Page 52 of Filthy Goalie
My hands were cold. I did not know when I had put the pie down. The apartment suddenly felt very small, too small for this story, too small for the weight of what he was carrying. I understood that this was the thing he had been holding since before I met him. This was the story that had made him quiet. This was the reason his eyes went dark sometimes when he thought I was not looking.
He said, “We were five miles from home. Two-lane road, no streetlights. Headlights came around the curve in the wrong lane. I had maybe a second. I jerked the wheel and the truck still took it on his side. Head-on. The other driver was drunk. Caleb died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I died too, just took thirteen years to understand it.”
The snow fell and fell and he was standing in his kitchen with his fork in his hand and his brother was dead and he had been the one driving and he had been the one who had told Caleb to sleep, and no amount of pie or snow or apology after the fact was going to undo that. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that he was not responsible, that drunk drivers were responsible. But I knew that knowledge and guilt did not occupy the same space. You could know something was not your fault and still carry it like a stone in your chest.
I took his hand. It was cold. Everything was cold except his palm, which was warm like he was burning fuel just to stay upright. His fingers were trembling. I held them steady.
I said, “That was not your fault.”
He said, “It was.”
I said, “A drunk driver killed your brother. You didn’t have a bomb in his chest. You didn’t put him in that car. A man with a bottle in his hand did that. You were nineteen and you were trying to let your brother sleep.”
He did not answer. His eyes were focused somewhere beyond the window, somewhere in the past where his brother was still alive and they were still driving home from Providence and he still had time to make a different choice. His jaw was clenched. His breathing was controlled. He was holding himself together the way he had learned to do it—with discipline and distance and the particular knowledge that falling apart was not an option.
I said, “Do you have a picture of him that’s not the one on the shelf?”
He went to the bedroom—the only other room in this small apartment—and he came back with a wooden box that he had kept in the nightstand drawer, and he opened it and inside there were medals from college hockey, and a photograph of the two of them at what looked like a birthday party, both of them smiling like they did not know what was coming, and a rosary made of olive wood that he held for a long time without speaking, his thumb sliding across the beads the way someone slides across a screen they don’t mean to open. The beads were worn smooth. He had been holding this rosary for a very long time. Some of the olive wood had worn away to lighter wood beneath. Some of the beads had small grooves where his thumb had worried them during long nights.
He said, “His name was Caleb.”
I held his hand and I let him say the name to someone who was not going to flinch away from it, and we sat on his too-small couch with his brother in a wooden box and a rosary and medals from a life that had ended when he was twenty-one years old, and I understood that Knox had been carrying this for longer than I had known him, and that the weight of it had made himquiet and careful and the kind of man who noticed things—the way Maple’s hands were cold, the way she needed a generator, the way she was trying very hard not to fall apart. The kind of man who had picked her up in front of the entire team and announced that he was not going anywhere. The kind of man who was already planning to tell her something that was going to change everything between them. The kind of man who did not get to be happy without also being sad, who did not get to love without also remembering what it meant to lose.
At some point, we went to bed. He was already in the habit of holding me like I might disappear, like he had learned very early that people left and that the only way to make sure was to hold them until you could not hold anymore. I did not tell him that I was not going anywhere. I just let him hold me and I held back and we fell asleep like two people who had finally found a place that was warm enough to rest. His arms were around me and his chin was in my hair and he was breathing like a man who had just finished running a very long distance.
Day 23 morning came in gray and quiet.
I woke up in Knox’s bed—which was to say, a full-size bed in a room that was maybe ten by twelve, with a window that faced Birch Street and a dresser that he had organized with the kind of precision that suggested he did not have many possessions and the ones he had were important. His thermal shirts were stacked. His socks were rolled. His underclothes were folded. A man who had lived in duffels and apartments and hotel rooms had learned to be organized about the few things he got to keep. It was a particular kind of loneliness—to know how to live like you were always leaving.
He was not in the bed.
I could smell coffee, which meant the generator had survived the night, which meant the bedroom heater was still running, which meant it was going to be okay. Everything was going tobe okay. I put on his thermal shirt because my clothes from yesterday were in a pile on the floor and I did not want to separate myself from the smell of him, the warmth of him, the impossible fact that I was allowed to be here, in his bed, in his apartment, wearing his shirt like I belonged in this small space above my own garage. The shirt smelled like him and cold and the propane that was keeping us alive.
The kitchen was barely three steps away.
He was standing at the stove with a mug of coffee in his hand, waiting. He had made it before I woke up. He always made it before I woke up, like he could not stand to be in a place where I was sleeping and he was not present, like he needed to be doing something—making coffee, standing guard, paying attention. The coffee was black. He knew by now that I was learning to like the things he liked. It was the kind of thing you did when you were making a commitment. You learned to like the things the other person liked. You changed yourself in small ways until you were both standing in the same direction.
I said, “Hi.”
He said, “Coffee’s ready.”
I took the mug and I drank it black because it was his and because I was learning to like the things he liked, and I was standing in his kitchen in his thermal shirt at 7:15 a.m. when I heard the yell from outside.
“MAPLE’S IN HER BOYFRIEND’S APARTMENT!”
Theo Jr.’s voice, loud and young and excited the way five-year-olds get when they have discovered something they think everyone should know about. Knox closed his eyes. His hand tightened around his mug. The coffee sloshed. I started to laugh. I could not help it. The laugh came out of me like relief, like the world was suddenly too funny to bear seriously. Like I had been holding my breath and could finally breathe again.
“MAPLE’S IN—” another yell, his mother’s voice cutting him off.
“Theo Jr., that is not our business!”
There was fumbling at the outside door—Heather Park was clearly trying to pull her child back toward the property line—and then a knock on Knox’s apartment door, the kind of knock that suggested she was very sorry and also very much here to address the situation. Apologetic. Mortified. Determined.
Knox set down his mug. He went to the door and he opened it, and there was Heather Park in a coat that was not zipped and Theo Jr.in his snowsuit with his feet dangling above the ground where she was holding him, and both of them looked mortified. Heather was blushing so hard that the color went down her neck. Theo Jr.looked like he had just made the greatest discovery of his life.
Heather said, “I am so sorry. He saw Maple’s truck in the driveway and he made an assumption and he yelled it into the world. I tried to stop him.”
Knox looked at Theo Jr.He said, “You see her truck and you yell it.”
