Chapter 9
The treatment room at six in the morning was the only place Theo let the mask come all the way off, and now Shane was in it.
That was the change the injury had made, the one nobody had voted on.
Theo’s rehab had been a solitary religion his whole career: Pete the trainer working the shoulder with his eyes elsewhere, the door shut, no audience for the ugliness of a body being coaxed back from failure.
But Theo couldn’t drive himself with the arm braced, and couldn’t do the home exercises one-handed, and so Shane came.
Early, before the rest of the team, into the cramped fluorescent room that smelled of liniment and tape and the sweat of men in pain, and Shane learned the rehab the way he’d learned everything else about Theo: by watching, and not saying, and being there.
“You’re guarding it,” Shane said, low, from the stool by the table. Pete wasn’t in yet. “When you do the external rotation. You’re cheating with your trap because the real movement hurts. I can see it.”
“It does not hurt.”
“Theo.” Shane reached over and put two fingers, light, on the ridge of muscle at the top of Theo’s shoulder, where it was bunched and lying.
“This is doing the work the rotator cuff’s supposed to do.
You’re protecting the thing we’re trying to fix.
Pete’d say the same if you’d let him actually look at you instead of making him do it with his eyes closed.
” A beat. “Do it again. Slower. I’ll keep my hand here.
When you cheat I’ll feel it and you’ll start over. ”
Theo looked at him, the loud reckless gambler gone quiet and clinical and patient, one hand resting on the part of him he never let anyone near, and the old animal panic rose: the you are seeing too much, the I am only worth this for as long as it works.
And under the panic, newer and worse, a pull he had no defense against: the wanting to be looked at.
Not the performance-armor looking, the camera looking, the is he still useful looking he’d lived inside his whole life.
This. A man on a stool at six in the morning who had learned the difference between his trap and his cuff because Theo’s body had become something he wanted to understand.
He did the rotation again. Slower. Shane’s fingers caught the cheat before Theo registered it: “there, you just did it, start over.” And Theo started over, and something in his chest cracked open, and his eyes stung, which he blamed on the early hour.
“Why are you good at this,” Theo said, on the fourth rep.
“Three years of my mom’s PT appointments.
” Shane said it easily, but his thumb went still for a second.
“MS, you do a lot of PT. I used to drive her, sit in, learn the exercises so I could spot her at home when the home health couldn’t come.
You learn to watch for the cheat. The body’s always trying to protect the broken part by overusing the part next to it, and then that part breaks too, and you’ve got two problems.” He pressed gently, guiding the movement true.
“You can’t let it guard. You have to make it do the scary thing, the movement that hurts, or it never gets strong.
She taught me that, actually. My mom. About her own legs.
” His voice shifted. “‘You have to use the part that’s failing, baby, or you lose it. Favoring it is how you lose it.’”
Theo stopped mid-rep. Looked at him.
“She’s talking about her legs,” Shane said, to the wall, “but I think about it a lot. About other stuff.”
“Yes,” Theo said quietly. “I think you do.”
They didn’t say anything else. Theo finished the set, doing the scary thing, the movement that hurt, not favoring it, while a man who’d learned spotting from his sick mother kept one hand on his shoulder and caught every cheat, and the fluorescent room hummed, and outside the season ran down, and Theo thought: the most married thing they had done yet.
More married than the courthouse, more married than the bed.
This. The careful unglamorous tending of a body that was failing, by someone who had decided not to look away.
* * *
The immigration interview was scheduled for a Thursday, in a federal building in Chicago that had the same beige despair as the courthouse but with metal detectors, and Theo had a sling on under his suit jacket and a story about how he’d hurt it moving a couch, and Shane had a folder.
The folder was what undid Shane, a little, in the days before.
Their lawyer, Dana, had sent a list, evidence of a bona fide marriage, and they’d had to build it, and it had turned out they didn’t have to manufacture much.
The lease with both their names. The joint account they’d opened for groceries.
Photos: they’d had to take some posed ones, sure, awkward in the apartment, Theo wincing through the sling, but most of the photos were just there, already, on Shane’s phone, dozens of them, the two of them at the rink and at the diner and one Marek had snapped of them on the bench mid-argument that somehow looked, when you didn’t know better, like a candid of two people in love.
