Chapter 1 #2
The players’ lot behind the barn was half-empty and lit by two sodium lamps that turned everything the color of weak tea.
Theo’s car was an eight-year-old Volvo he’d bought used and paid for in full, because Theo Lindgren did not finance things, and he sat in it for a while in the cold before he turned the key, letting his body settle into the grade of pain that meant it was over.
His phone had a voicemail. He almost didn’t listen to it. Then he saw the number, the 312 area code, the immigration firm in Chicago that ate four hundred of his dollars an hour to tell him things he already knew, and his stomach dropped before he’d even pressed play.
“Mr. Lindgren, hi, it’s Dana from Cardoso Immigration, returning your call.
So — I’ll be straight with you, because I know that’s how you like it.
The P-1 is tied to your employment, and your employment agreement runs through the end of this season, and after that there’s nothing to extend.
The visa doesn’t renew on its own. To stay on the athlete track past the summer, we’d need a new contributing contract — ideally NHL, because the P-1 wants you at the top of your field, and a returning AHL deal is a hard sell to the officer.
Without that, you’d be looking at leaving the country when the current authorization lapses.
There are other paths, but they’re — well.
We should talk about all of it. The one that’s fastest and cleanest, honestly, if it applies to your situation, is marriage to a citizen.
I know that’s not — I’m just laying out the options.
Call me back. We’ll figure it out. Okay. Bye.”
Theo sat with the phone warm against his ear after the message ended.
A new contributing contract. Ideally NHL.
He was twenty-seven. He had come over at twenty as the best young defenseman in the Swedish league, a kid who scored, a kid scouts wrote poems about, and he had landed in North America and the scoring had not made the trip.
The ice was narrower. The men were meaner.
The version of Theo Lindgren who’d put up forty points in the SHL had stayed in Sweden, apparently, and the version who’d come over had spent seven years becoming a different player, necessary, the one that blocked the shot and killed the penalty and made the flashy kid next to him look brilliant.
He was good at it. He was, by now, one of the best in the league at a job that had never once made anyone write a poem.
A coach could recommend him. Mercer had as good as said he would, if the math mathed.
But the call-up wasn’t Mercer’s to give, not really; it lived ninety miles down the highway in an office in Chicago, in the hands of people who ran a different math, and there was exactly one open spot on the Fury blue line and more than one Blaze defenseman who wanted it.
He did the arithmetic he’d been doing for a month.
Contract: not in his control. Call-up: not in his control.
The summer was coming whether he controlled it or not, and at the end of the summer was a flight to Gothenburg and his mother’s house and the rest of his life spent being the man hockey had been finished with, in a country he’d left at twenty because he’d wanted, more than anything, to be somewhere that didn’t already know exactly what he was worth.
Marriage to a citizen.
Theo almost laughed. He didn’t know any citizens.
He knew twenty-three hockey players, a coach who scared him, a captain who’d seen too much, and a trainer named Pete.
He had no one. This was not self-pity; it was a roster, and he kept clean rosters.
The list of people in North America who would marry Theo Lindgren to keep him in the country was a sheet of ice with nothing on it.
It hadn’t always been a short list. That was the part Theo didn’t let himself touch most nights, the part filed deepest. At twenty, he’d had a whole country’s worth of people who wanted to be near him, the kid from Gothenburg who’d put up forty points in the SHL, who scored in overtime, who got mobbed at center ice, who got asked for his number by people who’d never asked anyone for anything.
He’d been wanted then. And he’d looked at all that wanting and understood, even at twenty, with the cold clarity that had always been his curse and his only real talent, that it wasn’t him they wanted.
It was the points. It was what he could do.
And so he’d done the most reckless thing of his careful life and gotten on a plane to a country where no one knew the points, where he’d have to find out whether there was anyone underneath them worth wanting.
There was an answer to that question. Seven years later, Theo had it. The answer was no.
He’d lost the points somewhere over the Atlantic.
The scoring touch had stayed in seat 14C, apparently.
And he’d rebuilt himself into the other thing, the necessary thing, loved by coaches and trusted by partners and valued, genuinely valued, for exactly as long as it kept blocking shots.
He was good at being necessary. He’d made a religion of it.
And the religion had a hole at the center of it that he’d spent seven years not looking into, and tonight, in a Volvo in a parking lot in Rockford, Illinois, with a voicemail from an immigration lawyer cooling in his ear, the hole looked back.
He started the Volvo. The heater took a while.
Across the lot, Shane Novak was leaning against his own car, with his phone pressed to his ear and his back curled in on itself.
Even from forty feet away in bad light, Theo could tell the man was getting bad news, because Shane went still when he got bad news, the only time on earth Shane Novak ever went still.
Theo watched him go still and thought, with the small cold clarity he brought to everything, we are both standing in this parking lot losing something.
Then he put the car in drive and went home to the one-bedroom apartment he could not afford to lose either, and did not think about Shane Novak again until it was much, much too late to stop.