Chapter 9
· · ·
The waltz was the giveaway.
She did not, until the Tuesday after Portland, realize that anyone other than her had been listening to it.
She had come into the lobby at six-fifty, set her tea on the bench, done her warm-up. She had gone to the AV cubby behind the front desk, queued her playlist, hit play.
The waltz had not come on.
The waltz had been replaced.
In its place, in the seven-thirty Tuesday slot of her playlist, was a different recording of the same waltz — a slower, fuller, somehow older recording, possibly from the 1950s, in which a piano was joined by a single soft cello in the second movement.
It was a recording she had never heard before in her life.
It had been added to her Class Warm-Up Tuesday playlist by no one she knew, and the file had been saved on the rink’s shared music drive with the title Halloran — alt warm-up (try?).
She stood very still in front of the AV cubby for a beat.
She let the recording play.
It was, she had to admit immediately, the better recording.
It was richer. It was slower in exactly the places the eight-year-olds needed it slower.
The cello came in at minute one in the kind of place where, if you were teaching small humans the long, slow arc of a glide, you wanted there to be one more line of warm sound under the piano so that the children would settle.
She turned it off.
She walked, with her hands in her coat pockets, down the corridor to the equipment closet.
Wes was in the closet.
The equipment closet was the size of a small bathroom and was lined with metal shelves on which were arranged, in the order Wes preferred, helmets, gloves, neck guards, two jugs of pink athletic tape, a pile of practice pucks in a wire basket, a single ancient orange cone whose origin he had never explained, and a wall-mounted thermostat at eye height.
He was standing in front of the thermostat.
He had a cup of coffee in his off hand. He had a small flathead screwdriver in his on hand.
He turned around when she came in, mildly, as though she had been expected.
“Berglund.”
“Halloran.”
“You changed my playlist.”
He set the screwdriver down on the metal shelf, very carefully, on top of a sticky note he had been making notes on.
“Yes.”
“Without asking.”
“Yes.”
“Do not do that again.”
“No.”
“How long have you known that song was mine.”
He did not answer fast enough.
The pause was a quarter of a second too long, and in the quarter of a second Ada felt the equipment closet get smaller, because a pause that long meant the answer was not a week.
“About a year and a half,” he said.
“A year and a half.”
“Yes.”
“How.”
“You play it through the lobby speakers.”
“Loud enough for you to hear in the equipment closet.”
“Not loud enough for the closet. Loud enough for the hallway. It’s soft, and it plays on a loop before your class, and then it stops. I’m in the building before you most mornings. I hear it on my way past. I have not, for what it is worth, ever stopped and watched.”
“Berglund.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Why what.”
“Why have you been keeping track.”
He set the coffee down on the metal shelf next to the screwdriver.
He put his hands in the pockets of his coat.
He took a slow breath in.
“Because,” he said, “I am in the building. I have not been keeping track on purpose. I have been in the building. I notice. I notice the heater is at sixty-three, I notice the kettle is empty, I notice the leak in the east wall is back, I notice the Penalty Box is out of oat milk. I notice the staff parking has two cars in the wrong spot. I notice your warm-up music is at sixty-five percent on Tuesdays. I have been a goalie for a long time, Halloran. I read rooms. I read rinks. I have been reading this room for a year and a half. I should not have used what I read to change your playlist without asking. I will take it off. I’m sorry. ”
She did not say anything for a long moment.
He waited. He stood, very still, in the kind of patient way she had been quietly cataloguing for weeks as the way he stood at the front of the net before a faceoff.
He waited like a man who had decided that he was not going to fill the silence with himself and that whatever the silence cost would be the cost.
“I have not decided,” she said, finally, “whether this is the kindest thing anyone has done for me this year or whether I want to change every lock in this building.”
He took that without flinching. He did not defend himself. He did not say it was only a song.
“Both seem fair,” he said.
“Here is the boundary. Notice, ask, then act. You can offer me a recommendation. You do not touch the drive, or the heater, or anything else of mine, without asking. Got it?”
