Chapter 25 Beckett
There were two chairs in that room. One folded out and one did not. I sat in the one that did not for four nights, because the one that folded out was where her feet went.
I had been somebody's father for a day. I took the phone into the hall in my socks with sentences ready.
"Douglas. Girl or boy?"
"Girl."
"Weight."
"Five pounds eleven."
"That is a good weight," Baranov said. "You are not here Tuesday. You are not here Wednesday. Thursday."
"Game one is Tuesday."
"Game one is Tuesday and Kovic will play it."
A door shut on his end. "I have three of them. With the first one I was in Sudbury and I've thought about that week for thirty-one years. This is not a favor. It is a line change. Thursday."
He hung up. I went back in. Tessa was awake and looking at the door.
"What did he say?"
"Thursday."
"Beckett."
"He said family first. Then he said it was a line change, so it wouldn't be a nice thing he said."
Tessa put her head back on the pillow. "I like him."
"Everybody likes him. He's said about forty words to me since October."
"That's why everybody likes him," she said.
They played game one on the Tuesday and I watched it on a television bolted to a wall at an angle that was wrong for the room.
Willa was on my chest inside my shirt with a hat on. Nobody explained the hat and I did not ask.
Kovic was twenty-four and had played thirty-one games in this league. He stopped forty-one shots that night. I've watched a lot of hockey in my life and I've never once been happy the way I was happy in that chair.
Tessa went out like a light at the eleven-minute mark of the third, in the middle of a sentence about the second-graders. At two-forty they won it. I did not make any noise. I put my hand flat on my daughter's back, which covered the whole of it, and fell asleep sitting up.
The phone went at nine minutes past three.
I got it on the first ring because it was on my knee. I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat on the edge of the tub in the dark, because I was not going to risk waking that woman.
"Douglas."
"This is the answering service for Reeves Rescue. I've a Mr. Hollins. He says his dog's belly is swollen up. The dog's trying to be sick and nothing's coming up."
"What breed?"
"A Great Dane. Seven."
I said, "Give him this number. Tell him to put the dog in the car right now and not wait for me to call. Reeves on Federal, the door on the left with the light. Somebody will be there before he is."
"Sir, are you the veterinarian?"
"No," I said. "I'm the first number."
I understood something that had not been announced to me.
That list was a piece of paper on a wall at the service.
For nine years it went Reeves T., and then a mobile number for a woman in Wheat Ridge who covered the fill-in shifts.
In December Tessa wrote a clause on a refrigerator saying that for the duration his was the number they called after hers.
She wrote it small and fast so she would not have to feel it.
And at some point in the winter, without telling me and without an amendment, she had moved my name up.
Sofia picked up on the second ring like a woman who sleeps in a chair with her shoes on.
"Bloat. Dane, seven. Retching with nothing coming up, owner's driving now."
"Does Tessa know?"
"No."
"Good boy," Sofia said. "Twenty minutes. Wake your brother-in-law."
"He isn't my…"
"He is going to be," she said, and hung up.
Eli picked up on the fifth ring.
"Bloat coming in. Sofia's cutting and she needs hands. The tech's in Golden."
"Is Tess…"
"She's asleep. She's staying asleep."
There was a noise on his end of a man already getting into a pair of jeans. "Fifteen minutes. Douglas. Don't let her wake up."
At four-oh-nine Sofia sent one word, which was cutting. At five thirty-eight she sent three, which were up and stable. I read them standing in the dark with the brightness turned all the way down.
Tessa slept through the entire thing.
A woman who has not been unconscious through a crisis in nine years spent one on her back with her hand curled up on the blanket. Three people she let in did the work. A dog on Federal Boulevard is alive because of it.
She woke up at seven and said, "Was there anything overnight?"
"There was a bloat."
She sat up so fast the cuff line went tight. "Who took it?"
"Sofia cut at four. Eli scrubbed in. He's out and stable. Sofia's got him on fluids. She says the owner is a nightmare but the dog's a gentleman."
