Chapter 47
Jamie — Past
I tell myself I'm going because it's the right thing to do. He's sick. He's your father so you go. Simple. Clean. Nothing underneath it worth examining.
The house looks the same when I pull in.
That's the first thing. I don't know what I expected — some visible mark of what's happening inside, something different, something that matches the weight of it — but it's just the house.
Same shutters. Same front walk cracked along the left side where a tree root got under it years ago and nobody ever fixed it.
My mom's car in the driveway. A neighbor's trash cans at the curb. Ordinary afternoon.
I sit in the car with the engine off. I am not doing anything. Just sitting. Hands in my lap, looking at the front door, waiting for whatever this feeling is to resolve itself into something more controllable before I have to go inside.
I don't let myself look at it too closely.
The feeling.
Of relief.
I go inside.
My mom answers before I knock.
She looks smaller. Or I feel bigger. Or this doorway has always made both of us smaller than we actually are, like Alice in Wonderland. She hugs me and I let her and she holds on the way she has been holding on my whole life — briefly, like she knows better than to show too much.
"He's awake," she says. "It's a good day."
I nod. She takes my coat. She asks if I want coffee and I say yes because it gives her something to do and giving her something to do is the kindest thing I know how to offer her.
I follow her to the kitchen and I look at the photos on the hallway wall — hockey photos mostly, only the ones that look like achievements, the ones my father approved — and I don't stop walking.
She hands me the coffee and I carry it to his room.
The door is open.
I stop in the doorway for a moment before he sees me.
He's in the bed — their bed, the same frame they've had since before I was born — and he is smaller.
That is the only word for it. The man who has dominated every room he has ever walked into, who lowered the temperature of a house just by being in it, who I have spent my entire life arranging myself around — he is just smaller.
Yellow around the eyes. Hands wrong on the blanket.
The diminishment of a body that is failing at the job of keeping someone alive.
I feel a grief that has nothing to do with the man in the bed and everything to do with the man who was never in the bed. The father who didn't exist in this house. The one I kept waiting for anyway.
I breathe in and I go in.
He looks up when I cross the threshold.
Same eyes.
That's the thing. Everything else has gotten smaller but the eyes are exactly what they have always been — assessing, flat, running the same internal assessment they have been running on me my entire life. He looks at me the way he has always looked at me. Like he is checking something.
"You're late," he says.
"Traffic on the 9," I respond.
"Sit down."
I sit. I put my coffee on the nightstand. I look at him and brace myself for whatever he wants to say.
"You look thin," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You're not eating correctly. You can't sustain that level of play without eating correctly." He shifts against the pillows. He doesn't acknowledge that it costs him energy to do it. "I watched your last game."
"I know."
"Your defensive reads are better." He says this the way he says everything good — quickly, moving past it, not letting it land. "You're still dropping the shoulder."
"I'm working on it," I say.
"You've been working on it for years."
I look at the curtains.
"Don't look away when I'm talking to you."
I look at him.
We talk for a while about things that aren't the thing I’m here for.
My game. My coursework. My father has opinions about all of it — measured, certain, the particular authority of a man who has never once doubted that he knows best. His voice is slightly thinner than I remember.
He runs out of breath at the end of longer sentences.
But the content of the sentences is exactly what it has always been.
I answer when I'm supposed to answer.
My mom comes in once, quietly, to check the water pitcher on the nightstand.
She looks at me over his head with an expression I have been reading since childhood — distant, in the way of a woman who learned a long time ago what the options were and made her peace with them, choosing to stay anyway, waiting it out. I look back at her. She goes.
I drink my coffee. I look at the curtains.
I drove two and a half hours.
I sit for forty minutes talking about Harlow and I think about the drive back and I think about what I said I came here to do and I think about the way the drive back is going to feel if I don't do it and I think about how it's going to feel if I do and neither of those things is good but one of them is worse.
"Why," I say, abruptly.
He stops mid-sentence.
"All of it," I say. My voice does the right thing. Stays level. Doesn't give him anything. "The rink. The beatings. Everything. I need to know why."
He looks at me then. Not softly, not fatherly, not with love.
Not with the careful expression of a man who has been lying in a bed thinking about what he's done and arriving at something like remorse.
He looks at me the way he has always looked at me.
Like the question is slightly beneath him.
Like the answer is so obvious that I should be embarrassed to need it said out loud.
"Because you needed to be the best and were going to ruin everything if I didn’t help you," he says. Flat. Certain. No apology in it, no warmth, no hesitation. A fact.
"That's it," he says. "You have something — you've always had something — and I watched it from the time you were small and I knew what it was worth and I knew what would happen to it if you weren't careful.
" He says this without drama. The way you say the sky is grey, the road is icy, the shoulder is dropping.
"The world you're trying to get into doesn't like those kind of men. I don’t like those kind of men.
You know that. You've always known that.
The men who run that world—" he stops, breathes, the breath catching somewhere in the middle between a cough, "— they don't make space for it and they don't have to. "
"So you do whatever you need to do," he says, "and you push it down.
