Chapter 13 #2
Shane made his NHL debut on a Thursday in Chicago, and Theo watched it on a laptop in a hotel in Milwaukee, because the Blaze were on a road trip of their own, fighting for playoff seeding, and the two of them were, for the first time since December, in different cities on the same night.
It was strange to watch Shane on a screen.
Strange to see him in the wrong sweater, the Fury crest where the Blaze flame should be, strange to hear an arena announcer say his name to twenty thousand people instead of four.
Theo sat on a hotel bed with the brace on his arm and the volume low so his roommate could sleep, and watched his husband play the best and most terrified hockey of his life, and watched him, there, in the second period, drop back to cover a pinch that wasn’t his, defend a lead, do what Mercer had spent a season screaming at him to learn, what he’d learned in a cold apartment because someone had needed him to, and Theo pressed his good hand flat against the laptop screen like an idiot, like he could reach through it, and texted, after, when it was over and the Fury had won and Shane had logged fourteen safe competent minutes in the show:
You defended a lead. I am telling everyone I taught you.
The reply came fast. YOU DEFENDED A LEAD I taught ME nothing. how was the hair. did i look fast. mom watched she cried. theo she CRIED she said tell theo. i miss you. is that allowed in the folder. i miss you.
Theo looked at the words for a long time in the dark.
It is allowed in the folder, he typed. I miss you also.
* * *
The divide they’d been so afraid of, the separation Marek had warned about, call-ups don’t take two, turned out, to Theo’s complete bewilderment, to be survivable.
Nobody told you that part. It was ninety miles.
It was bad, lonely, the bed too big and too cold and Theo slept worse than he had in months, and it was also just ninety miles, just a season ending, just a distance two married people drove on weekends.
Dana the lawyer called him about it, practical as ever.
“Here’s the situation, Theo. What always worried me was the optics: a guy who marries a citizen right when his visa’s lapsing is the exact shape an officer is trained to smell.
The green card depends on proving the marriage is bona fide.
Real. Built to last.” A pause, and Theo could hear her almost smiling.
“And the funny thing is, yours is the easiest file I’ve got now.
An officer wrote on the record that you didn’t need most of the folder.
The path’s clean, Theo. You stay. Not on a hockey contract that depends on a coach.
On a marriage. A real one. If you both stop calling it fake. ”
If you both stop calling it fake.
Theo sat with that for the rest of the road trip.
He’d built it as a transaction exactly so it could never be real, because real was what got taken, and here was the bitter beautiful joke at the bottom of all of it: the only truth that would let him stay was the truth he’d spent the season disguising.
The fake marriage couldn’t save him. The real one could.
He’d never been good at out loud.
* * *
Chicago was everything Shane had spent his life skating toward. The loneliest he’d ever been.
The show was real. Nobody could prepare you for it.
The ice read the same, the puck sat the same, and then everything around it was bigger, the buildings, the crowds, the speed, the money, the fourth-liners in this league carrying skill sets that would’ve made them stars two rungs down.
Shane was, for the first time in years, not the most talented man in the room, and instead of frightening him it focused him; he played within himself, played defense, played the boring sturdy game a cold apartment had taught him, and the Fury’s coaches nodded at the boring sturdy game in a way that meant he might get to stay.
And then there was the other matter in the Fury room, what he’d known was coming and had told nobody he was dreading.
Because the Fury had a veteran defenseman, a steady stay-at-home guy three years established, and his name was on the stall four down from the one they gave Shane, and the name was NOVAK.
Tommy looked up when Shane walked in that first day, older, broader, their father’s exact jaw, years of not-talking standing between them like a third man, and for a second neither of them said anything, the loud room going on around two brothers who hadn’t shared a sentence since Shane was sixteen.
“Heard they were calling you up,” Tommy said, finally, neutral, unreadable.
“Congratulations.” And Shane said, “Thanks.” The entire reunion.
Two Novaks on the same blue line at last and ninety miles and years too late, and Shane went to his stall and did not text his mother that he’d finally ended up in a room with Tommy, of all people, because he didn’t know yet if it was good news or just one more weight to carry.
