50. Chapter Fifty
Percy
The door closes behind her, and I don’t move.
I couldn’t tell you how long I sit there on the edge of the bed in the dark.
My pulse has come up into my head somehow, a dull roar that’s shoved the rest of the world out past it, and I keep waiting to hear the side door and it never comes, and after a while I understand it isn’t going to, because she didn’t use it.
She went out the front. She stopped being careful. That’s how I know it’s real.
My face is wet before I’ve noticed it’s happening.
I sit there with the tears running down and I don’t even lift a hand to them, because I’m too far inside my own head, running it again and again, hunting for the exact place it went wrong.
What I did. What I didn’t do. What I could’ve said in that doorway if I were any other kind of man than the one I am.
I knew what she was asking me for. I’ve always known. I just couldn’t do it. Every single time she held a door open for me, I stood on my side of it and couldn’t make my body walk through, and tonight she finally stopped holding it.
There’s a difference between being loved and being chosen. I don’t think I understood that until right now.
She loves me. I have never once doubted that she loves me — it’s the one thing in my whole life I’ve been sure of.
But loving me and choosing me turned out to be two different jobs, and she couldn’t keep doing the second one.
She couldn’t keep choosing me over her own sleep, her own pride, and her own shot at a happy life out in the daylight where people can see it. In the end, she chose herself.
And the part that guts me, the part I can’t climb over, is that I don’t blame her. Not even a little.
I’d have left me too.
The days after come at me through glass.
I’m numb the whole way down. I eat what gets put in front of me — Rowan announced a while back that he’s done cooking for this house, that we’re grown men and can feed our own damn selves, but he’s clocked that I’ve stopped eating, and so a plate keeps landing in front of me anyway, and I keep clearing it.
Not because I’m hungry, but because he puts the food down, and I’m not built rude enough to leave it.
The ice doesn’t clear my head the way Josh always swore it would.
Josh, who promised me the crease would be the one place in the world that always made sense — and for years, he was right, and now he’s not.
I stand in it, and there’s nobody home upstairs.
I’ve gone hollow, top to bottom. A zombie doing a decent impression of the goalie who used to live in this body.
The funny thing is that people have walked out on me my whole life. A lot of them. And every single time, I stood there and watched them go and I never once understood it — what I’d done, what was so broken in me that made me so easy to leave.
Watching Penelope go, I think I finally get it.
I finally understand that there’s something seriously fucking wrong with me. There always has been. It just took the best thing I ever had walking out the front door for me to see it clearly.
At Friday’s game, I face twenty-nine shots and stop all of them and can’t remember most of the game.
My body does it without me — the post, the push, the glove hand up where it needs to be — the whole thing running on its own.
Fuller catches the back of my neck coming off the ice, his face lit up, saying something I don’t hear.
Stanley leaps onto my back in the tunnel with all his weight, howling.
I carry him a few steps and set him down and feel none of it.
Her name’s in my phone maybe twenty times a day.
My thumb finds it without my permission.
Sunday night I get all the way into the thread, the empty box sitting there waiting, and I type i miss you, lowercase, no punctuation, and I look at it.
My thumb hovers over send for a long, long time.
Then I delete it, one letter at a time, and put the phone down on the desk.
She doesn’t text either.
The first week I’m too far under to notice much of anything, and then somewhere in the second one it lands on me that the silence has two ends to it. I’m not texting her because I’ve got nothing new to hand her. She’s not texting me because she’s finished.
Those aren’t the same thing. It takes me a while to understand that.
By the third week I’m sleeping about three hours a night and I’ve stopped being surprised by it. I know what this room looks like at four in the morning. I know the line the streetlight puts across the floor and where it lands on the wall by five and how long after that the birds start.
Her name comes up in this house all the time now, and I have to stand there and let it.
Melly’s her roommate. Gianna’s her friend. Lucy’s over here a lot. Sometimes Melly will talk lightly about her, and I have to pretend that it doesn’t cut me deep.
I get very good at hearing her name. It’s a skill I’d rather not have.
The games keep going the way they’ve been going.
