Chapter 20 Lundy
"Get the lights, I've got the bags," I say.
Jules gets the lights. I take both bags because my hands need to be carrying something and his bag is right there.
"I can carry my own bag, Soren."
"I know. I've got it."
He doesn't fight me on it. That's the first wrong thing.
I note it how he notes things, because I've been around him long enough to catch it.
Any other night he'd have the strap off my shoulder and his bag back before I cleared the door.
Tonight he just lets me have it. Lets the lights come up on the apartment.
Stands in his own clean room like he's waiting to be told where to go.
Gaspard pours off the windowsill and winds my ankles.
I crouch and run a hand down his back, and he leans the whole notch-eared weight of himself into it.
"He's been on me all night," I say. "He likes me now. Don't tell him I said so."
"He likes the warm spot. You're furniture that radiates."
"He missed you."
"He's a cat, Soren."
But Gaspard goes to him anyway. Lands on the table and butts his forehead into Jules’s wrist. Jules cups the cat’s ear in his palm and rubs it how he does, slow and exact.
For two seconds I get him back. The apartment smells like his laundry detergent and the basil on the sill, a place someone keeps very carefully.
I watch his thumb trace the notch in Gaspard’s ear and I think, stay here. Not to him. To the moment.
It's a good line. It lands flat, no lift under it.
The words arrive without the thing that usually rides beneath them, and I take it anyway because I'll take what there is.
I go to the kitchen because the kitchen is a place with tasks in it, and I start the cacciatore, his version.
The motion loosens the knot the drive home put in my chest.
"You looked good out there tonight," I say. "Like you'd done it before."
"It was garbage time. The game was decided."
"You still looked like that." I turn the burner down. "Your brother was looking for you all night."
"He found me."
"He was looking at me, too. Whenever you were on the ice, he found me on the bench." I felt it the way you feel a shooter's eyes find the spot, a flat heavy attention from two hundred feet away that never once dropped.
"That's Matty. He looks. He's deciding something."
"About what."
"About you." Jules sits at the table, finally, in front of the half-done crossword that's been there since Tuesday. "He'll let you know when he's decided. He won't use words."
So I don't get an answer. I get a thing that's going to happen later, on Matty's clock. I set that next to everything else. The stack I keep not looking at.
"You want the chicken or just the sauce over rice?" I ask.
"I'm not hungry."
"You'll be hungry in twenty minutes. You always are after a game. I'll keep it warm."
"I'm good."
"I'll warm it anyway." My hands keep finding the next thing.
The spoon squared on the rest. The towel folded over the oven handle.
Each gesture a little smaller than the one before it.
I know they're pointless. I can't make them stop.
The only other thing to do is sit down across from him and ask the question. I'm not going to ask the question.
"Ash and Avi drove in together again," I say. "Third time this week."
"They carpool."
"Third time. Same as us, more or less."
"We carpool because the goalie schedule lines up. It's not the same thing." He says it to the crossword, pen not moving.
"Right. No. Of course." It is, though. The two of us in one car every morning for a season.
Three months ago he'd have said the line back to me with the corner of his mouth going.
Tonight he took the observation and handed me a fact, and whatever runs between us stalled out on the table. Neither of us reached for the key.
"Berger had four points," I say, because the silence needs filling and I'm the one who fills it. "Whatever moved in him this winter, it landed in the right place. You called that."
"I called that something moved. You called where it landed."
"Same operation."
"Sure."
I bring him the crossword like an offering, set it square in front of him the way he keeps things square. I know the answers. I've had twelve across and four down since Tuesday, turning them over while I waited for a night when we'd sit here and fill them in together.
"Twelve across has been killing me," I say. "Six letters. 'Sheltered water.'"
He looks at it for a long time, longer than the answer takes. I watch him not say it.
"I don't know."
"You always know. You knew quiet harbor was haven before I finished the clue, last month, in the car." It comes out lighter than I feel it.
"Not tonight. Leave it. I'll get it later."
"Okay, easy one, then. Four down. 'Steady.' Five letters." I already know the answer. I want to hear him say it.
He doesn't have it before I finish saying it. He doesn't have it at all.
"Four down," I say. "'Steady.'"
"I heard you."
