19. Brody
I see Everett’s email the moment that I wake up because even after everything, checking my phone to see if I have a message from him is still the first thing that I do every morning.
My stomach twists over when I see the sender: E. Rourke.
There’s been nothing for so long. Now he’s messaging me directly.
I open it.
Callahan,
I need to let you know that I am pregnant.
I read the rest of it. None of it goes in. I go back to the top and read it again, slower.
Pregnant. He’s pregnant, and it’s mine. Nobody has to draw me the timeline.
I’m going to be a dad.
I get out of bed and stagger into the kitchen. I need to be properly awake to deal with this.
I set the coffee machine going and listen while it begins to sputter. I sit at my kitchen table, holding the phone in both hands.
Today’s plans included a skate at eleven, video at one, steaks with the leadership group tonight to talk over Tuesday.
Now, none of that seems important. My world has been turned upside down.
A kid. A whole person, half me, half him.
I try to picture it and get nowhere. I can’t even imagine if this child is going to be a boy or a girl.
How long has he known? Weeks at least. I could get angry about that. I put it aside. I read the email again.
I don’t require anything from you — no money, no involvement — and nothing changes with the club.
Require. Like I’m a vendor he’s releasing from a contract.
If you want to be involved, then let me know, but it is not necessary if you do not want to be. I am happy to keep everything under the radar. Press and team do not need to know.
Yeah, that’s clear. The guy still doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want me for his alpha. He doesn’t want me for his alpha-daddy.
This is an obligation email.
He’s giving me an out and it’s clear he wants me to take it. No money, no involvement, no press. Nobody ever has to know I’ve got a kid on the other side of an ocean. Including, possibly, the kid.
I stand up and walk a lap of the kitchen. Past the counter where I kissed him that first time. His scent is long gone out of this house. It took months, and I know which week it finally went, because that’s the week I stopped finding reasons to walk past the guest room.
I start a reply.
I get two words in and delete them. Try again.
Everett — too familiar.
Mr. Rourke — too formal. We made a baby. That ship has sailed.
I type “I want to be involved” and stare at it until involved starts looking weird, like words do when you look at them too long.
I delete the whole thing. I can see exactly how the email version of this is going to go.
I give him a polite answer. He gives me a polite one back. Inside of a month, we’ll have a signed arrangement: updates on a schedule, photos at Christmas.
He’s better than me at paper. If I do this in writing, my kid becomes a clause.
I know how that story ends, because I grew up inside one. My old man never even bothered with a birthday call. I have no idea if he is even alive or not.
And Gordie — there’s the other lesson. Gordie kept a son quiet for decades, and I’ve seen up close what that did to the son.
Look at the two of us. Both of us have daddy issues up the wazoo.
Not my kid.
Whatever gets worked out between Everett Rourke and me — lawyers, schedules, oceans — my kid is going to know my face. My kid is going to be sick of my face.
I still have his number from the cohabitation. I pull it up and my thumb hangs over the call button for a long time.
I don’t think he’s going to answer. And if he does, he’ll answer cool and composed with a plan already drafted, and I’ll be agreeing to a visitation schedule before I get one full sentence out.
There’s exactly one place I’ve ever held my own with Everett Rourke, and that’s standing in front of him.
So that’s the answer. I turn the idea over a few times just to make sure it’s solid. It is. There’s no other option.
I’m going to London.
He can be my match, or he can be nothing to me but the other half of a custody arrangement.
His call. The kid isn’t canceled by the Bureau, though.
I want to be honest with myself so I say the rest of it out loud to my empty kitchen, like an idiot.
“This isn’t about him.”
It isn’t. It can’t be. He left this house the first minute the Bureau cleared him, stripped the bed, and skipped the goodbye. He skipped my hearing too. If any part of him wanted any part of me, I’d have heard something by now. What I got instead is an email offering me an exit.
So this isn’t a romance. I’m flying because there’s peanut-sized somebody over there who’s half mine.
I’m not doing what my father did.
Then there’s the other problem.
We’re playing home on Tuesday against the Marauders. It’ll be Dorn’s first skate in our barn since he put Linus on a stretcher.
