That was the truth of it, what lay underneath the policy. People thought Theo Lindgren didn’t answer his phone because he was cold, or aloof, or rude, and he let them think it because it was simpler than the real reason: Theo had no defenses against the people he loved, none at all, and a phone in his hand was a door he could not keep shut. If he answered, and Shane said come get me, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, Theo would be in the Volvo before the sentence finished, and they would be backwhere they’d been, two men in love with a wall rushing up at them, solving nothing, and Theo could not do that. He could not let Shane talk him out of the only clean thing left.
So he sat in the dark apartment at two in the morning and let it ring, and ring, and ring. It was the hardest thing he had done since he was eighteen years old getting wheeled into surgery. His hand shook holding the phone he would not answer, the hand that never shook.
Shane had taken his two duffels. Eleven minutes. Theo had heard him, had counted, the way Shane counted. The place that had been too small for two enormous men was now cavernous, the right side of the bed wrong-shaped, the silence louder than the two of them fighting had ever been. The tea Theo had left out at nine-fifteen, before he’d remembered, sat cold and full on the counter next to the certificate that was still, stupidly, squared to the laminate. Theo looked at the certificate for a long time. Theodor Lindgren. Shane Novak. Two names a clerk named Donna had bound together while a man named Reggie thought about lunch. The realest thing in the apartment, Shane had called it, the only one that belonged to both of them.
Theo did the math, because the math was the only language that didn’t hurt. The math said: Shane was right to leave. Not for the reasons Shane thought. Shane had left out of his own wound, the can’t-be-carried wound, the same way Theo had disguised the money out of his. But the leaving itself was correct. Because sitting alone in the dark, Theo could see what he hadn’t been able to see in December, or in any of the months since, all the while adding up what Shane meant to him and calling it a folder: he had been trying to keep Shane, and keeping was the old broken instinct, keeping was rent, keeping was what his mother had begged him on the phone not to do. Do not make them pay rent. Do not let yourself believe you are only the door you hold for other people.
He had been holding the door so hard he’d forgotten you were supposed to let people walk through it.
If he loved Shane, and he did, completely, at the price of everything, then the call-up had to go to Shane, and Marion had to be saved, and Theo had to want it for him with nothing owed and nothing disguised and no rent collected, even if it meant Sweden. He had to give the one thing he had left and not even get to call it nothing, because there was nothing left to disguise it as.
It would cost him everything. The country. The career. The man. All of it.
Theo Lindgren sat in the dark and said yes to all of it. The yes landed nothing like loss and everything like the first free breath he’d taken in seven years. The phone stopped ringing. He set it face-down on the counter next to the cold tea and the certificate, and he began to plan how to give Shane Novak the one thing that would take Shane away from him forever.
It was going to break both of them. Those were frequently the same thing, alone, at two in the morning, in a country that was trying to send him home.
Chapter 12
Theo went to Mercer’s office on a Monday and took his own name out of the only thing that could have kept him.
He’d had the weekend to decide, and the weekend had been its own slow surgery. Shane was gone, to a motel, then to a teammate’s couch; Theo knew because the room knew, the room always knew. The apartment held the shape of him anyway. Theo made two cups of coffee Saturday morning before he remembered, and left the second one on the left side of the machine until it went cold, and he poured it out and made the same mistake Sunday. He slept on his own side of a bed that was all his side now. He opened the banking app once, looked at the number that was barely a number, and closed it, because the math there was finished and there was no use re-counting a thing that was already spent. The certificate stayed squared to the laminate. He could not make himself move it. And he did the only thing he knew how to do with pain, which was take inventory and make a plan.
The inventory was this. He loved Shane Novak. The money was gone. The shoulder was recurrent and would, under the lights and grind of the NHL, fail: not maybe, certainly, he knew his own body as he knew the seams in the boards. His visa hung on a marriage Tripp Vandenberg could detonate with a phone call. And there was one call-up, and Marion Novak needed it to be Shane’s, because only an NHL salary held her treatment uppast this single funded year, and Theo had bought her one year and could not buy a second.
