Page 37 of Blind Spot
Ten days. That meant ten nights. Ten times I’d send Rook back to his room and wait the thirty seconds forI’m back.
Then I’d lie there reading water stains on the ceiling, thinking about Heath and Kieran two doors down in one bed. It felt like a tax. It was what I paid to keep Rook.
I thought about knocking on the office door. I rehearsed it all, standing there with the cold glass sweating in my hand. After I knocked, he’d sayyeah.I’d open the door and let him see me.
I didn’t knock. I rinsed the glass and checked the front bolt out of habit.Assume someone’s watching.The joke of it was that nobody was watching this house and never had been. All the watching was on the inside.
It was fourteen steps up, and I climbed them alone for the second time that month. I didn’t get into bed. I was tired, but getting into bed meant lying down alone, and as long as I kept moving around the room, I was just a man getting ready for bed. I took a very long time.
I brushed every quadrant of my teeth for the full thirty seconds, remembering a conversation from my last dental visit.
“You don’t floss, do you?”the hygienist asked while she scraped away with that hook.
“Every day,” I told her, sounding like I had a mouth full of cotton.
“Your gums say no.”
I was lying to a woman holding a sharp metal implement in my mouth. I’d flossed every day since.
After I spat and looked at myself in the mirror, I listened for Rook on the stairs. The house was silent.
I took off my shorts and put on different ones, which made no sense; the first pair were clean when I put them on after practice. I picked up the carved bird from the nightstand. It was a little wooden one my grandmother made.
I turned it over twice and set it back where it lived, beak facing toward the window. It had been with me every night since she gave it to me, in three different countries.
She carved the bird the winter before we left Slovakia, and she’s the one who told my father to take me to Canada.
“Take him where they have the leagues,” she’d said in Hungarian, and three months later we were in an apartment outside Toronto. I was nine-year-old Lucas, the only kid in the school who didn’t know the right words to ask about going to the bathroom.
You learn fast at nine what gets you hurt. Being the loud one on the ice got me picked first. Being the foreign one off of it got me followed home. So I split myself down the middle before I knew that was a thing a person could do. I was enormous on the ice and as invisible as possible off it.
My father said, “Jól van, Luki. Csak ne csinálj feltunést.”That means, “Do well, but don’t make a scene.” My parents sold a house for me. They learned a new language for me. The least I could do was not be a problem in the new country that had let us in.
Rook helped me follow Dad’s advice. I was still loud on the ice, but Rook bought me a place to do the thing I’d been doing since I was nine. Being quiet for him was the easiest thing anyone ever asked of me.
Finally, there was nothing left to get ready, so I got into bed.
I rolled my head back to look at the Bobby Orr stick hanging over the headboard. It was the only object in the house with both our names on the paperwork.
I don’t want this anymore.The sentence ran through my head three times.
It wasn’t about him. I wanted him, but I didn’t want the closed office door, the two Christmases, and the Rook and Varga Show in the locker room. I wanted us to be boring like Heath and Kieran were boring.
I’d never said it directly to him. In five years, I never once saidI want more than this.I decided early that he was carrying enough. Rook was a gift, and I shouldn’t rattle what was working.
He was my sun. I didn’t ask the sun to come closer. I orbited and was grateful for the heat.
I closed my eyes but didn’t sleep.
When I finally heard him on the stairs, I checked the clock on my phone. It had been two hours since I’d climbed into bed.
The door eased open, and a bit of hall light spilled inside. Rook undressed in the dark: belt, jeans, and the shirt pulled over his head. The mattress dipped on his side.
He didn’t reach for me. He lay flat on his back.
“Luki,” he whispered.
I held my breath.
