17. Frankie
Frankie
Three things from tonight I will carry into whatever’s left of my life, and none of them made the broadcast.
The sound the building made when he didn’t get up. Eighteen thousand people inhaling at once, and me on my feet with my hands over my mouth learning the difference between fear you write and fear that writes you.
The paper cup. White tablets, held out by a doctor who had no idea what he was offering, and the four seconds Nick looked at it.
I’ve read that look. I wrote that look, from imagination, and I got the shape right and the scale catastrophically wrong, because in my version it was a dramatic beat, and in the room it was just long, ordinary, and completely silent, a man standing in the open door of the worst room in his life, deciding, one more time, to close it.
And the word no, in the Captain voice, and the way nobody in that room but me heard what it cost.
Now it’s eleven p.m. and I’m driving a hockey legend home in December in a hatchback he secretly rebuilt, and he’s in my passenger seat with his eyes closed and his jaw set, pain arriving on schedule just like the doctor promised, and Gladys purrs up the canyon in her new French-Canadian accent, and neither of us has said a word since the gate, because there is nothing to say yet.
The worst of it lands at two in the morning.
Aroyan warned us: when the adrenaline wears off, the pain arrives all at once.
It does. I’m there when it arrives. That part matters, not for credit, for accuracy, because the internet thinks it knows what our romance looks like and the truest thing we have ever done together looks like this: a dark house above the foothills, a bag of ice, a heating pad, a man on his own bathroom floor at two a.m. breathing through his teeth with his back against the tub, too proud to groan and too wrecked to stand, and a romance novelist sitting on the tile next to him in one of his shirts, doing the count out loud. In for four. His trick. Given back.
“You should sleep,” he manages, somewhere in hour two. “You have a book due.”
“I’m field-testing dialogue. Keep breathing.”
He laughs, one syllable, and it costs him a wince, and I hold the ice against the back of his neck with one hand and his hand with the other, and his grip in the bad moments would scare me if I didn’t know exactly what it was: a man rerouting pain somewhere it can be held.
The somewhere used to come in a bottle. Now it’s me.
A palm. The most trusted I have ever been in my life.
I sit on that cold floor holding him in the dark and think: whatever you have to burn, Frankie. Whatever it costs. This stays safe.
Somewhere before dawn, on the bathroom floor, he starts talking.
Not the plane version. The plane version, I understand now, was the trailer, the confession cut for a stranger, sixty days and a bathrobe and a chip in a drawer.
What comes out of him between two and five a.m., in pieces, in the dark, with his head tipped back against the tub and his eyes closed, is the director’s cut, and I hold every frame of it with my hands still and my phone left in another room where it can’t hear us.
The tape tins. That’s where he hid them, years deep in the league, stick tape in the top, tablets underneath, one tin in the bag, one in the truck, one taped inside the panel of his locker, and the equipment managers never once found them because nobody audits the Captain.
The logistics of it: how many, how spaced, how to play seventeen minutes a night on the exact line between numb enough and too slow, a professional dosing regimen run by the same brain that read power plays, because addiction, he says, doesn’t make you stupid, it makes you organized, it becomes a full-time job you can never tell anyone about.
The night he knew. Not a crash, no cinema.
A Tuesday in December, his father three weeks buried.
He stood in his kitchen counting tablets into his palm for the road trip, and he caught his reflection in the dark window: a man in a beautiful house, counting pills, wearing his dead father’s face.
The man in the glass rubbed the back of his neck.
He watched himself do the tell he does when he lies, alone, with no one to lie to.
“I called Micah at one in the morning,” he says.
His voice is flat and calm, way past shame, just stating facts.
“Didn’t say much. Didn’t have to. He drove over in his slides, in winter, one in the morning, and sat in my kitchen till the sun came up.
He never asked for a single thing in return, not that night, not the desert, not after.
For nineteen years, I have watched that man stop two hundred pucks a season with his face, and the bravest thing I ever saw him do was sit in a kitchen in his slides saying nothing until I could dial the number. ”
“The retirement,” I say, quietly, and he nods with his eyes still shut.
