Chapter 10 #2
“It was an estimate. I am Swedish. We are efficient.”
Shane laughed, the surprised one, and Theo held him, and neither of them solved the third period, and for one night that was enough.
* * *
The road swing went through Shane’s hometown.
It was a quirk of the AHL schedule, a three-game trip with a day off in the middle that happened to put them ninety minutes from where Shane had grown up, from the small house where Marion still lived alone and fiercely and refused to move somewhere easier, and Shane had been planning to slip away on the off-day, alone, check on her and pretend the visit was casual and leave before she could see how scared he was.
“I’m coming,” Theo said.
“You’re not—”
“I am coming. I want to meet her.” The sling was off now, the arm in a brace, Theo cleared for limited minutes and chafing against the limit, coiled and restless with the season running out and his body not yet cooperating.
“She is my mother-in-law. It would be strange if I never met her. And—” he hesitated, the rare hesitation “—I would like to. If that is allowed.”
And Shane should have said no. He knew he should have said no, because Marion saw everything, because Marion was the one person on earth Shane couldn’t lie to, click or no click, and bringing Theo into that little house was bringing the truth into a room with the one person who’d read it on sight.
But Theo had said I would like to, in the small uncertain voice he only used for things he wanted and didn’t believe he was allowed to have, and Shane had never once been able to say no to that voice.
“Okay,” Shane said. “But she’ll figure us out. I’m telling you now. She’ll take one look and—”
“Then she figures us out,” Theo said. “I am tired of folders.”
* * *
Marion Novak was in her late fifties and used a cane on the bad days and a wall of pure will on all of them, and she opened the door of the small house and looked up at the enormous Swede filling her porch and said, “Well. You’re bigger in person than on the TV,” and Theo said, “Yes. I am sorry,” and Marion laughed, delighted. Settled.
She fed them. Of course she did: she was Shane’s mother, feeding people was the love language he’d inherited and bent into shape, and she watched Theo eat with the satisfaction of a woman whose hospitality had been accepted without resistance, and she made Shane do the dishes, and she talked to Theo about Sweden and about hockey and about his mother, tell Gitta we should talk, we have sons in common, and Theo, who took weeks to warm to anyone, was warm in an hour, easy, almost soft, and Shane stood at the sink with his hands in the dishwater and watched his husband charm his mother and the fragile impossible thing he wasn’t allowed to name swelled in him until it hurt.
And then Theo went to the bathroom, and Marion put down her tea and looked at her son with the look, the one he’d been dreading.
“How are you paying for it, Shane.”
“Mom—”
“The treatment.” Her voice was level. “The experimental program. The one insurance won’t touch.
You told me a fund came through. A family fund.
” She unfolded a sheet of paper and set it on the table between them, smoothing it flat with her palm: an EOB from the clinic, itemized, the payer line reading Private, Third Party.
“They sent this with the last billing cycle. I’m not on it.
You’re not on it. Over two hundred thousand dollars, paid in full, up front.
” She folded her hands over it. “I started adding up what a family fund looks like, Shane, and what it doesn’t look like, and then you walked through my door with your husband.
” A silence that Shane could have drowned in.
Her eyes went to the bathroom door, then back to her son, wet and furious and full of love.
“He’s not very good at not being named, your husband.
So. How are you paying for it. With what. ”
Shane’s hands were shaking in the dishwater. “It’s handled, Mom. That’s all you need to—”
“You married him for it.”
“Mom—”
“You married a man you’ve spent two years calling the worst thing that ever happened to your defensive zone, and now he’s paying two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for my legs, and you’re standing at my sink lying to me with your tongue clicking, and I want to know—” her voice broke “—I want to know what it cost you, Shane. Not him. You. What did you sell.”
“Nothing. I didn’t sell anything. He needed a green card and I needed—” Shane heard himself, heard the deal said out loud in his mother’s kitchen, and it sounded obscene, sounded exactly like what he’d spent six months swearing it wasn’t. “It’s a transaction. It was supposed to be a transaction.”
“Was.”
“Mom.”
“You said was.” Marion’s face went complicated and aching.
“Shane. Honey. Sit down. Sit.” And he sat, because she was his mother, and she reached across the little table and took his shaking wet hand in her two thin ones and said the thing he’d spend the rest of the season trying to outskate.
