Page 7 of Empty Net
What I will not have is an answer for why his face went still like that, or why the stillness is the thing I keep replaying.
NOLAN
November. The hip is worse after the back-to-back in Carolina.
Not dramatically worse. Not the kind of worse that makes the trainers exchange looks or Callahan adjust my minutes mid-game. The kind of worse that I measure privately, in the trainer's room, with an ice pack and a range-of-motion test I perform on myself because the self-test gives me information before anyone else gets to have it. Information is control. Control is the only currency I've ever trusted.
The range is down four degrees from October. Four degrees is nothing on paper. Four degrees is the difference between a pivot that works and a pivot that hesitates. Four degrees is the margin.
I lie on the trainer's table at 5 PM. The room is empty. Practice ended an hour ago and most of the guys have cleared out. The room smells like it always does. Rubbing alcohol. Menthol. Tape adhesive that never quite washes out of anything. The ice pack numbs the joint and the numbing is a relief that I do not enjoy because enjoying it would mean admitting the pain is significant enough to require relief.
Footsteps. I don't look up. I know who it is by the weight of the stride. Heavy, even, unhurried. The stride of a man who used to hit people for a living and who now walks through the world with the residual density of someone whose body was once a weapon.
Wes sits down on the next table. He does not say anything. He folds his hands in his lap. The hands are scarred, the knuckles ridged with scar tissue from years of fights he chose to have and years of fights he didn't. Wes's hands are a record. Everything Wes has survived is written on his body.
We sit in silence for four minutes. I know it's four minutes because the clock on the trainer's room wall is directly in my line of sight and I watch the second hand complete four full rotations. Four minutes of another man's company without a single word exchanged, and the four minutes are the most comfortable I've felt with another person in this building since I arrived.
He stands. He reaches into his bag and puts something on the bench beside me. A piece of bread. Sourdough, wrapped in a paper towel. Dense and slightly lopsided and made by a man who bakes at 2 AM because 2 AM is when the quiet is loudest and the bread is what he does with it.
"Luca made me bring extra," Wes says.
This is a lie. Luca did not make Wes bring bread. Wes baked the bread and brought the bread because Wes saw me icing my hip and Wes's response to someone in pain is to provide a carbohydrate. I don't call him on the lie because the lie is the kindness and the kindness is the bread and the bread is warm in my hand when I pick it up, paper towel rough against swollen knuckles.
Wes pauses at the door.
"You don't have to eat it here," he says.
I look at him.
"Just saying." He shrugs, one shoulder. "Some things are better warm."
Then he leaves, because Wes has no interest in ruining a perfectly good sentence by explaining it.
I eat the bread. The crust cracks when I tear it. It's good. It tastes like patience. I finish the ice. I get dressed. I should go home. The apartment is waiting with its one light and its counter and its undisturbed pillow.
On the way out, I pass the staff kitchen. Caleb Wren is standing at the coffee machine, staring at it with the focused displeasure of a man who has been personally betrayed by a piece of equipment.
I should keep walking. I stop.
"That will kill you," I say.
Caleb looks at the cup. "Statistically, many things will kill me before this coffee gets a turn."
I should leave. I don't.
"There's a better machine by the equipment room."
"Is that privileged player information?"
"It is now."
His mouth does something that is almost a smile. I file it in the same place I file everything that concerns Caleb Wren: the drawer I don't open. The drawer is getting full.
I keep walking. I should go home. The apartment is dark and quiet and the bread is gone and the bread was warm and the apartment is not warm and Wes said some things are better warm and Wes was talking about bread but Wes was not talking about bread.
The film room. The light is on.
I stop. Through the narrow window in the door, I can see Caleb at the console, laptop open beside him, rewinding the same clip for what looks like the fourth or fifth time. His tie isgone. His sleeves are rolled to his forearms. His glasses reflect the screen.
