Chapter 19 Nate - May 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia #2
And the number came back fast, and it was specific, and it was low. That is the most frightening piece of information I've ever been handed about myself, and I got it flat on my back at three in the morning with a division rival asleep four feet away.
Finland beat us in the final by one. Moose was the best player on the ice and did not celebrate the winner, because he did not celebrate goals he was not near.
They put the silver around our necks on a blue carpet while a Finnish anthem played, and it is a strange metal. I stood there with a medal on and it was the second-heaviest object in the room.
In the handshake line Moose got to me and took my hand in both of his and held it. "You made that difficult. Both of you. I want you to know that it was difficult, because I do not say that as a courtesy, and I've said many courteous things tonight and meant none of them."
"Congratulations, Ludvig."
"Thank you." He moved down one. "Riley."
"Don't."
"You made it difficult," said Moose, and moved on.
The pool was on the roof and it closed at ten and neither of us had ever cared about a sign.
I came up at two and he was already in it, sitting on the steps at the shallow end with the water at his chest and his medal on the tile behind him.
The city was orange over the wall and the water was too warm and it was the last night.
There was nothing running. No bet, no coin, no wager, no game, no Accord, because the Accord expired at wheels-up and both of us had already broken it anyway.
I got in. We talked about nothing for a while. The flight. The medal. Whether Tucker Pyne would remember any of this.
Then he said, in a completely ordinary voice, looking at the water, "I keep saying this is the last time."
I did not say anything.
"I say it in my head. I've said it a hundred times.
Every time, in the cab, on the plane, in the parking garage, walking to the room.
This is the last one. And I want you to understand that I've been lying about that since a hotel in October.
" He moved a hand through the water. "Not December.
October. The first one. I said it that morning with my shoes in my hand and it was already a lie when I said it, and I put my shoes on anyway and did the whole thing again the next month, and I've done it every month since, and I've said it every single time, and it has never once been true. "
"Riley."
"I'm not asking you for anything." He said it fast, and flat, and it was the only part of it he rushed.
"There's nothing on this. Nobody bet me.
I'm telling you because I'm tired, and it's a specific tired, and it's not the kind sleep does anything about.
I've been tired like this since about Chicago, and I'd like to stop carrying it by myself for one hour.
That's the whole ask. One hour, and then we get on a plane, and you can go back to being a man who irons socks and I'll go back to being a man who tells people about it. "
The water moved against the tile.
And I felt my whole architecture go over toward a door. Not a decision, a lean. Everything in me went four degrees in one direction, toward a door I've never once opened, and I could see straight through it, and what was on the other side was a Tuesday.
And with a man handing me the truest thing he owned, the tool my hand closed on was a joke. "You want to file that with the federation. There's a per-diem attached."
It came out of my mouth and went about eighteen inches and died on the surface of the water.
He did not laugh. He looked at me, not angry, just level, the way you look at a scoreboard when the horn's gone, and then he stood up out of the water. "Goodnight, Nate," he said, and got his medal off the tile and went inside.
I sat in that pool by myself for about twenty minutes.
In the morning the packing inverted every custom of the last three weeks. I was on my knees in front of the closet folding shirts, except I folded them four times each and squared the cubes and did the whole thing with my hands going, and I did not say a word.
And Riley Kowalski packed fast and neat and completely silent. He detonated nothing. He put things in the bag in order and zipped it and put it by the door and sat on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees. We were in that room together for forty minutes and said about nine words.
Somewhere in the middle of it a European travel adapter with a wrap of duct tape around it, which had been on the desk on his side for three weeks, ended up in my cube with the chargers. I did not put it there, and neither, as far as I know, did he.
The charter home seats you by roster number and we were a dozen rows apart. Somewhere out over the Atlantic with the cabin lights off and most of a hockey team asleep, I turned my head to the window.
And I said the truth about how I feel, with no sound at all. I just made the shape of it with my mouth against my own reflection, to find out what it felt like from the inside.
And what it felt like was exactly the same as a bathroom in a Courtyard Marriott off exit fourteen in February, with both hands on a sink and the light on and a fan running.
I said a true sentence and the world declined to end.
It did not even have the decency to notice.
And then I was standing there holding the fact that I'd survived it, with nowhere on earth to put it.
I looked past my own mouth in the glass at nothing, and a dozen rows back a man I had said it about was asleep with his head against a bulkhead.
The adapter came out of a cube in a laundry room in Philadelphia eight days later. There was a way to handle it. An envelope, a note that said ‘yours, I think’, a courier to the team's facility. Ten minutes and it's over.
I did not do that. I took it upstairs and opened a drawer in a desk in a room that nobody has ever gone into, and I put it in there.
There was a cocktail napkin in that drawer from April 2017 with a phone number on it in dried ink.
There was a folder with a letter in it, dated in pen, that will never be mailed.
There was a navy tie with lighthouses on it, which had come off the far end of the rack that spring and which I did not remember moving.
Now there was a travel adapter with duct tape on it.
Four things, none of them worth anything to anybody, and it was the fullest empty drawer in the state of Pennsylvania.
I shut it, and the summer started, and there was no schedule in it anywhere.