Chapter 4
The thermostat war started on day three.
Shane woke up at six because the apartment was the temperature of a meat locker, and he stood in the hallway in two pairs of socks and a hoodie with the strings pulled tight around his face and watched Theo do shoulder rehab on the living room floor, shirtless, in sixty-three degrees, a Viking who’d wandered into the wrong century.
“It’s freezing,” Shane said.
“It’s healthy.”
“It’s a crime.” Shane went to the thermostat and put it to seventy. Theo, not looking up from the resistance band he had hooked under one enormous foot, said, “If you touch the thermostat, I will put your protein powder in the toilet.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I have nothing to lose. I am a man who sleeps on a couch.”
Shane took his hand off the thermostat. He’d learned, in three days, that Theo’s threats were always small and exact and real, more frightening than a normal person’s for it.
The man didn’t bluff. It was infuriating.
Shane went and made coffee, banging the cupboard, and Theo finished his set with the serenity of a glacier, and this, Shane was discovering, was marriage: two men weaponizing household appliances at dawn.
The thing nobody warned you about a fake marriage was the dishes.
“You left a plate in the sink,” Shane said.
“You left three.”
“Mine are soaking. Soaking is a technique.”
“Soaking is what people say who do not wash plates.” Theo rinsed his single plate, dried it, and put it away, and the smugness made Shane want to commit a felony.
And yet.
And yet the rent was paid. And his half of it was less than the room on Kishwaukee had cost, just like the cover story said.
And his mother had started the treatment on Monday.
He’d watched the confirmation email come in while standing in this cold kitchen, first infusion scheduled, and he’d had to go into the bathroom and run the tap so the iceberg wouldn’t hear him lose it.
And the iceberg had pretended, all evening, not to notice that Shane’s eyes were red.
Shane was beginning to understand that this was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in years: Theo Lindgren’s enormous, deliberate, surgical not-noticing.
* * *
“We have to learn each other,” Theo said that night, over the food they were not eating together but happened to both be eating, at the small table, at the same time, which was not the same as eating together. “For the interview. They ask things. Small things. To catch a lie.”
“Like what.”
“Which side of the bed. What I eat for breakfast. The name of my mother. Whether I snore.” Theo paused. “I do not snore.”
“Everyone snores.”
“I do not snore. You snore. You snore like—” Theo made a sound, a sort of wet rattling honk, dead accurate, and Shane choked on his chicken.
“I do not sound like that.”
“You sound exactly like that. The walls are thin. It is sleeping next to a dying machine.” But there was amusement at the corner of Theo’s mouth, the barest crack in the permafrost, and Shane found himself fighting a smile and losing, and he looked down at his plate fast so Theo wouldn’t see.
They drilled it like a system. Birgitta (Gitta) Lindgren, Theo’s mother, fifty-three, lived in Gothenburg, was “blunt and warm, you will like her, everyone likes her, it is annoying.” Theo’s father was alive and might as well not have been, a man back home who had not spoken to his son in seven years; the flat, final way Theo closed the subject told Shane not to push, and he didn’t.
Theo ate eggs and oats and black coffee, slept on the left, read in Swedish to fall asleep, had a scar on his right shoulder he did not explain and Shane did not ask about, though he’d seen it, the long pale seam of it, every morning during rehab, and had started, without meaning to, to track the bad days by how slowly Theo lifted his arm.
In return, Shane gave up his own small facts.
Marion. The MS, mid-stage, diagnosed when Shane was nineteen and still believed his life was going to be simple.
His father, gone. Not dead, just gone, a different and worse kind of gone, the kind that left when the diagnosis got real.
His father had taken someone with him when he went: a son.
Shane’s older half-brother, Tommy, the dad’s kid from before Marion, who’d chosen the father in the split, who Shane hadn’t really spoken to in a decade.
“He’s good,” Shane said, flat, when Theo’s eyebrows went up at the name, because of course, Theo knew the name; everyone in the org knew the name.
“Tommy Novak. He’s a D for the Fury. The actual Fury.
Been up there three years.” A bitter twist of the mouth.
“So yeah. I’ve got a brother in the show, up the road, and I’d sooner block a slapshot with my teeth than ask him for a dollar.
