Chapter 16 #2
Not in the lobby with the other parents — outside, in the cold, standing by the car with his hands in his pockets.
I saw him through the glass doors before I pushed them open.
Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with the game anymore.
I pushed the doors open and the cold hit me hard after the warmth of the locker room. After Jonah.
"Good third period," he said.
I waited. There was always something after the good.
"The shoulder," he said. "Still dropping it."
"I know."
"You know but you're still doing it. Knowing isn't the same as fixing it.
" He looked through me. "The Caldwell coach was there — I talked to him after the second period.
He asked about you. I told him you were still working on your consistency.
You're attracting attention early and wasting it, Jamie. "
Still working on my consistency.
After the best game I had ever played.
I breathed in through my nose. Out through my mouth. I looked at the parking lot and the cars and the cold air making clouds of everyone's breath.
"I also saw you," he said. His voice didn't change. Same tone. Same flatness. Just a different direction. "With that boy."
I went still. I said nothing.
"Don't do that," he said. Not loudly. He never did anything loudly. "Don't stand there looking at the parking lot like you don't know what I'm talking about."
I continued to look at the parking lot. I couldn’t bring myself to look up or say anything.
"I'm not going to have that." He said it the way he said everything — like a fact. Like something that simply was and always would be. Like I had no choice. "You understand me? I'm not going to have that from you. This is your own future you’re wasting. You’re stupid if you think you’ll get anywhere behaving like that. An abomination is what that child is. You’re better than that. Be better."
The doors opened behind me and a group of parents came out, laughing about something from the game. Jonah’s dad clapped my shoulder as he passed — good game, Jamie, incredible out there — and I said thank you and my face did the right thing and they all moved on.
I don’t know why that meant so much to me, but it did.
My dad waited until they were past us.
"The shoulder," he said again and pointed at me. "Fix it. That's the last time I'm going to mention it."
He got in the car.
I stood in the cold for a moment. The parking lot was emptying out. I could hear people across the lot, families finding each other, a kid running ahead of his parents. Normal sounds. Normal Saturday tournament sounds.
I got in the car.
We drove home without speaking.
I watched the streetlights and I thought about the dropped shoulder and I thought about the Caldwell coach and I thought about still working on your consistency and I thought about all the things I was not going to think about, that I was going to put in the rooms I had been building since I was able to build walls and close the doors on and not go back to.
Jonah's hands on my face.
The way he looked at me when he said it.
I put it in a room.
I closed the door.
I thought about the shoulder instead. The mechanics of it.
What I was compensating for, why I kept defaulting to it under pressure, the specific adjustment I needed to make before it became unfixable.
I thought about it with the same focused attention I gave everything on the ice — methodically, completely, until it was the only thing in my head.
Until it drowned out the noise and drowned out Jonah.
That was what I was good at.
Closing doors. Running drills. Taking the thing that hurt and finding somewhere useful to put it. Tomorrow I would go to the rink early. I would fix the shoulder.
I would be different with Jonah.
Not cruel. I was not my father. I would not be cruel about it.
I would just be more distant than whatever I had been in that locker room.
More cold. More appropriate. And Jonah was kind — Jonah was so relentlessly, quietly kind that he would feel the shift and he wouldn't push.
He'd adjust the way he adjusted to everything, with that easy grace, and eventually he'd stop and I'd let him stop and that would be the end of it.
I would let it die in the parking lot of a hockey rink because my father said I'm not going to have that in the voice he used for me. And the terrible thing — the thing I would not be able to outrun no matter how early I got to the rink or how many drills I ran or how many doors I built —
Was that I was going to do it anyway.
I was going to walk into practice on Monday and be different and Jonah was going to feel it and I was going to let him feel it and I was going to choose this.
Standing at the door every single day and choosing this.
Because the alternative was my father in a cold parking lot.
The alternative was his voice finding every good thing I had and deciding what to do with it. Choosing to destroy it.
The ice was mine.
I had made it mine at six years old on a rink not unlike that one, skating until my body gave out, and I took it back from him. I took it and I built something out of it and no version of my father got to have it.
Everything else was negotiable.
Everything else could be put in a room.
He could have everything else.
I was sixteen years old and I was learning the second most important thing anyone would ever teach me.
You don’t get to have everything.
You picked the thing worth keeping and you held it and you let everything else go — the boy in the locker room and the hands on your face and the look that said I see you without flinching, all of it, you let it go — because the alternative was handing your father another piece of yourself to break.
Handing him something you loved and watching it get turned into something that withered and turned to ash right before you.
I looked out the window.
The streetlights came and went.
I picked the ice.
I would always pick the ice.
I would keep picking the ice.
Every single day for the rest of my life I would stand at that exact door and choose the same thing.
Until I couldn't bury it anymore.