Chapter 5
The rooming list went up in the locker room before every trip. This trip, the list said Lindgren / Novak.
“They put us together,” Shane said, reading over his shoulder, too close, smelling like the cinnamon gum he chewed instead of eating. “Obviously. We’re the roommates. It’d look weird if they didn’t.”
“Yes,” Theo said, and did not say the rest of the thought: the roommate cover story had a cost he had not fully calculated, and the cost was a hotel room, and a hotel room in this league, on a back-to-back, for two bubble guys, was going to have one bed.
It had one bed.
They stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Single broad king under its taut hotel coverlet, lit gray by the parking-lot light through the curtain gap.
The room was the size these rooms always were: one chair, one desk, one lamp with a shade the color of old teeth.
AHL budgets. Theo had understood the math his first season and stopped arguing with it.
They paid for two men in a room; this was the room.
He set his bag down near the chair and heard, behind him, the door swing shut on its slow hinge with a click that landed as a verdict.
“I’ll call down,” Shane said. “Get a cot. Or a—”
“For what reason,” Theo said. “You call the desk for a cot, and the guy at the desk tells the bellman, and the bellman is a Blaze fan, and by Tuesday, the whole barn knows the roommates would not share a bed. It is a small league.” He set his bag down.
“It is a bed. We are adults. We have both slept in worse.”
“You keep saying that. ‘I’ve slept in worse.’ Where have you slept that’s worse than sharing a bed with a guy you hate?”
“Junior billet houses,” Theo said. “Bus floors. A bench in a train station in Malm?, when I was seventeen and missed a connection. A bed is luxury.” He was already taking off his watch, unhurried, building the wall of routine he built around everything that scared him.
“Take whichever side. I sleep on the left at home but I do not care.”
“I’ll take the right.” Shane was doing the loud thing he did when he was nervous, narrating, filling the air. “We build a wall. Pillows. A demilitarized zone. The Theo-Shane Accords. Nobody crosses the line of control.”
“Fine.”
“I’m serious. I starfish. I’ve been told I starfish.”
“By whom.”
Shane opened his mouth, shut it. “People,” he said, and Theo filed that, the flinch, Shane’s loudness and the trapdoor under it, and did not pull on it.
They built the wall. Two pillows down the center of the king, a soft Maginot Line, and they lay down on their backs on either side of it with the lights off.
Theo on the left, Shane on the right, eleven inches between them and the breadth of a cold war.
Two enormous tired men holding themselves rigid and straight, arms at their sides, the geometry of not-touching.
Theo kept his right shoulder pinned, as he had for two days now, the joint unhappy and patient, the kind of patient that was really just waiting.
The radiator ticked. The parking lot hummed. Neither of them slept.
“You awake?” Shane whispered, after a while.
“No.”
“Liar.” A rustle of sheets. “I can’t sleep in new places.
Never could. On the road I just lie here.
Vibrate. My mom used to drive me to away tournaments when I was a kid and I’d be up all night in the motel just staring at the ceiling, and she’d be exhausted, she had two jobs, and she’d still get up and sit on the edge of my bed and just — talk.
About nothing. Till I went under.” His voice was different in the dark, the volume drained out of it, younger. “Weird thing to remember.”
Theo lay still on his side of the wall and considered the dark.
He was not a man who traded confidences; confidences were currency, and he kept his accounts closed.
But it was late, and the room was strange, and there was a wall of pillows between them that put them outside of real, in that register where the things you said wouldn’t count in the morning.
“My mother sang,” he said. “Not well. She is a terrible singer, it is famous in our family. But she would sing in the kitchen, very loud, very bad, and it meant everything was — fine. Safe. When she stopped singing, I learned to be afraid.” He stopped, surprised at himself, at the door he’d just cracked.
“There were years she did not sing. After my father got — when he got sick. The not-singing years. I learned to make myself useful in those years. Small. Quiet. A boy who did not add to anyone’s trouble.
” He shut the door again, firmly. “Anyway. You should sleep. We have a game.”
“Theo.”
“Mm.”
“Why’d you really do it. The marriage thing.
” The pillow wall shifted; Shane had turned toward it, toward Theo, a dim bulk in the dark.
