Chapter 20 Beckett
A thing had happened in that kitchen at midnight. By nine in the morning she had her hands inside her sleeves and was talking to me about the drug log.
Amendment one. For the purposes of clause seven, kissing does not constitute falling in love. Per management.
Then I initialed it, B.D., and went to bed.
She found it at six-forty. I know the time because I was standing in the hall with a bottle in each hand.
"Beckett. Come here."
I came there. She had a coffee she was not drinking. She was looking at that board with her head tipped over.
"Per management," she said.
"Yeah."
"Who's management?"
"It's a house with a charter in it. There's management."
"Is management you?"
"Management's whoever's holding the marker," I said.
She put her cup down. "This is a workaround."
"It's an amendment."
"It's a workaround. It's a man doing a workaround on my mother's freezer."
"Clause seven prohibits falling in love," I said. "It doesn't define it. You wrote a term with no definition in it. You gave me a hard time about that on clause three. I'm clarifying it."
"You are clarifying my boundaries again."
"Yeah," I said.
She stood there a while. "Give me the marker."
I gave her the marker. She took the cap off with her teeth and stood in front of that board for about eleven seconds not writing anything. Then she put T.R. next to my initials in that slanted hand. She capped it and handed it back.
"This does not mean anything," she said.
"No."
"It's a clarification. Fine," Tessa said. She drank her coffee. Neither of us moved out of that kitchen for a second. Then Plante started up down the hall.
The amendment worked constantly. The hallway is thirty-one inches and there is a crate on the left. In January I stopped taking the corner wide.
She came out of the bathroom on the 4th with her hair wet and I did not get out of the way. She stood with her hand flat on my chest where it goes, on the scar, and said, "You're in my hall." I said, "Yeah." It was nine minutes before either of us was anywhere else.
Wednesday it happened at the counter, with a syringe in her hand. Friday she came in while I was on the phone to the equipment guy. She took the phone out of my hand and put it face down on the counter with him still talking on it. She kissed me until Margaret knocked a jar off a shelf on purpose.
And every time, one of us said a version of the same sentence.
"That's covered."
"Amendment one."
We were both lying and we both knew it. I was better at it than she was. I would say the words and then go and hose a run and be fine. She would say the words and then get quiet.
On the 10th she got quiet for two days and I let her have them. On the 12th at eleven at night she came and stood in the doorway of a nine-by-eight room with her arms folded.
"I have a question. It's a medical question. Do you know what pelvic rest means?"
"I read the folder. There's a green folder. It's got twenty-two pages in it. Page nine."
Tessa put her forehead on the doorframe.
"Page nine says no intercourse and nothing internal until the placenta moves off the cervix. The rescan's at twenty-eight weeks. I've had the date on my phone since November." I sat up. "Is that the question or is that the preamble?"
"That's the preamble. The question is whether you understand what page nine does not say."
I did not say anything for a second.
"Say it out loud," I said.
"No."
"Tessa."
"I'm not going to stand in a doorway and…"
"Then it doesn't happen," I said.
She looked at me. "Why?"
"Because I'm not deciding anything for you. Not one thing, not ever again. If it happens it's because you said it in words in a room with the light on."
She stood there eleven seconds. I counted.
"Page nine," Tessa said, "does not say anything about your hands."
"No. It doesn't."
"Or your mouth."
"No."
"That's the question."
"That's not a question."
"Beckett."
"Come here," I said.
And she came there. I've never in my life been given anything the way that woman gave me that.
She is a person who cannot be helped. She will not take a decaf without arguing about it.
She has never once let anybody carry a bag of food from a van.
And she came into that room and sat down on the edge of a narrow bed and let me put my hands on her.
Inside a minute I understood I was not going to be allowed to be careful.
She got a fist in my shirt and said, "Don't do the careful thing.
" I said, "I'm doing the careful thing." She said, "I've had four months of everybody in my life doing the careful thing. " I stopped doing the careful thing.
