Chapter 5 #2
“Deal.” He said it fast, before she could re-litigate.
“Deal, thank you, thank you, Nora, I mean it. And listen—” He stepped closer, and he made himself say it plainly, because plain was the currency she trusted.
“This is not going to become your thing. Okay? I know how it looks. I know it looks like I’m the guy who’s going to hand you the baby and then somehow it’s Tuesday forever and you’re raising my kid while I’m off doing my little skating.
I heard the speech, I was listening. This is a bridge.
Three hours, one time, because Deb has a personal brand.
I’m going to figure the rest out myself. I promise you that.”
She studied him over the top of her glasses.
It was the exact look she gave him across the fence, the one he’d spent a year trying to provoke because it was the most interesting thing on his block.
Except this time it had something new underneath it.
Recalibration. A woman revising an estimate she’d been sure of.
“You keep doing that,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Being the guy I don’t expect.” She held out her arms for the baby, and it looked like it cost her something. “Stop it. It’s annoying. Give me the genius before she recruits me into a cult.”
He handed Charlie over. Charlie went to her without a fuss, settling against the robe like she’d been doing it for months and immediately grabbing a fistful of dark wavy hair. Nora made a small resigned sound and he had to look away before she saw an expression that would not have helped his case.
“Diaper bag’s got everything. I’ll text the other information, and I’ll be back by nine-thirty. Nine-forty-five if there’s traffic on the—”
“Nine-thirty. Go do your little skating.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. She did all the work.”
“She really did.” He looked down at his daughter, who was chewing her fist with the serene confidence of somebody who had never lost a negotiation in her life. “You should know she’s completely without shame.”
“I noticed.”
“Bring it up with her. She doesn’t listen to me.”
The locker room found out at six-fifty-two, roughly eleven seconds after he came through the door. He’d known it was coming and had still underestimated it. Fen, the youngest member of the team, got there first, jumping up on the bench, both arms in the air.
“THE FATHER RETURNS.”
“Sit down.”
“I have questions. I have a list of questions. I wrote them in the newsletter.”
“There is no newsletter,” said Tarmek, from the corner.
“There’s a newsletter now, Cap, there’s a whole section—”
Somebody had put a diaper in his stall. Somebody else had drawn something on the whiteboard that Coach Morrison would have to erase before video.
Groznick wanted to know if it was true that he’d bought seventeen kinds of bottles.
Jensen said Clara wanted to send over a casserole.
They were happy for him. They were loudly and stupidly happy for him.
The Enforcers expressed every emotion they had that way, and he loved them for it.
“A daughter—”
“How old—”
“Since when, you sneaky green—”
“Is this why you’ve been weird, you’ve been weird all summer, I knew it—”
“He hasn’t been weird all summer, he found out yesterday—”
“YESTERDAY?”
“Congratulations! I think! Is it congratulations?”
“Who’s the—”
“—six months old, her name’s Charlie—”
“CHARLIE—”
“—Charlotte, she goes by Charlie, and I would appreciate it,” Rognar said, raising his voice over the top of the avalanche, “if the next question was something other than who’s the mother, because the mother passed away three weeks ago and I didn’t know either of them existed until 2 p.m. yesterday, so. ”
That killed the celebration. The noise dropped off a cliff. Petrov set his skate down. Korvash put a hand on Rognar’s shoulder, a big warm heavy hand, and squeezed once, and said nothing.
“Rognar,” Petrov said softly. “Man. What do you need?”
“I don’t know yet.” He laughed, and it came out rough. “Sleep. A time machine. Somebody named Deb. I’ve got the next few days duct-taped together with a neighbor and a nanny agency and prayer, and after that I genuinely have no idea, and I’ve got to be on the ice in four minutes, so.”
“You got pictures?” Fen asked.
“Obviously I have pictures, I have four hundred pictures, I’ve had her since yesterday—”
And the room surged forward again, an entire team of enormous orcs crowding around one cracked phone screen to look at pictures of a six-month-old with light green skin and two tiny tusks.
Then he got his skates on and went out and had a genuinely terrible practice.
It wasn’t dramatically terrible and he was never a danger to anybody.
He was simply half a second late on everything, because he’d only slept for two hours in a rocking chair.
Half a second happened to be the entire sport.
He missed a pass he would have made in his sleep, and Grimshaw walked right around him in a one-on-one drill, and Grimshaw was thirty-eight and had told him so at length afterward.
During a rush drill he stopped dead at the blue line for no reason anybody could see.
He couldn’t remember writing down when Charlie last ate.
He had written it down. It was on the paper on the refrigerator and he knew perfectly well that it was, and he checked his phone in the tunnel anyway.
“Stonebreaker.”
Brogan had come off the ice behind him and was standing there with his mask pushed up, enormous and grey-bearded and entirely unhurried, blocking most of the light.
“Brogan.”
“How much did you sleep?”
He opened his mouth to say something charming and found nothing. Brogan waited because Brogan always waited, and he never helped anybody out by talking first. He stood there with the water bottle in one hand, and the silence went on and on, and it kept being his turn to speak.
“Two hours,” he said finally. “Give or take.”
Brogan nodded slowly, as though a number had been confirmed rather than volunteered.
“Sleep when she sleeps.”
“That’s what the internet says.”
“The internet’s right about that one.” He pulled a glove off with his teeth. “You’ll want to argue with it, because when she goes down you’ll finally have two hands and the whole house will need doing. Don’t. The house can rot. Sleep.”
“Okay.”
Brogan looked down at Rognar with an expression that gave away exactly nothing.
“You gonna say something else,” Rognar asked, “or is that the whole thing?”
Brogan started past him back up the tunnel, then stopped. “Ice in two minutes.”
Rognar stood in the tunnel with his helmet hanging from one hand and hated him a little, for being the only male in the building who had seen past the humor.
Then his phone buzzed against his hip.
Nora: 6:40—2 oz, mostly for the comfort of it
Nora: 7:05—asleep
Nora: 7:52—awake, extremely pleased about it
Nora: 8:15—3 oz, plus most of a pear
He read it twice, standing in the cold with the sweat cooling on the back of his neck.
She had kept his daughter a ledger. Four entries in a bookkeeper’s shorthand, timestamped to the minute.
That was apparently what Nora Bennett did with anything she had agreed to be responsible for, whether it was the Hendricks account or a baby who had strong-armed her with a smile.
Then, thirty seconds later.
Nora: She’s fine. Stop looking at your phone.
Rognar started to type how did you know, and deleted it, because obviously she knew.
Nora: Also she smiled at me again.
Nora: I’ve entered it in the log as a hostile act.
Fen went past and said something about the newsletter, but he was too busy grinning at the screen to care.