6. Nick
Nick
I watch it standing at the kitchen island, and it does the thing all bad news does, arrives in pieces, each piece polite on its own.
A woman with a prosecutor’s delivery. A book cover I’ve been not-looking at for a week: plane window, gold light.
Then a split screen, and on the right side of it is my own wrist at the dot in Winnipeg two seasons ago, rotating, small slow circles, and on the left side is a sentence.
He rotates his wrist while he thinks, small slow circles, like the joint owes him an answer and he’s patient enough to wait for it.
I stand very still. Nobody wrote that from a press box.
Press boxes see the wrist; they don’t see the patient.
That sentence was written from two feet away by somebody I let watch me think, and there’s exactly one person alive who fits the description, and eighteen months of Sundays reorganize themselves in my chest into something with edges.
The mustached kid says calisse on a clip from four years ago and giggles. The prosecutor holds up her timeline. And I stop hearing it, because I’m already at the search bar I deleted a week ago, typing the whole thing this time, and buying the ebook on the spot.
I read it in one sitting. Eight hours. I’ve sat through film sessions that qualified as punishment, four-hour teardowns after playoff losses, my own worst shifts frame by frame at quarter speed while a coach taps the screen with a laser I wanted to crush.
Nothing has ever been like this. This is game tape of my soul, broken down by the one scout who ever got inside the building.
Page one, and there she is. She’s called June in the book, and she’s taken one and a half Dramamine at a gate that isn’t B47, and it is not going well, and I can hear her.
That’s the thing I’m not ready for. Two pages in and the prose has her exact voice, the spirals, the joke laid over the fear like a tarp that doesn’t quite reach, and something in me that has been very carefully bricked over since a hotel checkout goes ahead and un-bricks.
The hero is Beau Girard. Retired. Enormous. Gray at the temples. He boards the plane with a grief he doesn’t name and an economy of words that June bills by the syllable, and I think, all right, fine, she wrote a man in a cap. Lots of men wear caps.
Then, page forty-one, dinner service, and Beau Girard looks down at his tray and says the chicken lied to everyone.
I put the book down and go to the sink and make myself drink a glass of water, and I stand there with my hands on the counter while the room seems to tilt, because that is not her line and it is not my line.
That’s a dead man’s line. That’s twenty-two seasons of bus dinners distilled into one review, a joke my father built and paid for, and she took it off my mouth and gave it to a paper man, and the whole reading public thinks a novelist made it up.
And here’s the part I can’t explain to anyone who doesn’t live in my rib cage: what I feel first isn’t theft.
It’s that he got quoted. Somewhere between the sink and the couch it lands crooked and sideways, the thought that Réjean Lachance finally cracked a bestseller, and I laugh, one ugly syllable, alone in my kitchen in the middle of the night, and then I sit back down and keep reading, because the laugh scared me.
The night is in there. Rearranged, renamed, the airport hotel upgraded to a fancier version, but it’s ours.
The armrest. The hand. Men like Beau don’t touch people idly, she wrote.
When his hand landed on mine, it wasn’t a gesture.
It was a decision. Which is a private thing I have never said out loud, diagnosed from the outside in one line and printed.
Being seen like that, past tense, in print, hurts in a way I can’t name, and also, God help me, it feels like being missed.
And somewhere in the middle third, a thing happens that I have no defense built for: I start learning her back.
Because June isn’t armor all the way through.
There’s a father in the book who leaves when things gets inconvenient, and an ex who lifted the premise of her first novel and took the credit and the advance, and there’s a line I read three times, flat on my back on the couch at 2 a.m., that I recognize the way you recognize your own tape job on someone else’s stick: June had decided a long time ago that she was the author of love, not a character in it.
Authors survive the ending. Characters have to live there.
Fiction, sure. Names changed. But nobody invents that wound, it’s got the specific weight of the real, and I sat next to that wound for a whole night and never asked one question about it, because I was too busy handing her mine.
She knew everything about me by Denver. I knew she was afraid of flying.
That’s the score from the night, apparently. She read me cover to cover. I read the flap copy.
Chapter nineteen is where the wanting stops.
I know it’s coming the way you know a hit is coming, too late to do anything but receive it.
