Chapter 6 Nate - October 2017, Philadelphia
I got dressed with my back to him. I turned around to find my shirt and then I just never turned back. I stood there buttoning a shirt with a torn collar seam, running media training in my head like a rosary.
Short answers. Don't fill the silence. Never repeat the premise of the question. Nothing is on the record but everything is on the record.
Behind me I heard him sit up. "Okay," he said, in a voice that had been awake for a while. "So that was…"
"Adrenaline," I said. "Opening night. There's a lot of emotion in an opening night."
"An enormous amount of emotion. Historically the most emotional night on the calendar." The sheet moved behind me. "They should put a warning on the ticket."
I finished the buttons and turned around. He was on the other side of the bed with the sheet across his lap and his hair completely destroyed. We stood there on opposite sides of it like two lawyers.
"It's an accident of the schedule," I said.
"Absolutely. A scheduling matter." He found his shirt on the floor with his foot and didn't pick it up. "These things happen when a league puts two men in the same city in October."
"It's not going to happen again."
"No. Definitely not."
"Because of what it would cost."
He agreed, nodding slowly, like a man initialing a page. "Careers, and so on. Both of them, yours and mine, in that order, since yours has the better lighting."
"So we're aligned."
Neither of us moved for a second.
"There's a service stairwell at the end of the hall," he said. "By the vending. It lets out on an alley, not the lobby."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I looked last night, before you got here, while you were presumably having a suit steamed by a man whose whole job is suits." He got a sock on with enormous dignity. "One of us has to be a professional, Sinclair."
I went down the stairs in yesterday's shirt and out through a fire door into an alley off Broad. I got a car. I went home. The machine held.
I skated a full practice on no sleep and I skated it immaculately.
I sat through video and answered every question correctly.
I had lunch with Angelo, who introduced cousin number two, Nicoletta, who did something with dental insurance, and I deflected it with the kind of charm you use at an awards show. It was normal, and it held.
Three days later I was looking for my headphones in my coat pocket and my hand closed on something plastic.
I pulled it out.
It was a keychain. Minnesota Duluth, the bulldog, and the enamel on the face of the dog rubbed down to bare metal from somebody's thumb doing it over and over for years.
I stood in the middle of a kitchen that had never had a pan in it and held a two dollar piece of plastic and could not, at any level, remember picking it up.
That's the part I could not get past.
I remembered everything. What I ate before games in juniors, the seat number of every plane I'd been on that month.
I did not black out. I was not drunk. There was no gap in that night I couldn't account for except this one thing, which was that at some point in a dark room my own hand went into a bag or onto a nightstand and took this, and my brain did not log it.
Some part of me had made a decision without consulting me, and the decision was to keep evidence.
I did not mail it back. There was no address to mail it to. Even if there had been, an envelope with my handwriting going to a Forge player's home is exactly the kind of object that ends up in somebody's hands. I stood there and thought about that for a while, which was where my head was.
I decided I would give it back at the rematch. December 27th. In person, at the rink, hand it to him in front of people, like it was funny, like it was a power move.
Then I put it in my gear bag.
Ginny Okafor was the Sentinels' equipment manager and had been for years. She was the only person in that entire organization who had never once treated me like a Sinclair. She was doing bag inventory before our first road trip and I was a few stalls down pretending to look at my phone.
She got to my bag, opened the side pocket, and she stopped.
I watched her out of the top of my eyes.
She looked at it for one beat. Then she picked up the roll of tape she was using to secure the loose stuff and taped carefully around it, on both sides, so it would not move and would not be covered. She zipped the pocket and moved on to Angelo's bag.
She didn't say anything. She never has. I did not thank her. She knew I wouldn't, and she did it anyway.
That same week I had lunch with my grandfather, which happened once a month and had since I was a freshman in college.
Big Jack drove himself. He was in his late seventies. He came down from Camden to eat a sandwich with me and drove back the same day, and he would not discuss it.
He asked better questions than anybody with a press pass.
"You're sleeping badly," he said, before the food came.
"I'm sleeping fine."
"You've got the face you had the year you didn't tell anybody about the wrist. Whole family at the table and you cutting your meat left-handed like we were all blind."
"That was a wrist."
"It was a scaphoid, Nathaniel, and you played on it." He shook his head at his water. "How's the room?"
"It's good. It's young. Angelo's got me meeting his cousins."
"Good," he said, and then we ate for a while, and then he said, out of absolutely nowhere, "I ever tell you about Terry?"
"Your roommate."
"Four years. Road roommate, end of the sixties." He put his fork down. "Best hands I ever saw. I've seen a lot of hands. He had the best ones."
"You've told me, and about the laces, too."
"Flat," Big Jack said, like I hadn't spoken. "Flat as paper. Every game. He'd lay them out on the ironing board in the room and press them, and then he'd check them again before he went down. Twice, always twice. And I'd say, Terry, they're laces. And he'd say, Jack, you don't understand."
He was not looking at me. He was looking at the middle of the table.
"Best hands I ever saw," he said.
Our family had been hearing that story for about thirty years. My father did an impression of it. There was an accepted family position on the Terry story, which was that it was charming, that Grandpa was getting old, and that at some point somebody should ask him what happened to the guy.