I’m playing the best hockey of my life. Fuller’s started saying things to me in the hall that he’s never said before about the pro camps in the spring, about what scouts have been asking.
I nod and thank him and go get on the bus.
The trade paid out. Every part of it, exactly the way I said it would that night on the porch.
I chose this and I got it, all of it, and I’ve never felt less like a person in my life.
I take the drawing out on a Thursday.
It’s been in the dresser since I moved down here, face down between the two pieces of cardboard. I get it out and sit on the edge of the bed with it. The two of us in the Hawthorne kitchen. Her against the counter, me in the doorway in my coat.
I remember exactly what I thought when she handed it to me. That I’d have this when I had nothing else.
I sit there with it for a while. Then I put it back between the cardboard, and back in the drawer, and I shut the drawer, and I go to practice.
It’s December and Stanley’s at full volume about the national title.
We’re winning, and he’s on it every night now — the run we’re on, the seeding, the bracket he’s already drawn out on the back of a pizza box, their one last shot at the whole thing.
The sermon he’s been preaching since I’ve known him.
He’s happier than I’ve ever seen a human being.
Half of that’s the hockey, and the other half is Aspen Linwood, the coach’s daughter from three doors down — the thing that started as some fake relationship he was running for reasons none of us ever fully followed, and then turned real on him over Thanksgiving, and he has not shut up about her for a single hour since.
Stanley Ermington. The man who enforces the rules on the whiteboard. Whose entire personality, for three straight years, was those rules.
He’s got a girlfriend now. He’s unbearable about her, and not one person in this house holds him to a single word he ever said.
Nobody but me, apparently. I sit here holding all of it while he glows.
“Okay. Christmas break.” He spins a chair around backward and drops into it, forearms crossed over the top. “Let’s do a ski trip. There’s a hot tub. We can stay—”
“No,” I say.
And I feel the meanness of it come up out of me, because three of the four other men at this table are in real relationships, and I’m the one who had exactly what they’ve got and set it on fire with my own two hands.
The room pauses.
“...Okay. So that’s a no from the goalie.” Stanley recovers. “Counterproposal. We—”
“I said no.”
They look at each other. Not at me — at each other, over me, around me, and they start having one of those conversations this house holds without a single word in it, all eyebrows and small mouth-movements, and I hate that I’ve lived here long enough to read every syllable of it.
“He’s said no to everything for a month,” Rowan says.
“Said no to the steak place,” Blue adds.
“Said no to ice skating, and that was a whole house thing,” Benson nods.
They’re keeping a tally. They’ve been keeping a tally of me.
“Deveroux.” Stanley leans in. “What is with you, man?” He’s still grinning, but the grin’s got something under it now, something real wearing a joke’s clothes.
“You’ve been a ghost. You don’t eat. You don’t come out.
You do the thing where you sit in the corner and stare at a wall like a widow in black waiting on a ship that already sank—”
“Nothing,” I say.
“No. Seriously.” He won’t let it go; Stanley has never in his life let one thing go. “Is it Fuller? You worried about your minutes, your draft stock, what?” His eyebrows climb. “Christ. Did somebody die? Because we’ve all been talking about it, man, all of us, we’ve been—”
“You’ve been off since August,” Benson says. He leans back, arms folded, and the captain voice comes out, the low even one none of us push past. “That’s four months, Percy. That’s not a rough week. That’s a season.”
Stanley argues, “No, it hasn’t been since August. Not like this. These past few weeks have been bad.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine, and we’ve all watched it, and—”
“Is it a girl?” Stanley says.
And when I stare blankly, they’re all going at once.
Voices coming at me from every side of the table, stacked on top of each other, every one of them worried, every one of them loud.
The kitchen’s gone too bright. Every question they throw is a door I can’t get open, and my hands have started doing the thing on the table where they won’t stay still.
The pressure on my chest is cinching down until there’s no room left to pull a breath, and there’s nowhere to put my eyes, nowhere in the whole loud room to land—
Except Blue.
Blue’s right beside me, and it hits me that it was only ever three voices. Not four. Blue hasn’t said a word this whole time.