Chapter 19
CARTER
Her name was Dr. Sloane Bennett and her office was on the fourth floor of a brick building in the Central West End, nowhere near the rink, which I appreciated more than I could have explained to anybody.
She had a bowl of butterscotch candies on the table between us that I would eventually come to understand as a test.
“So,” she said, in the first session. “Tell me why you’re here.”
“My girlfriend’s kid told me to go away,” I said, “and I went.”
Bennett nodded slowly. She was younger than I’d expected — thirty-five, maybe — with running shoes under her chair and a very level way of looking at a person, and she had the single most irritating quality a human being can possess, which is that she did not fill silences.
The Blaze paid her for two days a month of performance work. Everything past that was mine, on my own dime, in her office, on a Monday, where nobody from the organization ever had to know about it.
That mattered. I want to be honest that it mattered.
“That’s — that’s the short version,” I said.
“It’s a good version.” She wrote nothing down. “How long were you gone?”
“Four days.”
“And where did you go?”
“My couch.”
“Mm,” Bennett said. And then, after roughly nine hundred years: “That’s a long way for four days.”
Boy, she got under my skin. It stung because she was right. I went back the next week.
The thing nobody tells you about starting therapy in the middle of an eighty-two game season is that the season does not care.
We flew to Dallas on a Monday and Nashville on a Wednesday and I sat in a middle seat on a charter jet with a laptop full of film and Ty Hendricks asleep on my shoulder like an enormous rookie golden retriever, and I did my job.
I did it well. I had four points on the road trip and Coach put me back on the top line with Liam and a kid named Sorenson who couldn’t backcheck but could shoot the puck through a car door, and for two straight weeks I was, by every measurable standard, the best version of myself.
I called Jess every night.
That was the deal I’d made with myself, and I kept it, and I want to be honest about what those calls actually were.
They were fine. They were warm. I asked about her day and she told me about Patricia finally, grudgingly, asking her opinion on a protocol; I told her about Ty getting fined by the veterans for wearing sandals in an airport in November; she laughed, and I sat on a hotel bed in Dallas with the phone against my ear and my chest aching.
I have always been good at surface-level conversations.
Keeping it light, keeping it moving, keeping it easy — that part I can do in my sleep.
It’s the other part I can’t do, the part where you let the person on the other end of the line actually know what it feels like to be you right then.
I gave her the whole surface and none of the rest, and I hung up telling myself I’d protected her from something.
I didn’t tell her about Bennett. I mean — I told her that I was going. I told her every week, and every week she’d say good in that low steady voice, and I’d feel like a man handing over a receipt.
I never told her what happened in the room.
“How was it?”
“Good. Fine. She’s a hard-ass.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Ah — you know. The usual. Foster stuff.”
And she’d let it go. That was the awful part, looking back.
She let it go every single time, because she was being so careful with me. Because I had stood in my own living room and asked her for room.
And Jess Calloway had heard me and given it to me — exactly and precisely, like a woman measuring out a dose.
Nobody ever tells you that getting what you asked for can be the worst thing that happens to you all month.
“What do you think would happen,” Bennett said, in the third session, “if you told her the truth about what we discuss in here?”
“She’d be supportive.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It’s not a threat?—”
“Carter.” She leaned back. The chair creaked.
“You’ve said the word supportive four times today.
You’ve also said she deserves better, she’s got enough on her plate, and — my favorite — I don’t want to make my problems her homework.
” She tilted her head. “You’re building a very nice, very clean, very considerate wall.
And you’re telling yourself it’s a gift. ”
“That’s not?—”
“Who taught you that the way to be loved,” she said, “was to be no trouble?”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
“Guy named Ronnie Ferris,” I said eventually. “Ames, Iowa. Nice enough. He had three of his own and two of us, and there was this thing he used to say at dinner.” I turned the butterscotch over in my fingers. “Michaels is easy. You never hear a peep out of that one.”
“And how did that feel?”
“Like a compliment,” I said. “That’s the thing. It felt like the best compliment I ever got.”
Bennett wrote something down. First time in three weeks.
“That’s the whole file, isn’t it,” I said.
“It’s a start,” she said.
Justin called me on a Wednesday.
I was in Nashville, in the hotel, in the twenty minutes between the pregame nap and the bus, and the phone lit up with JESS and I picked it up and it wasn’t Jess, it was a six-year-old boy with something urgent to report.
“Gerald has a friend.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Hey, bud.”
“Gerald has a friend,” Justin repeated, in case the enormity of it had not come through. “There’s another duck. He’s smaller and he doesn’t have a bent feather so he’s not the leader, but Gerald lets him swim in the good spot. Which means Gerald is a good leader and not a jerk. I named him Barry.”
“Barry,” I said.
“Barry.” A rustle. He was walking somewhere; I could hear the apartment moving around him. “Mom says ducks don’t have friends, they have flocks, but Gerald doesn’t have a flock, he has Barry, so.”
“So she’s wrong.”
“She’s wrong,” Justin agreed, generously, as though it were a small thing and he had decided to let her keep her dignity.
I had my hand over my eyes.
He talked for six more minutes. He told me Andy Martino had thrown up at school but it was only because of the milk. He told me the number nine was the best number and always had been, which he wanted me to know was his own idea. He told me he could nearly do a cartwheel.
