15. Brody
The Bureau app chimes while I’m mid-set on the bench press.
I nearly drop the bar on myself. I’d like to pretend that it’s because I’m so focused on the workout, but I’m not.
It’s Everett who is on my mind. I can’t put him out of it, no matter how hard I try.
It doesn’t help that he’s still in the house and I have effectively banished myself to the basement like a cave troll.
I rack it and dig the phone out of my bag.
Compliance period complete. All check-in requirements now met. The Bureau thanks you for your compliance.
I sit up and read it again. We’re done. There’s no breach and no story in the papers. Aside from JP, not one soul has found out about it.
We’ve pulled it off perfectly.
Five minutes later, I hear the guest room door open and the sweet scent of orange fills the air.
He’s not wasting any time. Something about that makes my stomach twist. This is for the best. I know it is. He is not the person I should be spending the rest of my life with.
Still, it’s a scent match. Even I can’t deny it and knowing he is leaving makes something in my chest tighten more than I want to admit.
His footsteps cross the hall, then the garage door rumbles up under the far end of the house.
I hear his rental car start. I sit in my own basement and listen to him drive out of my life. I cross the room, stand on my tiptoes to see out of the high window and watch the car move down the drive. The gate swings shut behind him.
He’s gone.
There was a second, while his footsteps were still crossing the hall, when I almost went up. My legs straightened halfway off the bench before I caught myself and stayed where I was.
And what was I going to say to him? There’s no version of a goodbye that isn’t either begging or a fight. Or worse, just a cold goodbye. We shake hands and send each other on our way. I don’t have the stomach for any kind of goodbye.
He must have been packed since last night, bag standing by the door, waiting for the Bureau to give him the all clear.
Good riddance.
I do two more sets I hadn’t planned on. The second one is ugly, my arms shaking by the end.
I strip and shower in the bathroom off the gym, because the upstairs is going to smell like oranges.
The basement isn’t much better. His heat was only a few days and the ghost of him is everywhere, soaking orange peel and dark honey into the very foundations of my house.
It takes me about an hour to finally put on my big boy pants and go upstairs, letting myself bathe in his scent.
I’m not going to have this again. The next time I see him will be at practice or in the locker room. Maybe his office. And I can guarantee I’ll be surrounded by a horde of sweaty alphas in hockey gear and neither of us are going to look each other in the face.
His scent here is going to fade.
I walk along the hallway toward the guest room. The door at the end of the hall is standing open for the first time in two weeks.
I take a deep breath, breathing him in.
The bed is stripped and the window is open. Before I think, I cross the room and open the closet door. Everything is empty. There’s nothing in the bathroom.
I stand there and stare at the tub. I washed his hair in it with him lying all soft and relaxed against my arm.
I reassess how long it took him to leave. Not only the suitcase, but the bed too. I imagine him sitting here on the corner of the stripped bed, waiting for the Bureau to let him loose so he could run away from me the first chance he got.
I pull the door shut.
I have another week left before my suspension hearing. I don’t want to be alone.
I call JP.
“You got plans tonight?” I ask.
“Now I do,” he says, and doesn’t ask a single question. That’s why it’s him I called.
He shows up with pizza and we drink the six-pack he brought over two weeks ago, the one he handed through the gap in the door. He clocks the label as I hand him one. He doesn’t say anything about that either.
We eat on the deck with the game on inside, sound off.
“He left the minute the Bureau cleared him,” I say, somewhere into the second beer. “Stripped the bed. No note. Nothing.”
JP looks at his bottle. “You want me to say he’s an asshole?”
“I don’t know what I want you to say.”
He points the neck of the bottle at me. “Thursday, you shave, you wear a good suit, and you don’t look wrecked. They’re deciding whether you’re a problem. Don’t walk in looking like a problem.”
He stays through the third period. It’s the best night I’ve had in two weeks, and it still isn’t a good one.
*
The week crawls past. Practice, gym, home.
I check my phone more often than I’ll ever admit to anyone.
Nothing from Everett. Not a text, not a call, not so much as a message passed through the club.
Fourteen days in the same house, and now a silence so complete I could almost believe I invented him.
I shave properly for the first time in days, JP’s advice still in my head. Don’t look wrecked.
The eyebrow has healed down to a pink line. I wear my good suit, making sure that my tie is straight, making myself tie it twice to get it right.
