I turn to a fresh page in my notebook.
I don't know why I do it. I'm not going to leave it here — there's no book to leave it in, no margins to write in, no conversationto continue. But I write it anyway because apparently I have completely lost control of my own impulses where this is concerned.
You took the book.
I stare at that.
Then underneath it: I know it was you.
I don't know that. I don't know anything except that the book is gone, the annotations are gone, and whoever has been writing back to me in the margins of a dead man's ideas has them now. That could be anyone. A student who found it and re-shelved it incorrectly. A library employee. Anyone.
But I write it like I know because some part of me does know, in the specific wordless way you know things you can't yet prove.
I look at what I've written.
Then I write one more line underneath.
Bring it back.
I tear the page out of my notebook.
I fold it once.
I set it in the center of the table — the empty table, the empty chair, the space that has been accumulating meaning since the first afternoon a book landed on my desk without explanation.
I pick up my bag.
I walk to the elevator.
I don't look back.
But I slow down slightly, just before the doors close, just long enough.
Just in case.
Chapter 36: Beckett
TheflightbackfromDenver lands at six in the morning.
I'm off the plane and in my truck by six forty-five, gear bag in the back, and exhausted. Not by the game but the locker room. Theo's face when Coach Crick said Cody's name, and the room erupted, and I watched something go out behind Theo's eyes like a light switched off at the source.
He held it together.
But I've known Theo for years and I know what it looks like when he's holding something with both hands that doesn't want to stay held.
I drive back to my apartment through an empty Seattle morning, the city still mostly asleep, the roads gray and wet and quiet. I should go home, shower, and sleep for a few hours beforethe afternoon skate Coach scheduled as penance for the loss. I should eat something. I should do any number of things that a person with a functioning sense of self-preservation would do.
Instead, I find myself taking the long route.
The one that goes past campus.
I pass the quad, pass the academic buildings with their lights coming on floor by floor as the morning advances, pass the IMA, where in six hours I'll be back on the ice, pretending my ribs still don't ache from Denver's first line deciding I was a message worth sending.
Elm Hall.
I slow down without stopping.
Fifth floor. Her window is on the east side. The light is off. Either she's asleep, or she's already gone, already somewhere else, already moving through a day I'm not part of.