“Got it.”
She turned around to leave.
She turned back.
“Berglund.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know the warm-up music was the warm-up music. Not the class music.”
“You play the class music starting at seven-twenty,” he said.
“Loud. With the kids in mind. You play the warm-up music starting at seven-oh-five, soft, on a loop, for fifteen minutes, until you stop. That is the difference. The warm-up music is the music you play for you. I am sorry. I — I will not bring it up again.”
She nodded, once.
She walked out of the equipment closet.
She did not, all the way back to the AV cubby, allow herself to put a word on what she was feeling.
The feeling was not anger. The feeling was not fear.
The feeling was something closer to the way she had felt at fifteen when she had performed a long program for the first time in front of a coach she did not know, and had finished, and had turned to the coach for a critique, and the coach had said, very calmly, I saw you, Ada.
The feeling she had had then had been, she remembered, half-pride and half-terror.
She felt half-pride and half-terror now.
She played the 1991 version through the lobby at sixty-five percent, on purpose, out of something she was not proud of.
It sounded thin.
It sounded thin because she now knew there was a version with a cello in the second movement, and she spent the whole warm-up listening for an instrument that was not there.
On Thursday she played the 1958 one. The cello came in at minute one, exactly where her count lived.
She did not tell him.
He would know anyway. That was the part she had not decided how to feel about.
She did not tell anyone about the song.
Not her mother, who would have made a noise. Not Joanna, who would have looked at her sideways and said nothing. Not Bridget, who would have known immediately that something was different about her and would have asked the next time Ada bought a tea.
She filed it instead. She walked around with it in her chest for two days, the way you walked around with a stone in your shoe that you had not yet decided to take out — in her car, in the staff kitchenette, in the long slow hour of teaching Glenn the forty-six-year-old how to do an inside-edge stop.
By the end of the week, the stone in her shoe had a small companion.
The companion was: who else is doing this.
The waltz alone could be explained as a man with a long memory and a habit of being in a building.
The waltz plus the heater plus the coffee at the launch breakfast was a pattern.
The pattern was something she was going to have to think about.
She did not, yet.
She had a Family Skate Night to get through first.
Friday evening she came in through the staff door at five.
The rink, by Friday evening, was a different building than it was at any other point in the week.
The lobby was strung with paper snowflakes — the youth program kids had spent two weeks making them — and Joanna had hauled out the long folding table from storage and put it under the front window with two big aluminum trays of cocoa and three boxes of donated cookies, and Pete had decorated a sign that said FAMILY SKATE NIGHT in dark blue marker on white poster board with a small careful spelling error he had self-corrected with white-out.
Wes was at the boards in the rink, doing nothing in particular. He had his coat on. He had his hands in the pockets of his coat. He was watching Joanna unfurl, with great ceremony, a long red plastic banner that said TIDEMARK OUTFITTERS along the bottom. The banner had wrinkles in it.
“Berglund,” Ada said.
“Halloran.”
“You are not in pads.”
“I am not in pads. Marin specifically asked. We want him approachable, not on a poster.”
“Approachable.”
“Approachable. Coat. Jeans. Polite face.”
“Polite face.”
He turned to her. He had the polite face on.
The polite face was, indeed, polite. It was an outdoor face — the public face he had worn at the donor reception, smoothed for cocoa and snowflakes and children — and it was also, very faintly, an entirely different person than the one who had stood in the equipment closet on Tuesday and said you stretch your right hip to it.
She put the equipment closet out of her mind. Tuesday could wait.
She had a Family Skate Night to do.
Cass the photographer arrived at five-twenty, in jeans this time, with her thermos.
Marin arrived at five-thirty. Three reporters from the Mercer Bay Reporter arrived shortly after.
A man Ada did not recognize set up a small folding table in the corner that was labeled YOUTH PROGRAM — DONATE, and Joanna stood next to it for an hour like a person who had been told to be friendly to a wall.
Pete spent the first half hour fussing with the cocoa pot.
The doors opened at six.
Children poured in.