Chapter 29 Beckett
I've had about eleven hundred nights of the other kind and I know the taste of them. The bad kind sits on my sternum and runs game tape. This was the opposite and I did not have a word for it. I lay there an hour trying to find one.
Willa went at ten past two and I got her before she got properly started. The whole art of a two o'clock is arriving before the person is committed to it.
I did the feed in the kitchen with one light on over the stove. I stood there with my daughter asleep on my shoulder and did the accounting. I've done it every day since I was nine. I'm not going to pretend a good year has cured me of it.
Here is the ledger.
I lost the biggest series of my life in June. My career high-water mark is behind me and everybody who watches this sport knows it. I have four years and then I'm done. My father is not going to say the sentence. There is no version where he says it.
That is the one side. That is everything on it.
On the other side there is a nine-by-eight room I do not sleep in any more.
There is a woman down the hall who took my head in both hands last night and told me to stop talking.
There is a dog who gets up for one person in this world and it is not me.
There is a laminated document with a legend on it.
There is a cat named after my father. There is eleven weeks and four days of a person who currently weighs, contested, eleven pounds.
And I stood in that kitchen at half past two and could not make it come out.
I have been trying since the 28th of June. It will not balance. It will not balance in the other direction either. That is the part I had never once considered was possible. In the arithmetic I was taught there is no such thing as being up.
I put the bottle in the sink. And then I looked at the refrigerator.
I got the marker off the counter. I did it one-handed, which took a while. The letters are not good and I'm not going to redo them.
CLAUSE ONE. SEPARATE ROOMS. VOID. NOT OBSERVED SINCE JUNE. NOT GOING TO BE.
CLAUSE TWO. RENT. NOTES THE AMENDMENT OF 2 JULY. STATES FOR THE RECORD THAT RENT IN THIS HOUSE HAS BEEN PAID IN FULL SINCE OCTOBER, BOTH DIRECTIONS. THE PARTY WHO WROTE ZERO HAS NEVER ONCE UNDERSTOOD WHAT SHE HAS BEEN PAYING ME.
CLAUSE THREE. QUIET HOURS. REPEALED BY UNANIMOUS SCREAM OF THE PARTY OF THE THIRD PART.
CLAUSE FOUR. NO REORGANISING. UPHELD. THE HOUSE WON.
CLAUSE FIVE. END DATE. NONE. SEE BELOW.
CLAUSE SIX. ANSWERING SERVICE. NOTED THAT THE FIRST NUMBER WAS CHANGED IN JANUARY WITHOUT NOTICE, IN brEACH OF AMENDMENT TWO. THE MANAGEMENT HAS DECIDED TO LET IT GO.
Then I stood in front of clause seven for a while.
It is the only one in red. She wrote it in block capitals at that table in about four seconds on the 19th of December, so she would not have to feel it.
NOBODY FALLS IN LOVE.
And under it, on the right, in a hand that did not slow down once, B.D.
I wrote underneath it.
Finding: Breach. Self-reported. Effective ten years ago.
Then I put the cap on and put my daughter in the bouncer on the table. I went and got my blocker out of the hall cupboard.
She came out at ten to four.
I knew she was there before she said anything. There is a board in that hallway that goes.
"It's four in the morning and the light's on. You're not in bed."
"I know."
"So I've come out here," Tessa said. "And I want to say before anything else that I've been awake since half two. I was lying in there listening to a silence with a specific texture to it."
"Come here a minute."
She came around the counter and stopped.
She looked at the board first, all of it, from the top. She got about four clauses in and put her hand over her mouth. She got to the bottom of it and did not take her hand away.
Then she looked at the table.
My blocker was on it, face down, wrist strap up. The lining was unlaced along the top seam, all the way open.
"What is that?"
"Sit down."
"Beckett."
"Tessa, please sit down," I said, "because I've been trying to do this for three weeks and I've got exactly one run at it."
She sat down.
I took them out one at a time and put them in front of her. I did not do a preamble on any of them. I had one going in the truck that afternoon and it was terrible.
"That's the exam form."
She did not touch it. It has been in there since the 4th of October and it looks it. It was folded in four, the fold gone soft and furry. There was a shine on it where the strap sits.
