Chapter 23 Beckett
I did not sleep, so I did the things.
Four o'clock bottles. Six o'clock seniors, with their pills hidden in food. Stevie in butter, Noodle in cheese, Dolly in bread. All four logged on the laminated sheet. Runs hosed at five-forty. Feeding tube flushed at six. Dryer on at six-fifteen with nothing in it.
At six I put the soup on, because my head was loud. The card says low and slow and I have never had trouble with that instruction.
Then I took a coffee out onto the porch steps and let it go cold and watched the light come up grey over the runs.
Eli's truck came in at ten to seven.
He got out with his coffee and stopped in the gravel about fifteen feet away. I watched him understand that I was there. He had come in braced. He had come around that fence expecting an empty spot where a truck goes.
He stood there a while. Then he came over and sat down on the step below mine, which put his back to me, and drank his coffee.
"Runs are done," I said. "Hose is coiled wrong."
"I know how the hose is coiled," Eli said.
We sat there about two minutes. A magpie did something to a bin down the block.
"She was up," he said. "Light was on at three. I could see it from Tennyson." He turned his cup around. "You two had it out. Was it about money?"
"It was about money," I said.
Eli nodded slowly at the gravel.
"I was eleven," he said.
I did not say anything.
"When you left. I didn't know your name, I didn't know anything about it.
I knew there was a guy in Fort Collins because she was different that summer.
She used to sing in the car and she does not sing.
" He drank some coffee. "And then in August I came into the kitchen at six in the morning to get cereal, and my sister was on the floor.
"She wasn't crying loud. She was sitting between the counter and the dishwasher with her arms around her knees.
Mom had been dead nine months. She looked up at me and put her face straight back down.
" He stopped a second. "And I said what's wrong, and she said nothing.
And I said what's wrong. And she said nothing, Eli, get your cereal.
"And I got my cereal," Eli said. "I sat at that table and ate it four feet from her, because I was eleven and I did not know what else to do."
The furnace came on inside the house.
"She never told me one thing about it. Ten years. I found out your name off a search in 2019 when I was drunk, from a photo credit."
"Eli."
"I'm not finished." He still had his back to me.
"So that's what I've been doing since I was eleven.
Every guy she's brought within forty feet of this place I have been a nightmare to, and I don't care.
I made a decision on a kitchen floor with a bowl of cereal in my lap.
It was that nobody was ever going to put her there again. "
He turned around then and looked up at me. My God, he has his sister's face.
"I'm not asking you for anything," he said.
"I'm not asking you to promise me. I don't want a promise, I've had promises.
I'm telling you the price. You do that to her again, for any reason that sounds good to you at the time, and it will not be a punch in a lobby.
Do you understand what I'm saying to you? "
"Say it back."
"I know," I said. "And if it happens I'd hand you the bat myself."
Eli sat there.
"Don't say things like that. That's a psycho thing to say."
"You asked me to say it back."
"I asked you to say it back, not to." He rubbed his face with his hand. "God. You two are the same person. That's the actual problem here."
The screen door went.
She was in the doorway with two mugs and the cardigan and her hair pushed back off her face. She had not slept either. She stopped when she saw both of us.
Eli was up off that step before I was.
"Runs are done," he said. "I'm going to go and do them again."
"They're done, Eli."
"They're done wrong," he said. He took one of the mugs out of her hand on the way past and did not look at me. That man did not come back for a long time.
She sat down on the step, not next to me. She sat one down and over, on the corner, the way somebody sits when they have decided to be somewhere but not to be near anybody.
"You made soup," she said.
"It's on low."
"I can smell that it's on low," Tessa said.
We sat there. She had the mug in both hands.
"I came out here to keep going," she said. "I had four more things and they were all good ones."
"You can go ahead."
"I'm not going to, because Eli made himself scarce with tact. My brother has never done that in his life. It has thrown me completely." She put the mug down on the step. "So instead I'm going to ask you a question, and I want the answer, not the version. What happened in Minnesota?"
That is where the trade was. Everybody says Minnesota and means the thing.
