23. Frankie
Frankie
Monday night I am ready to say it. Then he calls at ten, wrecked and warm from video review, asking whether Fabio has forgiven him for holding him still during a nail trim, and I lose my nerve and say nothing.
Because here’s the draft I approved, sitting on my kitchen floor with the calendar: you do not hand a man a bomb before a clinch week.
Tuesday they play. Thursday they can make the playoffs, the actual playoffs, the thing his father died without, and the story is contained, Becca killed the sale, the NDAs are holding as far as anyone knows, and a good partner, a protective partner, waits for the right window.
Tuesday night, I decided. Then Tuesday night was a win and a west corridor full of cameras and Gwen steering us both by the elbow, and it became Wednesday, I decided. First thing.
I have since run the honest audit on all that deciding. It was never protection. I just wanted one more good day before everything changed.
Wednesday, 10:52 a.m., Becca calls, and I know before I answer, because I am fluent in the physics of my own life now: good news walks, bad news runs.
“It’s out,” she says. No champagne anywhere in her voice, flat, front-line, the voice from the year we got orphaned by a bankrupt publisher.
“A page. Maybe more than a page. Rhonda at one of the houses called me off the record, conscience call, said a sub-rights assistant forwarded the sample outside the building last week, quote, to one person, unquote, which you and I both know is like being a little bit pregnant. And Frankie.” She breathes.
“The person it went to knows hockey people. It’s moving toward that reporter. The one with the teeth.”
“Barlow.”
“Barlow.”
The kitchen tilts. I put a hand flat on the counter, next to the tea mug that lives here now because he left it here, and I say, with a calm that comes from somewhere outside my body, “How long?”
“A day. Two if he’s confirming, and he’s a confirmer, it’s what makes him dangerous.” Papers moving. Becca reassembling into a weapon on my behalf, too late, magnificently. “I’m calling media lawyers in ten minutes. Tell me what’s true, kid. You can’t armor what you won’t name.”
And there, standing in my kitchen, months of vows and omissions come down to a coin flip, and I flip it, and for once in my cowardly year it lands right side up: “The pages aren’t fiction, Becca.
The recovery is real. I knew before I wrote a word of it, he told me on the plane, and if it prints, it isn’t an embarrassment, it voids his contract and ends his season and hands his sobriety to eighteen thousand strangers.
That’s what I sent you. That’s what you sent them. ”
Silence. Long. And then Becca Kaplan, who has monetized every syllable I’ve produced for twelve years, says, quietly, “Okay. Then we’re not protecting a book deal. Different war. I need an hour,” and hangs up, and I stand there having finally said it out loud to exactly the wrong person first.
I call Nick at 11:14. Voicemail. I call again at 11:31.
Voicemail. I don’t know, standing at my counter listening to his outgoing message, that he is at that exact minute in a conference room watching my own sentences slide across a table, that Gwen’s office has already delivered its version hours ahead of mine, that I am, with surgical, structural precision, exactly one meeting too late.
But this is not news to leave in a recording.
I text: I need to see you tonight. It’s important.
The dots don’t come. Lunch doesn’t come. At 2:40 the phone lights up and my whole body lunges, and it’s him, and it’s three words.
Game tomorrow. After.
I read it forty times. I am a professional close-reader of this man, I have a doctorate nobody else will ever hold, and there is nothing in three words to read, that’s the whole art of him when he shuts down, and either he’s deep in clinch-week tunnel and this is nothing, or something has already reached him and this is everything, and I sit in my apartment with Fabio on my lap running both interpretations side by side, over and over.
Then I do the useless things, because the alternative is doing nothing.
I call my editor and ask what it would take to pull Mile High from print.
She laughs, kindly, the way you laugh at a good joke at a funeral, and then hears my silence and stops, and explains, gently, the mechanics of my own success: four million copies in circulation, a backlist print run scheduled, e-book, audio, twenty-nine translation territories, a film option.