“You have carried things alone so long you think that’s what love is.
” She squeezed. “That boy in my bathroom has been carrying you for months, and you can’t even look at him.
I know. I made you.” Her thumb moved over his knuckles.
“Let him carry you, baby. Before you lose him being too proud to be held.”
And Shane, twenty-six years old, three hundred road miles from a marriage he wasn’t allowed to want, his mother’s hands around his and the truth said out loud at last by the only person he couldn’t lie to, did what he always did when it got too big to hold.
He bolted. Stood up so fast the chair fell.
“I gotta go, curfew, I have to get Theo back—” and he was grabbing his coat.
Theo came out of the bathroom looking between them with his quiet inventory-taking eyes, reading the wreckage.
Marion called after them, soft, “It was lovely to meet you, Theo. Take care of my stubborn son. Somebody has to.”
Theo said, “Yes, ma’am,” and Shane was already out the door into the cold, breathing like he’d finished a shift, pushing through air that felt too thin, like he could outskate what his mother had named.
You’d rather die than be carried.
She hadn’t said it. She didn’t have to.
* * *
After that, they stopped competing.
Shane didn’t decide to do it and neither did Theo; it just happened, the body knowing before the brain.
They were supposed to be auditioning. There was one call-up and a hole in Chicago and a coach who was watching them both, and the smart move, what every other guy in that room was doing, was to play selfish, to pad the stat sheet, to make sure your name was the one Mercer said.
And instead, Theo, brace and all, played hockey so generous it bordered on reckless, setting Shane up, feeding him the puck on the power play, making Shane look like a star.
And Shane, who could have buried his head and chased points, kept dropping back to cover, kept playing defense, kept making Theo look good, the two of them spending their own auditions trying to win each other the prize that would split them up.
A love letter written in plus-minus, legible to anyone who knew how to read it.
There was a game against Milwaukee that Shane would remember for the rest of his life, not because of the result (they won, three to one, it didn’t matter) but because of one shift in the second period that said everything.
The Fury’s scout was in the building; everyone knew it.
It was the night to be selfish, to pad the sheet, to make the highlight, to put your name in lights ninety miles down the road.
And on a Blaze power play, the situation that was Shane’s entire calling card, the puck came to Shane at the point with a lane to shoot and a scout watching and a goal there for the taking.
Shane saw Theo back-door, in a worse shooting spot but a better story spot, a defenseman’s goal, the kind that would make the scout write Lindgren.
Shane passed it. Gave the goal away. Set up his husband in front of the man who’d decide which of them got the call, on purpose, because winning Theo the spot mattered more than winning it himself.
And Theo, who saw the pass coming, who understood in the half-second what Shane was doing, Theo didn’t shoot.
He couldn’t. He turned and fed it right back, no-look, into the empty net Shane had skated into, gave the goal back, because he was doing the same thing, the same thing to the last detail, spending his own audition to make Shane look like the better call.
The puck went in off Shane’s stick. The building stood.
The scout wrote something. And the two of them stood in the celebration with the team piling on, both of them having just tried and failed to give the other a goal that would take them away from each other.
Shane looked at Theo over the shoulders of their teammates and Theo looked back.
It was everything, the entire impossible thing, said without a word in front of twelve thousand people and a man with a notebook, and neither of them knew if the scout could read it, but they knew, with a cold dropping certainty, that somebody could.
Tripp Vandenberg knew how to read it.
Shane caught him watching from the bench, the kid’s clever eyes going from Shane to Theo and back, doing the math, and after the game, in the tunnel, Tripp fell into step beside Shane and said, low, friendly, terrible: “You guys are something, huh. You and Lindgren. You spent the entire third period feeding each other. Almost like neither of you actually wants the call.” He smiled.
“Almost like there’s more you want.” And he clapped Shane on the shoulder, hard, and walked on whistling, and Shane stood in the tunnel with his heart going and understood that the clock had just gotten faster, that what they hadn’t named was now visible to a twenty-one-year-old who wanted what they had and would not hesitate to use what he’d seen, and that the wall at the end of the season had just rushed up to meet them at speed.