* * *
The recovery was its own slow torture, and the torture was not the shoulder.
The shoulder Theo knew how to suffer. He’d suffered it before; he had a whole curriculum for it, the ice and the bands and the careful incremental coaxing of a joint back toward trust. What he did not have a curriculum for was the watching. He was a healthy scratch and then an injured one, in a suit in the press box, watching the Blaze play without him, and the thing about watching was that it showed you, in real time, how replaceable you were. The team did not fall apart. That was the cruelty of it. Mercer slotted Tripp Vandenberg up into Theo’s minutes, and Tripp, God help them all, was good, was visibly good, made plays Theo could not make at twenty-seven on a bolted shoulder, and the room adjusted, and the wins kept coming, and Theo sat in the press box in a suit and watched his own erasure proceed without friction.
“You’re brooding,” Shane said, on the drive home from one of these games. He was driving the Volvo, Theo’s one arm in the sling, strange and intimate, being driven in his own car. “I can hear you brooding. It’s very loud for a quiet guy.”
“Vandenberg looked good tonight.”
“Vandenberg’s a child.”
“Vandenberg is twenty-one and his shoulder works and the org owns his future.” Theo watched the dark highway. “This is what I mean about the number going down. I am in a suit and the team is winning and a rookie is playing my minutes better than I played them, and every person in that building did the math tonight, the same math I did. Maybe we do not need Lindgren.” He said it flat, a report. “It is not bitterness. It is accurate. I have been the replaceable necessary thing my whole career. I only forgot it for a few weeks. The shoulder reminded me.”
Shane was quiet for a mile. Then he said, “You know what I did tonight? In the third? We were up one and they pulled the goalie, chaos in front, and I dropped back and I covered, I just — I sat in the lane and I ate a shot and I cleared it, boring, ugly, no points, and you know what I thought?” He glanced over. “I thought, Theo would be proud of me. That’s it. Not the coach, not the scouts, not Chicago. You. I played the most Theo Lindgren shift of my life because I wanted you to see it.” He looked back at the road. “So don’t tell me the number’s going down. The number went up tonight, in my net, and you didn’t even play. You’re not replaceable, you idiot. You taught a guy who used to think defense was beneath him to take a slapshot off the chest to protect a one-goal lead. That doesn’t go in a stat sheet. But it’s the realest thing I did all year.”
Theo did not say anything. He could not. He looked out the window at the highway and let the headlights blur, and Shane reached over with one hand and found Theo’s good one in the dark and held it the rest of the way home, driving one-handed down ninety miles of nothing, and neither of them mentioned it. The kindest lie anyone had ever told him, Theo thought, except that Shane Novak did not lie. So it was just true.
Chapter 9
The treatment room at six in the morning was the only place Theo let the mask come all the way off, and now Shane was in it.
That was the change the injury had made, the one nobody had voted on. Theo’s rehab had been a solitary religion his whole career: Pete the trainer working the shoulder with his eyes elsewhere, the door shut, no audience for the ugliness of a body being coaxed back from failure. But Theo couldn’t drive himself with the arm braced, and couldn’t do the home exercises one-handed, and so Shane came. Early, before the rest of the team, into the cramped fluorescent room that smelled of liniment and tape and the sweat of men in pain, and Shane learned the rehab the way he’d learned everything else about Theo: by watching, and not saying, and being there.
“You’re guarding it,” Shane said, low, from the stool by the table. Pete wasn’t in yet. “When you do the external rotation. You’re cheating with your trap because the real movement hurts. I can see it.”
“It does not hurt.”
“Theo.” Shane reached over and put two fingers, light, on the ridge of muscle at the top of Theo’s shoulder, where it was bunched and lying. “This is doing the work the rotator cuff’s supposed to do. You’re protecting the thing we’re trying to fix. Pete’d say the same if you’d let him actually look at you insteadof making him do it with his eyes closed.” A beat. “Do it again. Slower. I’ll keep my hand here. When you cheat I’ll feel it and you’ll start over.”
Theo looked at him, the loud reckless gambler gone quiet and clinical and patient, one hand resting on the part of him he never let anyone near, and the old animal panic rose: the you are seeing too much, the I am only worth this for as long as it works. And under the panic, newer and worse, a pull he had no defense against: the wanting to be looked at. Not the performance-armor looking, the camera looking, the is he still useful looking he’d lived inside his whole life. This. A man on a stool at six in the morning who had learned the difference between his trap and his cuff because Theo’s body had become something he wanted to understand.
He did the rotation again. Slower. Shane’s fingers caught the cheat before Theo registered it: “there, you just did it, start over.” And Theo started over, and something in his chest cracked open, and his eyes stung, which he blamed on the early hour.
“Why are you good at this,” Theo said, on the fourth rep.
“Three years of my mom’s PT appointments.” Shane said it easily, but his thumb went still for a second. “MS, you do a lot of PT. I used to drive her, sit in, learn the exercises so I could spot her at home when the home health couldn’t come. You learn to watch for the cheat. The body’s always trying to protect the broken part by overusing the part next to it, and then that part breaks too, and you’ve got two problems.” He pressed gently, guiding the movement true. “You can’t let it guard. You have to make it do the scary thing, the movement that hurts, or it never gets strong. She taught me that, actually. My mom. About her own legs.” His voice shifted. “‘You have to use the part that’s failing, baby, or you lose it. Favoring it is how you lose it.’”
Theo stopped mid-rep. Looked at him.
“She’s talking about her legs,” Shane said, to the wall, “but I think about it a lot. About other stuff.”
“Yes,” Theo said quietly. “I think you do.”
They didn’t say anything else. Theo finished the set, doing the scary thing, the movement that hurt, not favoring it, while a man who’d learned spotting from his sick mother kept one hand on his shoulder and caught every cheat, and the fluorescent room hummed, and outside the season ran down, and Theo thought: the most married thing they had done yet. More married than the courthouse, more married than the bed. This. The careful unglamorous tending of a body that was failing, by someone who had decided not to look away.
* * *
The immigration interview was scheduled for a Thursday, in a federal building in Chicago that had the same beige despair as the courthouse but with metal detectors, and Theo had a sling on under his suit jacket and a story about how he’d hurt it moving a couch, and Shane had a folder.
The folder was what undid Shane, a little, in the days before. Their lawyer, Dana, had sent a list, evidence of a bona fide marriage, and they’d had to build it, and it had turned out they didn’t have to manufacture much. The lease with both their names. The joint account they’d opened for groceries. Photos: they’d had to take some posed ones, sure, awkward in the apartment, Theo wincing through the sling, but most of the photos were just there, already, on Shane’s phone, dozens of them, the two of them at the rink and at the diner and one Marek had snapped of them on the bench mid-argument that somehow looked, when you didn’t know better, like a candid of two people in love. Shane had scrolled through his own cameraroll, building the folder, and realized he’d been documenting a marriage for months without noticing he was in one.
They rehearsed the night before, at the kitchen counter, with Dana’s list printed out between them, and Shane’s voice went half a note too careful on the first question. Too much mattering to be loud about.
“They’ll separate us,” he said, for the third time. “They ask you stuff and me stuff and they compare. So we have to know the answers, Theo, the real ones, not the cover story. Which side of the bed. What you eat. Whether I—” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “What if I get one wrong. What if I say you sleep on the right and you say left and the whole thing falls apart and you get deported because I couldn’t remember which side of the bed my own husband sleeps on—”
“Left,” Theo said. “I sleep on the left. You know this. You have slept beside me for two months.”
“I know you sleep on the left, I just, under pressure I blank, I’ve blanked in shootouts, I once forgot my own jersey number on live TV—”
