Chapter 9
The decision took Rognar about four seconds, which he’d later learn was three and a half seconds too many for anyone to leave him alone about.
Bex had a Tuesday morning class—something about kinesiology, she’d texted, with a photo of a lecture hall and a sad face.
Morning skate was optional. He’d looked at the gap in the schedule, and then at his daughter, who was gumming the corner of the giraffe bag on the kitchen floor.
And for some reason he couldn’t later decipher, he’d decided that an optional skate was a fine place for a baby.
He carried her into a locker room that smelled of tape and wet gear and old sweat, and the whole room went quiet.
It went silent in a way it never went silent.
Not for Coach. Not for the general manager.
Not for the time a bird got into the rafters and stayed for a week.
A room full of the largest males in the state, half-dressed, mid-argument about something involving Jensen’s playoff beard, and the room went silent and stupid at the sight of one green baby in a sling.
“Oh,” said Fen, in a voice Rognar had never heard him use.
Then it was chaos, but a reverent kind.
They came off the benches. They came around the stalls.
Korvash got there first and put his hands up before Rognar had even unclipped her.
Rognar handed her over. His shoulders were shot from carrying her since five.
Korvash tucked her against his chest with the head cradled exactly right and rocked without being told, like he’d done it a thousand times.
“Where’d you learn that?” he asked.
“Four kids, remember?” Korvash didn’t look up, cooing down at Charlie.
Fen was digging in his stall. He came out triumphantly holding something green, and shook it open. It was a jersey. An Enforcers jersey in home green with STONEbrEAKER across the back over the number 9, and it was the size of a pillowcase.
“I ordered it three days ago,” Fen said. “Next-day shipping. Cost me extra.”
“Fen.” He looked from the jersey to his daughter. “That’s a 4T.”
“It’s the smallest one they make.”
“It covers her whole body.”
“She’ll grow.”
“She’s six months old. By the time that fits her she’ll be walking. She’ll be talking.”
“So she’ll have it ready.” Fen held it up against Korvash and Charlie, and the hem hung past Korvash’s knee. He frowned at it, undefeated. “It’s aspirational.”
“It’s a suffocation risk,” said a level voice from the tunnel, and every other sound in the room went away.
Nora stood three steps in. She had the diaper bag over her shoulder.
The one he’d left on her porch that morning.
He’d been juggling and it hadn’t fit and he’d told himself he’d grab it later.
He’d known even then that later meant she’d bring it.
She’d stopped dead, because there was a professional hockey team on its knees on the rubber matting.
He saw her before she saw him. He’d think about that later, when he replayed it.
He’d been looking for her without having decided to look, his eyes going to the tunnel mouth the second the light changed.
Like she registered on some frequency he hadn’t known he had.
He'd spent half of last season giving Tarmek hell for knowing exactly where Edie was in any room before he'd admitted why.
Apparently that kind of thing was funnier from the outside.
She wasn’t cooing. He hadn’t expected that either. She walked in, took in the scene—the giants, the kneeling, the enormous jersey—and she didn’t make a single soft noise. She looked at the 4T and delivered her professional assessment, and Fen, who did not take notes from Coach, took the note.
“…Yeah,” Fen said slowly, lowering the jersey. “Yeah, that’s fair. I’ll get a bib made.”
And that did it. Something in his chest gave way, as quietly as a light switching off. He had to look at the ceiling for a second. He examined the rafters. He thought about the bird.
“I got one that fits,” said Kowalski, and produced, from nowhere, a jersey in an actual infant size, snap crotch and everything, and would not say where he’d gotten it. “Don’t ask me.”
“Where did you—”
“Don’t ask me.”
Charlie, meanwhile, had started fussing. She’d been at it all morning, one fist jammed against her jaw, gnawing and grizzling and building towards a real cry. Now she twisted in Korvash’s arms and let out a proper wail. Twelve enormous males flinched in unison.
Brogan crossed the room.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask. He put out both hands, and Korvash handed her over like a live grenade to the one male in the room who knew what to do with it.
Brogan settled her against his forearm and put his thumb to her mouth—not on the little tusk, the way Rognar always did, but above it, against the swollen gum where the next tooth was coming.