He did not say one single word about the meltdown.
Not one. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t explain, he didn’t ask if I was still upset, and it took me most of those six minutes to understand why, and when I understood it the floor came out from under the room.
He didn’t remember it.
He’d been exhausted and he’d screamed at a grown man in a hallway and he’d gone to bed, and it was gone — the way a hard afternoon is gone from a six-year-old, completely, without residue. It had never once occurred to Justin Calloway that anything had happened between us at all.
I had lost four days of my life to a sentence he did not know he’d said.
“Carter?”
“Yeah, bud.”
“Are you coming over when you get back?”
Fastball. Right down the middle. From a kid who didn’t know there was such a thing as a hard question.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice was a mess. “Yeah. Soon as this trip’s over.”
“Roger that,” said Justin, and dropped the phone, and I heard it hit the floor and I heard him already talking to someone else about something else, and then there was a scuffle, and then Jess.
“He got the phone off the counter,” she said quietly. “I didn’t put him up to it. I want you to know that.”
“Jess.”
“He wanted to tell you about the duck.” A pause. “He’s been wanting to tell you about the duck since Sunday.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Carter?”
“Sunday,” I said. “I’ll be back Sunday. Can I come over.”
“Yes.”
“I mean it this time.”
“I know you do,” she said, and there was something in her voice, something tired and glad and not entirely convinced, and I heard it and I did not ask about it, and we hung up, and I went out that night and scored two goals in a building full of people screaming for the other team.
Sunday I came back.
And it was good — that’s what nobody would believe afterward, that’s what I could never explain to Bennett, to Mark, to anybody. It was so good.
I walked into that kitchen with a bag of the specific gummy worms Justin liked, and he hit me in the stomach at full speed, and I got both arms around him and just held on. A kid who had never needed to forgive me for anything, because he’d never known there was anything to forgive.
Over his head, Jess stood at the counter with a dish towel, her eyes bright, and she mouthed hi. And I thought: okay. Okay. We’re okay.
Three weeks. Three good weeks. November in St. Louis, cold and clear, the team on a five-game heater.
I went to Bennett on Mondays. I went to Justin’s school concert on a Thursday and stood in the back of the gymnasium between Jess and Andy’s mom, Lisa, and clapped until my hands hurt while Justin played the triangle with tremendous seriousness.
Jess started house-hunting in earnest — Webster Groves, Kirkwood, a place in Clayton with a yard she liked and a kitchen she didn’t — and she sent me listings and I sent back opinions. I let myself want it. That was the most reckless thing I have ever done in my life.
On the second Friday in November she came out of the study in the temporary apartment with her laptop open and a look on her face I’d never seen before, and it took me a second to place it, because I had never once seen Jess Calloway look shy.
“So,” she said. “St. Andrew’s sent the winter forms.”
“Okay.”
“There’s an emergency contact section.” She set the laptop on the counter and turned it toward me. “It’s three lines. My parents are in Kansas City, which is four hours, and Anne’s on the list, but if Anne’s at the clinic and I’m in a delivery?—”
I looked at the screen.
AUTHORIZED PICKUP / EMERGENCY CONTACT. Name. Relationship to student.
Two blank fields, and a cursor blinking in the first one.
“It’s just a form,” Jess said. “Carter. Hey. It’s a piece of paper. It means you can pick him up if I’m stuck in an OR, that’s all it means, I’m not?—”
She stopped. She was watching my face.
“It’s not a piece of paper,” I said.
And I meant it as yes. I meant it’s so much more than a form, and I know exactly what you’re really asking me, and I want it — I want all of it. That’s what was happening inside my chest.
But I heard my own voice come out of my mouth, and it was flat, and it was cold, and it landed in that kitchen like a dropped plate.
“No,” Jess said slowly. “It’s not.”
“That’s not what I?—”
“I’m going to leave it open,” she said. “The form. It’s not due till the twenty-first.” She closed the laptop. Her hands were perfectly steady, which is how I knew. “Take your time.”
And she smiled at me, and kissed me, and asked what I wanted for dinner.
Here’s the part I couldn’t say out loud, the part I could barely say to myself: it wasn’t that I didn’t want it. It was that I wanted it so much it scared the hell out of me.
Being on that form meant being counted on. It meant a school would have my name in a file as one of the people who showed up for Justin Calloway — and it meant that if I ever didn’t, if I ever became the adult who wasn’t there, it would be documented. Official. A matter of record.
I had spent my whole life keeping my name off other people’s lines.
Not because I didn’t want to belong to anyone.
Because every time I’d let myself believe I belonged somewhere, a social worker had shown up with a garbage bag and a new address.
I’d learned to travel light. To stay unwritten.
To be easy to erase, so that being erased couldn’t gut me.
And now Jess wanted my name on Justin’s emergency contact card — wanted me to be one of the people a school would call if something happened to her boy — and I was standing in a warm kitchen realizing that the thing I wanted most in the world was also the exact thing I had built a life around being able to walk away from.
I stood there with my heart going like I’d just taken a shift-and-a-half, and I understood, with total clarity, that I had eleven days to become a man who could write his own name on a line.