Chapter 17
The list was in block capitals because Rognar didn’t trust his handwriting under pressure, and packing for three days away from a seven-month-old qualified, in his current estimation, as pressure.
MOUTHGUARD. He crossed it off. SKATES—already in the bag the team packed, but he wrote it anyway, because writing it was the point. TAPE. PHONE CHARGER. SECOND PHONE CHARGER, because he had learned, in thirty-four years, that there was always a second one needed somewhere.
He got to the bottom of the list and read it again.
Nothing on it belonged to Charlie. It had taken him a startling amount of effort to get it that way, and he’d been pleased with himself right up until he read it back.
Everything Charlie needed was staying here, because Charlie was staying here, because Charlie’s father was going to Montreal and Charlie was not.
He’d never once had to think that sentence before. He did not enjoy the experience.
He zipped the bag. Then he unzipped it, checked for the mouthguard he had already crossed off, found it, and zipped it again.
“You’re stalling,” he told the empty bedroom.
The empty bedroom, being a coward, said nothing.
Nora was at the fence when he came out, which she was not usually at seven thirty in the morning. He decided not to notice that she’d timed it. He was busy not noticing several things this week, and one more wouldn’t hurt.
“Montreal,” he said, over the pickets. “Three days. Two games.”
“I know. It’s on the fridge.” She had done that. She had put his schedule on his fridge, in her handwriting, one evening in October, and neither of them had ever discussed it. “Nine o’clock flight back on the third night. The late one.”
“The late one.” Everybody took the late flight out of Montreal.
It got you home at a stupid hour to a dark house and it was the only flight worth taking.
“Deb’s got Charlie the whole trip. Days and nights.
It’s covered. The insurance is sorted, the pediatric thing’s the fifteenth, that’s after I’m back, and there’s a card for the fridge with my number, Deb’s number, the team doctor, and Barrington, in case—” He stopped. “In case of Barrington.”
She waited.
“I’m not asking you,” he said plainly. He needed it clear between them, the way he’d needed it that first night, when it was a screaming baby and no idea what he was doing.
“You know that. This isn’t yours. I’ve got it handled and none of it’s landing on you.
That was the deal from the first night and it’s still the deal. ”
She looked at him over the fence for a moment. She had her mug in both hands and her glasses pushed up into her hair, and her mouth did something he couldn’t identify, and then she nodded.
“I know,” she said. The deal worked precisely because neither of them ever said out loud that it was working.
He went to Montreal.
The scheduling problem arrived on the morning of the second day, by text, from Deb.
It was the sort of problem that was barely a problem—a daughter’s parent-teacher evening she’d forgotten, on the middle night, and a gap of about four hours she needed covered.
Apologetic in three paragraphs, with a laminated feel to them even on a screen.
He called Nora to lay out the options. He had options. He had a backup sitter, a name from the agency, and a plan, and he was two sentences into explaining the plan when Nora said:
“I’ll take her.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know you weren’t.” A pause on the line, and he could hear the ordinary sounds of her house behind her. “I’m not doing you a favor. I want her. I’ll get her from Deb this afternoon and keep her until you get back.”
He stood in a hotel corridor two hundred miles from home with his phone against his ear and found he had nothing prepared for that. It was the second time something had gone by between them unremarked, and both of them, he was fairly sure, had noticed both times.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
“The travel crib’s in the hall closet. The one with the—”
“Rognar.”
“Right.”
“Go to your meeting.”
He went to his meeting.
He called at seven that evening to confirm the handover had gone fine. It had gone fine. Charlie was fed, Charlie was delighted, Charlie had discovered the giraffe Nora’s mother left behind and was conducting research on its ear.
He called at nine to confirm bedtime. Bedtime had happened. Down at seven-fifteen, the way she always went down at seven-fifteen, because Nora knew she went down at seven-fifteen and had for weeks.
He called at eleven and there was, if he was honest, no reason for it.
Charlie was asleep. Charlie had been asleep for hours.
There was nothing to confirm, nothing to check, no gap in the plan requiring his attention.
He called anyway, and asked how the night was going, and Nora said, “She’s asleep, same as an hour ago,” and he said something, and she said something, and the something wasn’t about the baby at all.
He hung up and stared at the wall.
The fourth call had no pretext. He didn’t even build one. He dialed and she answered and he said, “How is she,” and Nora said, levelly and not unkindly,
“She’s fine, Rognar. She was fine at eleven. She’s still fine now.”
Charlie was fine. He knew Charlie was fine. He had not, for one second of any of these four calls, believed Charlie was anything other than fine. He was not calling to hear that Charlie was fine.
He was calling to hear Nora say it.
Fen figured it out first, because Fen figured out exactly the things you least wanted figured out, and had the constitution of a male who’d never once regretted saying anything.
