Chapter 11 #2
“It did not cost me my family,” Theo said quietly.
“It cost me their money. With my father these were the same thing. It is the only version of family he ever offered. There was one telephone call. His lawyer, not him; my father has not called me himself since I was twenty. They had found the record. A marriage in Illinois is public.” A breath.
“I did the math before I ever asked you, Shane. I knew what it could cost if they learned. I decided you were worth the risk. Then it happened, and I did not tell you, because you would have tried to give the money back, and your mother would not have her treatment. So I made it small. I made it nothing. I made myself useful. It is the only way I know how to give something. To make it look like it costs me nothing, so the person can take it without—” He stopped.
Started again, rougher. “I did not hate you. That is not true. I want to be — I never hated you. I told myself I did because it was safer, and then it stopped being safe, and I did not have a word for it that did not terrify me, so I called it a folder, and I let you call it an amenity, and we both lied because the truth was something neither of us could afford.” His pale eyes were wet, the second time Shane had ever seen it.
“It was never a transaction for me. Not for one day. That is the cost. Not the money. The money I would spend again tomorrow. The cost is that I love you and there is a call-up coming and a divorce in the deal, and one of us leaves, and I have known all along that loving you was the most expensive thing I would ever do, and I did it anyway, and now you have seen it and you know.”
The kitchen was silent. The certificate was squared to the laminate. The season clock ticked.
His mother’s voice, you’d rather die than be carried, and Tripp’s voice, one phone call, and the math that had no solution, and the man he loved standing in front of him with wet eyes having just said the unsayable thing first, having given him everything and called it nothing so Shane wouldn’t have to feel held, and Shane’s hand was already at his pocket, already reaching for the reflex he’d been running on since he was seventeen years old: the one where the carrying got too heavy and he put it down and backed toward the door.
“I can’t do this,” Shane said.
“Shane.”
“I can’t — you can’t just say that, you can’t spend everything you have and then tell me you love me and put it all on me, I never asked you to love me, I never asked you to empty your whole life out for my mom, that wasn’t the deal, the deal was clean, the deal was nothing else, I wrote it down, I pressed the pen so hard it—” He was backing toward the bedroom, toward his two duffels, everything he owned that mattered, everything he could carry.
“Tripp knows. Tripp knows everything and he’s gonna make a phone call and you’re gonna get investigated and deported anyway, and it’s gonna be because of me, because of this, because we got attached when we said we wouldn’t, and I can’t — I can’t be the reason you lose everything twice, the money and the country, I can’t carry that, Theo, I can’t—”
“So you carry it alone.” Theo’s voice had gone flat again, the wall back up, but behind it the face had broken open, the pale eyes raw in a way they hadn’t been since he’d said I love you thirty seconds ago.
“Of course. The one thing you cannot do is let me carry any of it with you. Even now. Even this.”
“Don’t.”
“Take your duffels,” Theo said. “You are very good at leaving with everything you can carry. It is what you are best at.”
And Shane took his duffels. He packed them in eleven minutes.
He’d timed it, the first time. Eleven minutes was the sum of Shane Novak.
Theo stood at the kitchen counter with his back to him and did not turn around, and Shane walked out into the cold with everything he owned and the truth he couldn’t hold and got in his financed car and drove to a motel by the highway, and he called Theo at two in the morning to say anything, he didn’t even know what, and it rang and rang and rang.
Theo didn’t answer his phone.
He never answered his phone. Shane knew that.
It was one of the nine hundred things Shane knew about him now, catalogued, the way Theo catalogued everything, Theo does not answer his phone, Theo sleeps on the left, Theo’s mother switched to English just to tease me, Theo spent everything he had and called it nothing so I could take it without being held, and Shane sat in a motel room with his two duffels and his phone ringing out against his ear, and the call-up decision was coming any day now, and he had broken the one true thing in his life to keep from being held by it.
The motel room was the kind you only end up in when your life’s come off the rails: a comforter the color of a bruise, a TV bolted to the wall, the ice machine humming through one wall and the trucks through the window.
Shane sat on the edge of the bed with his duffels at his feet and reached for his phone, and this time it wasn’t Theo he wanted.