“Frankie,” she says, careful, “you can’t recall a book.
You especially can’t recall that book. It’s not ours anymore, it’s not even yours anymore.
It belongs to everyone who read it.” Which is the whole problem with everything I have ever made, stated in one sentence by a woman with a lunch at one.
I draft a statement nobody asked for and delete it.
I type Barlow’s number into my phone from the card and stare at it and don’t call, because Becca’s lawyer said do not, under any circumstances, and for once I listen.
I take the STOLEN note and export it and delete the app off my phone entirely, eleven years of other people’s sentences gone from my pocket, a gesture so symbolic and so late that Fabio watches me do it with visible editorial contempt.
The woman does laps of her apartment. The woman is handling it.
***
Thursday, the tease goes up an hour before puck drop.
I’m not at the game. Gwen’s office, glacially polite in a way that tells me everything about what conference rooms have been saying about me this week, suggested tonight was family suite optics we can revisit later, and so I watch the win alone on my couch, the building I’ve learned to love roaring on my TV with a five-second delay, and I watch the man I love score the goal of the season with a face like sea ice, and I know, I can see it from my couch through a broadcast feed, that he knows.
He plays the way he talked the day I met him: clipped, closed, perfect.
Nobody else on earth can tell. I wrote the book on him. I can tell.
Barlow’s tease crosses forty thousand shares during the second intermission.
It’s not about hockey. It never was. The replies are full of guesses: gambling, doping, a fight, a woman.
And threaded through them, rising, the ones with my name in them, because the internet never forgot how this story started. It just got distracted by the wedding.
I call him when the horn sounds. I call him during the handshakes and the helmet raise, during Rory’s interview, flushed and beautiful, saying this group deserves it, during the slow emptying of the parking lots on the traffic cam I am actually watching like a lunatic, six calls across three hours, and on the last one I leave the voicemail, forty seconds, and I keep my voice from breaking for thirty-eight of them.
“It’s me. I know something reached you, and I know what it looks like, and I’m not going to do this on a phone.
I’m coming to you. Whatever you’ve decided by the time I get there, decide it to my face.
You owe the ending that much. I’m—” and the two seconds, right there, at the end: “—Nico, please.”
Gladys takes the canyon in the dark, high beams sweeping the switchbacks he drove me up in December, the radio off, my hands at ten and two like the manual says, and I rehearse it the whole way, the document, the cloud, the vow, the deleting that fixed nothing, out loud, third person, and I notice, clinically, from a great distance, that the bit isn’t a bit anymore, it’s not even a coping mechanism, it’s just the sound of a person coming apart at forty miles an hour.
The woman drives to the fortress. The woman has the whole truth ready, eleven months of it in order. The woman is four days too late, and she knows it is exactly four days, because every one of those delays was her own choice.
The gate is closed.
I sit in Gladys with the engine ticking, close to midnight, March, the pines black on both sides, and I press the intercom button, and somewhere up the dark drive the house is lit, two windows, the kitchen and the one at the end of the hall, his father’s room, lit, at midnight, which tells me exactly where he’s standing and exactly what he’s asking the bench and the skates and the framed jersey to help him decide.
The intercom crackles once. Live. Listening. He’s holding the button down on the other end, I can hear the house behind it, I can hear him not talking the way other people can hear talking.
“Nico,” I say, into the little steel grate, in the dark, in the cold, to the man and everything he built. “It’s me. Open the gate.”
The crackle holds. Three seconds. Five. An unfinished sentence, his native language, and I close my eyes and lean my forehead on the cold window and wait for the sound of the motor, the gate, the give.
The intercom clicks off.
The gate stays shut. The porch light does not come on.
The woman in the hatchback he rebuilt with his own hands sits in the dark at the bottom of his driveway and finally understands, in her body, where third acts come from.
Too late is a place. You can drive there.
The gate is always closed when you arrive.