Chapter 10
The rumor landed in the room like a grenade on a Tuesday, sideways, from a guy who knew a guy.
“Reuben’s done,” Wozniak, the Blaze’s chirpy fourth-liner, said, loud across the room while pulling on his gear.
“Chicago. Reuben blew his knee out in warmups last night, did you see it? Non-contact, just went down. He’s out for the year.
” Wozniak let it hang, because everyone in an AHL room knew what an NHL injury meant.
“That’s a hole on their blue line. Somebody’s getting a call. ”
The room went quiet, twenty-three men all doing the same math at once.
A hole on the Fury blue line. A call-up.
And Mercer, everyone knew this, it was the open secret of the whole arrangement, got to recommend.
The Fury didn’t have to take his guy, but they listened.
One name, from this room, ninety miles down the highway, to the show.
Shane felt Theo go still two stalls down. He didn’t look. They’d gotten good at not looking.
The candidates were obvious, and everyone knew them, and nobody said them out loud.
There was Theo, when healthy the best defensive defenseman in the division, a coach’s dream, a penalty-kill anchor, the stay-at-home insurance a playoff team wanted for a stretch run; except Theo had a sling coming off in a week and a shoulder the org thought was chronic-nothing and would un-recommend in a heartbeat if they knew was recurrent.
There was Shane, younger, the power-play quarterback, the offensive upside, the guy whose ceiling was higher and whose floor was a heart attack; the guy the Fury’s analytics department probably liked and whose own coach didn’t fully trust to defend a lead. And there was Tripp.
Tripp Vandenberg was twenty-one and a first-round pick and the only one of the three the organization actually owned a future in, and he played like he knew it.
He was good. That was the infuriating fact.
He had the easy entitled excellence of a kid who’d been the best player on every team since he was nine, and he wanted the call-up openly, hungrily, without the years of being ground down that taught you to hide it.
“Big week, boys,” Tripp said, to the room, to no one, grinning, and his eyes went to Shane, and then, Shane caught it, to Theo, and then back to Shane, slow, and the kid’s face sharpened, and Shane’s stomach dropped, because Tripp Vandenberg was entitled and arrogant and not, unfortunately, stupid.
* * *
Sloane Bauer came to Rockford on a Wednesday, and the fact that an assistant general manager had driven ninety miles to watch a practice was not lost on anyone.
She was in her forties, dark coat, a tablet, and the unsentimental stillness of a person who decided other people’s lives for a living.
She watched the entire skate from the bench without expression.
Afterward, the room cleared slowly, guys lingering, antenna up, watching who she approached.
She went to Theo. Not Shane, not Tripp. Theo.
Shane was at his stall, half-dressed, lacing his skates back in their bag, and he had a direct angle on it: Bauer settling onto the bench across from Theo with the ease of a person who had an appointment, the tablet on her knee, her voice dropped so he couldn’t catch it.
He watched Theo go very still, that particular stillness, the arithmetic stillness.
Watched them talk for four minutes. Watched Bauer stand, smooth her coat, say one more sentence, leave.
Theo didn’t move for a long moment after she walked out.
Marek slid into the stall next to Shane and said under his breath, “You see that.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think she said.”
Shane watched Theo’s back, the controlled set of it, the spine locked the same way his face locked when he was carrying weight he wasn’t going to show. “Nothing good.”
He waited for Theo to tell him that night, gave him the whole drive home and dinner and the dishes, and Theo said nothing, and Shane let him not say it, because sometimes Theo needed to carry a thing in his teeth before he could set it down. That was fine. Shane had learned to wait.
Three days later, Marek caught up with him after practice, half-voice, no eye contact. “The Bauer meeting. Word from a guy on the office side.” He kept walking. “It’s the visa thing. Call-up triggers a new filing, new review. Theo’s paperwork is — she used the word liability.”
Shane kept his stride even. “Vandenberg.”
“Easy phone call, is what she said, apparently. Or Novak.” A beat. “Sorry, man.”
Shane didn’t answer. He thought about Theo at his stall after she left, the silence of the drive home, a whole dinner’s worth of nothing said.
What Marek had just named was real and he’d known it and it still landed low, because it wasn’t unfair the way incompetence was unfair.