Shane had scrolled through his own camera roll, building the folder, and realized he’d been documenting a marriage for months without noticing he was in one.
They rehearsed the night before, at the kitchen counter, with Dana’s list printed out between them, and Shane’s voice went half a note too careful on the first question. Too much mattering to be loud about.
“They’ll separate us,” he said, for the third time.
“They ask you stuff and me stuff and they compare. So we have to know the answers, Theo, the real ones, not the cover story. Which side of the bed. What you eat. Whether I—” He scrubbed his hands over his face.
“What if I get one wrong. What if I say you sleep on the right and you say left and the whole thing falls apart and you get deported because I couldn’t remember which side of the bed my own husband sleeps on—”
“Left,” Theo said. “I sleep on the left. You know this. You have slept beside me for two months.”
“I know you sleep on the left, I just, under pressure I blank, I’ve blanked in shootouts, I once forgot my own jersey number on live TV—”
“Shane.” Theo put down the list. “Look at me. We will not get the answers wrong, because we are not going to memorize answers. We are going to tell the truth. That is the whole secret. The lie is only the reason we married. Everything else is real. You do not have to remember which side I sleep on, you have to know me, and you do. You know me better than anyone has known me in years. You watch me do my shoulder in the morning. You leave tea out for me at nine-fifteen and think I do not notice.” Shane’s head came up.
“I notice everything. It is my one talent. So tomorrow, when they ask, do not perform. Just answer. The truth will hold because it is the truth.”
Shane stared at him. “You know about the tea?”
“I know about the tea.”
“I never said anything because I didn’t want to make it—”
“Weird. I know.” The ghost of the almost-smile.
“You make everything weird by trying not to make it weird. It is one of the things I—” Theo stopped, the sentence walking toward a cliff, and stepped back from the edge.
“Anyway. Go to bed. You sleep on the right. I sleep on the left. Tomorrow we tell the truth and you stop trying to memorize a man you already know by heart.”
And Shane went to bed on the right, and Theo joined him on the left within the hour, because they had stopped pretending about the couch weeks ago, and Shane lay awake in the dark next to the man he was going to perform a marriage for tomorrow and realized, with a dread he couldn’t un-know, that none of the answers were answers.
They were just facts about a life he was already living.
The divorce written into the deal was going to take a cut it had no right to.
The call-up was coming. He lay there doing Theo’s arithmetic for once, cold and clear, and did not sleep, and in the morning they drove to Chicago to convince the government of what had stopped being a lie somewhere around Cleveland.
“You’re nervous,” Theo said, in the waiting room. They were sitting in the molded chairs, knees almost touching, and Theo said it without looking, eyes on the far wall.
“I’m not nervous.”
“You are clicking your tongue.”
Shane stopped clicking his tongue. “How do you—”
“You do it before you lie. I noticed it the first week.” A pause. “It is a bad poker tell. We should fix it before you do team media for a living.”
“Shut up.” But the grip in his chest eased. I notice you. I have clocked every tell. Nobody paid attention to Shane. Shane was the one who paid attention, who carried, who managed his mother’s appointments from three hundred miles away and remembered everyone’s birthday.
“Lindgren. Novak.” A clerk at a door. “Officer Reyes will see you.”
* * *
The officer was tired and thorough and not unkind, and she had their folder and a computer and a list of questions she’d asked a thousand couples, and she separated them at first (standard, Dana had warned them, they ask you apart and compare) and then brought them back together, and Shane sat in a hard chair holding Theo’s hand on the table between them, the tungsten bands clicking together when their fingers shifted, and somewhere in the second half of it he stopped performing and didn’t notice he’d stopped.
“Mr. Novak. Whose idea was it to move in together?”
“His,” Shane said. “He’ll tell you it was practical. Cheaper, closer to the rink. But honestly I think he just got tired of me being three guys’ problem across town and decided to make me his problem instead.” True. All of it true. Theo’s thumb moved against the back of his hand.
“Mr. Lindgren. What does your husband do that drives you crazy?”