9. Maren
Maren
A nor’easter grounds the charter in Boston, which means God has decided I haven’t suffered enough.
We’re supposed to fly to the last city tonight.
Instead the storm shuts the airport, the team’s stuck another night in the same hotel with the same hallways and the same ice machine I will be seeing in my nightmares, and there’s a team dinner in a private room downstairs because a grounded hockey team is a bored hockey team and a bored hockey team finds trouble.
So I spend the evening doing the thing I do, which is standing at the edge of a room making sure twenty-three men and one silver fox don’t end up on anybody’s phone.
I’m good at the edge of the room. I’ve lived there my whole life. You see everything from the edge and nobody sees you, which is the whole appeal, and also, I’m starting to suspect, the whole problem.
It’s a strange thing to have built a career on, being the one who watches.
I’m the person at the wedding who notices the caterer’s about to run out of the good wine, the one at the funeral quietly refilling the family’s water glasses, the one in every room making the room run so nobody has to think about who’s running it.
You can disappear completely inside being useful.
I have. It’s restful, mostly. It’s only nights like this, watching a man be effortlessly, helplessly present for a scared teenager over a bread basket, that I feel the actual cost of it, the suspicion that I’ve spent thirty years making myself indispensable so I’d never have to find out whether I’m wanted, which is not the same thing as needed, which is a sentence I keep getting to the edge of and refusing to finish.
What I see tonight is Rhett coaching when he doesn’t know it’s coaching.
He’s not running a drill. He’s just sitting at the end of a long table with a club soda, and the kids keep drifting to him.
Voss, who fell apart in a stairwell three nights ago, sits next to him the whole dinner and doesn’t say much and doesn’t have to.
A rookie d-man asks him something about angles and Rhett moves the salt and pepper and a roll around the table for ten minutes like they’re the most important objects in the world.
He listens more than he talks. When he talks it’s short. The kids lean in for the short part.
I’ve spent two months managing this man’s image and I just figured out, at a stranded team dinner over a bread basket, that the image isn’t the thing.
The thing is this. He’s a man who’s good at the people right in front of him and terrible, apparently, at the ones who aren’t, and I’m memorizing that distinction like it’s going to be on a test, which it is, the sort nobody tells you you’re taking.
Tobin slides into the chair next to me at the edge. The storm bought everybody a night off from being judged.
“He’s better at it than he thinks,” Tobin says, watching Rhett with the rookie.
“Always was. The man could read a room like a power play. Just couldn’t ever read the room he actually lived in.
” He takes a drink. “You want to know the thing about Rhett Mercer, since you’re the one selling him to the city? ”
“Is this a captain thing or a gossip thing?”
“It’s a be-careful thing.” He says it gentle, eyes still on the room, not on me, which is the only reason I let it land.
“He gives everything to whatever’s in front of him.
Everything. It’s why the kids love him and it’s why the banner’s in the rafters.
” A beat. “It’s also why his wife isn’t his wife anymore.
Front of him got all of it. The rest got the leftovers.
” He finally looks at me. “Whatever you are to him, and that’s your business, friend, just know that’s the man.
He’ll burn the house down keeping you warm and never notice the house. ”
He gets up and leaves me with it before I can pretend it’s not about anything.
***
The dinner breaks up. I do my last lap, confirm nobody’s filming anybody, send the staff up. And then it’s the hallway again, because it is always, with us, the hallway, and he’s there, because the storm grounded his ability to avoid me the same as mine.
“Walk,” he says. Not a question. “I can’t be in the room. I’ll lose my mind.”
We walk. The hotel’s got one of those enclosed sky-bridges to the parking structure, glass on both sides, and the storm’s going sideways out there, the whole city erased in white, and we stop in the middle of it because it’s the only place in the building with no people and no cameras and no kid who needs his coach.
Just the snow and the glass and the two of us, suspended over a street we can’t see.