The whole city has the date circled. The boys have had it circled for months. Every man in that room expects that when Dorn’s blades touch our ice, his captain will be standing across from him.
And his captain is going to be an ocean away.
The room will be fine without me. Ozzy can discipline Dorn if it’s needed. Linus will score, because he is the up-and-comer. I’m the old guard. My time is coming, sooner rather than later.
The thought stings.
I shower, dress, and drive to the arena. Practice can run without me today. I need the fifth floor.
They redid the executive floor over the summer when Belanger came in, and it still smells of fresh paint and new carpet. Priya kept the corner office, the one full of boxes. She flies home at the end of the month. That’s the single personal fact anybody in this building has on her.
Her door is open. She’s at the desk with a laptop and she doesn’t look surprised to see me. I have never once seen her look surprised.
“Mr. Callahan.”
“I need his address.”
“Good morning to you as well.”
“Priya.” I make myself slow down. “His address in London. Please.”
She closes the laptop halfway. “Mr. Rourke’s address is not mine to give.”
“I have to see him.”
She shrugs. “Keeping people from seeing him is most of my job.”
“This isn’t club business.”
“I assumed not. Mr. Belanger’s office is down the hall for that.” She folds her hands. She isn’t going to help me, but she isn’t throwing me out either. She raises her eyebrows. “He has a phone. If you want to talk to him, call him. If he wants to talk to you, he’ll answer.”
I take a breath. “He’s pregnant.”
Nothing moves in her face. Not an eyebrow. Anybody else would swear she already knew.
But I’ve watched Priya operate since the spring. I know her now. “I see,” she says.
He never told her. She is the person he trusts with everything he owns, and he didn’t tell her. He’s sitting in that city carrying this completely alone.
“Please, Priya.”
“No. If Mr. Rourke wanted you to have his address, Mr. Callahan, you would have it.”
There it is, then, delivered evenly. He doesn’t want me. Fine. Noted. It changes nothing about the kid.
“I’ll walk every damned street in that city to find him if I have to.”
Until I catch the scent of orange and honey on the air.
Her lips curl up in a smile. “London is nine million people.”
“Then I’d better start early.”
She looks at me across the boxes for a long moment.
“Then I recommend comfortable shoes,” she says, and opens the laptop, and that’s me dismissed.
I’m at the door when she says my name. My first name. First time ever.
“Brody.” I turn. She doesn’t look up from the screen. “Good luck.”
On the way down I take the long way through the concourse, past the photo of Gordie at nineteen with the cup over his head and all his own teeth.
Your grandkid, old man. He’d be over the moon, and he’d be over the moon for all the wrong reasons, and there’s nobody left to argue with about it. I keep walking.
I book the flight sitting in my truck on level two of the players’ garage. The fund’s website still says Mr. Rourke is based in London, and it’s the only fact I own, so London it is.
Nine-oh-five tonight, direct, wheels down at Heathrow early morning. I pay stupid money for the seat with legroom, because I simply don’t fit in the tiny little seats they give you as standard. I hit purchase before I can think better of it.
Then I text Belanger telling him I need personal leave for a family matter.
A week, maybe two, sorry for the timing. The reply lands inside a minute. Understood. Keep your phone on.
Yeah. I’m definitely not this year’s whizz kid.
JP, I owe in person. I text him to come by after practice, then drive home and pack.
Clothes. Passport. Phone charger. I stand in the garage for a minute in front of the moose painting, and I want it on the record that I do not take the moose painting to London. But I think about it, which tells you the state of me.
JP walks in at half past one.
“You missed practice.” He says it from the hallway, working off a shoe. “Sacco had a face on him all morning. You sick?”
“I’m going to London.”
He stops, one shoe in his hand. “Tonight?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Tuesday is the Marauders.”
“Yeah.”
He sets the shoe down and comes into the kitchen and looks at the bag standing by the door, then at me. And he waits. The man knows when to say nothing.
“Everett’s pregnant.”