He’s not Mom’s. He went with Dad. Far as Tommy’s concerned, she’s just the woman who came after.
” He shrugged, like it didn’t sit on him.
It did. “It’s been the two of them ever since, him and Dad.
And the two of us. Me and Mom.” That it had been that way ever since, and that he’d give every cent he’d ever make and a few he hadn’t to keep her walking, and that this, this arrangement, this cold apartment and this ring and this lie, was the cent. The biggest one he had.
Theo sat still and listened, taking inventory, and when Shane finished, he didn’t say I’m sorry or that’s hard or any of the things people said that meant nothing. He said, “She raised a stubborn son. That is a good thing in a son. It is hell in a defense partner.”
And Shane laughed, surprised, wet-eyed, and Theo got up and rinsed his single plate and did not look at him. The not-looking again, the deliberate mercy of it. Shane thought, don’t, at himself, hard. Don’t. There’s a line. You wrote it down.
* * *
The days settled into a shape. That was the dangerous part.
Shane learned the apartment by repetition, until he stopped having to think about it.
He learned that Theo got up at five-forty without an alarm and did forty minutes of shoulder work on the living room floor in the dark, and that if Shane stayed very still in the bed and watched through the cracked door, he could see the moment the arm went from stiff to functional, could read the bad mornings by how long the stiff part lasted.
He learned that Theo made coffee for two even though they pretended they weren’t a two, that he left Shane’s mug on the left side of the machine without comment because that was the side Shane reached for, that the apartment’s terrible water pressure meant whoever showered second got it cold, and Theo always, somehow, ended up showering second.
He learned that Theo never finished a sentence about his father, and that the photo on the windowsill was the only personal object in the entire apartment, and that on the nights Theo turned it to face the room, he was sadder than usual, and on the nights he turned it away, he was sadder still.
And Theo, Shane could tell, was learning him back, with that flat total attention that should have been unsettling and was instead a kind of honor Shane hadn’t expected.
Theo learned that Shane talked to fill the silence and went quiet when actually something was wrong, backward from most people, and adjusted accordingly: pressed when Shane went quiet, let the chatter wash past when it was just chatter.
Theo learned that Shane called his mother every night at nine and came out of the bedroom afterward with his face carefully arranged, and started, around the second week, leaving a cup of the disgusting herbal tea Shane secretly liked steeping on the counter for nine-fifteen, never mentioning it, leaving water out for an animal he was trying not to spook.
They did not talk about any of it. That was the rule, the unspoken one underneath the written ones.
They catalogued each other in silence and pretended the cataloguing was just logistics, just two roommates learning a shared space, just evidence for a folder, and the lie held, barely, fine until weight went on it.
“You watch me,” Theo said one morning, not turning around, mid-rehab, the resistance band stretched taut.
Shane froze in the bedroom doorway. “I — no. I was getting water.”
“You watch me do the shoulder. Every morning. I can see you in the television. It is reflective.” A pause; the band released, slow and controlled. “It is fine. I only wonder why.”
Shane could have lied. He was good at lying, click and all.
Instead, because it was early and his guard was down, and Theo had his back turned, so it didn’t quite count, he told a piece of the truth.
“I’m checking if it’s a bad day. For the shoulder.
So I know to, I dunno, cover the right side more.
In the game.” He shrugged at Theo’s back.
“You won’t tell anybody when it’s bad, so somebody’s gotta know.
Might as well be me. I’m already lying to the government for you, what’s one more secret. ”
Theo was quiet for a long moment. He didn’t turn around. When he spoke his voice was very even, the managing voice. “That is — efficient,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I am not making it weird. You are making it weird by announcing you watch me undress every morning.”
“I said I watch you do rehab—”
“Mm,” Theo said, and there was the ghost of the almost-smile at the corner of his mouth again, and Shane threw a dish towel at the back of his head and missed, and Theo caught it without looking, and the morning kept going, sixty-three degrees and ordinary and quietly, ruinously good.
* * *
Dana Cardoso’s office was on the eleventh floor of a building in the Loop, and it cost four hundred dollars an hour to sit in it, and Theo had insisted on paying for the consult himself. Their first fight as a married couple, about money, would not be the last.