“Tobin talked to you,” he says.
“Tobin talks to everyone.”
“He talked to you about me.” Rhett looks out at the storm. “He’s not wrong, whatever he said. He’s usually not.”
I should leave it. The professional move is to leave it. “He said you give everything to what’s in front of you and nothing to what isn’t.”
Rhett’s quiet for a moment. The snow ticks against the glass.
“My wife asked me once,” he says, “what I’d do if I had to choose. Her or the game. Hypothetical, over breakfast. I had a game that night.” He says it flat, the way he says everything, and somehow the flatness is what undoes me. “I said it wasn’t a fair question. She said that was the answer.”
“Rhett —”
“I never cheated on her. People assume, with a guy on the road. I never did.” He shakes his head, once.
“It would’ve been cleaner if I had. A man who cheats, she gets to hate him, she gets a reason.
I just wasn’t there. Twenty-two years of not being there.
There’s no scene for that. No moment you can point to.
You just look up one day and your wife is a stranger you’re polite to and your kid won’t return your calls, and everybody still thinks you’re a hell of a guy, because the building loves you, because you gave the building everything.
” He finally looks at me. “I got to keep the good-guy story. She got the divorce. Caden got a father who showed up to the playoffs and missed his whole life. That’s the man your job is selling.
I just figured you should know what’s actually in the box. ”
I don’t say that’s so sad, Rhett. I don’t reach for him, though every cell I’ve got wants to. I do the thing he did for me in the film room, the night I told him about wanting things too much. I just take it. Clean. Hold it.
I know what it costs a man like him to say a thing like that out loud, because I’ve spent my life around men who’d rather lose a marriage than narrate one.
He just narrated his, in a parking-garage skyway, to the woman whose entire job is his reputation, which makes it either the most reckless thing he’s done since the press room or the most honest. With Rhett I’m learning those are frequently the same thing.
“Why are you telling me this?” I say finally. “You don’t tell anyone this.”
“No.”
“So why me?”
He looks at me for a long time, the storm wiping the world white behind him, fifty-three years old and lit by an exit sign, and he says the most dangerous thing anyone’s said to me all season, more dangerous than the almost, more dangerous than his hand on my jaw three nights ago.
“Because you’re standing in front of me,” he says. “And I give everything to what’s in front of me. That’s the whole problem, Maren. You’ve been in front of me since the press room, and I have spent thirty years learning exactly what I do to the people who end up there.”
It is, I realize, not a confession of feeling. It’s a warning. He’s not telling me he wants me. He’s telling me what wanting me would cost me, in the only language he has, which is the language of a man itemizing his own wreckage so I can read the receipt before I sign.
And the horrible thing is that it doesn’t scare me off.
It does the opposite. Because nobody has ever handed me their worst self as a gift before.
As a don't. I've spent my entire life being the reliable one, the person everybody leans on and nobody warns.
And then a man looks at me in a snowstorm and says I will hurt you because it's what I'm built to do, and I have never in my life felt more wanted than that.
Which tells you everything you need to know about me, and none of it is good.
“We should go up,” I say. My voice isn’t working right.
“Yeah.”
We don’t move. The snow keeps erasing the city. Somewhere below us a season’s falling apart and a family’s cracking down the seam and I’m standing on a glass bridge falling for a man who just told me, kindly, in detail, that I shouldn’t.
I go up first. Alone. It’s the smartest thing I do all night, and it doesn’t feel smart, it feels like leaving the only warm room in the building.
In the elevator I take out my phone but I do not text him.
I open the weekly report template instead, because work is the thing I do when I can't have the thing I want.
I get as far as the cursor in the box marked coach demeanor / stability before I realize I have no idea what to write.
The honest answer is cracked all the way open on a bridge in a snowstorm.
That's not a number from one to five. It's not anybody's business, and it's certainly not the front office's.
I close the template without writing anything. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that.
I don’t think about why that matters.