"I need a second," I said. "Not because I don't want to say it. Because I've never said it and I don't know how long it is."
"Then take the second," Tessa said.
So I took it.
"His name's Milo Renner," I said.
"He was twenty. Third goalie, he'd been up with the team eleven days because Kaspar had a knee.
He had the stall next to mine because they put the kids next to the old guy.
" I had my elbows on my knees. "Nobody knew anything was wrong with him.
For two years I've let people think that room was full of idiots and it wasn't. He was funny. He was doing fine.
"It was the eleventh of April. I got a text at twenty past midnight that was four words long and that no man sends. I read it twice and got in the car."
"Beckett."
"He was in his apartment," I said. "I'm not going to say the rest of what was in it. That part isn't mine.
"I got him to Abbott Northwestern at one-forty in the morning and I stayed. I sat in a chair in a hospital hallway from about two until the morning. His mother's in Kelowna and there was nobody else in that building for him. I was still in the chair when she got there."
The dryer went off inside the house.
"Curfew's midnight. Morning skate was ten. I wasn't at either one and I didn't call anybody, because the only thing I had to say was a thing I could not say."
"You could have said one sentence."
"To who?" I said. "A room with twenty-six people in it and four staff and a communications department?
I'd have had to say a name. I say a name and a thing like that and it is on the internet in four minutes.
It follows a twenty-year-old into every room he ever walks into for the rest of his life.
And he was going to be fine. He is fine. He's in Bakersfield. He's playing.
"So I played that night on no sleep and I was terrible. I let in four goals on nineteen shots. We lost, and we lost the next one, and we lost the series in seven. The coach was asked about his goaltender afterward and did not defend me. He was right not to, because I had nothing to give him.
"They wrote unprofessional. They wrote checked out. There was a guy in that market who put the word done in a headline. I have never been able to say he was wrong on the information he had."
"And you let them. For two years."
"Yeah. They traded me in June for a fourth-round pick and a kid. My value went from a starter to a guy on a one-year contract in about eleven weeks."
Tessa did not say anything for a long time.
"Did he ever…"
"No," I said. "And he shouldn't. He was twenty. He doesn't owe me his worst night so I can have a better September."
"Beckett."
"It's not a noble thing," I said. "You'll make it one and it isn't. I paid for it because paying for it was easier than the other thing."
"Which is what?"
"Standing in a room and saying I need somebody to take my word."
She was quiet a while after that. Out behind the building a hose was running that did not need to be running.
"Tell me the rest of it," she said.
"There isn't a…"
"There's a rest of it," Tessa said. "In that exam room you told me what your father said to you at that table when you were twenty-one. You said it in about nine words and then you stopped talking. You have never gone near it since. I have thought about the way you stopped every week since then."
The sun had come up enough to see the whole lot.
"He drove me back from Denver," I said. "The call-up.
We got in at about one in the morning and he made eggs, which he did about four times in my life.
He sat down across the table from me and said it like a man doing me a favor.
He said men like us ruin what we keep. He said love is a number and it gets withdrawn the night you let in a soft goal.
He said if I wanted a life in this game I should not carry anything into it that could be taken off me. "
"You told me that part."
"Yeah."
"What's the part you didn't tell me?"
I sat there and could not make my mouth work for a few seconds.
"He said, I know, because I did it to your mother."
Tessa did not move.
"That's the whole sentence. He said it flat, the way he says everything, and then he got up and put the pan in the sink and asked me what time my flight was.
"And I was twenty-one. I had spent my entire life being told what I was by the only man I'd been trained to believe.
He had just told me it was hereditary and produced the evidence.
" I was looking at the gravel. "Two weeks later I stood in a hallway in Fort Collins with a phone in my hand.
I did not ask you to come, because I already knew what I was going to do to you eventually.
And I thought I was giving you something. "
"You thought you were doing me a favor. For ten years."
"Beckett." Her voice had gone somewhere else. "And the money."
"That's the corollary. I worked it out when I was about twenty-three. I have run my whole life on it and I have never said it out loud."
"Say it out loud."