He should have told Theo. He knew, later, that he should have told Theo, that if he’d gone home and said Tripp knows, Tripp threatened us, we figure it out together, none of the rest would have happened the way it did. But Shane Novak did not bring people his problems. Shane Novak carried. So he went home and said nothing, and lay awake in the bed next to Theo’s careful sleeping shape, and spun, and the spinning took him somewhere worse.
Because here was the math, the math Shane had been refusing to do, and Tripp’s smile had forced it into the open. If Shane got the call-up, Marion’s long-term care was covered by an NHL salary, real money, sustainable money, the experimental program and whatever came after it, secure. If Theo got the call-up, Theo whose shoulder was a ticking liability, who’d never be re-signed if it failed under NHL lights, but whose entire right to stay in the country hung on either an NHL contract or a marriage the government already half-suspected, then Theo stayed, and Shane went back to an AHL salary that couldn’t touch his mother’s bills, and Marion got worse, and it was Shane’s fault for being too proud to let the better fit happen.
The prize that saved one of them deported the other. There was no version where they both won. He’d known that since Marek said it in the empty room. Call-ups don’t take two. But he’d let himself forget, in the cold apartment, in the bed, in the kitchen with the knäckebröd, and now Tripp had walked into thelot and reminded him, and Shane lay in the dark and heard the beautiful impossible thing crack down the middle.
* * *
The crack finished the next day, and it finished over what Shane found by accident.
Theo’s laptop was open on the kitchen table, Theo in the shower with the brace off, the only ten minutes a day the arm got free. Shane wasn’t snooping. He went to move the thing so he could set the table, and it woke under his hand, and the screen was Theo’s email, a message from a law firm in Göteborg, and behind it, half-hidden, a tab open to Theo’s bank.
The email was in Swedish. Shane clicked translate without thinking, the way you do, and the English caught up a second later: your interest in the family trust is terminated, effective immediately. He didn’t understand the legal shape of it. He understood the size. And the bank tab said the rest with no translation needed: Theo’s checking, the small steady AHL deposits, and the one line that wasn’t small, the wire from before Christmas, two hundred and twenty thousand dollars to the clinic, and what it left behind. A few thousand. Nothing under it. He’d had money of his own, real money, and he’d spent it, all of it, on Marion, and he’d been living on the change ever since and never said a word.
Shane was still staring at it when the shower stopped.
“They cut you off.” It came out flat, far away, not like his voice at all. The water had stopped. Theo filled the doorway with a towel in his good hand and went still when he saw the screen. “Your family. They found out about me, and they cut you off.”
“Shane—”
“You’ve had nothing for weeks.” Shane’s hands wouldn’t hold still. “You stood in that locker room like the money was sparechange and it was already gone, all of it, and you came home and made coffee for two and let me think it cost you nothing.” His voice cracked clean through. “You spent everything you had on my mother, and it cost you your family, and you decided I didn’t get to know. Like it was yours to carry. Like I’m one more thing you protect.”
And Theo, who could have lied, who had spent seven years building a face that didn’t move, told the truth instead, because the laptop was open and there was nowhere left to put it.
“It did not cost me my family,” Theo said quietly. “It cost me their money. With my father these were the same thing. It is the only version of family he ever offered. There was one telephone call. His lawyer, not him; my father has not called me himself since I was twenty. They had found the record. A marriage in Illinois is public.” A breath. “I did the math before I ever asked you, Shane. I knew what it could cost if they learned. I decided you were worth the risk. Then it happened, and I did not tell you, because you would have tried to give the money back, and your mother would not have her treatment. So I made it small. I made it nothing. I made myself useful. It is the only way I know how to give something. To make it look like it costs me nothing, so the person can take it without—” He stopped. Started again, rougher. “I did not hate you. That is not true. I want to be — I never hated you. I told myself I did because it was safer, and then it stopped being safe, and I did not have a word for it that did not terrify me, so I called it a folder, and I let you call it an amenity, and we both lied because the truth was something neither of us could afford.” His pale eyes were wet, the second time Shane had ever seen it. “It was never a transaction for me. Not for one day. That is the cost. Not the money. The money I would spend again tomorrow. The cost is that I love you and there is a call-up coming and a divorce in the deal, and one of us leaves, and I have known all along that loving you was the mostexpensive thing I would ever do, and I did it anyway, and now you have seen it and you know.”