“And don’t say the visa. I know the visa.
I mean, you could’ve found somebody else.
Some girl from back in Sweden, some — anybody.
You picked the guy who screams at you on the bench. Why.”
Theo was quiet for a long time.
“Because you would never love me,” Theo said, finally, into the dark.
He stopped. He had not known that was the answer until it was already out of his mouth, sitting there between them, and he hadn’t meant to say it.
“That was the reason.” He could feel a larger shape around it, a weight he had no word for yet, about safety, about the cost of it.
He let it go. “I chose you because you were safe.”
The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door closed.
“Huh,” Shane said, very softly, and didn’t say anything else, and Theo lay awake listening to his breathing not even out, both of them very much not asleep on either side of a wall of pillows that had stopped, somewhere in the last few minutes, from being protection and become the only thing holding the line.
* * *
Theo knew the exact moment the shoulder was going to go: a half-second of warning, the air before lightning.
He’d played the second of the back-to-back on a body that had nothing left, the team running on fumes, and he’d blocked two shots in the third on legs that didn’t want to and the shoulder had taken a cross-check in the corner that he’d absorbed wrong, just slightly wrong, and ever since he’d been managing it, keeping the arm close, sleeping (trying to sleep) with it pinned carefully to his side.
And then he turned over. In his sleep, or near it, the old animal turn toward the warm side of the bed, and the joint, tired and angry and a decade past trustworthy, slid.
Not all the way out. It had only fully dislocated three times in his life, and each one was a memory he kept in a locked room.
This was the lesser horror, the partial, the subluxation, the shoulder leaving its home a centimeter, and the centimeter being enough that Theo’s body locked around a white bolt of pain and he made a sound he would have died before making if he’d been awake enough to stop it.
The light came on.
“Theo. Theo. Hey—” Shane was up, the pillow wall scattered, his hands already there, and here was what Theo would think about for weeks: Shane did not ask what was wrong.
Shane, who narrated everything, who needed every situation explained to him twice, took one look at Theo’s right arm and went silent and certain, and his hands found the shoulder, and he said, low and fast, “Okay. Okay. It’s the shoulder.
Don’t pull on it, don’t — here, can you let it hang?
Let the arm hang, let me—” and he was easing Theo to sit on the edge of the bed, getting Theo’s forearm cradled across his own knee so the weight came off, doing exactly the right thing, what a trainer would do, gentle traction and patience, and Theo breathed through his teeth and the joint, after a long terrible moment, slid its grudging centimeter home.
“There,” Shane said, low. “There it goes. Okay. Okay. Breathe. You’re okay.”
Theo sat hunched on the edge of a hotel bed at three in the morning with his enemy’s hands on the most secret broken part of him and his face an inch from his enemy’s bare shoulder, and he was shaking, fine tremors, shock and adrenaline, and Shane did not move his hands away.
Shane held the shoulder, both palms warm and certain over the old scar, and waited, and breathed slow on purpose, giving Theo a rhythm to match, and the radiator ticked, and neither of them said a word for a long time.
“How long,” Shane finally said. Quiet. No volume in it at all. “How long has it been this bad.”
“It is not bad.”
“Theo.”
“It is — managed. Juniors. The surgery was when I was eighteen. It comes out if I brace wrong. I know how to live with it.” Theo made himself sit up, made himself find the flat voice.
“It is nothing. It is not in the injury report and it will not be in the injury report. You understand? Pete does not know how bad. No one knows how bad. If the org knows my shoulder cannot be trusted, I do not get the call, I do not get a contract, I do not stay. It stays in this room.”
He braced for Shane to use it. That was the reflex; that was the math Theo ran on everyone, always: what will they do with the part of me that’s weak. The answer was always use it, because a weakness was currency you surrendered and someone else got to spend.
Shane didn’t use it. Shane sat back on his heels on the hotel bed and looked at him, loud face gone soft and serious, and said, “Yeah. Okay. It stays in this room.” And then, because he was Shane: “But you’re letting Pete look at it when we get back.
I’ll tell him I tweaked my back, get us both in the room, you can have the table. Nobody’ll know.”