“Fuck,” JP says, with feeling, and sits down hard on a stool. It’s the same thing he said in my front hall the morning he found out everything else. Maybe it’s the only word that fits Rourke news.
Then his face changes, and I stand there and watch the grin arrive, wide and delighted and impossible to be mad at. “You’re going to be a papa.”
“Yeah.”
“How far along?”
“Has to be seven months. Bit more.”
“A little Callahan.” He shakes his head slowly. “God help the league.”
“JP.” I lean on the counter across from him. “Tuesday. I’m sorry. I know what that game means, I know what the boys want from it, and I’m going to be an ocean away while Dorn takes his warmup laps grinning at our bench. If you want to be angry, you’ve earned it.”
JP looks at me for a while.
“Some things are more important than hockey,” he says. “Dorn isn’t even more important than lunch.”
“Sacco—”
“I’ll handle Sacco. Family emergency. It’s even true.” He takes an apple out of the bowl and points it at me. “The boys will handle Dorn. Might do them good to do it without you — Ozzy keeps saying he wants bigger minutes. Let him earn them.”
“That’s about what I figured you’d say.”
“That’s why you told me and not Sacco.” He bites the apple. “What’s the plan over there? You have an address? A hotel? A meeting?”
“I’ve got a city and a scent. And I know his coffee order.”
JP chews. Swallows. “That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” he says. “Ninety-eight percent. You’ll find him.”
“The radio guys are going to lose their minds,” he adds, and he sounds delighted about it. “Captain skips the Dorn game. Let them chew. It’s good for ratings.”
“And if he tells me to get back on the plane?” I ask, because it lives right behind my teeth and JP is the only one allowed to hear it.
“Then you get a hotel and you wait,” JP says. “He can hate you from any distance he likes. Doesn’t mean you leave.”
That settles it about as well as anything is going to get settled today.
*
He drives me to the airport at six. Neither of us says much on the highway, which is how we like it, and when he pulls up at departures he gets out, lifts my bag from the back seat, and stands it upright between us.
“Text me when you land. Text me when you find him.” He waits until I look at him. “And ask him about the league business. This time, ask. Don’t tell.”
“Yeah.”
He hugs me hard enough to shift ribs, claps my back twice, and gets back in the car.
The airport is quiet on a Monday night. I keep the cap low anyway.
One guy in a Barons hat clocks me at security and then talks himself out of it — nobody expects the captain to be flying commercial to Europe the night before the Dorn game — so I get to be just another big man with a beat-up face, minding his business.
I buy a toothbrush at the little store because I forgot mine, and a paperback I’m not going to read, and I sit at the gate with an hour to kill and my knee bouncing.
I let myself remember the cooler. Two in the morning, sandwiches and electrolytes outside his door, because it was the only thing he’d let me do for him.
He didn’t touch it the first night. I made more anyway.
I figure being a dad runs along the same lines, and it’s the one job in this whole mess I already know I can do.
At the gate I read the email one more time.
I don’t require anything from you. I heard him the first time.
He can tell me again standing up, face to face, and if he means it then, I’ll take the arrangement and the schedule and whatever access he’ll give me, and I’ll be grateful, and I’ll show up anyway, every time the door opens even a crack.
That kid will not grow up wondering. Whatever else gets decided in London, that part got decided this morning at my kitchen table.
I think about replying. I thought about it all day. But whatever I have to say needs saying in the same room, and I already made that call once today.
There’s one more thing to do at the gate.
I open the group chat and type: something came up, family, back inside a week, take Tuesday to them.
I read it twice and don’t send it. JP will say it better in the room than I can in a text, and the last thing the boys need the night before Dorn is a mystery to chew on.
I message JP instead: tell them whatever works.
The thumbs up comes back, and then, a second later: already done. sleep on the plane.
Tomorrow I land with no address and no invitation. There’ll be a way to find him. I’ll try his offices. Hopefully, they won’t call the police on me.
They call my group. I shoulder the bag and hand over the pass, and the woman at the gate wishes me a pleasant flight.
I find my seat, fold myself into it, and switch the phone to airplane mode with his email still open on the screen.
The cabin door closes.