Page 89 of Blind Spot
The headline was plain because Kovac wouldn’t do a loud one.What It Costs to Stay.And under it, in smaller type:Mattias Rook has played fifteen years by being impossible to notice. He’s decided to stop.
“He’s good,” I said, three sentences in. “I hate that he’s so good.” There was a line about Rook’s game: how the best defensemen don’t make highlight reels, and how his entire job for fifteen seasons had been to make the night boring for the goalie. Kovac said he was ruthlessly good at it. “Ruthlessly. He called you ruthless. You’re the man who apologized to a basil plant.”
“Keep going.”
Kovac discussed the room in his article. He mentioned Trier’s married-couple line and Rafe’s Saskatchewan politeness.
My voice slowed when I got close to me.
“He will tell you, if you ask him plainly, that he spent most of those fifteen years deciding he would wait for a life with someone he loved until after hockey. He will also tell you, now, that he was wrong about that.” I had to stop. I grabbed Rook’s hand and held it to my chest while he took over the reading. “He never wanted until after. He wanted now. I was slow to catch on.”
“You said that to a reporter? With a notebook.”
“He didn’t write it down. He said he’d remember.” Rook moved his thumb on the back of my hand. “He remembered.”
There was a last line, and Kovac had earned it. I swallowed hard and read it. “For fifteen years, the most reliable man in that room was also the most hidden. He has stopped being one of those two things. He will keep being reliable.”
I closed the laptop and reached over Rook to set it on his nightstand on top of his book. That annoys him, so I did it on purpose and settled down with my ear over his heart and was quiet.
He ran his fingers through my hair.
“Hey,” I said, after a while, into his skin.
“Yeah?”
“You did the thing this morning you said you couldn’t do? You let go of the wheel. How’s it feel?”
He took his time.
“You know the last shift of a back-to-back? The legs are gone, and when you finally get to the bench, you’re emptied all the way out, and it’s the best you’ve felt all night.” His fingers continued to move through my hair. “That. I keep waiting to feel like I forgot something on the ice. I know I didn’t.”
He whispered, “Szeretlek.” He murdered it like always with his Maine mouth sliding the sz sideways.
“It means I love you, he told me, as if I didn’t already know from the hundred other times he’d said it.
“Say it again,” I said, my voice getting thick with impending sleep.
“Szeretlek.”
“Worse.”
“Yes, it’s the worst.”
“That means it’s perfect,” I said.
“Christmas,” I said, a while later. The word arriving out of nowhere the way words do when I’m halfway under.
“What about it?”
“It’s two weeks. We’re going to Minnesota, and my mother is going to put a bowl in your hands and Medve’s going to knock you in the snow. Then we’ll fly to Maine and your mother is going to set out five mugs and not say a word about it. Still two Christmases, but we’ll be there together for both.”
“I like Christmas,” he said.
“My dad will make you watch a documentary with maps in it now that he knows you like it.”
“I like maps.”
“I know you like maps; that’s the whole horror of it. I’m going to lose you to a Slovak fisherman and a Maine carpenter with a black Lab—“