Tessa looked at me for a while.
"The service called you. They called you first."
"Yeah," I said. "You want to tell me when you did that?"
"No," Tessa said, and pulled the blanket up over her face. From underneath it she said, "January." Then she would not come out for about a minute.
We came home on the Wednesday at two in the afternoon.
Bear was standing in the hall.
He is fourteen. He has one hip that works and the other one is a suggestion. He does not get up for the mail or for Eli. I've seen him decline to get up for a plate of chicken.
He was on his feet at the door before the truck was off.
"Don't let him," Tessa said. "Beckett, he's going to…"
"He's fine. Tessa, look at him," I said.
He came the four steps to the car seat and stopped. Then he put his whole head down into it, right down. He did not lick her or push or make a sound. He breathed her in from one end to the other, twice. It was long and slow, the way he does with a bag of groceries when he is deciding what is in it.
Then he sat down beside the seat, in the way of everything, and looked up at me.
"Yeah," I said. "That's her."
He walked that seat down the hall about three inches behind my heel. I put it down by the bassinet. He lay against the leg of it with his spine along the wood and his chin on his paws.
He has held that post every night since. Nobody asked him to and nobody has ever moved him.
"He knows," Tessa said, from the door.
"He doesn't know anything, he's a dog."
"Beckett."
"He knows," I said.
I got on a plane on the Thursday morning and played that night on four hours of sleep.
I stopped thirty-nine. It went on like that for a month.
I've never played like that in my life and I do not think I will again.
Every night I went out there with a photograph of a refrigerator door in my blocker.
There was an exam form and a grey square with a crease in it.
After the 3rd of June there was a strip of paper with a bar code on it and my daughter's weight printed in tiny letters.
The men who wrote in September that Denver had taken on a problem wrote in May that Denver had found something. I read one paragraph of that and put my phone face down. I've had the other kind and I did not die of it. I would rather not learn to need the good one.
Game six was at home on the 28th of June and we were down three games to two.
I played the best sixty minutes of my career and I've watched it since. Thirty-four shots and two went in. The second one came at eleven forty of the third. Their kid put it under the bar on the short side from about nine feet. It beat me clean.
For eleven years I've gone home and gone through the tape looking for the two inches that were mine. There were not two inches in it. He beat me. That is a legal thing a hockey player is allowed to do.
We lost two to one. Season over.
The room afterward was the way it always is. Baranov came in and said a few words about being proud. He could not do any more. Auggie sat down next to me with his shoulder against mine. He did not say anything for a long time, which for him is a hospital-grade injury.
"You know that was you," he said. "All of it."
"It went in."
"I know it went in," Auggie said. "I was standing there."
The other thing happened while I was in the room. Skoglund told me about it in the parking lot with his bag on his shoulder and his eyes still going.
The family lounge had the broadcast on. On the broadcast my father was at the desk, and the man two seats down from him, who used to play in Buffalo, did the elimination up properly. Then he turned in his chair and asked Roy Douglas what he made of his son’s night.
And my father, who has forty years of answers and has never in my life let three seconds of air go by unused, said nothing at all.
They held on him about four seconds, which on television is a very long time. He had his hands together on the desk and he looked into the middle of the room. The man from Buffalo picked it up and moved them along to Boston.
I stood in the lot and thought about it while a kid loaded my bag into the truck.
There is no version of my father where that is an accident. He has never once been beaten by his own material.
That is the closest thing to an apology that man has in him. I understood exactly what it cost him. I got in the truck and found that I did not need it. That is not strength. It is that at eleven at night I had somewhere to be. It was nine minutes away and it was not owned by him.
Every other night of my life like this one had gone the same way.
I went to a dark apartment. I put the bag by the door, because the bag was not allowed past the door.
I did not eat. I sat on a couch I bought in a hurry in a city I got sent to and went through it.
At about two I got into a bed I made that morning.