Charlie stopped fussing. She stopped cold, mid-wail, and clamped down on his thumb and made a sound of pure animal relief, and the room noticed. Nobody said anything, because it was Brogan.
“How did you know that?” he asked.
“It’s the gum.” Brogan didn’t look up. “It’s always the gum.”
Charlie had stopped chewing to stare at him. She got a fist into that big silver-shot, and she studied his face with the total scientific absorption of a scholar who has finally located the primary source.
Fen leaned in, pulled a face, waggled his fingers, did his whole act.
Charlie didn’t even look at him. Fen tried the clicky sound that always worked.
Nothing. He escalated to the one Charlie usually laughed at.
She kept her eyes on Brogan, unblinking, like Fen was weather happening on some other continent.
“She’s not even—” Fen straightened, wounded. “I’m fun. I’m the fun one. Rognar, tell her I’m fun.”
“You’ve been demoted,” Korvash said. “There’s a new fun one now. He hates fun.”
Brogan didn’t move. He held her correctly and he did not soften and he wore the expression of a male waiting out a fire alarm, patient and grim, as if being adored were something done to him.
“She’s leaking,” he said.
“That’s spit.”
“I’m aware of what it is.”
He held her a beat longer, and Charlie kept a fist in his beard and gazed up at him like he’d hung the moon, and for half a second something moved behind that terrifying scowl. Then he handed her back. He transferred her smoothly, not looking at Rognar.
“Cold helps too,” Brogan said quietly.
“How do you know that?”
Brogan simply turned and went to get his pads.
Rognar took the ice with the rest of them and did the optional skate, which meant nobody worked and everyone chirped. Charlie held court from her carrier in a folding chair in the tunnel with Nora standing over her. Half the roster took turns getting waved off the ice by Coach for coming to look.
He kept finding her at the boards. Nora. He’d cut a lap and there she’d be through the glass, her arms crossed, watching the ridiculous circus of it. She had that flat unimpressed face he’d learned meant she was having a better time than she’d ever admit under oath.
Somebody skated up beside him. Tarmek, breathing easily, watching the tunnel too.
“Somebody got her a coffee,” Tarmek said. “Jensen’s telling her the seats behind the bench are where the mates sit. If she wants out of the tunnel.”
And it wasn’t a chirp. That was what got him. Nobody was nudging anybody. There was no ooh. Jensen had handed her a coffee and pointed at the bench seats and told her where the partners sat during games, like somebody telling a new signing where the good parking was. Just a fact about the building.
He looked at the tunnel. She had the coffee in her hand and her mouth was open and nothing was coming out. The silence opened up between them.
One.
Two.
He should have said something at one. A clean she’s my neighbor, light and easy, the line the old Rognar would have fired off before the sentence finished.
He didn’t. She didn’t. They let two full seconds fall into the space between them like dropped gloves.
Two seconds is nothing and it is a very long time, and then—
“Oh, I’m not—” she started.
“She’s just—” he started.
At the exact same instant. Over each other. Which was worse, so much worse, than either of them saying nothing. Jensen just nodded, unbothered, already skating off, his mission completed, and left the two of them tangled in a correction neither of them had finished.
Nora looked at him through the glass. He looked at Nora. Charlie, between them in the chair, sneezed, and broke the look, and that was a mercy.
He found her after, in the tunnel, when the ice had cleared and the great grinding drone of the Zamboni came up through the boards and swallowed every other sound in the building.
Charlie was asleep against his chest, worn out from being worshipped, a small warm weight breathing slowly into the crook of his neck.
Nora had the diaper bag repacked—of course she had, she’d repacked it, everything zipped, everything squared—and she held it out to him.
He didn’t take it.
Instead he leaned down over the sleeping baby between them and kissed her, short and certain. The Zamboni covered the sound of the bag hitting the floor.
When he straightened, she picked up the bag back and put it over her shoulder, her face composed. Only her eyes gave anything away, and only for a second.
“That’s twice you’ve done that without checking,” she said levelly.
“I know.”
“I’m not complaining.” She adjusted the strap. “I’m keeping records.”