30. Beau #3
“Stay.” She says it like it’s the easiest word in the world.
“You were supposed to say stay. You were supposed to say I want you, this is mine, you do not get to decide it alone. You were supposed to fight, out loud, ugly, the way you fight for the puck in the corner where it costs you a shoulder.” She turns to look at me and her old face is fierce and full of love and absolutely without mercy.
“But you have never once in your life done that, min pojke. Not one time. You have spent twenty-one years being exactly what every person needed you to be. You are so good at it. It is the most beautiful thing about you and it is the thing that is going to ruin you, because you have never learned to stand in a room and say this one is mine and I want it for me. Everything was always given to you so you never had to ask. And the one thing that was only yours—the one thing you wanted for you, not for your father, not for the scouts, not for any of us—you let her walk out the door, and you said nothing, because saying it would have meant wanting something out loud, for yourself, and you do not know how.”
The plow comes back the other way. I look at my own hands around the cup.
“That is the injury, Beau,” she says, gentle now, the fierce gone out of it.
“Not the shoulder. The shoulder they will fix with a knife and six months. The shoulder I am not worried about.” She reaches over and puts her old hand on the side of my face the way I held Sloane’s, four days ago, in the living room, when she didn’t lean in.
“This one,” Mormor says, “you have to fix yourself. And you have to learn how fast, gubben, because you are going to spend your whole life losing things you love in silence if you do not.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t. The cup’s gone cold in my hand and my eyes are doing something and I keep them on the dark and I let her hold the side of my face and I don’t say anything, because she’s right, all the way down she’s right, and there’s nothing in my whole performance to say back to a thing that’s just true.
“There,” she says, soft, and pats my cheek twice, and takes her hand back.
“Now. We sit a minute more in the cold so your face can do what it needs to where the boys can’t see, and then we go in, and you let those three feed you, and tomorrow we start being a person who fights out loud.
A little at a time. You will be bad at it. That is allowed.”
We sit. My face does what it needs to. She lets it.
When we go back in, the three of them are arranged on the furniture with the elaborate casualness of guys who definitely weren’t trying to hear through the door. Cash has built something architectural out of the throw pillows for my arm. There’s a fresh coffee on the table, steaming, mine.
“How’s the porch?” Cash asks. “Therapeutic? You solve me a captain out there?”
“Cash,” Wyatt says.
“What? I’m asking after his wellness.” But he’s looking at me carefully, the loud turned down, checking.
I sit. Theo rebuilds the pillow architecture around my arm without being asked.
And Cash, who has been carrying this whole room on his back for four days, who read my consent form so I wouldn’t have to fight the letters, who I have never once seen at a loss, leans forward with his elbows on his knees and looks at my sling and the cut-off jersey still bunched in my lap and he says, completely deadpan: “So I guess this means I’m captain now. ”
There’s a second of nothing.
Then Wyatt makes a sound like a tire losing air, and Theo huffs out an actual laugh through his nose, and something in my chest cracks along a seam that’s been welded shut for four days and I’m laughing—it hurts, it pulls the shoulder, it’s a wrecked, ugly sound and there’s something else right underneath it that isn’t laughing at all—but it’s out, it’s the first thing that’s gotten out of me since Tuesday, and Cash watches it happen with the quiet satisfaction of a man who knew exactly which wire to cut.
“Over my dead body,” I tell him. It comes out rough.
“Your dead body’s got a torn rotator cuff. I like my odds.” He leans back, easy now, the bit landing him exactly where he wanted to land me. “Relax. I’d be a terrible captain. I’d run everybody into the boards.” He pauses, just long enough. “Too soon?”
“Way too soon,” Wyatt says.
“Noted,” Cash says, and grins, and the room breathes.
It doesn’t fix anything. The arm’s still gone and the season’s still gone and the draft’s a number falling down a well, and underneath the laugh the gray’s still there, patient, waiting for the room to quiet back down so it can have me again.
But for a minute there’s my guys, the bad TV, the coffee I didn’t ask for going cold the way I like it. Mormor in the kitchen pretending not to listen.
And one new thing, sitting in my chest next to all the gray, small and unfamiliar and not going anywhere: the word I didn’t say. Stay.
I’m going to have to learn how to say it out loud.
I’m just going to have to learn it too late to use it on the one I meant it for.