The last thing I heard was a man's voice explaining what it meant about me.
I came south on Federal at ten past eleven and the porch light was on.
It is a yellow bulb because of the moths. She had left the inside door open eight inches, because the strike plate is an eight-dollar part I still haven't fixed.
Tessa was on the other side of it before I got to the step. She had Willa's monitor in her hand, hissing. She was in the grey cardigan with the sleeves over her hands. She looked at me for about two seconds.
Then she put the monitor down on the shelf by the door and came out in bare feet. She got both hands in my collar and pulled. I went down to her, because I always do.
She kissed me for a long time, one hand up the back of my neck and into my hair. The other one was flat on my chest, on the scar, where it goes. She did not say anything at all first, which is how I knew she had watched all of it.
When she stopped she stayed where she was with her forehead against my sternum.
"Don't," she said. "You were going to do the thing where you tell me about the two inches."
"I wasn't going to. There weren't two inches in it."
"I know there weren't," Tessa said. "I'm a person who watched it. Get inside. There's soup."
I stopped in the hall with my hand on the frame.
"You made soup. From the card."
"From the card," she said. "I had to take it out of your jacket, which is a strange place to keep food instructions, Beckett."
The kitchen smelled like Walt's kitchen.
She had it in the wrong pot. She had it on medium, which the card does not permit. She had put in twice the celery.
"You put in a lot of celery."
"There was a lot of celery."
"That's not the instruction."
"The instruction," Tessa said, "says a good handful. I have small hands, so I did two, which is arithmetic."
"It's not."
"Sit down and eat your soup."
I sat down and ate my soup. It was wrong. There was too much celery in it and it was thin because she had run it hot. I ate two bowls of it at midnight on the night my season ended.
She brought Willa out at half twelve because she was up anyway and put her on my chest. Willa did four minutes of complaining about the arrangement. Then she went to sleep with one hand out flat on the side of my neck.
Tessa sat down across the table with her own bowl and her feet up on the chair beside me.
"Say the number," she said.
"Thirty-four shots, two goals."
"That's not the number I want."
"Then say which one you want, because there are about nine."
"How many did they have in the last four minutes?"
"Six."
"And how many went in?"
"None."
"Right," Tessa said, and ate her soup.
The monitor on the counter did its hiss. Bear came in off the hall floor and looked at the three of us. He lay back down across the doorway, which is where he sleeps now.
"I'm not sad," I said. "I'm not doing a thing where I say I'm not sad. I'm sad. I'm saying it isn't the other thing."
"What's the other thing?"
I had to sit with that a second, with my hand on my daughter's back.
"There's a way I've always done this," I said. "I lose. I put it on one side and I put what it costs me on the other side. It comes out to a number, and the number is what I am that week. I've done it since I was nine. He taught me the arithmetic at a kitchen table and he was good at it."
"And?"
"It won't add up. I've been trying since the horn. I lost the biggest game I've ever played about four hours ago. I can't get it to come out to anything. Every time I put it down on the one side I have to put this on the other side, and it isn't a close thing."
She did not say anything for a bit.
"Say what this is," she said.
"You know what it is."
"I want the words. You're the one who does capitals."
"You," I said. "Her. That dog. Your brother, who I would apparently now take a bat for. That soup, which is bad."
"It is not bad."
"It's got two handfuls of celery in it."
"Beckett."
"It's the best thing I've ever eaten," I said. She put her spoon down and put her face in her hands. I let her have it, the way she let me have it in a dark hospital room on the 29th of May.
Then she came round the table and put both arms round my shoulders from behind, over my daughter. Her chin was on the top of my head. Neither of us moved for a while.
"28th of June," she said, into my hair. "That's the worst day of your professional life."
"By a lot."
"How is it going so far?" Tessa said. I sat in a kitchen on Federal Boulevard at one in the morning with everything I have on my chest. I could not make one single thing add up in either direction. I gave up on it and finished the soup.