“Announced it from the parking lot of the facility. Agent on one phone, team on the other, me in a rental car looking at a cactus.” One corner of his mouth lifts. “Bad hips. True enough to print.”
The line lands in me the way it’s always going to land now, forever: true enough to print.
His whole life is captioned, and I’m the one who proved it, and he’s telling me anyway.
That’s the part I can’t get over, sitting on his bathroom floor at four in the morning.
He read the book. He knows exactly what I do with the things men tell me in the dark.
And he’s handing me the tape tins, the window, the kitchen, Micah’s slides, the cactus, no off the record, no negotiated terms, a man emptying his pockets to the exact person who once picked them.
There is a word for what that is, and it is not trust. Trust is too small.
It might be absolution. Or it might just be what he asked for in Minneapolis: a real choice.
He’s choosing to tell me. Both of us clear-headed, awake.
“Why?” I ask. Just that. He opens his eyes, and even wrecked, even gray, they do the steady thing.
“Because you watched me look at the cup,” he says, “and you didn’t look away, and you didn’t reach for a pen.
In the desert they teach you that a secret weighs exactly as much as the number of people carrying it.
It has been two of us, me and Micah, ever since the pills started, all those years ago.
” His hand turns under mine, palm up, fingers lacing through.
“I’m tired, Frankie. Not of the game. Tired of only two people on earth knowing who I really am. ”
And that, right there, is when the fake dies.
Not at the gala, not at his house, not in any bed.
On bathroom tile, at four in the morning, holding hands with the ice melting, the moment he lets me all the way in, and I feel the weight of it settle onto me, the real, living secret, all of it this time, settling across my shoulders like a coat someone puts on you in the cold, heavy exactly the way he said, and I take it. Whatever it costs.
Which is when I make the vow, silently, holding his hand on the floor of his bathroom while the sky outside goes from black to charcoal: I will never write the true ending.
Not for Marion, not for seven figures, not for the eleven singing pages, not for any version of my career that requires this coat to come off in public.
Beau Girard’s story is over. It ended in a wedding, and as far as the world is concerned, that wedding is the whole truth.
I make the vow with my whole heart. And I still don’t tell him that Becca wants to auction a second book, the true story, to the highest bidder.
I find one more reason to wait, because telling him tonight, this specific night, with his body in ruins and his pockets empty on the tile between us, feels like cruelty, and it will feel like cruelty tomorrow too, and I already know, the way I know structure, that I am not choosing between telling him and not telling him.
I’m choosing between telling him and him finding out.
Those are the only two options there have ever been.
Near six, the pain finally eases. The Toradol and the heat and the hours do their work, and I get him up off the tile and into the enormous bed. He goes docile in a way that would frighten his league while I’m arranging the pillow under the bad side of his neck when his hand closes around my wrist.
“Stay.”
“I’m staying, I’m just getting the—”
“Frankie.” Full stop. Even now. “Stay where I can feel you.”
So I stay where he can feel me. The sky through the big windows has gone from black to gray, and the house is completely silent, and we lie facing each other in the enormous bed, close enough to share breath.
He looks exhausted and hollow and calm all at once, and his hand rests on my hip like it plans to stay for years.
“You should sleep,” I whisper.
“I don’t want to sleep.” His thumb moves slowly against my hip bone. “I want to be here.”
I kiss him first. Softly, carefully, mindful of his neck, and he makes a low sound and pulls me closer, and the kiss deepens by slow degrees until my whole body is warm with it.
His hands slide under the hem of the shirt I’m wearing, his shirt, and travel up my back, and I sit up and pull it over my head so there is nothing between his hands and me.
“Come here,” he says, rough and quiet, and draws me down so he can put his mouth on my breasts, unhurried, thorough, one and then the other, until I’m trembling and gripping the headboard and entirely unsure who is supposed to be taking care of whom.
“Your neck — ” I start.
“Is fine at this angle. Come back.”