I got her out of the shirt and then I stopped.
At sixteen weeks a body is a different shape than the one I knew.
I put my palm flat and low and open across it and did not move.
She went absolutely still under my hand.
Then she said, in a voice with something coming apart in it, "Beckett, I swear to God.
" I said, "Give me a second," and she gave me a second.
Then I put my mouth where my hand had been, and then lower. After that she stopped talking in sentences.
She could not keep hold of anything. This is a woman who runs an emergency clinic on four hours of sleep and has never once handed anybody a task.
She held onto the top of my head with both hands and told me what she wanted in a voice with no armor left in it.
She said my name twice near the end like it was something she had found in a drawer.
Afterward she lay against my chest with her heart going. Her hand came up and flattened out on the middle of me, on the scar, where it always goes.
"That's not covered," she said, to the ceiling.
"No."
"That is nowhere in amendment one."
"No, it isn't."
"You'd have to draft something."
"I'm not drafting that," I said.
Tessa started laughing and could not stop for a while.
I lay in the dark in a room that smells like kittens and antiseptic with the best thing that has ever happened to me shaking on my chest. Bear got up off the floor, put his chin on the mattress, and sighed at us both like a man who has seen enough.
The world came in on the 22nd of January at four in the afternoon.
I was in the players' lounge with a coffee and my feet up. The national afternoon show was on the wall with the sound low. My father's face came up on it.
Roy does a segment on Thursdays, in a blue jacket. The thing about my father on television is that he is very good. I've never met anybody outside my family who does not like him.
"There's a story out of Denver," Roy said, "and I'm not going to be the one to tell it."
And then he told it for ninety seconds.
He never said a fact. That is his whole craft and I've watched him do it since I was nine.
He said situation. He said personal circumstances.
He said that this is a young man in a contract year with a lot on his plate right now.
He said, look, you all saw the clip in November.
He said, I have no idea, and I'm not going to speculate.
He said, I love him, and I want him to be all right.
He said I love him on national television.
Skoglund got up and turned it off, which is a thing I will not forget about Skoglund. About six guys found something to do with their hands.
I sat there and the old cold came up my chest the way it does. There is a version of me that goes into a room by himself and stays there two days. I could feel him arriving.
My phone lit on the arm of the chair.
just say it
That was three words, from a woman standing in a clinic on Federal Boulevard with a television on a shelf. She was eighteen weeks pregnant.
I typed are you sure and looked at it. Then I deleted it. I've asked that woman are you sure about six things in my life. Every one of them was me asking permission to be a coward.
Media availability is Friday at eleven with eleven guys from three outlets and a woman from the radio who has been kind to me since October.
They asked about the road trip. They asked about the back end of the schedule. Then Fenner from the paper, who is not a bad man, did the thing where they leave a door open and stand back from it.
"Beckett, there's been a lot of chatter this week, some of it involving family. Anything you want to say about where your head's at?"
I've answered questions in this business for eleven years. I say we're focused on Tuesday.
"Yeah," I said. "We're expecting a baby in the summer."
The room did not do anything for about a second and a half.
"Her name's Tessa Reeves. She's the veterinarian who saved my dog's life in October.
She runs Reeves Rescue on Federal. She's the best person I've ever met.
" I looked into the camera in the middle.
If it was going to exist I wanted it to exist all the way.
"That's my family. Anything about them comes from me and not from anybody else.
There won't be much of it. It isn't anybody's business. Next question."
Somebody timed it at eleven seconds and put the number on it. That is what everybody called it after.
There was a noise in that room like a bus letting off air. Fenner said, "Congratulations," which is not a question. Then a kid from the digital side asked me about the back end again because he had nothing else. It was over.
Auggie was against the wall by the door with a towel around his neck and he was crying openly, not a little.
"Allergies," he said.
"It's January."
"There's a thing in the carpet, Beckett," he said. He hugged me hard enough to lift me off the floor. Nobody has done that since I was twelve.
