12. Nick
Nick
I wake up at five in a Minneapolis hotel room with twelve inches of neutral territory intact and my whole defensive system in ruins.
She sleeps like she talks. Diagonal, expressive, one hand flung out over the border like a treaty violation her government will deny all knowledge of, hair everywhere, dead asleep in the middle of a sentence.
Along the DMZ, her fingertips rest maybe an inch from my arm.
I know it’s an inch because I have been awake since four, not moving, doing the professional athlete thing where you lie very still and audit the damage.
The audit is bad.
Not the body. The body held; the body was, for once, the adult in the room.
What’s wrecked is the system, the beautiful, boring system, fences, rules, rations, everything holding up a man who got sixty days in a desert and came out understanding that he survives on structure or he doesn’t survive.
Last night I had her under me saying my name, and I stopped it, and stopping was right, and here’s the truth I learned overnight: walking away from her last night was the hardest thing I’ve done since I quit the pills.
I would do it again. But now I know how much I want her and wanting like that is dangerous for a man like me.
She wakes at seven, performs a full theatrical stretch, opens one eye, and says, “For legal purposes, everything I did or said after eleven p.m. was the altitude talking.”
“We were on the ground.”
“Emotional altitude.” She’s already up, already talking, already rebuilding the bit like a barricade, and I lie there watching her armor herself in jokes and think, scoreboard-clear, I am in so much trouble.
***
The charter home is quiet. Guys sleep, play cards, watch film.
She sits one row up across the aisle with her notebook, writing, chewing the end of the green pen, and I watch the back of her head for forty minutes and then make myself watch a defensive-zone breakdown package instead.
If you asked me one thing about that package I could not answer.
Sully drops into the seat next to me somewhere mid-flight, follows my eyeline, and says nothing.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“Didn’t.” He deals himself solitaire on the tray table, hums two bars of something that turns out, when I place it four hours later, to be the wedding march, and I spend the rest of the flight planning how to tell Gwen the rollaway story before the road manager’s version beats mine to her desk, which it does, which is why my phone has four messages that are just champagne emojis.
Home is worse. Home has a schedule with her name on it taped inside my kitchen cabinet, and I catch myself checking it the way I used to check standings.
Tuesday: her signing downtown, no appearance required.
I know her signing schedule. I know she hates the Thursday slot because it competes with the book club crowd’s carpool window.
Film at midnight stops working. I try to study game film and think about her green pen instead.
Even the ice bath fails me. For twenty years the cold has cleared my head of anything I couldn’t manage.
Not this time. She’s already all the way in.
The wall cracked first on my side. That’s the fact of it.
She named the tension and I climbed over the fence to meet it, and now I’m the one lying awake rearranging my guarded life around a woman I’m contractually obligated to pretend to love, which is a sentence that would be funny if it were about anyone else.
So I do what men like me do instead of talking. On Saturday, after the afternoon appearance, when the valet brings her car around and it arrives sounding like a maraca full of bolts, I say, casually, eyes on the middle distance, “Leave it. I’ll have somebody run it up to you Monday.”
“Somebody,” she says.
“Guy I know.”
Sunday I put my phone in a drawer and spend nine hours under the hood of a fifteen-year-old hatchback named Gladys, and I am not going to explain it any better than this: my father fixed things.
Sticks, skates, carburetors. Once or twice, with one well-timed sentence over a beer, other men’s marriages.
The love went into the objects, because his mouth wasn’t built for the words.
I grew up the same way. I can’t tell her that I stopped last night because she matters too much. But I can fix her car.
Timing belt. Plugs. The alternator bushing that’s been screaming for a year.
Brake pads, because I looked, and then I sat in the driver’s seat of her ridiculous car in my garage with my hands on the wheel where her hands go, and the whole cab smelled like the inside of her tote bag.
I got out of there fast, because a man knows when he’s doing surveillance on his own heart.
Monday, Rory drives it to her building, thrilled to be included in what he clearly believes is a covert operation. Tuesday, she corners me outside the practice rink with her jacket wrongly buttoned and fire in her eye.
“Your guy,” she says.
“Mechanic.”
“Your mechanic replaced my windshield wipers, Nick. And the little light that’s been dead since the Obama administration. Gladys purrs now. She purrs in a French-Canadian accent.”
“Good mechanic.”
“Your mechanic,” she says, stepping in, jabbing my chest with the capped pen, and her voice does a thing in the middle of it, drops its comedy for one syllable and picks it back up, “has your exact knuckles.”
My knuckles, freshly scraped across the tops, are in my pockets before she finishes the sentence. “Occupational hazard. Faceoffs.”
“You take faceoffs with your knuckles?”
“Bad technique.”
“You’re a legend of the sport.”
“A declining one.” And she laughs, the whole-face one, alone with me on a sidewalk with no photographer within a mile, which means it goes into nobody’s metrics but mine.
For a second, the season and the contract and the buzzer on the whole arrangement go very far away, and this, right here, is the state of the defensive system: breached, daily, willingly, by the home team.
Micah is waiting for me in the parking garage after Thursday’s practice, leaning on my truck, arms crossed, waiting.
“The car,” he says. No preamble. “Rory told the guys. Rory tells everyone everything.”
“It needed a belt.”
“It needed a mechanic.” He doesn’t move off the truck.
Nineteen years, and I can count on one hand the times he’s planted himself like this, and every one of them preceded me hearing something I didn’t want to hear.
“I’m going to say it once, Nico, and then I’ll drop it and back whatever you do, same as always.
She wrote you, man. She met you for one night and produced four hundred pages, and it made her rich and famous, and it’s still selling.
That’s not a character flaw, maybe. It’s a job.
But you’re not just a man to her, the way you are to me.
You’re material. She’s got a job, and the job is you, and you’re in your driveway on Sundays doing brake pads for the person who profits from your secrets. ”
The garage is quiet. Someone’s duffel wheels squeak two rows over and fade.
“You done?” I ask.
“Almost.” He straightens off the truck, picks up his bag, and delivers the last of it with his eyes level on mine, no anger in it anywhere, which has always been his most dangerous setting.
“Sixty days I drove to that desert, and the man I drove home swore he’d never again hand his whole self to something that felt this good this fast. I’m not saying she’s the bottle.
I’m saying you’ve got a pattern, and she’s got a pen, and she’s already made you material once. History says she’ll do it again.”
He leaves. I stand in the garage next to my truck for a long time, and I want to tell you his math is wrong, but I can’t, because it isn’t math, it’s scar tissue, his and mine, and the honest answer to everything he said is that he’s right about the pattern and wrong about the woman, but I have no evidence for the second half.
Just a hand holding mine on a plane. The way she never pushes and never pries, and lets me offer things in my own time.
Faith, in other words, and faith is the one thing I’ve never learned to handle carefully.
I tape my stick before Friday’s game, and then I re-tape it, which I do maybe twice a season, when I’m nervous and don’t want to admit it.
I can control this. That’s the position I take, officially, with myself, in the last quiet minute before warmups: contained, managed, a professional situation with professional boundaries and an end date I signed twice.
Then the doors open and eighteen thousand people stand up, and I skate my first lap, and my eyes go to the family suite before the anthem, before the puck, before anything, like they’ve been permanently rerouted.
She’s there. Wrong-clapping already, at warmups, which nobody claps for.
I can control this, I tell myself, gliding through center ice, forty-one years old, undefeated against every opponent except the ones that live in my own chest.
Somewhere behind his mask, at the far end of the rink, my oldest friend watches me look, and starts counting.