nobody.
The equipment guys got in at eight-thirty and I was already there, which they've stopped remarking on.
My blocker had a gap in the lining on the inside, up near the top where the wrist strap anchors. It had been there since last season.
I put the paper in it.
I had a rule about superstition, and the rule was that I didn't have any. Superstition is a system I don't control, and I only keep systems I control. I've said that out loud to teammates and to a reporter.
I pushed a folded piece of exam paper down into the lining of my blocker with two fingers. I pressed the edge flat so it wouldn't ride up. Then I sat there in an empty room with my hands on my knees for a while.
Then I went home and cleaned out the hall closet.
There was a closet in that house with forty years of things in it. I took every one of them out and sorted them into three piles on the front room floor. One of the piles was a shoebox of photographs I did not open.
Then I made soup. Chicken, whole, don't be cheap.
Seven-forty when I started, noon when it was done. I stood in Walt's kitchen with a wooden spoon and six quarts of soup. One thirteen-year-old dog was not permitted to have any of it and sat under the table with his chin on my foot anyway.
Low and slow. If it's boiling, you're mad about something.
It was boiling. I turned it down.
I sat at that table with my phone and looked up a leasing company.
Then Apex Veterinary Partners, which had a website with a photograph of a woman in a white coat laughing with a beagle.
Then I looked up who owned the buildings on that block.
It was public. It took eleven minutes and a county website.
Then I turned the phone over and did nothing about any of it. She had told me in a doorway that there was no room. I was not going to answer that by moving her furniture.
Auggie caught me at practice.
I was fine at practice. I did the drills and I took the reps. My numbers were my numbers. But between drills I always talked, at about the level of a man buying gas. I did not do it, and Auggie noticed inside of forty minutes.
He waited until we were in the room. He sat down next to me while I was cutting tape off.
"So, we're not doing the thing where I make jokes today," he said.
"You can make jokes."
"I can. I'm not going to." He sat with his elbows on his knees looking at the floor, same as me. "Something happened."
"Nothing happened."
"Beckett, last night you won a game after your father called you a lawn chair on national television and you looked exactly like this. This morning you look worse. It is not about the hockey, because you were unbelievable and you know it."
I peeled tape off my shin. "Yeah."
He waited about eight seconds. "Okay."
And then he didn't say anything else. He sat on that bench and untaped his own shins next to a man who wasn't talking for about six minutes, until Skoglund came in and asked about a restaurant.
I had three people whose calls I answered. That was why.
My father called Sunday.
"Good response Thursday. I said so on the air. The glove was better. You're still late on the push and now the league's seen you can be got early, so they'll test it. Vancouver will test it Tuesday. Watch their four. I'm not going to soften what I said before the game."
"I didn't ask you to."
Under two minutes.
Tuesday I got to the rink at two for a seven o'clock game.
Two hours out the room was four guys and a trainer. I sat in my stall with my pads on and my blocker in my hands.
I felt for it through the leather. Nobody can feel a piece of paper through a blocker. I checked anyway, with my thumb along the seam, until I found the place where the lining sat a little high.
Then I put the glove and blocker on. Then I did what I always did before I went out, which was put both hands flat against the front of my chest for about three seconds. I've done it since I was nineteen. There's a photograph of me doing it on a wall in the concourse.
Nobody has ever asked what it is, because it doesn't look like anything.
I stood up and went out.