Chapter 19 Soucy
The puck dies under Hájek's skate behind my net and the whistle goes.
For one second there's nothing to track.
That's the second Matty picks. He comes off the wall heavy and finds the front of my crease the way water finds the low spot.
His glove comes up into my mask, not hard, a wash.
Then his forearm is across my throat with all of Montreal behind it.
"You look tired, Jules."
The barn is the loudest it's been all night.
Their building loves this. A brother shopping his little brother into the boards in his own hometown.
I shove back with both hands on his numbers and it does nothing.
He's a wall. He's always been a wall. For half a second before the linesman gets an arm in, I see it.
His eyes go somewhere else. Not anger. Not the performance.
Something behind the anger that looks how it looked when he was fifteen and I was ten.
He broke the banister and stood there holding the piece in his hand, mouth open, no sound coming out.
Then the linesman's arm is between us and Matty's face closes back up, all jaw and show.
My hands won't stop after. They're going under the blocker, thumb to index to middle to ring to pinky and back, faster than the pattern is supposed to run.
I have no place to put them down. The crease is supposed to be the place.
Tonight my brother is standing in it. I find one word in French I don't decide to find.
It doesn't make it past my teeth. The puck drops and there's hockey again.
The hockey is fine. The hockey is the one part of the night that's uncomplicated.
I play the rest of the period clean because the saves were never the problem.
The horn ends it. We win the thing or we lose the thing in a way that tilts the series, not a way that ends it.
I shake the line and Matty's hand grabs mine an extra beat at the end, his thumb pressing once into the back of my hand, the apology he'll never say out loud.
Then we're down the tunnel, into the bus, into the hotel.
The door closes. The city goes quiet behind it.
Soren is already moving when I come out of the bathroom, a water in his hand, the curtains pulled to the exact overlap that kills the parking-lot light. My bag set on the rack with the zippers facing out as I leave them, and he did all of it in the four minutes I had the door shut.
"Drink this."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your brother tried to put you through your own glass and your hands haven't stopped since the third." He holds the water out and keeps it there. "Drink the water."
"My hands are my business." It comes out with an edge I don't have for him, and he takes it, sets the water on the nightstand inside my reach, and doesn't push. He just waits, the way he waits, all of him turned toward me. The waiting is worse than pushing because there's nothing to brace against.
"Sorry," I say. "I'm not fine. Whatever the word is."
"There isn't one. You don't have to find it."
He sits on the end of the bed and I stay standing because standing is the only thing my body wants to do.
"What did he say to you out there."
"That I look tired. He said it with his forearm across my throat, so the delivery undercut the concern."
"That's a strange way to ask if you're sleeping enough."
"It's the only way he has. He's done it since I was nine.
He gets scared and it comes out sideways and it comes out big.
" I make myself sit, on the other bed, across from him.
"Tonight he's scared because he saw you.
And I saw him be scared, right before the linesman got in.
Half a second where his face wasn't his face.
He looked the way he looked at fifteen when he broke something and couldn't put it back. "
"Saw me what."
"Saw you standing next to me. Worked out what you are. So now he has to size you up, and he can't do it with words because we don't, in my family. So he did it with his body in front of his whole building."
"Did he get an answer."
"He got that you didn't drop your gloves and you didn't look away. He'll have noted it. He keeps track. It runs in the blood."
"I could talk to him," Soren says.
"Absolutely not."
"I'm just saying. Brother to whatever I'm."
"You aren't going to brother-to-whatever-you-are your way out of fifteen years of guilt-shaped aggression. He'd respect it and then he'd put you through the glass too. That's how he tells you he likes you."
"Your family communicates exclusively through assault."
"And tourtière. Assault and tourtière." The corner of his mouth goes and the warmth that usually chases it's there.
I can feel it start. Tonight it stalls. Not gone.
Stalled. Like a signal trying to reach me through glass that wasn't there a week ago.
What scares me isn't the glass but how precisely I can trace its outline.
Every accommodation he's made for me tonight laid over it like a blueprint.
The water. The curtains. The waiting. I know the shape because I grew up inside it.
My mother built one and I lived in it for eighteen years.
I loved it and I left it, and now I'm sitting across from a man who builds the same thing with his hands without being asked.
The question is no longer what it was in my kitchen two weeks ago. The question has changed.
He watches me a beat too long. "You don't talk about them much. The brothers."
"There's not much that translates. You'd have to have been in the house."
"Tell me about the house."
"It's small. Three boys in a small house and a mother who ran it like a clock because one of her boys needed it to be a clock.
She figured that out before anyone told her there was a reason.
" The water sits in my reach. I don't drink it.
I'm aware of not drinking it, and I'm aware that he's aware.
"We ate at six. Not six-fifteen. Six. The forks went down the same way every night.
The door got checked twice, by her, out loud, so I'd hear it and not have to do it myself.
She did my counting for me for years before either of us knew that's what it was. "
"She sounds like you."
"She's where I got it. Not the wiring. The managing of the wiring.
She built the whole house into a shape I could live in and never once made me feel like that's what she was doing.
