23. Brody
The kid at Rosie’s finds me a box for the syrup bottle and packs it out with napkins.
I take it over to a table and put Everett’s address on it, writing FRAGILE twice in marker.
I FedEx it, paying extra to get there fast. Three days later a photo lands on my phone at one in the morning: a mug on a terrace rail, whipped cream on top, the river behind it doing its gray London thing. Underneath, he’s typed:
It survived customs. Thank you.
We have a system now. I stay up past one so I catch him at six his time, tea on the terrace, the day not at him yet.
Some nights we talk about the baby. Some nights he explains a deal I don’t follow one word of. Some nights neither of us says much and we just leave the line open, him reading, me maybe watching sports on the TV. Those are the best ones. I couldn’t tell you why.
Last week he put the phone against his belly on video so I could see the kicking. I watched his shirt twitch from five thousand miles away and didn’t say anything for so long he asked if the call had frozen.
It hadn’t. I had.
The packages go both ways now. He sent me a box of proper tea for the away bag with instructions typed on an actual card, and the boys found it in Denver and I had to stand there while a professional hockey team passed around a tin of loose-leaf Assam like it was contraband.
Marchetti asked if I had a butler. JP made himself a cup and pronounced it excellent, and that shut it down, because nobody argues tea with a goalie on a shutout streak.
And the man watches every game. All of them, at horrible London hours, and I know because the texts arrive during the intermissions.
Your second line got outshot nine to two.
Also your interview voice is ridiculous.
Nobody stands like that. He’ll deny to his grave that he can now explain a trap breakout, but I have the texts, time-stamped at four in the morning his time, and someday, when I’m feeling brave, I’m going to frame one.
His flight’s booked. Which means the clock is running on the thing I have to do first.
Because the minute Everett Rourke walks into that arena with my kid out in front of him, every phone in the building knows inside an hour. The boys deserve to hear it in this room, from me. And I owe them a correction on the way in.
I ask Sacco for the room after Thursday’s skate. He gives me a look but he pulls the video guys out and then plants himself in the doorway with his arms crossed.
The room quiets down fast. Twenty-two guys in various stages of undress, all of them suddenly very interested. Ozzy stops with one sock half off.
“Couple of things,” I say. “You’re going to get them off the internet soon enough, so you’re getting them from me first. Last spring the Bureau matched me. Prime match. Ninety-eight percent. The cohabitation happened during my suspension.”
Someone whistles, low and cool.
“Congrats, Callahan,” Ozzy shouts. “Who’s the unlucky omega? Er. I mean the lucky omega.”
Everyone laughs, including me.
“It’s Everett Rourke.”
And the room goes quiet. Nobody moves. Somewhere at the back a stall creaks.
“And he’s pregnant. That’s the second thing. I’m going to be a dad.”
Marchetti finds his voice first. “With Rourke.”
“Yeah.”
He starts counting on his fingers, gives up, and sits down on the bench like his knees quit. “I need a minute.”
“This is why you smile at your phone!” Linus shouts out like a man winning a bet, and judging by the way Ozzy’s head whips around, he is.
JP says nothing. He’s known for a year. He sits in his stall re-lacing a glove that doesn’t need it, grinning at the leather.
“Third thing.” I wait for it to settle. “The hearing last year. I stood in this room and told some of you that ownership called the league and pushed for more games. That came from Cade Dorn, and it was a lie. The truth is the opposite. Eight was on the table, and Rourke called to argue it down. I got four. I spread the wrong story in here, so I’m putting the right one in here.
If you’ve been carrying a grudge for me, you can set it down. ”
It goes quiet in a different way. Ozzy looks at Marchetti.
Marchetti looks at the floor. More than a few of them are replaying a certain afternoon in this same room, when a cold little omega in a gray suit told us he’d sell, and we all decided what he was inside of five minutes. I know, because I’m replaying it too.
Sacco pushes off the doorframe. “Anything else? Triplets? Trade request?”
“That’s everything, Coach.”
“Good.” He looks at me a beat longer than he needs to, and then past me at the wall. “Gordie’s grandkid,” he says, mostly to himself. He clears his throat like the words went down wrong. “Video in ten. Bring your legs tonight.”
He’s gone before anybody can look at him.
“Wait.” Ozzy’s still got the one sock in his hand. “Does this mean the owner’s coming to the summer barbecue? Do we bow?”
“You don’t bow,” JP says, finally, standing up. “You make sure there’s something on that grill that isn’t burnt. He’s carrying the future of this franchise.”
The room lets go all at once — noise, tape balls, somebody starting a pool on the due date before I’m out the door. My kid isn’t born yet and already has a betting line.
I don’t stop smiling all through video, which everyone agrees is deeply weird of me.
That night the club’s comms director calls me at home, very polite, very tired, to ask how I’d like to handle the announcement, and I tell her the truth: he lands in three weeks, he’ll be at games, we’re not hiding and we’re not doing a sit-down interview on a couch.
She’s quiet for a second and then says that’s the easiest celebrity call she’s had all year.
*
Everett lands on a Tuesday and I still can’t believe it when he does. I was planning on going over there again as soon as I could, but apparently Everett can be as spontaneous as I have been because one morning I wake to a message that simply has a flight number and arrival time.
