Page 79 of Blind Spot
It was a game-day afternoon. We usually spent it lying down, letting our legs forget the morning skate, so they’d remember how to work in the evening. I couldn’t lie down without Rook. He’d come in from the driveway two hours ago, set his phone face-down on the island, and gone quiet in a way I’d never seen before.
He sat at the table with his hands flat, looking straight ahead at nothing.
“You pulled it,” I said. “All of it. Mark and Kovac both.”
“Mark’s parked. I told Kovac to kill the entire piece.” He didn’t look up. “Texted him from the truck.”
“And he said?”
“Dots came up. I put the phone down before I had to read it.”
I cut the sandwich on the diagonal like my mother does and set it in front of him. He said thank you and let it sit.
I let him sit like that for three minutes more while I cleaned up, leaving only the plate with the sandwich out.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what’s not happening. We don’t walk in there tonight like we did something wrong this morning, and we don’t let a guy on a one-year deal force us to keep hiding.”
“We pulled the announcement through Mark. We’re not doing it tonight.”
“I know. I’m not talking about tonight.” I sat down across from Rook. “I’m talking about how we walk in. We pulled the part where we say it. Fine. We didn’t pull the part where we walk in there with our heads up. So we put the hockey costume on, and we walk in, without flinching, and the room does whatever the room’s going to do.”
He looked at me then. It was the first time all afternoon that his eyes fully focused.
“You’re handling this,” he said.
“Somebody in this house has to. You’ve used up your turn.” I picked up half of the sandwich and put it in his hands. “Eat. You don’t make sense when you haven’t eaten. Then you’re going to lie down for an hour, and I’m going to lie down next to you, and tonight we’re going to go play hockey like the professionals we apparently still are.”
He ate half of it. I took that as a win.
Upstairs, I pulled the blinds, and we lay on top of the duvet in our clothes because neither of us was going to sleep. He rolled onto his side, and I put my palm flat between his shoulder blades.
I reached behind me with the free hand and grabbed the carved bird off the nightstand. Then I pushed it around in front of him.
“Hold on to it. It helps. You don’t have to do anything; you just hold it.” I closed his fingers around it. His hands were cold. “Did I ever tell you it has a name?”
“No.”
“Gretzky.”
That got half a laugh out of Rook.
“I talked to my grandmother on the phone about a month after we landed. I knew four English words by then, and one of them was Gretzky.” My body tucked in closer against his back. “She didn’t speak English, but she knew a Slavic name when she heard one. I think she figured I’d named it after a neighbor she didn’t like. So now here’s a Hungarian heirloom with a Russian hockey name, and it’s going to get us through tonight.”
He held it and said nothing for a while. Then his thumb moved over it, the way mine had a million times, and his breathing slowed.
We didn’t sleep, but it was the good kind of not-sleeping. At five-forty we got up and put our suits on, and when I came back from the bathroom, the bird was sitting on Rook’s nightstand, not mine.
***
The locker room was too quiet. Conversations were pitched in a lower tone than usual, and they stopped when I walked in. At least a dozen eyes focused on me.
Dahl was in his suit, leaning against the far wall. I started in before my bag hit the floor. I was still the loud guy out front who filled the space until the danger got bored and wandered off.
“Rafe.” I crossed to the kid, who had a skate half-laced while he looked around the room with his careful prairie eyes. “Here’s today’s lesson. A scratched man decides he’s a philosopher. Hehas no game of his own to play, so he decides to play everybody else’s. Do not engage with that. He’s like a guy at a bar at last call—“
“Funny,” Dahl said. “Do you do encores?”
It was a real shot, and it landed, because for half a second I didn’t know if the room was still mine. That’s the one thing the loud guy can’t chirp his way out of—a room that decides it’s tired of him. I reached for the next loud thing on pure reflex, to paper over the gap before—
