Chapter 15
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Theo Carmichael caught Wes after practice on the Monday before the dress rehearsal.
Practice had ended at four-fifteen. The dressing room had cleared by four-thirty in the loose-limbed shamble of men who had skated hard and were planning to eat large bowls of pasta in their kitchens that night.
Sully Petrov had left last, with his hair very wet, after telling Wes — softly, sincerely — if you need me, you call me, do you understand, which was the kindest sentence Sully Petrov had ever said to him, and which Wes had answered with a single nod.
Wes had stayed in the dressing room a few minutes longer than was strictly necessary, the way he sometimes did at the end of a long week, with his pads on the rack and his elbows on his knees and his head down, listening to the building.
The dressing room door opened.
Theo Carmichael came in.
He had his jacket on. He had his stick in one hand and his helmet under his other arm.
He had not skated in pads today because the starters had been on the second half of practice and Theo had been off-ice for the second-half tactical chalk talk.
He had on, also, the careful easy face of a man who had been planning a conversation for the seven minutes it had taken to walk from the chalkboard to the dressing room.
“Wes,” Theo said.
“Theo.”
“Got a minute.”
“Yes.”
Theo did not sit down. Theo did not put down the stick. Theo leaned against the wall opposite Wes’s stall and crossed one ankle over the other, casually, like a man at a kitchen counter.
“I’ll be brief,” Theo said.
“All right.”
“I know we are not — we are not really — we don’t really have this kind of conversation.”
“No.”
“You and I have never — we have never sat down.”
“No.”
“You have been very gracious about the campaign.”
“Theo, you do not need to —”
“Let me say it.”
“Okay.”
“You have been very gracious,” Theo said.
“I have not, in three weeks, said any word about it that I would not also say in front of Pete or Joanna or Frenchie. You have not made me say a single word about it. I am grateful. I want to say that. I want you to know I am grateful. The campaign is doing — the campaign is doing well. I have seen the numbers. Marin sent the team the week-three numbers. The youth program reels are — they are very good. The Family Skate Night candid of you and her at center ice — that was a — that was a good photo.”
“Thank you, Theo.”
“It was a good photo because you two — you two are good at this. You are. I am telling you. You are good at this. Ada has always been — Ada has always known how to be good in a room with a camera. She has had a lot of practice.”
“Yes.”
Theo paused.
He looked at the dressing-room floor.
“Look,” he said. “I’m going to be out of line for a minute. Somebody in this building should be, and I’m the only one with the history for it.”
“Okay.”
“Ada has been performing room face for twenty years. I know because I lived inside it for three years. The campaign is going to cost her. By the end of February she breaks. She breaks after rooms like this. She used to break after podiums — goes quiet, sleeps for days, doesn’t want anyone in the building with her.
I’ve seen versions of her, after a year of cameras, that did not come back.
So. Be careful with her in March. That’s the whole speech. ”
It was delivered kindly.
It was also delivered with the easy, settled authority of a man reading from a file he had stopped updating five years ago.
Wes did not, for a long beat, answer.
He thought about the woman in the third row of the rec center, with her sleeping daughter on her shoulder, asking how is your hip. He thought about Ada in the passenger seat of her own car, in the dark, crying for the first time in two years, and saying be in the car.
Then he said, very evenly, “Pays.”
Theo looked up. “Excuse me?”
“She pays. She doesn’t break. Those aren’t the same.
A person who breaks doesn’t come back. Ada has been paying for rooms for twenty years and she has not, in twenty years, broken.
She is going to be tired in March. She is going to be quiet.
That is not breaking. That is a person whose body knows what a room costs. ”
Theo’s mouth tightened.
“You have known her six weeks.”
“And you keep talking like you still own the old version.”
The dressing room went very quiet.
Theo straightened off the wall. For a second Wes watched him decide between two doors — the door where he said something about six weeks against three years, and the door where he left.
He took neither.
“I refused this campaign,” Theo said. “I told Pete I had a scheduling conflict. That was a lie. I refused because I knew what the campaign was going to do to her, and I didn’t want to be the one watching it happen.
So you can stand there and tell me I don’t know her.
But I knew enough to get out of the way. ”
“Getting out of the way is not the same as being careful with her, Theo. It is just quieter.”
Theo picked his helmet up off the bench.
He stood at the door a moment with his back half-turned. Whatever ending he had planned — and he had planned one; Theo always planned one — he set it down, and reached for something with the gloss off it instead.
“You’ve known her six weeks,” he said. “Come find me when you’ve watched her go quiet for a month and stop answering the door, and tell me then how far careful got you. I’m not the one who’s wrong about her, Wes. I’m just early.”
He did not wait for an answer.
“Goodnight, Wes,” he said.
He left.
Wes sat on the bench in the dressing room for a long time after he was gone.
He was not proud of all of it. The six weeks line had been bait, and he had taken it, and the sentence he had hit back with had been built to bruise.
It had bruised. He had watched it bruise.
He had meant every word and he had also, for about four seconds, enjoyed it, and the enjoying was the part he sat with now, turning it over, the way he turned over a goal he should have had.
He thought about the cello in the rink at six in the morning. He thought about a yellow page on a desk in Joanna’s office that had four lines on it, two of which were about her, and the rest of the folder he had still not handed over.
He thought, after a long beat, about Henrik.
He thought about Henrik in the basement at the back of their mother’s house in his old practice sweater, saying if you ever fall for a person, kid, fall on purpose. Fall like you know what you are doing.
Wes had been twelve.
He had not known what Henrik had meant.
He sat in the dressing room with both hands open on his knees and he understood, after eighteen years, what Henrik had meant.
He stood up. He put on his coat. He went home.
He slept badly.
In the morning the lobby door was unlocked at six-thirty for a woman who had told him, in a parked car, I will be ready sooner than I thought, and he was, for one of the first times in his adult life, willing to be ready when she was.