I’m at arrivals an hour early with a cap pulled low, which fools nobody. Two kids in Barons sweaters clock me inside ten minutes and ask if it’s all true. Everything’s true, I tell them, and sign their shirts. Their mother takes a photo of the three of us that is definitely already online.
Then the doors slide open and there he is. Coat open, because the coat doesn’t close anymore.
Whatever I had ready to say is gone by the time he reaches me.
He lets me take exactly one bag. “The rest is shipped. Don’t fuss.” Then, quieter, into my jacket, where nobody in international arrivals can hear it: “Hello, you.”
The house changes fast after that. His suits go up next to my flannel and every morning the closet looks funnier to me.
The guest room stops being the guest room: crib against the long wall, a chair by the window that took him two weeks and a spreadsheet to choose.
The moose painting stays in the garage. I’ve got plans for the moose painting. I’m waiting for my moment.
I come home from the Christmas road trip and every soft blanket I own has migrated into our bed, along with three of my hoodies. He watches me notice it and lifts one eyebrow, pre-loading for a fight.
I know better than that. I sleep that night with his back against my chest, inside the walls, and nobody mentions the walls.
The relinquishment gets signed and witnessed properly his first week back. He reads it through twice at the kitchen counter, folds it into its envelope, and puts it away in his side of the closet. Neither of us brings it up again.
The December homestand he watches from the couch, feet up, doctor’s orders about crowds and stairs, texting Priya his notes like the league’s least qualified scout.
We win five straight. I bring him the game puck from the fifth one because I am apparently seventeen years old about him and always will be, and he rolls his eyes and puts it on the mantel, front and center, where it still is.
*
The night it happens is a Saturday in January. Home ice, first place on the line, the whole city chewing its nails.
It’s also the first time he’s watched from the box since the news broke. The cameras have been hunting him all season, and during warmups they finally get him: up on the board, forty feet tall, coat open, unmistakable.
I’m supposed to be doing edge work. I stand at center ice looking up like a tourist until JP skates by and whacks my shin pads.
The game is a mean one. Tight, whistles swallowed, everything earned in the hard ten feet in front of both nets.
Linus ties it in the second on a wrist shot I’d swear bends around their defenseman’s skate, and celebrates into the glass right below the box, which is not an accident.
We get the winner off a faceoff play Sacco drew up at the morning skate, four minutes left, and the barn comes apart.
The horn goes and I look up. Old habit. There was most of a year when nobody stood at that rail and I looked anyway.
He’s there. And he’s not watching the ice.
He’s standing very still, one hand on the rail, the other flat against his belly, and beside him Belanger has stopped celebrating and is waving somebody over. Even from the ice, even through the glass and the noise and the distance, Everett finds my eyes and holds them, and I know.
I don’t remember leaving the ice. I’m told I cleared the boards without the gate.
One of the suite attendants is already at the tunnel mouth, radio in hand, shouting over the crowd. “Mr. Callahan — message from Mr. Rourke. He says, and I’m quoting him exactly: take your time, and also hurry.”
Nobody in the history of this sport has gotten out of gear faster.
Half of it’s still on the floor of my stall when I go — hair soaked, suit jacket over a base layer, one shin pad in my hand for reasons I couldn’t explain under oath.
The boys are yelling things after me that would get every one of them fined.
He’s down in the service corridor by the loading dock, upright, coat over one arm, timing something on his phone. Composed as a Monday board meeting, right up until you look at the grip he’s got on the attendant’s cart.
“It started in the second period,” he says.
“The second — you waited?”
“It was a one-goal game.”
“Everett.”
“Don’t take a tone. The bag is in your truck, the contractions are nine minutes apart, and first babies are slow.
We have time.” A breath catches him mid-sentence.
He rides it down with his eyes shut, knuckles going pale on the cart, and comes back up like a man surfacing on a schedule.
“We have some time. Drive like a person.”
The bag has been in the truck for a month. He knows that. He inspected it, removed one of my three phone chargers, and added actual clothes. I put his seat belt low across his hips the way the class taught us, and he lets me, which tells me more about the contractions than the app does.
Every instinct I own is up and roaring — get him inside, get him safe, growl at strangers. I keep both hands on the wheel and drive like a person.
At the halfway light one takes him properly. Both hands go flat on the dash and he doesn’t make a single sound, which is so much worse than screaming. When it lets him go he exhales through his teeth.
“That one meant it,” he says.
“Nine minutes, huh.”
“Seven. Drive.”
There are photographers at the emergency entrance, because it’s a game night and rumors move faster than I do. I don’t slow down. I take the ramp on the far side instead — the radiology door, the back corridor I came through a year ago when it was Linus in the neck brace.
The midwife meets us on the fifth floor. She takes one look at him — at the way he stops walking mid-stride and folds one hand against the wall, coat still hung over his arm like we’re checking into a hotel — and tells us first babies take their time.
Everett breathes his way out of the top of the contraction, straightens up, and nods.
Then the next one takes him, and his hand finds mine and grinds my knuckles flat, and we go through the doors together.