Bauer was doing her job. The visa situation was real.
The timing of the marriage drew attention whether or not anyone meant it to.
It was unfair the way physics was unfair: just a wall, no malice, no appeal.
Theo had married him and inherited the paperwork and was now paying for it twice.
* * *
They didn’t talk about it until they got home, and then they couldn’t talk about anything else.
“One spot,” Shane said, pacing the small living room while Theo sat very still on the too-short couch.
“One spot, and it’s me or you or the kid, and Mercer recommends, and—” He stopped.
Made himself say it. “And if it’s me, my mom’s treatment’s covered for good.
Real money. NHL money. The next round and the round after and whatever comes after that. And if it’s you—”
“If it is me, I stay in the country on a hockey contract instead of a marriage. And your mother’s treatment is paid through this year, and after this year—” Theo stopped.
Something closed in his face, the locked-door thing he did when a subject had a worse truth behind it, and he did not open it.
“After this year, it is not certain. Not the way it is certain on an NHL salary. On your salary.” He said it flat, the report voice, the cold-math voice, and moved past the closed door before Shane could try the handle.
“I did this math in December, before I ever proposed. Not this call-up; I could not have known about Reuben’s knee, nobody could.
But a call-up. There is always one, some season, some injury, and I knew that if it came, it could only go to one of us.
” He looked at his hands. “I told myself it did not matter, because in December we hated each other, and one of us getting the call and the other staying was just logistics. Two strangers going two directions. It was clean.”
“And now?”
“And now it is not clean,” Theo said, “and I do not know how to make it clean again, and I have been trying, and I cannot.”
Shane stopped pacing. The apartment was sixty-three degrees and the certificate was squared to the laminate and the season had eleven games left.
“What saves my mom is what loses you,” Shane said. “And what lets you stay is what loses my mom. There’s no—” His voice cracked. “There’s no version where we both get what we need. Is there. There’s no play here. I keep looking for the play, the breakout, the way out, and there isn’t one.”
“No,” Theo agreed. “There is not.”
“So what do we do.”
Theo was quiet for a long moment. Then he stood, and crossed the room, and did what he’d started doing instead of talking when talking would say too much: he put his hands on Shane’s face, careful, both of them, and rested his forehead against Shane’s, and breathed, and let Shane breathe with him, slow and deliberate, giving Theo’s panicking lungs a rhythm to find.
“We play the game we are in,” Theo said, against his mouth.
“Not the one at the end. Tonight there is no call-up. Tonight there is just this apartment, and you, and me, and eleven games. We do not have to solve the end tonight. Nobody solves the third period in the first.” His thumbs moved over Shane’s cheekbones.
“I have spent my entire life solving the end first, so I would never be surprised, never be hurt, never be left without a plan. It is a terrible way to live. You taught me that, you loud idiot, you who never plans anything and somehow survives. So tonight we do not solve it. Tonight I am going to take you to bed and we are going to pretend the season is a hundred years long. Can you do that. Can you, for one night, not carry all of it.”
And Shane, who carried, who carried always, looked at the man asking him to put it down for one night, and found that he could, barely, for him, and did.
Theo took him to bed slower than the other times, more deliberate, building rather than burning.
The sling was off now, officially, but the arm was still braced, still careful, still limited, and Theo used the limitation as a framework, turning the constraint into structure, because that was what he did with every broken thing.
One good hand mapping the topography of Shane’s ribs, the bruise from the blocked shot two nights ago already yellowing, his mouth following the map, and Shane tried to take over, let me, I carry this too, and Theo pressed him back down, flat hand on his sternum.
“No. Tonight you give nothing. Tonight someone does for you.” The first-night words, and they still worked.
“Theo—”
“Stop carrying.” The flat voice, over the heat, command and plea at once.
“For twenty minutes. I am asking you to stop carrying for twenty minutes and let me—” He didn’t finish.
His mouth finished for him, moving down, and Shane’s hips lifted off the bed, and his hands found the sheets, and he stopped carrying.
After, tangled, the apartment at sixty-three degrees and the call-up eleven games away and that unsolvable problem waiting outside the bedroom door:
“Twenty minutes,” Shane said, into Theo’s neck. “You said twenty minutes.”