I sat there three days after the worst best night of my life and listened to my grandfather tell it, and I did not laugh.
I sat very still. And for the first time in my life it occurred to me that the family position on that story might not be correct.
"What happened to him?"
"He died." Big Jack turned his water glass a quarter turn on the table and left it there. "Long time ago now."
"I'm sorry."
"Hm." He looked at the middle of the table a while longer. "They didn't put it in the program that year. He was a hell of a player and they didn't put it in the program."
We paid, and I walked him to his car.
At the door of it he stopped, with his hand on the roof, and looked back at me. And he stayed there.
It was one beat too long, and then it was two. There was an old man audibly deciding whether to say a second thing, probably about Terry. I watched him decide not to.
"Drive safe," he said. "Call your mother. She's decided you've been kidnapped and I think she's enjoying it."
I drove home with both hands on the wheel at ten and two like somebody leaving the scene of something.
Then, about a week after October, my phone lit up with a number I did not have.
Unknown: I want to speak to whoever is in charge of returns
Unknown: a priceless family heirloom has gone missing from a Philadelphia hotel room and I'm told it left the building in a suit pocket
I sat down on the edge of the couch.
Nate: Who is this?
Unknown: you know exactly who this is
Unknown: I got your number off a world juniors guy under false pretenses. He thinks I want to invite you to a golf thing
Nate: I don't play golf
Unknown: that's not the part
I put the phone face down on my leg. Then I picked it back up.
I was holding the keychain in my left hand while I typed with my right. I'd taken it out of the bag that morning to look at it, which was a thing I'd done more than once that week and was not planning to examine.
Nate: I've no idea what you're talking about.
Riley: Sinclair!
Riley: I've searched this room. I've had a maid in here. Her name is Rosa and she thinks I'm insane
Nate: Have you considered that you lost it?
Riley: I've never lost anything in my life. Be advised that I'm prepared to go to arbitration
Nate: Good luck. Pittsburgh's forensic capabilities are famously limited.
There was a long pause.
Riley: ok that was a good one. I'm writing it down. it's going in the file. the file is thin, Sinclair. the file is one line long
Nate: Then I'll pace myself.
Riley: I'm still calling Interpol
The negotiation ran four days.
It settled nothing, because settling it would have ended it. I never admitted anything. He never stopped accusing. On day three he sent me a photograph of a hand-drawn evidence board with string on it. On day four he claimed to have retained counsel.
And then, sometime around day five, without either of us saying anything about it, it turned into something else.
Box scores. He'd send me the Forge's line, all caps, no comment. I'd send back one word about their goalie's rebound control and he'd send back an essay.
A photograph of Ludvig M?kinen asleep sitting completely upright on a plane with his hands folded, captioned only: he does this the whole flight.
And then, right after I finished a postgame availability in Toronto, my phone buzzed and it said:
Riley: 4/10. the pattern's fine but that's a schoolboy knot, what are you doing?
That's the part I could not get past. It came in before I had my jacket off, which meant he had watched it.
It meant that a guy in another city, on his own night off, with everything in the world available to him, had put on the feed of a team he did not play for to watch a man he claimed to hate say almost nothing about a two one loss.
I read it again. I did not interpret it.
Nate: It's a four-in-hand. It's the correct knot for that collar and you know it.
Riley: it's a child's knot. it's what they teach you when you're nine and somebody dies. you've got the neck for a half windsor and you're squandering it on a funeral knot
Nate: I'm going to sleep.
Riley: send tomorrow's in advance for review
Nate: No.
Riley: I'll take that as a maybe
I started leaving my phone face up.
That was the only actual change in that stretch of the season. It used to live face down on the counter, in my stall, at dinner. It stopped.
Angelo caught me at lunch a couple of weeks later. "Okay. Who is she?"
"There's no she."
"You're doing a thing." He pointed his fork at my face. "You were smiling at your phone. You don't smile at people, Nate. And I watched you shake hands with a mayor."
"It's my mother."
"Your mother is not that funny."
"You've met my mother."
"Yeah, and she's a lovely woman and she is not making that face happen." He sat back. "I've got a third cousin…"
"No."
"She's a chef, Nate!"
And then my phone buzzed on the table between us, face up. I looked down at it and I felt it happen. My whole face did the thing, completely outside my control, like weather coming across a field. Angelo pointed at me with both hands and shouted something, and I told him to eat his lunch.
There was a paper calendar in my kitchen. Angelo had found it in his first week in that apartment and had not stopped bringing it up since.
I circled December 27th on a Thursday night in October, in pen, and did not write anything next to it, because there was nothing to write. It was a division game. Division games mattered. That was all it was.
That night I was falling asleep when the phone went off on the nightstand.
Riley: proposal. 27th December. we're both going to be there anyway. seems like a waste not to have something riding on it
Nate: Riding on what?
Riley: TBD. terms to be negotiated at a neutral site, and by neutral site I mean a bar with bad lighting. obviously there have to be penalties for cowardice
Nate: Define cowardice.
Riley: drafting a text three times before you send it, for one. I can hear you doing it from here
Nate: That's not a definition, that's an accusation.
Riley: you in?
I lay in the dark and looked at that for a while with the screen lighting up the ceiling.
Nate: I'm in.