He got as far as Marion’s contact photo before he stopped.
Because what would he say. Mom, the man paying for your treatment loves me and I ran.
She’d ask why, and the why was the thing he’d spent his whole life not looking at, and he couldn’t say it to her at two in the morning.
So he put the phone down, and called Theo instead, needing the flat voice to say come home, and it rang, and rang, and knowing Theo wouldn’t answer didn’t stop the last door from swinging shut.
He lay back on the bruise-colored comforter in his clothes and didn’t sleep.
He thought about the bank page, the wire, the balance that was almost nothing.
He thought about Marion saying let him carry you, baby, before you lose him being too proud to be held, and then he thought: I’m doing it.
Right now. Precisely what she warned me about.
And still he could not make himself get in the car, because understanding it and being able to stop doing it are two different sports, and Shane had only ever been good at one of them.
Outside, the highway hummed toward Chicago, ninety miles of it, the divide made of asphalt, and somewhere down it was the show, the salary, his mother’s legs, the prize.
And somewhere behind him in a cold apartment was a man who loved him sitting alone with an empty account and a recurrent shoulder and a phone he wouldn’t answer, and the season had nine games left, and then eight, and the clock did not care that they were in love. The clock never had.
* * *
Theo did not answer the phone because if he answered it he would say yes.
That was the truth of it, what lay underneath the policy.
People thought Theo Lindgren didn’t answer his phone because he was cold, or aloof, or rude, and he let them think it because it was simpler than the real reason: Theo had no defenses against the people he loved, none at all, and a phone in his hand was a door he could not keep shut.
If he answered, and Shane said come get me, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, Theo would be in the Volvo before the sentence finished, and they would be back where they’d been, two men in love with a wall rushing up at them, solving nothing, and Theo could not do that.
He could not let Shane talk him out of the only clean thing left.
So he sat in the dark apartment at two in the morning and let it ring, and ring, and ring. It was the hardest thing he had done since he was eighteen years old getting wheeled into surgery. His hand shook holding the phone he would not answer, the hand that never shook.
Shane had taken his two duffels. Eleven minutes.
Theo had heard him, had counted, the way Shane counted.
The place that had been too small for two enormous men was now cavernous, the right side of the bed wrong-shaped, the silence louder than the two of them fighting had ever been.
The tea Theo had left out at nine-fifteen, before he’d remembered, sat cold and full on the counter next to the certificate that was still, stupidly, squared to the laminate.
Theo looked at the certificate for a long time.
Theodor Lindgren. Shane Novak. Two names a clerk named Donna had bound together while a man named Reggie thought about lunch.
The realest thing in the apartment, Shane had called it, the only one that belonged to both of them.
Theo did the math, because the math was the only language that didn’t hurt.
The math said: Shane was right to leave.
Not for the reasons Shane thought. Shane had left out of his own wound, the can’t-be-carried wound, the same way Theo had disguised the money out of his.
But the leaving itself was correct. Because sitting alone in the dark, Theo could see what he hadn’t been able to see in December, or in any of the months since, all the while adding up what Shane meant to him and calling it a folder: he had been trying to keep Shane, and keeping was the old broken instinct, keeping was rent, keeping was what his mother had begged him on the phone not to do.
Do not make them pay rent. Do not let yourself believe you are only the door you hold for other people.
He had been holding the door so hard he’d forgotten you were supposed to let people walk through it.
If he loved Shane, and he did, completely, at the price of everything, then the call-up had to go to Shane, and Marion had to be saved, and Theo had to want it for him with nothing owed and nothing disguised and no rent collected, even if it meant Sweden.
He had to give the one thing he had left and not even get to call it nothing, because there was nothing left to disguise it as.
It would cost him everything. The country. The career. The man. All of it.
Theo Lindgren sat in the dark and said yes to all of it.
The yes landed nothing like loss and everything like the first free breath he’d taken in seven years.
The phone stopped ringing. He set it face-down on the counter next to the cold tea and the certificate, and he began to plan how to give Shane Novak the one thing that would take Shane away from him forever.
It was going to break both of them. Those were frequently the same thing, alone, at two in the morning, in a country that was trying to send him home.