Beau’s lost year. The facility in the desert.
Sixty days, a press release about injuries, a chip in a drawer.
She changed the details, changed the sport, made the reporter a brother-in-law, but the load-bearing truth is standing right there in the middle of the room where anyone could walk in and recognize it, and eighteen thousand people have a key.
I don’t throw the book. Let the record show that a man who has put a stick through drywall over a bad line change sat here and did not throw the book.
What comes instead is the stillness, so complete the house forgets I’m in it.
This is what the fury’s always been, since I was a boy: a freeze, not a fire.
Everything slows down and gets very organized.
I finish the chapter. I finish the book, the airport chase, the wedding in the snow, the happy ending she invented for us.
It’s 5:40 in the morning and the foothills are going gray and I’ve been holding a glass of water for an hour, full.
Here is what I keep catching my brain doing, and I keep benching it, and it keeps hopping the boards: the book is a confession.
Not mine. Hers. Nobody writes four hundred pages of a stranger’s hands because they’re done thinking about him.
Somewhere under the anger there’s a man who wants to know what it means that she kept the wrist and the chicken and the decision.
That she read me right down to the grain.
I shut that man down, because the other fact is bigger.
It’s got my father in it, and my sixty days, and a paragraph that could void a season eighteen thousand people already paid for.
She had the only unlocked room I’ve ever stood in, and she sold tickets.
Micah calls at six, before the sun clears the ridge, and he doesn’t say hello either. Everyone’s dropping the formalities today.
“Page one ninety,” he says. “The brother-in-law who visits the desert.”
“You read it.”
“Johanna read it in August. I read it last night, after the video.” A goalie pause, long enough to stop a two-on-one. “Nico. The visiting-hours detail. The chairs. Somebody described that room to her.”
“I know.”
“From the inside.”
“I know, Micah.”
“All this time I kept that quiet,” he says, and there’s no anger in it, which is worse. He sounds like a man taking stock of the years. “Every reporter, every agent, every girl, every teammate. And you gave it to a stranger on a plane because she didn’t know your name.”
“That’s not—” It is, though. That’s exactly the shape of it, and we both listen to me not finish the sentence. When he speaks again he’s quieter.
“Is she a problem?”
And I look at the book, face-down on the couch, four hundred and nine pages, one wedding in the snow.
“She’s the problem I’m going to go solve,” I say, which is the first lie I’ve told him in two years, because it comes out sounding like strategy, and it isn’t. I already know where her signing is.
Gwen calls at 7:05 in the morning. She probably wanted to call much earlier.
“Legal read it overnight,” she says. No hello, tablet voice, I can hear the bullet points.
“It’s beyond the wrist now, Nick. Three outlets have the theory, one has the author’s real name, and Barlow is shopping something with teeth for Thursday.
So I need two answers and I need them straight. One: do you know this woman?”
The seatbelt sign. The thumbnail. Okay, Just Nick.
“Define know.”
“Nick.”
“Ask your second question.”
A pause, the sound of a woman deciding not to fight on this hill because there’s a better one behind it.
“Chapter nineteen,” Gwen says, careful now, professionally polite.
“The addiction storyline. Legal flagged it under the conduct language, purely as diligence. Is there anything in it the club should know about?”
And there it is, the question underneath the season, asked at 7:05 in the morning by a woman with a tablet, and I give her the answer I’ve been giving my whole life, the answer that built the wall of gold and the myth and the cage, smooth as a fresh sheet of ice and just as thin.
“It’s fiction.”
“Wonderful,” Gwen says, meaning filed, not believed. “Then here’s the plan. You do nothing, you say nothing, you skate. We’re handling the author. And Nick. We found her. The front office wants you both in the building on Monday.”
She hangs up and I stand in my quiet house with the phone in my hand and the book face-down on the couch like something sleeping, and I discover I have a plan of my own first, and it will not be front-office approved.
Because she never gave me her name on that plane, and I never asked for one, and now the whole world knows it before me, which is its own small robbery.
Her event is Saturday. It was in the video, in the comments, everywhere: first-ever public appearance, J.M.
Sinclair, Tattered Cover, 2 p.m. The internet will be there in force, phones out, waiting for a fairy tale.