"That's Bear's recheck."
"It's not Bear's recheck."
"Beckett, that's a four-week recheck on a…"
"You wrote that at five in the morning," I said, "standing at the counter out there, after the first time.
You did it so the night would have a piece of paper attached to it that made it look like medicine.
You put it where I'd find it and you went into the kennel run.
And I picked it up on my way out and I've had it in this blocker every single time I've gone onto the ice since. "
Tessa put one finger on the corner of it and did not say anything.
"That's the first scan."
"I know what that is."
"It went on the floor at the adopt-a-thon in front of forty thousand people and it's got the crease in it from the concrete." I put it next to the form. "That's the twenty-eight-week strip."
"You kept the strip."
"I asked Charlotte for it in the car park."
"You did not."
"I went back in," I said. "She was very nice about it."
I kept going, because if I had stopped I would have started explaining.
"That's the board. It's a four-by-six of a refrigerator door with two amendments on it, printed on Colfax the day after the worst night we've had. I've taken it onto the ice thirty-one times.
"That's her bracelet. They cut it off her on the Thursday.
"That's Walt's card."
Tessa picked that one up. It is an index card, grease-stained through in one corner. The ink has gone brown. It says low and slow twice, once in the method and once at the bottom, underlined.
"This lives in your jacket."
"It lived in my jacket until the 29th of June," I said. "It's lived in here since the morning after you made it wrong."
"I did not make it."
"You put two handfuls of celery in it," I said, "and I ate two bowls of it at midnight on the worst night of my professional life. I've thought about it about once a day since, so it's in here. That's just where things go."
And then the last one. "That's the diner," I said.
It is a four-by-six with a white border and the color has gone orange the way they do.
It is Walt behind the counter with a cloth over his shoulder.
There is a kid at the end of the counter on a stool with his elbows on it.
The kid is twenty-one and has a very stupid haircut.
He is laughing at something out of frame.
Tessa looked at it for a long time.
"Beckett," she said, and her voice had gone somewhere. "I took this on his camera, in the summer. He made me take it because I said the light in there was…"
"He got two printed," I said. "One of them he kept by the register in a frame for ten years and I found it in the drawer under it when I cleared that building out. I've had it since."
She put her hand flat on the table beside it. I watched her do the arithmetic on the ten years the way I had done it in a drawer on a Tuesday. Then she looked up at me.
"You have been playing hockey," Tessa said, "with all of this inside your glove."
"It's a blocker."
"Beckett."
"Yeah," I said. "Since October."
"Why are you showing me?"
"Because I've run out of ways to do it like this," I said.
And then I had to stop for a second and she did not fill it. I will be grateful to that woman for it until I'm dead.
"I've been doing this since I was twenty-one.
It's the only way I know how. You put money in a dog's account.
You put a photograph in a lining. You take a job at four in the morning so somebody can sleep.
You keep everything you're not allowed to say in a piece of equipment and carry it out onto the ice.
Nobody can tell you you haven't earned it.
Nobody can take it off you. You never have to stand in a room and say a sentence. "
"Beckett."
"I'm going to say the sentence," I said. "Give me a second."
She gave me a second.
There is not one thing in eleven years of that job that has been harder than the next ninety seconds.
"I love you," I said.
Tessa did not move at all.
"I've loved you since I was twenty-one years old and I haven't stopped for one single day of the ten years in between.
Not one. Not when I was married to that job.
Not when I got moved. Not when I heard you'd come back to Denver and didn't do anything about it.
There isn't a gap in it. I've looked for one. "
"Beckett."
"I'm not finished, because if I stop here you'll be kind to me and I'll take it.
" I had my hands flat on that table. "I left you in a hallway in Fort Collins because a man told me at a kitchen table that I'd wreck whatever I kept and then produced the evidence.
I was twenty-one and I believed him. He was the only one I'd ever been trained to believe.
And I've replayed that hallway more than any goal that has ever gone in on me.
Everything else is tape. That's the one I actually see. "
"You've never said that."
"No. I spent my whole career keeping things out," I said. "That's the job and I was good at it. I did it at home as well and I did not know there was another way to live. You're the only thing that ever got in. And it's the only save I'm glad I missed."
She had both hands over her face.