" The thing I'm describing is sitting on the bed across from me with a water he poured, curtains he closed, and a bag he squared.
I keep my voice level and my eyes on the carpet because if I look up he'll read it.
"That's the part nobody can teach. She just did it. "
"And Matty?"
"Matty was fifteen, watching his mother bend the house around his little brother and not understanding why, and being a fifteen-year-old about it. He's spent the last fifteen years paying that back. Tonight was him paying it back with a forearm. He doesn't know another currency."
"Are you going to see them? The one free night."
"I'm going to sit in that kitchen and eat tourtière and let my mother run her clock around me for three hours.
It's going to be the easiest I feel all series.
That's the part I can't explain to anyone who didn't grow up in it.
The thing that should feel like a cage is the only place the noise in my head goes quiet without me working for it. "
"That doesn't need explaining. I'd take a place the noise goes quiet."
"You have one. You just have to sit still in full gear for twenty-two minutes to get there."
"It's a high price. I pay it." He reaches for the folded newspaper on the nightstand, the one that travels with him, creased to today's grid. "Seven down. I've been sitting on it since the bus."
"We're not doing the crossword."
"We could do the crossword."
"I know what you're doing."
"I'm doing a crossword."
"You're handing me a thing to put my hands on that isn't the pattern.
" It lands soft. Almost fond. The way it would land any other night.
Any other night that's all it would be. Tonight my brother put his arm across my throat.
I saw him be afraid of what he was doing and do it anyway.
That's the grammar. The only grammar any of us were ever taught.
The man across from me has learned the same grammar without growing up in the house.
I don't know anymore if what I'm seeing is care or fluency.
"Is it working?" he asks.
"That's not the question."
"It's my question. Is it working."
"Yeah. It's working. It always works." I open my mouth.
The next sentence is right there, fully formed, the one I've been carrying since the kitchen and the ropa vieja and the cat.
I can't tell if you care about me or if you're managing me, and I'm terrified they're the same thing.
It sits on my tongue for three full seconds.
I feel the shape of it. I feel the weight it would put into the room.
I close my mouth. Let the sentence go back down where it lives.
Saying it would make him answer, and whatever his answer is, I'd spend the rest of my life cataloguing it for evidence.
So I say the other thing instead. "You're good at it.
You're good at all of it." He hears a compliment.
It's one. He takes it, because he should.
"Then let it work," he says. "Come here."
I go. The body wants him even on the nights the rest of me is somewhere small.
He takes me down onto the bed and folds himself around me with that care that has a hundred hours in it.
His hands find every place I'm wound and start letting it out.
It's good. So close to perfect that the distance between close and perfect is the loneliest stretch of carpet in the world.
"Soren."
"I've got you. I've got it."
"I know you do." The phrase comes out worn smooth from how many times I've thought it this week. He hears only the warmth in it. The warmth is real. Both things are real at once. That's the whole catastrophe.
"Where do you want me?" he asks.
"Here. Just. Here."
"Like this?"
"Yeah."
He works the knot at the base of my neck.
I let him. I'm present and I'm pulling small at the same time.
Here in his arms and a long way back behind my own eyes.
Watching him take care of me the way my mother took care of me, as Matty tried to take care of me tonight with his forearm and his fear.
The whole architecture of people who love me by rearranging the room before I enter it.
The doubt isn't the same doubt it was two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago I could name it. Tonight the name is too small.
Tonight it sits under my brother's scared eyes, my mother's kitchen, this man's hands, and it's bending.
I can feel it bending, the way a bone bends before it gives.
I don't know what breaks when it breaks but I know it's going to break something I need.
"Talk to me," he says into my hair. "You went quiet. You don't go quiet with me."
"I'm here."
"That's not the same as not quiet."
He's reading it. Of course he's reading it. He reads everyone. Now he's reading the one thing in the room he can't name because I won't give him the word. I won't give him the word because there isn't one yet that isn't also a knife.
"I'm tired, Soren. It's been a long night in a loud city and my brother put his arm across my throat in front of my mother." All true. Every clause of it. True enough to cover the thing it isn't. "Let me be quiet and here."
"Okay," he says, and pulls me in another inch. Gets it exactly right, how he gets everything right. "Quiet and here. I've got both."
He has both. He has the quiet and the here, the wound and the want, all of it gathered up in two big careful hands.
I lie in his arms in a hotel in the city that built me.
The sentence I didn't say is still in my chest. Whole and heavy.
A thing I chose not to give him and will choose again tomorrow and the day after that until the choosing costs more than the silence.
I can feel that day coming the way you feel weather change through glass.
My brother put his arm across my throat tonight because he was afraid of what he saw.
Afraid is the only thing my family does with the body first. Soren pulled the curtains, squared the bag, held the water out and waited.
That's the only thing he does with his hands.
I'm lying in his patience, and he's never once been anything but good to me.
I'm not pulling away because I doubt him.
I'm pulling away because the doubt is in me.
Structural. Load-bearing. Tonight it's taking more weight than it was built for.
I don't say the words because saying them would be the crack.
Tomorrow there's more hockey. The night the words come isn't tonight.