I’m going to go stand in line.
First, though, I drive to the practice rink, because the fury needs somewhere legal to live. I have my own key. Twenty years of first-on-the-ice earns you the code to the door.
I skate for two hours with no puck and no plan.
Just laps, harder and harder, until my lungs burn and the bad hip files its complaint and the freeze finally breaks a sweat.
I have never trashed a hotel room. I don’t yell at rookies.
I don’t put my fist through glass. I inherited my father’s whole quiet, and this is what lives underneath it, always has: a man skating alone at dawn as fast as his ruined body will let him, because the alternative is finding out what he sounds like when he screams.
By ten I’m sitting in my truck in the empty lot, soaked through, hands steady again. The skating didn’t touch the anger. It just banked it low enough to hold. Saturday I want to be calm. She deserves the calm version. The calm version is worse.
* * *
The bookstore smells like every away city I’ve ever killed an afternoon in, and the line goes out the door and around a block of women holding my soul in hardcover.
Cap low. Three days of beard. It worked for eighteen months; it gets me forty minutes of queue, past a table of gold-plane paperbacks, past two women debating whether Beau Girard would wear a wedding ring.
Behind me, a reader is explaining the book to her friend who hasn’t finished it, and I stand in enemy territory listening to my own life get recapped with spoiler warnings.
“It’s the lost year that makes it,” she says, authoritative, happy.
“The desert chapter. You can’t invent something that specific.
That’s why everyone knows he’s real.” Her friend says “lucky author.” The line moves forward one heartbeat at a time, and I keep my eyes on the shelf tags, and nobody looks twice at a tired man in a cap, because this is a romance crowd, not a hockey crowd, and nobody expects a legend to be standing in their line.
Right up to a folding table, then, where a woman in a green cardigan is signing books with a green pen and being loved by strangers at a rate that would kill me.
She’s good at it. I watch her be good at it, and my chest does something I refuse to itemize. She’s thinner than the plane. There are new lines at her eyes that eighteen months of nights at a laptop likely put there, and I know exactly which nights, because I read them.
Then it’s my turn. I put the book on the table, spine toward her, and she reaches for it with her eyes still finishing a smile at the last reader, pen up, running on script.
“Hi! Who should I make it out to?”
“Steve.”
Her pen stops. Everything about her stops, so complete and so fast that I recognize it, because it’s mine, the freeze, she caught it from me the way she caught the unfinished sentences, and her head comes up and a year and a half slams shut like a door in a wind.
“Nick.” Barely a sound.
“You knew,” I say, and it comes out the way I decided it would in the truck, level, quiet, a voice for two people in a room of two hundred.
“Page forty-one, you knew whose joke that was. Chapter nineteen, you knew what you were holding.” Her mouth opens.
I don’t let it. “I counted, Frankie.” Her name lands hard on her, all of it.
Good. Now she knows how it feels. “Four hundred and nine pages. I counted what was mine.”
“It’s fiction—” The thumbnail is at her teeth. She knows I know the tell; she does it anyway, or can’t not.
“Chapter nineteen isn’t.” Quiet. Quieter. “You had the one thing I ever handed anybody, and you gave it a cover.”
“Nick, please, I never thought—” She stops herself the way I stop. First time I’ve been on this side of it. It’s terrible over here.
“There’s a photographer by the biography section,” I say, “and a reporter behind the woman in the red coat. So sign the book, and smile like the fairy tale, because as of Monday we’re a company problem. Nine a.m. The arena. They’ll send a car. Bring your agent.”
“Who’s they—”
“The people who own my face.” I take the book back, unsigned.
She’s looking up at me with her whole life caving in real time, and once, in another life, I watched this same face come apart at thirty thousand feet and put my hand over hers, and the man who did that starts forward somewhere behind my sternum and I put him in the box, because he’s the reason we’re here.
“You wrote one thing wrong,” I tell her, before I go. She waits, wrecked, pen still up, and I watch the last-page reader in her need to know. “The ending. The rest of him you got right, and I’ll never forgive you for it.”
Then I do what she did, that snowed-in morning, in a hotel doorway.
I keep walking and I don’t look back.