By the fifth call—a fifth call, God help him, he was aware of it as he made it—Fen had appointed himself stadium PA.
“Incoming!” he bellowed across the hotel meeting room, both hands cupped around his mouth. “Call number five! That’s a new personal best! Let’s hear it for the rookie dad, folks, he’s calling home, he’s checking the baby, the baby is… What’s the baby doing?”
“The baby’s asleep,” he said, his phone already to his ear, heading for the corner.
“The baby’s asleep!” Fen relayed, to a room that did not need relaying to, being able to hear both of them. “The baby’s been asleep for three straight nights, folks, but Dad’s gonna call again, because Dad’s not calling about the—”
“Fen.”
“—baby.” Fen grinned his broad crooked grin. “You’re not calling about the baby, big man. Everybody knows you’re not calling about the baby.”
Korvash didn’t join in. Korvash had been married for seven years, had four kids, and read paperback thrillers on the road because he’d learned to take quiet where he could get it.
He looked up from his book, once, and studied Rognar over the top of it like a male whose friend had just mentioned, cheerfully, a pain in his left arm.
“You’ve got the look,” Korvash said.
“I don’t have a look.”
“You’ve got Tarmek’s look. From last year.” He went back to his book. “I’d get that seen to.”
Brogan let it run one more call.
Rognar hadn’t even meant to make the sixth call.
His thumb had done it while the rest of him was thinking about something else.
He decided not to look at that too closely.
He was three rings in, standing by the window of the shared room, when a hand the size of a dinner plate arrived in front of him, palm up.
“Give me the phone.”
He looked at it. “No.”
Brogan didn’t repeat himself and didn’t look at him. He rarely did either. He stood there with his heavy silver-threaded beard and his terrifying resting scowl and his open hand, and he waited. Rognar would rather have had the argument. Brogan waiting felt geological.
“It’s not… I’m just—”
“You’ve called five times.” A beat. “Six. You’ve called six times.” Another beat, and this one went in under his ribs. “She’d have called you.”
The phone was still ringing against his ear.
“If anything was wrong,” Brogan said flatly, “she’d have called you. She hasn’t. So nothing’s wrong, and you know nothing’s wrong, and you’re calling anyway.” He gave it a second. “Give me the phone. You’ll get it back in the morning. You won’t like it now, but you’ll thank me later..”
He hung up before Nora answered, and he put the phone in Brogan’s hand.
Brogan pocketed it without a word and went to sit down, and Fen opened his mouth. Brogan looked at him, and Fen closed it, which was the only recorded instance of that happening all season.
That night he couldn’t sleep.
He lay in the dark of a hotel room in Montreal, with a strip of light from the corridor under the door, and a city he didn’t live in humming faintly outside.
He did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep.
He thought about how long it would be before he was home.
The nine o’clock flight tomorrow. The drive from the airport.
And, out of a habit he’d developed and would deny developing, how long it had been since he’d last heard her voice.
Charlie. He was missing Charlie. That was allowed, the ache of a new father three days away from a seven-month-old. Korvash had warned him about it and said it never fully went away. He couldn’t decide if that was good news.
But it wasn’t only Charlie.
He let himself think about the house eight feet from his.
Dark now, with the travel crib up in the office and the giraffe standing guard.
The baby asleep at seven-fifteen because someone knew she went down at seven-fifteen.
And Nora in the kitchen, or the living room, or wherever she was.
Both of them under one roof that wasn’t his roof.
My girls are both home, he thought, and a half-second later he heard the words. They didn’t sound like him at all. He tensed under the hotel sheets. He hadn’t chosen that my. He hadn’t chosen both. He had certainly not chosen to file a house he’d didn’t own as home.
He got up.
He didn’t decide to get up. One minute he was in bed and the next he was simply standing at the window, with the curtain pushed back and the cold glass under his hand, looking out at a Montreal street.
Eventually he realized he didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, and his stomach turned over.
Because he’d been staring in one direction. Not at anything. At a direction.
At home.
Home was southwest. He’d known it without a map, the same way he knew up from down in the dark. His body had turned him to the window and aimed him at a house two hundred miles away and held him there like a compass needle that had found true north.
He let the curtain fall.
New father, he told himself, walking back to the bed and lying down. Three days out. Missing my kid. That’s all this is.
He was very good at telling himself things. He’d had years of practice being the one who never needed telling anything at all.
New father, he thought again. Protective instincts.
Except there were other instincts too. The kind he'd watched turn Tarmek into a complete idiot the previous year. He refused to think about those, closing his eyes and rejecting the possibility with his full stubborn strength.
He fell asleep facing the window in the dark. He did not turn over.