Chapter 4
Cole
She doesn't write about the literacy program.
I notice within a week, the way you notice a sound that stops. There's no piece. There's no mention. There's no clever paragraph where she uses the kids as a redemption beat for a guy the public loves to hate. Nothing.
I file it. Information, like everything is information.
What it tells me: she didn't go to the community center for a scoop.
Or she went for a scoop and then decided the scoop wasn't hers to take.
Either way it's not the move I expected from the person who built the spreadsheet, and I'm starting to understand that the person who built the spreadsheet and the person walking around my facility with a recorder might not be the exact same person anymore.
People change in two years. I should know. I'm a guy who used to be a headline and is now a guy who drinks water and argues with six-year-olds about dragons.
"You're being weird," Theo informs me, lacing his skates. "With the reporter."
"I'm being normal with the reporter."
"You answered a question yesterday. Like, with information in it. Doug nearly swallowed his pen."
"I'm cooperating. It's a whole thing. Marisol color-coded it."
"You're 'cooperating.'" Theo does the air quotes, which on a man his size look like he's trying to catch invisible bugs. "Westy. I've watched you give two years of interviews where the most you'd cough up is the date. And the date was wrong once, on purpose, I think."
"It wasn't on purpose."
"It was a little on purpose."
It was a little on purpose.
The access opens up because I open it up.
Not all at once — I'm not built for all at once, all at once is how twenty-three-year-olds end up in spreadsheets.
But I start answering her questions in the media room with something past the minimum.
A real sentence. Then two. The other guys notice.
They give her a look, the look that says what did you do to him, and she doesn't acknowledge the look, which I respect, because acknowledging it would make it a thing and the whole skill of her is knowing what to leave alone.
Then I invite her to a film session.
"You can sit in," I tell her, after a skate, keeping it light, keeping it like it's nothing. "If you want to see the part nobody films."
"The film session. You're inviting me to watch you watch film."
"It's more interesting than it sounds."
"That's a low bar. Watching paint dry is more interesting than watching me watch you watch film sounds."
"Was that a sentence?"
"It was barely a sentence. Yes. I'll come."
So she comes. She sits in the back of the video room with her notebook, and I do what I do, which is the thing I'm actually good at, the thing the party photos never showed because nobody takes party photos of a guy alone in a dark room learning a defenseman's tells.
I ask the coaches questions. I freeze frames.
I point out that their D-man, number six, drops his far-side shoulder a half-second before he commits, which means if you sell the cross-ice look he overcommits every time, which means there's a lane.
I talk about reads and gaps and the geometry of a forecheck.
I forget, for about forty minutes, that she's there.
When I remember, I look back, and she's not taking notes anymore. She's just watching. And her face is doing the nothing-on-purpose thing, but she's bad at it now, with me, she's gotten bad at it, and underneath the nothing is something that looks a lot like I did not expect this.
"You didn't expect this," I say, after, in the hallway.
"I didn't say that."
"Your face said it. You're losing your poker face. It's very unprofessional."
"My poker face is excellent."
"Your poker face was excellent. It's developed a tell. You drop your far-side shoulder."
She laughs. It surprises her — I watch it surprise her, watch her hand come halfway up like she's going to physically catch it and put it back. "Did you just scout me?"
"I scout everybody. It's a sickness."
"That's my line. I said that to Priya."
"Priya tells me everything. We're very close."
"Priya does not tell you everything."
"She told me you found the typo on page nine of the binder."
She stops. "Okay, that one she told you."
It's going well. That's the problem with it going well.
Things going well make me nervous, because in my experience things going well are just a thing that happens right before they don't, and I've spent enough years rebuilding myself out of the rubble of the last time I let something go well that I keep one hand on the exit at all times.
And then my phone rings, in the middle of all this going-well, and it's my mother, and I have a rule about my mother, which is that I always pick up.
"I have to take this," I tell Jenna, and I step into the corridor.
"Cole, love," my mam says, and her voice does the thing it does, the warm loud Cork thing that turns me back into a kid in about a syllable. "Are you eating. You sound thin."
"You can't sound thin, Mam."
"You can. Your father sounded thin for thirty years, God rest him, and he was thin, so. Are you eating."
"I'm eating."
"What are you eating."
"Vegetables. Protein. A man who drinks water now, I'm a disgrace, you wouldn't know me."
"I'd know you anywhere," she says, and her voice goes soft and fierce all at once, the way it does, the way that gets me every time, "you're my whole heart, you eejit, now tell me about the reading. Did the small one finish her dragon book."
"She thinks the dragon's bad."
"He's not bad."
"That's what I said."
"He burned the one barn. Sure who hasn't."
I'm laughing, in a corridor, leaning against the wall, and I'm not paying attention, which is how Jenna walks past me on her way out and hears it — hears my voice go all the way soft, hears the Cork come back into it, hears whatever it is that's in a man's voice when he's talking to the woman who pulled him out of the worst version of himself and never once let him stay there.
She doesn't stop. She's too good to stop. She just keeps walking, eyes forward, the picture of a journalist with somewhere to be.
But I see her face for half a second as she passes, and the nothing-on-purpose is gone completely now, and what's underneath it is a person watching a wall come down on a guy she thought she'd already finished building.
I don't say anything to her about it. There's nothing to say. You don't comment on the moment somebody sees you. You just let them have seen you, and you hope it doesn't cost you everything, and you keep one hand on the exit, and you talk to your mother about a dragon who burned one barn.
"I have to go, Mam."
"Is there a girl."
"Mam."
"There's a girl. I can hear a girl. Your voice has a girl in it."
"Goodbye, Mam."
"Eat something green!" she shouts, as I hang up, loud enough that I'm fairly sure Jenna hears it from the parking lot.
I stand in the corridor for a second.
There's a girl. My voice has a girl in it.
I take my hand off the exit. Just for a second. Just to see how it feels.
It feels like the half-second before number six drops his shoulder.
It feels like a lane.