He wasn’t ready. But the room was small, and the season was long, and Tommy was four stalls down, and some things you don’t get to keep deferring once they’re sitting in the same room breathing the same recycled air.
He had a furnished apartment near the practice facility that he’d done nothing to, because making it a home meant admitting Theo wasn’t in it.
He had a roommate-shaped hole in every evening.
He’d call his mother, Marion three infusions in now, and there were good days, real good days, days she walked to the mailbox without the cane, and every one of them was a thing Theo had bought and would never take credit for, and then he’d hang up and the apartment would be silent and seventy-two degrees, because nobody was here to keep it at sixty-three, and Shane would lie awake too warm and unable to sleep in new places, and there was no wall of pillows and no enormous Swede on the other side of it pretending to be asleep, and he’d reach across a too-big bed in a too-warm room and find nothing, the same nothing each night, the shape of what he’d run from and couldn’t stop reaching for.
They talked every day. That was the lifeline.
Theo, who did not answer his phone for anyone, answered for Shane, every time, first ring, which Shane knew, because Gitta had told him in one of the group-chat asides that had become the texture of his life, was unprecedented in the entire history of Theo Lindgren and his phone.
They talked about nothing much. The Fury’s systems. The Blaze’s playoff push, Theo anchoring it on a shoulder that needed surgery the second the season ended.
Marion’s good days. Tommy, who had started nodding at Shane in the tunnel after games, just nods, nothing more, but nods that were happening, that existed, that Shane mentioned to Theo in the careful voice you keep for weather you’re not sure is clearing.
Gitta’s increasingly unhinged texts. The cat Gitta had acquired and named, after a hockey rival of all people.
They did not talk about the thing itself, because the phone wasn’t where you said it, the phone was just where you stayed tethered across ninety miles until you could say it in a room.
“You defended a lead again tonight,” Theo said one night, late, both of them in their separate dark cities. “I watched the highlights. Twice. I am going to have it printed on a shirt.”
“It’s not a big deal—”
“It is the entire deal. You were a power-play specialist who could not be trusted to kill a clock and now you eat shots to protect a one-goal lead in the third period of an NHL game.” A pause, and Shane could hear the almost-smile down the line, ninety miles away, and his chest hurt with it.
“I made you better. I am taking full credit. It is the one good thing I did this year.”
“It’s not the one good thing you did this year,” Shane said, and the line went quiet, both of them right up against the edge, neither of them able to cross it down a phone, and Theo said, rough, “Go to sleep, Shane. You have a game,” and Shane said, “yeah,” and didn’t, and lay awake in the too-warm dark missing a man and a temperature and a life he’d run from and was learning how to run back toward.
* * *
Tommy found him after a Tuesday win, the room half-empty. He didn’t sit. He stood by Shane’s stall and filled the space the same as their father had always filled a doorway, big and undecided about coming in, and Shane braced for weather.
“I heard about your mom,” Tommy said. “Marion. The MS. Guy I know does PT up in Rockford; it’s a small league.” He turned a roll of tape over in the restless family hands. “I should’ve called when it started. Years ago.” A beat. “Didn’t know how. We didn’t exactly grow up with a model for it.”
And there it was, the father, in the room at last, never named, the Novak way.
The old reflex wanted the fight: you don’t get to show up now, you weren’t there, I carried it alone.
Shane had carried it alone. But he’d spent a whole season learning that what you carry alone is what finally caves your chest in, and he was tired, bone-tired, of the family religion of doing it by yourself.
“You could call her now,” Shane said. “She asks about you. She never stopped.”
Tommy’s jaw worked, their father’s jaw, doing something their father’s jaw had never once done.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” He didn’t promise.
Shane didn’t push. It wasn’t fixed; you didn’t fix sixteen years in a half-empty locker room.
But a door that had been shut since Shane was a kid stood open the width of a hand, and for this season, that was enough to be going on with.
He texted his mother on the bus. Saw Tommy. He’s good. He asked about you.
* * *