The corridor feels smaller than it did thirty seconds ago.
She questioned my skating as well as my leadership.
And Calloway said nothing to contradict her.
I push off from the wall and walk back down the corridor the way I came.
I don’t go back to the locker room.
I push through the exit and I’m outside before I’ve decided to be, cold air hitting my face, and I stand in it and breathe.
The apology will have to wait.
Right now I don’t trust myself to open my mouth and have anything useful come out of it.
She thinks I’m holding them back.
The worst thing is, once I put aside my humiliation and the shock of hearing it said out loud, is that I’m not so sure that she’s wrong.
ELIDA
Iris picks up on the second ring, which means she was already awake and has been waiting for this call.
“You seem tired,” she says, in Swedish, and her face on the screen is so familiar and so far away.
“It’s early here,” I reply in Swedish, which feels like taking off shoes I’ve been wearing too long.
“It’s always early there. You always call when it’s early.” She shifts on her sofa - I can see the lamp behind her, the coziness of her apartment in Gothenburg, the cat that isn’t technically her cat but lives there anyway crossing behind her. “How is it?”
“Fine.”
She looks at me.
“It’s fine,” I say again.
“Elida.”
“The women’s program is good. Really good, actually. They’re keen and they work hard and there’s real potential there.”
“That’s the women’s program. How areyou?”
Outside my window the campus path is quiet, the yellow glow of the lamps and the dark pressing in at the edges. Minnesota is not so different from home in that respect - the cold darkness that settles in for months and makes you live your life in small lit rooms.
“I had a hard morning.”
“Tell me.”
So I do. Not all of it. Just a player who doesn’t want to be coached. A confrontation on the ice. And Jake asking me out for coffee.
Iris listens without interrupting.
“That player sounds like a lot of work,” she says, when I stop. “And the other coach sounds hot. What does he look like?”
“Iris.”
“I’m just asking.”
“You’re not just asking anything, you never just ask anything.”
