22. Sloane #2
It’s the shoulder. The left one. I live with him now, which means I see the parts he doesn’t perform — the way he winces pulling a shirt over his head when he thinks I’m not looking, the way he ices it at the kitchen table some nights, wrapped, casual, like it’s nothing.
The bottle of ibuprofen in the bathroom that empties faster than a bottle of ibuprofen should.
The night I woke at three and he wasn’t in bed, and I found him in the dark of the kitchen with the ice on it and his jaw set, and he said couldn’t sleep and I said okay and neither of us said the real thing, the way neither of us ever says the real thing about the parts that hurt.
I know what hiding an injury looks like. I know what it looks like to be in pain and decide it’s not anyone else’s problem, to wrap the thing and ice the thing and play through the thing and never once let it show on your face. I know it because I do the emotional version every day of my life.
I should ask. I don’t ask. Because asking would mean he’d have to lie to me or tell me the truth, and I’m not sure I want to make him choose, and because — this is the part I don’t look at directly — some quiet part of me understands that a man hiding a thing that could end his whole future is a man who isn’t telling me everything, and I am the last person on earth with the standing to mind that.
So I file it. The way he files things about me. The way we’ve built a whole love out of the things we notice and don’t say.
I tell myself it’s probably nothing.
I’m wrong, but I don’t know that yet.
He has an away game, and I learn what the Raven House sounds like empty.
The team buses out Thursday for a two-game road swing — somewhere in Vermont, a conference rival, the kind of trip that means a hotel and a late return — and the house empties out around me, Cash and Wyatt and Theo and Beau all gear bags and noise and then suddenly gone, and it’s just me, alone, in Beau’s room, in Beau’s bed, in a house that isn’t mine surrounded by the evidence of a life I’ve somehow been folded into.
It’s the first time I’ve been properly alone since the fire.
I should like it. I’ve spent my whole life liking it — the alone, the quiet, the room with no one in it to read.
And I do, a little. But I also lie in his bed in his shirt with the house creaking around me and his side of the mattress cold, and I notice I’m listening for the truck, for the door, for the noise of him coming home, and the noticing is its own alarm, because listening for someone is a thing I swore I’d never do again after I learned, at nine, what it does to you to listen for footsteps that don’t come.
He texts me before the game. In Burlington.
Cash already got us kicked out of one diner.
Wish you were here. And then, a minute later, the thing that undoes me, the thing he had to work to type because typing costs him: Watch the stream if you want.
I’ll find the camera after I score. That one’s yours.
I watch the stream. Of course I watch the stream.
He scores in the second period — a hard wrist shot, top corner, the Vermont crowd groaning — and he doesn’t do the big celebration, he never does, but he wheels out of the slot and looks, for half a second, straight up into the nearest camera, and I’m sitting alone in his bed four hours away with my hand pressed over my mouth like an idiot, because he found the camera, because that one was mine, because he told me he would and he did.
I don’t text him back right away. I don’t know what to say that isn’t I think I’m in trouble.
I text:
Adequate goal.
He texts back, after the game:
Coming home tomorrow night. Don’t get used to the whole bed.
I have, though. That’s the problem. I’ve gotten used to the whole everything.
That night I go through the house in the dark, alone, the way I used to go through the Sailmaker when the others were out — except this isn’t my house, and the going-through isn’t the old habit of cataloging exits and checking locks.
It’s something worse. It’s me touching the evidence of a life I’ve been let into.
Wyatt’s ancient cap on the hook. Cash’s ridiculous protein tubs lined up like trophies.
The egg situation, ongoing, Theo’s territory clearly marked.
The framed jersey in the hall, Beau’s number from some junior tournament, his father’s shadow hanging behind it the way Margaret says it always has.
And on the fridge, held with a magnet shaped like a puck, a grocery list in Beau’s handwriting — careful, deliberate, the letters formed slow and a little wrong in places, the handwriting of a man for whom writing is work — and at the bottom, after the milk and the eggs and the protein, in the same careful hand: the chai she likes. cinnamon. ask Mormor which.
I stand in the dark kitchen and look at that line for a long time.
He wrote it on a list he didn’t know I’d see.
The chai she likes. Not for an audience.
Not for the plan. Just a man remembering to buy the thing that makes a hard morning easier for the girl who’s moved into his life, written in the handwriting that costs him to produce, and I think — standing alone in his kitchen at midnight in his shirt — that I have spent my whole life being someone people forgot to keep, and I have somehow ended up on a grocery list in a hockey house in western Massachusetts, remembered, in pen.
I take a picture of it. I don’t know why. I just want it to exist somewhere besides the fridge.
Then I go up to his bed and lie in his cold sheets and listen for a truck that isn’t coming until tomorrow, and I let myself miss him, which is a thing I haven’t let myself do about another human being since I was nine years old waiting on footsteps in a different kitchen, and the missing doesn’t feel like the danger I always thought it would.
It feels like being a person.
The truth is the campus had started catching on before the fire, before the drawer, before any of it — at Halloween.