Chapter 20
JESS
The form sat open on my laptop for eleven days.
I did not mention it. I want that on the record, because later — much later, when I could think about that November without my hands going cold — I went back over every hour of that week looking for the place where I’d pushed. Where I’d cornered him. Where I’d made it a test he could fail.
I never did. I made dinner and I went to work and I sent him a listing for a four-bedroom in Webster Groves with a bad kitchen and good light, and I let the cursor blink in an empty field on a school form and said nothing, and I have never in my life worked so hard at not asking a question.
The Blaze left for a four-game road trip on the sixth. Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, Pittsburgh.
He called every night. That was the thing.
He called every night, the way he’d promised, and each call was a little shorter than the one before, and by Wednesday I was standing in my kitchen at ten p.m. having a warm, pleasant, entirely hollow conversation with a man who was eight hundred miles away in more ways than one.
“How was Dr. Bennett this week?”
“Didn’t go. Road trip.”
“Right.” I moved a dish from one side of the sink to the other for no reason. “Are you going Monday?”
“Yeah.”
“Carter.”
“I said yeah.”
And I let it go. God help me, I let it go, because I had stood in his living room three weeks earlier and promised him room, and I had a horror of being the woman who gave a man room and then stood over him with a stopwatch.
So I gave him room.
I gave him so much room that he had space to disappear standing right in front of me.
Thursday he was supposed to meet me at the Webster Groves house.
Not a showing — a drive-by, which had become a thing we did, a stupid small ritual I had started looking forward to more than I wanted to admit.
We’d park across the street with coffee and Justin in the back seat and rate the house out of ten on criteria Justin invented on the spot.
Porch. Tree situation. Does it look like it has a basement where something bad happened.
Thursday he was in Detroit, and I had known that, and I’d said when you’re back? and he’d said sure, and then on Thursday afternoon I got a text.
Can we push the house stuff till after the road trip? Head’s not in it. Playing like garbage.
He was not playing like garbage. He had six points in three games.
I read that text eleven times.
Then I typed of course, and deleted it, and typed is everything okay, and deleted that too, and finally sent back a thumbs up, which is the single most cowardly thing I have ever done in a relationship, and I am including the ones I ended by moving cities.
“Mom. It’s starting.”
Friday night. Pittsburgh. Justin was on the couch in his jersey with Carter Junior propped against the cushion beside him and a bowl of popcorn in his lap that he was defending from nobody, and the temporary apartment smelled like butter, and the pregame guys were doing their thing with the little diagrams and the too-loud voices.
I sat down next to him.
“There he is!” Justin shot up on his knees. “There! That’s him, he’s doing the thing with his stick, he does that when?—”
“I see him, bug.”
Carter was on the ice for warmups, taking slow easy loops, and even through a television, even at that distance, in all that gear, I could see it.
Something in the shoulders. Something in the way he wasn’t talking to anybody — Carter always talked in warmups, he chirped the other team’s rookies through the glass, he’d told me that, he’d made me laugh telling me that.
He skated alone in a big empty circle like a man doing laps in a prison yard.
“He looks mad,” Justin observed.
“He looks focused,” I said.
He was not focused.
Fourteen minutes into the first period Carter took a run at a Pittsburgh defenseman along the boards that was late by about half a second — the kind of late that isn’t a penalty in a bar fight and is absolutely a penalty in the National Hockey League — and the whistle went and the crowd came up out of their seats and the guy he’d hit got up slowly and said something to him, and Carter dropped his gloves.
Justin screamed with delight.
I did not.
I sat on that couch with a bowl of popcorn on my knees and watched the man I was in love with grab a stranger by the front of his jersey and hit him in the face, twice, three times, with a kind of blank mechanical fury that had nothing whatsoever to do with hockey. The linesmen got in.
They pulled him off. The crowd was baying and the arena horn was going and the camera found him being walked to the box with his helmet gone and his hair stuck to his forehead and blood on his knuckles.
And his face.
His face was empty.
Not angry. Not lit up the way Liam got, that hard bright competitive thing. Not the way he’d looked on the ice in June with the Cup over his head.
Empty. Like a house with the power cut.
“That’s five for fighting,” the announcer said cheerfully. “Michaels doesn’t do that much.”
“Michaels doesn’t do that ever,” his partner said. “That’s — you know what, that looked personal. Whatever that was, that wasn’t about the hit.”
They cut to a replay. They cut to Liam on the bench, and I watched Liam O’Connell — the most controlled man I have ever met — turn his head and look down the ice at the penalty box with an expression that made my stomach drop through the floor of that apartment.
Because Liam didn’t look angry either.
Liam looked worried.
“Mom,” Justin said, “why is your face like that?”
Anne called at the second intermission. She didn’t say hello.
“Liam’s going to call him tonight.”
“Anne—”
“Jess, that wasn’t a hockey fight. That was a guy trying to get hit.” A pause. In the background I could hear Finn narrating something to himself. “Liam says he’s been like that all week. Quiet in the room. First one on the ice, last one off. Sitting in the back of the bus with his hood up.”
“He calls me every night,” I said. “He calls me every single night, Anne, he’s been — he’s fine.”
The silence on the other end had a texture to it.
“Okay,” Anne said carefully. “But you know that’s not the same thing.”
I stood in my kitchen with my hand over my eyes.
“He asked me for room,” I said. “He asked me for room to get himself right and I gave it to him, and I have spent nine days being so careful with him, Anne, so careful, and I don’t —” My voice did something I didn’t authorize.
“I don’t know how to be careful with someone and also actually be with them.
I don’t know how you do both. Nobody ever taught me that. ”
“Yeah,” Anne said quietly. “I know.”
“He’s disappearing.”
“I know.”
“He’s standing right there and he’s disappearing, and I keep waiting for him to come back, and I’ve started to think?—”
I stopped.
“What,” Anne said.
The television murmured in the other room. Justin laughed at something.
“I’ve started to think he’s waiting for me to give up,” I said. “I think he’s been waiting for it since October. And every day I don’t, it makes it worse.”
They got home Thursday.
He texted from the airport — landed. can I come by tomorrow after practice?
— and I read that text about nine times, standing in the hallway of a temporary apartment I had never intended to still be living in, in a city I had moved to because a man had made me feel like the future was a place you could just walk into.
I thought about my son, asleep down the hall, who had told his entire first grade class at St. Andrew’s that week that Carter Michaels was going to pick him up from after-care one day, and who had drawn a picture of it, and whose teacher had mentioned it to me at drop-off with a warm and terrible smile.
I thought about the form. Eleven days open now. Due tomorrow — Friday, the twenty-first.
AUTHORIZED PICKUP / EMERGENCY CONTACT. Name. Relationship to student.
And I understood that I had a choice, and that both versions of it were going to cost me something, and that I had known for about a week which one I was going to make.
I typed back: Yes. Come tomorrow at eight. You’ll catch him before bed.
Then I put the phone down on the counter, and I stood in my kitchen with my arms crossed, and I said out loud to nobody at all:
“I’m going to ask him.”