Chapter 12
Theo went to Mercer’s office on a Monday and took his own name out of the only thing that could have kept him.
He’d had the weekend to decide, and the weekend had been its own slow surgery.
Shane was gone, to a motel, then to a teammate’s couch; Theo knew because the room knew, the room always knew.
The apartment held the shape of him anyway.
Theo made two cups of coffee Saturday morning before he remembered, and left the second one on the left side of the machine until it went cold, and he poured it out and made the same mistake Sunday.
He slept on his own side of a bed that was all his side now.
He opened the banking app once, looked at the number that was barely a number, and closed it, because the math there was finished and there was no use re-counting a thing that was already spent.
The certificate stayed squared to the laminate.
He could not make himself move it. And he did the only thing he knew how to do with pain, which was take inventory and make a plan.
The inventory was this. He loved Shane Novak.
The money was gone. The shoulder was recurrent and would, under the lights and grind of the NHL, fail: not maybe, certainly, he knew his own body as he knew the seams in the boards.
His visa hung on a marriage Tripp Vandenberg could detonate with a phone call.
And there was one call-up, and Marion Novak needed it to be Shane’s, because only an NHL salary held her treatment up past this single funded year, and Theo had bought her one year and could not buy a second.
So the plan made itself, cold and clean and total.
He could not hand the call to Shane. The call belonged to Chicago, to Bauer and the people upstairs, not to Mercer and not for one second to Theo; a player got no vote in where he was wanted.
The only piece of it Theo could touch was himself.
He could take his own name out of it, honestly, all the way down, and let the choice fall where it should have fallen anyway.
He would give it up the way he had given up the money, every cent of value he had left, except this time there would be nothing to disguise it as.
“You got a minute, Coach.”
Mercer looked up from his computer, surprised; Theo never came to the office. “Lindgren. Shoulder?”
“That is what I came to talk about.” Theo sat without being asked, which he also never did.
“I have not been honest about it. The org thinks it is chronic. Manageable. The same nothing it has been for years.” He kept his voice flat, the wall doing its last useful work.
“It is not. It is recurrent. It came fully out against the rival, you saw, and it has come out before, in juniors, and it will keep coming out, and under an NHL schedule, against NHL bodies, it will fail inside a month. I have known this. I have hidden it, because a specialist who cannot take a hit has no value, and I needed the value.” He set it down like a brick.
“I am telling you so that you do not put my name in front of Bauer. Chicago does its own medical before a recall. The shoulder would not pass it, and if it somehow passed, it would not survive April. I am not the call. Do not spend your word on a man who breaks in a month.”
Mercer leaned back. He was a hard man and not a stupid one, and his eyes moved over Theo’s face as they moved over game tape, finding what was under what. “You’re taking yourself out of the running.”
“Yes.”
“On a shoulder you’ve successfully hidden for years and could’ve hidden a while longer.
” Mercer laced his fingers. “You know what this costs you, son? No NHL look means no NHL contract. No contract means,” he gestured, “your visa situation. The one I told you to sort out. You take yourself out of this, you might be sorting it out from Sweden.”
“I know exactly what it costs,” Theo said.
“I have done the math. It is correct.” He held Mercer’s eyes.
“She will ask you when she calls. Bauer always asks the bench. So tell her the true thing. They do not need aging defensive insurance with a shoulder that lies. They need a young puck-mover with upside who has, this season, finally learned to defend a lead. You know which name that is. It was never going to be mine for the right reasons, only the kind ones, and I am taking the kind ones out of your hands.” He stood.
“Watch the last six games again. He drops back. He covers. He learned it.” Theo’s voice broke then, the only crack, and he hated it and let it happen.
“He learned it because someone needed him to. He is better than he was. That is all I came to say.”
He got to the door before Mercer said it, low, almost gentle. “Why.”
Theo stopped. He could have lied. He was so good at lying flat. But he was tired, more tired than the shoulder, tired to the bone, and so he told Danny Mercer the truth, the second person he’d told it to.