In the room they did the stick thing on the floor.
They do that for a first goal and for a guy coming back from an injury and for one other kind of thing.
Wheeler stood on a bench and yelled something about a car seat.
Baranov came through, looked at the ceiling, said, "Tuesday," and walked out. That is Baranov weeping in the street.
The clip went where the other clip went, and faster. In November there was a hole in a floor for a third of a second and forty-one thousand people filled it in with whatever they had. In January there was a man saying eleven seconds of plain sentences.
My father called at one-forty and again at one fifty-two. I did not pick up either one.
He came to the house on the Sunday at four in the afternoon.
I knew the car before it stopped. He has driven a black one with tinted rear glass since 2011 and he parks it out from the curb. He came up that path past two eight-foot inflatable snowmen with his coat over his arm like a man arriving at a hotel.
I got to the porch before he got to the steps and shut the front door behind me.
"There he is," Roy said.
"Dad."
"This is the house?"
He looked at it. He looked at the runs behind the fence and the sign with a dead woman's name on it.
"You didn't call me back."
"No."
"Twice."
"I know how many times it was," I said.
He smiled. He has a very good one and it is on a poster in a bar in Wheat Ridge. "Beck. That was a hell of a thing you did Friday. Frankly it was better television than anything I've done in four years." He put a hand out toward the door. "Am I coming in? I'd like to meet her."
"No."
The smile stayed exactly where it was, which is the thing about him.
"Son, I've been fielding calls since Friday from people who want to put you and me in a room for eleven minutes. I've said no to all of them, because I wanted to talk to you first. That is a courtesy I did not have to extend."
"Okay."
"Don't say okay to me."
"Dad." I put my hands in my pockets, because otherwise they were going to do something. "I'm going to say a thing once and then I'd like you to go. Tessa and the baby aren't material."
He waited. He does that. He is extremely good at the silence and I grew up in it. I've spent eleven years in a job where I do not move first.
"They're not a story. They're not a segment.
They're not a mention. They're not a look, I'm not going to speculate.
" I kept my voice flat, because up is where he lives.
"You will not say her name on air. You will not say the baby on air.
You will not stand on this street. If somebody asks you, you say, that's my son's family and I don't talk about it.
Then you talk about a hip injury in Nashville. "
"You've thought about this."
"Yeah."
"Is this her?"
"Don't."
"I'm asking a question."
"It's me," I said. "It's the first thing I've ever asked you for."
The furnace came on inside the house and I could hear it through the wall. Somewhere in the back a dog said something to another dog about nothing.
My father put his coat over his other arm.
"Forty years I've been in this business," he said. His voice had come down out of the register he uses. "You know what I've got out of it?"
"I know what you've got out of it."
"You don't, actually." He looked at the snowmen a while. "All right. That's your line. You've never had one before. I'd have remembered."
"I've got one now."
"Yeah," Roy said. "I hear you."
And then he did a thing he does not do. He went off the porch without the last word and got in the car. He sat in it about twenty seconds before he started it. I watched him go up Federal.
I turned around and the front door was open eight inches, which it does. The strike plate is an $8 part I've not fixed.
She was inside it with her hand still on the edge.
"How long?" I said.
"Since this is the house. Beckett."
"I didn't want you out here."
"I know you didn't," Tessa said. She came out of that door and got both hands in my collar and pulled. I went down to her, because I always do.
It was cold and she was in a T-shirt. She did not seem to care. She kissed me the way she does when she has decided something, which is with no runway at all. My hands went into her hair. One of the snowmen's fans cut out on the timer and it started to go down slowly behind her in the dark.
When she stopped she kept her fists where they were.
"That's covered," I said.
"That is not remotely covered," Tessa said. "Get inside, you're freezing."
I went inside.
I've spent eleven years learning to give a man nothing to write. On Friday I gave a room everything on purpose. On Sunday I told my father where the wall is. Both times I was standing in front of the same door.