“You would do that.”
“I’d—” Shane stopped. Frowned, like he’d surprised himself. “I’d lie to the trainer about my back to get you a table. Yeah. I guess I would. Don’t make it weird.”
“You are making it weird.”
“I’m not — you’re shaking, you don’t get to—” But he was almost smiling, and his hands were still on Theo’s shoulder, and the moment had gone on too long to be anything other than what it was: two men touching in the dark for no reason hockey could explain, and they both seemed to realize it at once.
Shane took his hands back. Cleared his throat. “Lie down,” he said. “On your left. So it can’t — so the arm’s safe. I’ll take the wall.”
They lay back down. The pillow wall was gone, scattered to the floor, and neither of them rebuilt it.
Theo lay on his left, the shoulder pinned safe, facing the edge, and behind him the heat of Shane Novak in the dark, close, not touching, the line of control abandoned somewhere around three a.m., and he listened to Shane’s rhythm go slow and then deep and then, eventually, into the wet rattling honk he would never in his life admit to, and Theo Lindgren, against every term of the agreement, against the locked room and the flat voice and twenty-seven years of careful arithmetic, slept.
* * *
He woke tangled.
No other word for it, no pretending otherwise.
Sometime in the last hours of the night, the two of them had drifted across the dead zone like ships off their anchors, and Theo woke with the gray morning in the curtains and Shane Novak’s face slack and young six inches from his own.
Shane’s arm lay across Theo’s ribs, heavy and warm, the weight of him, all two hundred and ten pounds of Shane Novak redistributed in sleep into something that had forgotten to be armored.
One of Shane’s bad-in-the-cold hands was fisted loose in the front of Theo’s shirt, holding on, the knuckles pale.
Theo lay in the space of his own stillness and took inventory the way he took inventory of everything: the arm’s weight, the heat of another body that close, the slow rise and fall of Shane against his ribs, in and out, steady.
The shoulder didn’t hurt. That was the first thing he noticed, with the strange clear stupidity of just-waking: the shoulder didn’t hurt, for the first morning in longer than he could remember.
The second thing he noticed was that he did not want to move.
He lay still, good at lying still, had been good at it since the not-singing years, and looked at the sleeping face of the man he had married for a visa, and what he had been refusing since a parking lot eleven days ago rose through him slow and warm, and he thought, in Swedish, as he thought the truest things: oh no.
Shane stirred. His eyes opened, found Theo’s, an inch away. For one suspended second neither of them did anything at all.
Then Shane went, “Nope,” and rolled away and off the bed in one motion and stood up and clapped his hands once, too loud, “okay, morning, great, we gotta catch the bus, I call the shower,” and was gone into the bathroom, and the door shut, and the shower ran, and Theo lay in the warm dent Shane had left and stared at the ceiling and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the body knew, the body had known for days, and the brain was just the last to hear about it, and the bus left in forty minutes.
On the bus, Shane sat one row up and across the aisle, his usual seat, and put his headphones in, and performed normal so hard that Theo, who performed normal for a living, recognized every seam of it.
They did not look at each other. That was the rule now, apparently, the unspoken amendment to the agreement: whatever had happened in the dark of a hotel room belonged to the dark of a hotel room, and out here, in the gray bus light, they were defense partners who tolerated each other, and the gap between those two things was the width of an aisle and an entire ocean.
But somewhere south of the state line, Shane fell asleep, the only place the loud man ever went quiet, and his head tipped and came to rest against the window at an angle that Theo knew, by morning, would leave a crick in his neck that his bad-in-the-cold hands would make worse.
And Theo sat across the aisle and watched him sleep and did the math he could not stop doing.
The math said this is a complication. This will cost you.
There is a call-up at the end of the season with one name on it and a divorce written into the deal, and you have just added the one variable that makes the equation impossible to solve cleanly: you have started to want what you are supposed to be able to walk away from.
The math was correct. The math was always correct. And Theo looked at Shane Novak asleep against a bus window with his neck at the wrong angle, and against every line of the arithmetic, the terrible tenderness of wanting to fix that angle moved through him clean and exact.
He didn’t fix the neck. They weren’t there yet. But he wanted to.