I look in the mirror and try to look contrite.
That was the advice that my agent gave me over the phone last night. Show up early, look respectful, let the lawyer do the talking.
If I can sit in a chair for two hours without saying anything stupid, we can reduce the number.
Today matters, whatever I think of standing in front of a panel in a suit to apologize for the most honest thing I did all season.
I don’t know if Everett is going to be there. It’s a stupid thought, and it keeps coming back anyway, all through the shave and both tries at the tie. Gordie would have been. But as I have learned, the apple falls very far from the tree.
Gordie never missed a hearing. Not mine, not anybody’s. The man once flew out for the appeal of a guy he traded away two seasons ago.
I shrug into my suit jacket. Maybe Everett was right about that. Gordie was a little obsessed with hockey. It was his whole life.
Same as it’s my whole life.
At my first hearing, I was twenty-two and terrified, and he sat next to me in the waiting room in his silver-and-green tie, chatting to the panel’s assistant about her hometown rink. He bought me a steak afterward and told me the fine was cheap at the price.
The man had a lawyer on speed dial. Not the club’s lawyer. His own guy, kept warm all year for whenever the league looked at one of us sideways.
And I have no idea if his son is going to be there. Maybe we’ve got a history, but Everett still owns the club and technically, he’s still managing it, even if no one sees him.
Showing up is just the job. You can hate the game and still do the job.
*
The drive downtown takes forty minutes. Sports radio has my hearing as the second story, after the standings.
I listen to two men I’ve never met argue about me and whether the code is dead. It doesn’t take long before I shut it off and drive the rest of the way listening to nothing at all.
My agent meets me in the parking garage with the union lawyer, a small, calm woman who reads her notes one more time in the elevator and doesn’t try to make conversation.
There are two camera crews on the sidewalk out front. My agent walks me past them with a hand on my back and a smile. I say good and nothing else. Somebody shouts a question about McNally’s, whether I stand by what I said about ownership. I keep walking.
Fuck. I regret saying that. It was stupid of me. Really stupid.
Sacco is in the waiting area when we come up, wearing his hearings suit. JP and Marchetti are with him.
I don’t see Everett Rourke. I take in a deep surreptitious breath. I can’t pick up his scent either. It makes part of me want to shrivel up inside.
Sacco walks toward me. I put my hand out. “Coach.”
“Callahan.” He looks me over once. “You’ll do.”
My phone buzzes. It’s Linus, from his couch: a photo of himself in the neck brace, thumbs up, good luck captan. The kid is a whizz on the ice but he cannot spell to save his life.
I send back a “thanks man,” then put my phone away.
JP goes to the machine down the hall and hands me a coffee without asking.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” He studies me. I look away. He’s the only one who knows about Everett, and I know he wants to ask about it. The only thing stopping him is Sacco’s presence and I’m grateful for that.
I take a sip of the coffee. It is absolutely terrible. I take another sip anyway.
He looks at me a beat longer than I like, then drinks his own terrible coffee and turns to Sacco. “No word from the boss, then?”
It’s the question I haven’t dared ask. I am more grateful to JP than I care to admit.
Sacco settles into one of the league’s stiff chairs and studies the carpet.
“I won’t speak ill of Gordie,” he mutters.
“Thirty years. He was my best friend, but I will go to my grave not understanding why he left this club to that idiot omega. Thousands of people love the Barons. All of us. The fans. Fucking thousands. So why leave it to him?”
“Yeah,” I say. And I mean it. That’s where I’ve landed.
JP says nothing. He has found something to study out the window, hands in his pockets.
It’s Marchetti who goes off. “Yeah. And he can’t be bothered to turn up? I mean Callahan’s the fucking captain and he’s not here. Has anyone even seen him?”
“Nah,” Sacco says. “Not for weeks. And he hasn’t replied to my phone calls.
I get a lot from that bitch assistant of his, though.
She’s always up my ass about one thing or another.
Always something dumb. Gordie would have been in that room before the panel was.
This guy couldn’t send a lawyer. He couldn’t send an email. ”
I nod along. More than couldn’t send a lawyer. He actively sabotaged me, the son of a bitch.
Before I think about it, I open my mouth. “I ran into Dorn a couple of days ago.” Faces turn to look at me. “I was going for”—pumpkin spice latte—“coffee and he was in the line behind me.”
“Hope you punched him in the mouth,” Marchetti says.