“Because his mother is sick,” Theo said, “and the salary is her medicine, and I have already spent everything I have on this year of it and I cannot buy another. And because I would rather lose the country than watch him lose her. That is why.” And he walked out before the coach could say anything, because there was nothing to say, and the saying would have undone him.
* * *
Marek found him in the parking lot. Of course he did. Marek found everyone in parking lots; it was where captains did their realest work.
“I heard,” Marek said, leaning against the Volvo. “Pete heard you in with Mercer. Whole building’ll know by tomorrow you pulled your own name.” He studied Theo. “That’s a hell of a move for a guy you scream at.”
“It is the right call.”
“Sure. It’s also the other thing.” Marek looked out across the dark lot, the sodium lamps, the weak-tea light.
“I told you, weeks ago. I’ve been the guy left here.
Called up nine games my whole career, sent down nine times, and somewhere in there I stopped having anything worth staying for, you know?
The hockey was all I had, so I just kept it.
The hockey.” The shrug was the saddest Theo had ever seen.
“You’ve got something worth staying for.
I can see it from here. I’ve seen it since December, you idiots think you’re subtle.
” He pushed off the car. “I’d have given the whole nine NHL games and the next nine I never got to have somebody look at me like the loud one looks at you when he thinks you can’t see.
You took yourself out of a call-up. Fine.
Don’t take yourself out of the other thing too, out of pride.
That’s the one that doesn’t come back.” He clapped Theo’s good shoulder, gentle, and walked off, and Theo stood by the Volvo in the cold and let it land: that taking himself out for Shane was not the same as letting Shane go, and that he’d been about to do both, because doing both was easier, because losing everything at once was a pain he knew how to survive and being loved across ninety miles was not.
* * *
Shane spent four nights on Wozniak’s couch and was a disaster on all of them.
He told Wozniak it was a roommate thing, a blowup about the thermostat, you know how it is, and Wozniak, who was a good and uncomplicated soul, accepted this and gave him a pillow and a beer Shane didn’t drink and asked no questions, and Shane lay on the couch in the dark and stared at a stranger’s ceiling and missed his husband so badly it had a physical location, a weight under the sternum, the same place a blocked shot lived.
He called his mother on the third night because he couldn’t not. He’d meant to keep it light. He did not keep it light.
“You sound like the bottom of a well,” Marion said. “What happened.”
And Shane, who carried, who never brought her his problems, who had lied to her about a fund for months: Shane broke, on a stranger’s couch three hundred miles away, and told her.
Not all of it. But enough. That there was no fund.
That a man had paid for everything and it had cost the man everything.
That the man loved him and Shane had run, two duffels and a head start.
Marion was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was the one she used to use when he was small and had done what he already knew was wrong.
“You ran because he loves you,” she said. “Not because he doesn’t. Because he does.”
“Mom—”
“No, I want to make sure I understand my son. A good man, a man who emptied his entire life out to keep my legs working, looked you in the eye and told you he loved you. And you packed two bags.” Her voice wasn’t angry.
It was worse than angry; it was sad. “I told you in my kitchen, baby. You’d rather die than be carried.
I watched you decide it at nineteen, when your father left and you appointed yourself the man of everything.
And I let you, because I was sick and scared, because being carried was easier than fighting you about it.
That’s my fault. I should have fought you.
” A breath. “He’s not your father, Shane.
He is not going to leave you for needing him.
The man stayed up all night not answering his phone rather than let you talk him out of doing right by you.
That’s not a man who leaves. That’s the opposite.
You found the opposite and you ran from it because you didn’t recognize it. Go home.”
“I don’t know how to be—”
“Carried. I know. Learn. He’s already teaching you. You just have to stop fighting the lesson.” Her voice dropped. “Go home, baby. Before you’re too proud to have a home to go to. I didn’t raise you to win the argument about who gets to suffer most. Go home.”