I leave it. I take the pen back and write nothing, because writing the answers myself isn't the point and never was.
I set it down parallel to the long edge because that's how it lives on his table.
I go stir a sauce that doesn't need stirring, and the fear I've been outrunning all night catches up to me at the stove with my back to him.
He's two rooms deep in himself. I can't find the door.
I read everyone. I read shooters before they shoot and teammates before they know their own faces.
And I'm standing in his kitchen unable to read the one person I'd give anything to be right about.
I come around behind him with the plate and put my hand on the back of his neck the way I do, as I've done since a hotel in Tampa when I learned his neck was a place my hand could go and the rest of him would ease.
My hand lands. For a quarter second nothing eases.
For a quarter second he's a man with a stranger's hand on him, every line of him deciding, and then he leans back into it on purpose and gives me the ease, hands it over like a thing he had to go to another room to get.
"That's nice," he says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Keep your hand there."
I keep my hand there. It used to be the one place on him that never had to think about it.
Tonight he thought about it. I felt the half-second where my hand was a question instead of an answer.
I felt him choose to say yes. A yes you have to choose is a different animal than the one I've had all season, and I hold his neck and I don't say any of that.
Tonight's rule, the one neither of us wrote down, is that we don't say any of it.
"Did you see them?" I ask. "Your mom."
"Tomorrow. The one night."
"You should go. Take the whole night. I'll handle the morning skate, tell Bodie you're with family." The fixing reflex says it before I can stop it, the whole plan assembled and offered. Make their life easier. Remove an obstacle. Be useful until the wall comes down.
"I don't need you to handle it. I'll be at skate." There's an edge on it, thin and tired, gone almost before it lands.
"I just meant if you wanted the time."
"I know what you meant." And he pulls it back, gives me that much. "Sorry. I know what you meant."
I plate the food. "Leave the dishes after. I'll do them."
"I can do my own dishes."
"I know you can. Leave them." I set the plate down. "Tell me if I'm doing too much."
"You're not doing too much."
"You're fine. It's not you. I'm tired, and my family is exhausting, and the series is long. That's all it's." He says it like a thing he's reciting, true in every clause. I count the clauses and notice none of them is the one I'm afraid of. I don't make him say that one.
"You'd tell me," I say. "If it was me."
"I'd tell you."
"Would you, though."
"Soren." He sets the pen down. "Drop it. Please."
So I drop it, because he asked, because the please had a crack in it I've never heard from him, and dropping it's the worst thing I do all night, because dropping it means leaving him alone in whatever room he's in, and I've built my whole life on never leaving anyone alone in a room, and he just asked me to, and I'm doing it. He picks up the fork. He doesn't eat.
I'm wiping down a counter that's already clean when he speaks again, quiet, to the crossword.
"Twelve across is lagoon."
"What?"
"Sheltered water. Six letters. It's lagoon. I had it." He doesn't look up. "I had it the whole time you were asking. I don't know why I said I didn't."
He says it like a confession. It's one. The smallest possible version of the thing neither of us is naming, because the man doesn't leave wrong data standing, it isn't in him, and "I don't know" was wrong data, and his brain made him come back and fix the record even when nothing else will get fixed tonight.
Lagoon and steady. I had them both, too, sitting right there in the grid, and I couldn't say them to him in any way that counted. There's no clue for that.
"Lagoon," I say. "Yeah. That's it. Eat before you sleep. I'll leave it on the stove."
"I'll."
"Promise me you'll eat."
"Soren. I'll eat."
I leave the food on a low warm because he won't eat it while I'm watching and he might eat it after I go.
Gaspard has gone to sit on the back of the couch where the light from the tank reaches him, blue and slow, the bamboo shark a pale drift behind the glass in the world Jules built and runs alone.
I stand in the doorway of an apartment I'm not going to sleep in tonight and watch the man I can't get through to sit very still in front of a finished word he wouldn't give me.
I tell myself it's the city and the brother and the series.
Most of me believes it. The part that reads shooters for a living knows the read I'm refusing to make, and across two hundred feet of memory Matty is still looking at me from the far bench, deciding.
I still don't have the answer. I'm beginning to understand the answer was never going to come from him.
?