The kitchen was silent. The certificate was squared to the laminate. The season clock ticked.
His mother’s voice, you’d rather die than be carried, and Tripp’s voice, one phone call, and the math that had no solution, and the man he loved standing in front of him with wet eyes having just said the unsayable thing first, having given him everything and called it nothing so Shane wouldn’t have to feel held, and Shane’s hand was already at his pocket, already reaching for the reflex he’d been running on since he was seventeen years old: the one where the carrying got too heavy and he put it down and backed toward the door.
“I can’t do this,” Shane said.
“Shane.”
“I can’t — you can’t just say that, you can’t spend everything you have and then tell me you love me and put it all on me, I never asked you to love me, I never asked you to empty your whole life out for my mom, that wasn’t the deal, the deal was clean, the deal was nothing else, I wrote it down, I pressed the pen so hard it—” He was backing toward the bedroom, toward his two duffels, everything he owned that mattered, everything he could carry. “Tripp knows. Tripp knows everything and he’s gonna make a phone call and you’re gonna get investigated and deported anyway, and it’s gonna be because of me, because of this, because we got attached when we said we wouldn’t, and I can’t — I can’t be the reason you lose everything twice, the money and the country, I can’t carry that, Theo, I can’t—”
“So you carry it alone.” Theo’s voice had gone flat again, the wall back up, but behind it the face had broken open, the pale eyes raw in a way they hadn’t been since he’d said I love you thirty seconds ago. “Of course. The one thing you cannot do is let me carry any of it with you. Even now. Even this.”
“Don’t.”
“Take your duffels,” Theo said. “You are very good at leaving with everything you can carry. It is what you are best at.”
And Shane took his duffels. He packed them in eleven minutes. He’d timed it, the first time. Eleven minutes was the sum of Shane Novak. Theo stood at the kitchen counter with his back to him and did not turn around, and Shane walked out into the cold with everything he owned and the truth he couldn’t hold and got in his financed car and drove to a motel by the highway, and he called Theo at two in the morning to say anything, he didn’t even know what, and it rang and rang and rang.
Theo didn’t answer his phone.
He never answered his phone. Shane knew that. It was one of the nine hundred things Shane knew about him now, catalogued, the way Theo catalogued everything, Theo does not answer his phone, Theo sleeps on the left, Theo’s mother switched to English just to tease me, Theo spent everything he had and called it nothing so I could take it without being held, and Shane sat in a motel room with his two duffels and his phone ringing out against his ear, and the call-up decision was coming any day now, and he had broken the one true thing in his life to keep from being held by it.
The motel room was the kind you only end up in when your life’s come off the rails: a comforter the color of a bruise, a TV bolted to the wall, the ice machine humming through one wall and the trucks through the window. Shane sat on the edge of the bed with his duffels at his feet and reached for his phone, and this time it wasn’t Theo he wanted. He got as far as Marion’s contact photo before he stopped.
Because what would he say. Mom, the man paying for your treatment loves me and I ran. She’d ask why, and the why was the thing he’d spent his whole life not looking at, and he couldn’t say it to her at two in the morning. So he put the phone down,and called Theo instead, needing the flat voice to say come home, and it rang, and rang, and knowing Theo wouldn’t answer didn’t stop the last door from swinging shut.
He lay back on the bruise-colored comforter in his clothes and didn’t sleep. He thought about the bank page, the wire, the balance that was almost nothing. He thought about Marion saying let him carry you, baby, before you lose him being too proud to be held, and then he thought: I’m doing it. Right now. Precisely what she warned me about. And still he could not make himself get in the car, because understanding it and being able to stop doing it are two different sports, and Shane had only ever been good at one of them.
Outside, the highway hummed toward Chicago, ninety miles of it, the divide made of asphalt, and somewhere down it was the show, the salary, his mother’s legs, the prize. And somewhere behind him in a cold apartment was a man who loved him sitting alone with an empty account and a recurrent shoulder and a phone he wouldn’t answer, and the season had nine games left, and then eight, and the clock did not care that they were in love. The clock never had.
* * *
Theo did not answer the phone because if he answered it he would say yes.