So the plan made itself, cold and clean and total. He could not hand the call to Shane. The call belonged to Chicago, to Bauer and the people upstairs, not to Mercer and not for one second to Theo; a player got no vote in where he was wanted. The only piece of it Theo could touch was himself. He could take his own name out of it, honestly, all the way down, and let the choice fall where it should have fallen anyway. He would give it up the way he had given up the money, every cent of value he had left, except this time there would be nothing to disguise it as.
“You got a minute, Coach.”
Mercer looked up from his computer, surprised; Theo never came to the office. “Lindgren. Shoulder?”
“That is what I came to talk about.” Theo sat without being asked, which he also never did. “I have not been honest about it. The org thinks it is chronic. Manageable. The same nothing it has been for years.” He kept his voice flat, the wall doing its last useful work. “It is not. It is recurrent. It came fully out against the rival, you saw, and it has come out before, in juniors, and it will keep coming out, and under an NHL schedule, against NHL bodies, it will fail inside a month. I have known this. I have hidden it, because a specialist who cannot take a hit has no value, and I needed the value.” He set it down like a brick. “I am telling you so that you do not put my name in front of Bauer. Chicago does its own medical before a recall. The shoulder would not pass it, and if it somehow passed, it would not survive April. I am not the call. Do not spend your word on a man who breaks in a month.”
Mercer leaned back. He was a hard man and not a stupid one, and his eyes moved over Theo’s face as they moved over game tape, finding what was under what. “You’re taking yourself out of the running.”
“Yes.”
“On a shoulder you’ve successfully hidden for years and could’ve hidden a while longer.” Mercer laced his fingers. “You know what this costs you, son? No NHL look means no NHL contract. No contract means,” he gestured, “your visa situation. The one I told you to sort out. You take yourself out of this, you might be sorting it out from Sweden.”
“I know exactly what it costs,” Theo said. “I have done the math. It is correct.” He held Mercer’s eyes. “She will ask you when she calls. Bauer always asks the bench. So tell her the true thing. They do not need aging defensive insurance with a shoulder that lies. They need a young puck-mover with upside who has, this season, finally learned to defend a lead. You know which name that is. It was never going to be mine for the right reasons, only the kind ones, and I am taking the kind ones out of your hands.” He stood. “Watch the last six games again. He drops back. He covers. He learned it.” Theo’s voice broke then, the only crack, and he hated it and let it happen. “He learned it because someone needed him to. He is better than he was. That is all I came to say.”
He got to the door before Mercer said it, low, almost gentle. “Why.”
Theo stopped. He could have lied. He was so good at lying flat. But he was tired, more tired than the shoulder, tired to the bone, and so he told Danny Mercer the truth, the second person he’d told it to.
“Because his mother is sick,” Theo said, “and the salary is her medicine, and I have already spent everything I have on this year of it and I cannot buy another. And because I would rather lose the country than watch him lose her. That is why.” And hewalked out before the coach could say anything, because there was nothing to say, and the saying would have undone him.
* * *
Marek found him in the parking lot. Of course he did. Marek found everyone in parking lots; it was where captains did their realest work.
“I heard,” Marek said, leaning against the Volvo. “Pete heard you in with Mercer. Whole building’ll know by tomorrow you pulled your own name.” He studied Theo. “That’s a hell of a move for a guy you scream at.”
“It is the right call.”
“Sure. It’s also the other thing.” Marek looked out across the dark lot, the sodium lamps, the weak-tea light. “I told you, weeks ago. I’ve been the guy left here. Called up nine games my whole career, sent down nine times, and somewhere in there I stopped having anything worth staying for, you know? The hockey was all I had, so I just kept it. The hockey.” The shrug was the saddest Theo had ever seen. “You’ve got something worth staying for. I can see it from here. I’ve seen it since December, you idiots think you’re subtle.” He pushed off the car. “I’d have given the whole nine NHL games and the next nine I never got to have somebody look at me like the loud one looks at you when he thinks you can’t see. You took yourself out of a call-up. Fine. Don’t take yourself out of the other thing too, out of pride. That’s the one that doesn’t come back.” He clapped Theo’s good shoulder, gentle, and walked off, and Theo stood by the Volvo in the cold and let it land: that taking himself out for Shane was not the same as letting Shane go, and that he’d been about to do both, because doing both was easier, because losing everything at oncewas a pain he knew how to survive and being loved across ninety miles was not.
* * *