That's all. It's not complicated." His eyes on me are flat and patient and completely without doubt.
"Look at what you've built. You're already most of the way there.
You just have to keep going. Jamie, no one will accept that.
No one will love you like that. Be different. "
The room is quiet. My mom's television down the hall. A car outside. Strong wind against the curtains.
"Just push it down, Jamie."
The same voice.
The same words.
Final.
He has been saying this to me my entire life and he is saying it now in a smaller body with yellow in his eyes and he means it exactly as much as he has always meant it.
There is no version of this conversation where he says he was wrong.
There is no version where he looks at me and sees what he did, the thing he built and what building it required.
There is no other version.
I knew that before I got on the interstate. I knew it sitting in the driveway looking at the front door.
I came anyway.
Because some part of me that I cannot seem to get rid of, that I have been pushing down alongside everything else for my entire life, still thought —
Still thought maybe.
I drink the rest of my cold coffee. I put the mug back on the nightstand.
He talks for another twenty minutes.
The Harlow coach. The shoulder. Whether I've been doing enough conditioning work in the off-season. His voice gets thinner toward the end, the breath catching more, and my mom comes back in and adjusts his pillows and he waves her off with a hand that doesn't have the power it used to.
I sit in the hard chair.
I wait some more.
Eventually his eyes go to the window. "You can go," he says.
Not thank you for coming. Not it was good to see you. Not anything that would indicate I am a person who drove two and a half hours because he is dying and I am his son. No last words. Nothing except, shove it down and be different.
You can go.
I stand up.
"I'll call next week," I say.
He's already looking at the window.
I take my mug.
I go.
My mom hugs me at the door.
I let her.
"He's glad you came," she says.
I get my coat and I get in the car.
I sit in the driveway for a moment — engine on this time, heat running, hands on the wheel — and I look at the front door and I think about walking back in there and saying the thing I drove two and a half hours to say and didn't.
I sat in the hard chair and I answered questions about hockey and then I waited to be dismissed and I was dismissed and I got my coat and I got in the car.
I didn't say it, though. The one question I wanted to ask.
Why couldn't you love me?
The way fathers are supposed to.
The way you loved hockey.
What was so wrong with me?
I used to lie awake at night and try to figure it out.
Maybe if I worked harder.
Maybe if I played better.
Maybe if I got stronger.
Maybe if I stopped being whatever it was you saw when you looked at me.
Maybe if I fixed all of the things you said were wrong with me.
Maybe then.
Maybe then you'd look at me and see your son instead of a problem.
I spent years trying to become someone easier to love.
Years.
And none of it mattered.
Because it was never about how hard I worked.
Or how good I was.
It was me.
Just me.
Was it really that bad?
What I was?
I did exactly what you wanted.
Every time I stood there and took the beating because I thought if I could just survive long enough you'd eventually see me.
Was it really enough to make you stop loving me?
Or worse—
Did you ever love me at all?
Because I can live with being hated.
I can live with being punished.
I can live with pain.
What I still don't know how to live with is the possibility that I spent my entire life trying to earn something that was never mine to begin with. Something I was never going to get anyway.
I back out of the driveway.
I think about what he said on the drive back.
I run it the way I run game tape. Not to feel it.
Just to see it. Because you need to be the best. Push it down.
I have been hearing this my whole life in one form or another and hearing it out loud, in that flat certain voice, changes nothing.
He was not sorry. He did not ask how I felt.
He looked at me the way he has always looked at me — like something he made and is still in the process of correcting — and delivered the same instruction he has been delivering since I could remember.
Fixing what is wrong with me, until his last breath comes.
He is not sorry.
He is never going to be sorry.
He is going to die in that bed waiting for a liver that might not arrive and he is going to die absolutely positive that he was right and I am going to have to figure out what to do with that.
I have spent my entire life building around his instructions. I don't know who I am outside of it and that is the thing — the real thing, the one I won't look at, the one I put in a room so long ago the room has become part of the entire structure of who I am —
That is the thing I drove two and a half hours to ask about.
And he said push it down.
And I am pushing it down.
I am always pushing it down.
I pull into my parking lot.
Engine off.
I think about Danny.
I put Danny in a room.
I think about Jonah.
I try to put Jonah in a room too.
It doesn't go as cleanly.
I think about the ice.
The shoulder. The left edge that keeps breaking down under pressure because I am compensating for something I learned so early I can't find the original wound anymore — just the habit, just the thing I keep doing that isn't quite right and keeps not being quite right no matter how many times I run the drill.
It’s not right.
I’m not right.
Push it down, Jamie.
I push it down.
I go inside.
I have practice.
I have a shoulder to fix.
I have doors that I am getting very good at keeping closed and a voice in my head that tells me this is the right way and the only way and the way that makes me what I am and I have never had another voice to put next to it.
Not yet.
I just know I’m not okay the way I am.
The dark.
The quiet.
Push it down.
Just push it down.