11. Maren
Maren
The rule works great for exactly as long as nobody tests it, which is the thing about rules, and about me.
We come home from the road and the team does the unthinkable, which is keep winning.
Not a lot. A home win against a bad team, then a road-style grind-it-out against a good one.
Four and nine becomes six and nine, and six and nine on a team everybody buried in October feels like a parade.
The radio softens. The think pieces find a new corpse to pick at.
A national guy who spent November calling the hire a nostalgia stunt writes four hundred words about “early signs of a culture shift,” and I clip it and send it up the chain and tell myself the small bright feeling in my chest is professional satisfaction.
For the first time since camp I get to spend a day not on fire, and I have no idea what to do with my hands.
Rhett and I are professional. We are so professional.
We prep before availabilities. He hits his messages, I write him clean lines, we stand the regulation distance apart and say true, boring things to each other about the penalty kill.
And the whole building can feel us not-doing-something.
Except now the not-doing has a flavor it didn't before, because now we know exactly what we're not doing.
We did it at a bar, in front of God and a bartender, and you can't un-know a thing like that.
The rule holds. The rule is a fence around a fire.
The fence holds. The fire does not care about the fence.
Tobin finds me on a Tuesday.
I’m in the tunnel after practice and he falls into step beside me, gym bag over his shoulder, knees narrating every stride. He doesn’t do a preamble.
“I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to go ice things that hurt,” he says.
“I covered for you in Boston and I covered for you in wherever-the-hell, and I’ll keep doing it, because that man is the best coach I’ve had in twenty years.
Also, because he’s been a ghost since his divorce and right now he’s not a ghost, and I’m pretty sure that’s you.
” He keeps his eyes forward, sparing me, the way he does.
“So I’m not warning you off. I’d never. I’m just telling you that I see it, and one old man seeing it is fine, and the next person who sees it might not care the way I do.
That’s all. Be careful, kid. You’re carrying something breakable and you’re carrying it through a building full of cameras. ”
“Tobin —”
“Don’t tell me it’s nothing. I’ve been married twenty years.
I know the face of a person who found their something.
You’ve both got it. It’s a good face.” He stops at the fork in the tunnel, the one that goes down to the trainers’ room, and finally looks at me, and there’s twenty years of his own road behind his eyes.
“I missed about nine seasons of my marriage being a professional. Eleven cities a winter. My wife raised our kids on FaceTime and grace. I’m telling you all this so you understand I’m not the chaperone in this story.
I’m the cautionary tale rooting for you to not be me.
” He peels off. “But it’s also going to get you fired.
Salad’s good in the players’ lounge today, by the way.
You look like you haven’t eaten since Canada. ”
He’s not wrong. I haven’t, really. I’ve been running on coffee and adrenaline and the specific fuel of being needed, which burns clean and leaves you starving.
***
The night it actually breaks isn’t a night anything happens. That’s the part I can’t explain to anyone, later. Nothing happens. That’s what breaks me.
It’s nine o’clock and I’m still at my desk because Camila spent the afternoon “helping” by reorganizing the media schedule in a way that buried two of my decisions under hers, and I’ve been quietly un-burying them for three hours.
I’m so tired I’ve stopped being a person and started being a list. My sister called twice, and I didn’t pick up.
The building’s gone to that after-hours hum, the big HVAC breath and a vacuum somewhere two floors down, the lights in the hallway on their half-power setting that makes everything look like a memory of itself.
I’m going to die at this desk, and they’ll find me holding a press release.
Rhett appears in my doorway with a paper bag.
“You didn’t eat,” he says.
“I had —”
“You had coffee and a protein bar wrapper I saw in your trash at two. That’s not eating.
” He comes in, sets the bag on my desk, and starts taking things out of it.
A container of soup. Bread. A ginger ale, because, he says this like it’s obvious, “you’ve been pale since the plane, your stomach’s off, ginger ale.
” He’s been watching me. Reading me the way I read everyone else, and the word for being on the receiving end of that, it turns out, is not managed. It’s something I don’t have a word for.
“Rhett, the rule —”
“The rule’s about cameras and your career and not blowing up my son’s franchise.
I agree with the rule.” He sits down across from my desk, in the chair where I sit people I’m managing, and he opens the soup and puts the spoon in my hand like I’m one of his rookies.
“There’s no rule that says I have to watch you not eat. Eat the soup, Maren.”
And I do. I eat the soup. It’s the good kind, from the place six blocks down that has a line at lunch, which means he stood in a line, which means a fifty-three-year-old hockey legend queued up with the after-work crowd and a paper number and got soup for a woman who told him not to.
It’s the most undone I’ve been all season, more than the film room, more than the bridge, more than his mouth on mine at that bar.
Because a kiss I understand. A kiss is want, and want I’ve handled before, want is a known weather system.
This is a man sitting in my office at nine at night who noticed I was pale on a plane four days ago and went and got me ginger ale for a stomach I didn’t tell him was upset, and asked for nothing, and is now just sitting there making sure I eat, and nobody has ever once in my entire life done that for me.
I’m the one who does that. I’m the one who notices, who shows up, who carries it.
I’ve been the ginger ale my whole life and I did not know, until this exact moment with a plastic spoon in my hand, that I have been starving to be on the other end of it.
I don’t cry. I want that on the record, again, for all the good it’s doing me lately.
“Why are you doing this?” I say.
“Because you take care of everyone in this building and nobody takes care of you.” He says it plainly, like a stat. “I notice the people in front of me, Maren. It’s the one thing I’ve always been good at. You’ve been in front of me for two months.” A pause. “Eat your soup.”
We don’t touch. That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
He sits six feet away and watches me eat soup he brought me and we don’t touch once and it is, without contest, the most intimate hour of my adult life, and somewhere around the bottom of the container I understand that the rule was always going to fail, but not the way I thought.
I thought we’d lose to the wanting. We’re not going to lose to the wanting.
We’re going to lose to this. To the being known.
The wanting I could’ve white-knuckled till June.
This I have no defense against at all, because I’ve wanted it longer than I’ve wanted anything, and I never even let myself say so.
He gathers the empty container when I’m done. Throws it out. Stands.
“Go home,” he says. “The schedule will survive Camila till morning. So will you.”
“That obvious?”
“Only to someone watching.” And there it is again, the watching, the thing that should feel like surveillance and feels like the opposite. “Goodnight, Maren.”
He leaves. I sit in my office with a ginger ale I’m actually drinking now, and I add it up, and it comes out bad. You can build a fence around want. There’s no fence for being loved correctly by someone you can’t have. Nobody makes that fence. I’ve looked.
I go home. I call my sister back from the car, finally, and I don’t tell her any of it, I just listen to her talk about her day, the roommate drama and the audition she’s nervous about, and I let being needed feel like the safe thing it’s always been, the thing I know how to do, while a paper bag of soup quietly rearranges every load-bearing wall I’ve got.