“Of course.”
“Don’t, don’t say anything to anyone. Don’t even look at me weird in the room. If you breathe a word—”
“I have no one to tell,” Theo said, and it came out flatter and truer than he’d meant it to, and Shane blinked at him, and for one second something passed between them that wasn’t contempt, that Theo could not name and did not want, and then Shane grabbed his bag and was gone, and Theo sat alone in the empty room with his heart doing something it had no business doing, and told himself it was relief.
It was not relief. But Theo Lindgren was very good at telling himself things, and so for now it was relief, and he carried it out to the paid-off Volvo and drove home and waited for a man who hated him to decide whether to save them both.
* * *
His mother called that night, because it was Sunday in Gothenburg, and Theo almost didn’t answer. He did not answer his phone as a rule, a policy his mother had stopped taking personally a decade ago. But he was sitting alone in the dark of his clean apartment and the photo on the windowsill turned away from him and the impossible proposition still ringing in his ears, and he wanted, childishly, to hear her voice. So he answered.
“You answered,” Gitta said, in Swedish, instead of hello. “Are you dying? Has the shoulder finally killed you? Should I book a flight?”
“I am not dying, Mamma.”
“Then why are you answering the phone like a normal son. I am suspicious.” A cup clattered, and her voice went sharp, away from the phone; a quick word in Swedish; then back to him. “Tell me. You have your dishonest voice. The flat one. You only get the flat one when you are about to do an enormous, stupid thing; you have had it since you were a boy. The last time you used the flat one you got on a plane to America.”
Theo closed his eyes. His mother had a way of finding the exact center of a thing and pressing on it until it confessed. He could not tell her the truth. He couldn’t say I am going to marry a man I hate so they do not send me home to you, because she would either be devastated or, worse, delighted, and he did not have the strength for either tonight. So he gave her the shape of it without the substance, as honest as he could manage.
“I am working out a way to stay,” he said. “In the country. After the season. There might be a way.”
“A way that does not depend on hockey.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Gitta said, with a fierceness that surprised him. “Hockey has had your whole life, Theodor. Let the rest of your life hold the door for once.” A pause. “Is it a person? The way to stay. Please tell me it is a person and not some tax scheme. You are exactly the kind of boy who would marry a tax scheme.”
Theo did not answer, which was its own answer, and his mother, who missed nothing, who had raised a careful son in a careless world and learned to read his silences the way other mothers read words, let out a long breath that traveled four thousand miles and landed somewhere under his ribs.
“You always thought you had to earn your place,” she said, softer now. “Even with me. Even as a small boy you would bring me things: a drawing, a good grade, a fish you caught, like you were paying rent on being my son. You never had to pay rent,Theodor. You were never a tenant here. I wish I had said it more when you were small enough to believe it.”
Theo sat in the dark and could not speak for a moment.
“I will call you Sunday,” he managed, finally.
“You will not. But I will call you, and you will not answer, and I will leave a message you will pretend not to receive. It is our way.” A briskness, the tenderness packed safely back away. “Sleep. Ice the shoulder. Eat real food, not a supplement. Goodnight, my enormous foolish boy.”
She hung up before he could say anything else. It was her way.
* * *
He did not sleep, and in the morning, there was a text from Shane Novak that said only:yes. but I have terms.
And Theo Lindgren, against every rule he had ever written for himself, felt his careful heart lift.
Chapter 3
Shane called his mother before he said yes, backward, because he’d already said yes in his body three days before his mouth caught up. He knew it the way he knew a play was dead the second the puck left his stick wrong. Some things land before they land.
“You sound weird,” Marion said. “Are you eating?”
“I’m eating, Mom.”
“You’re not eating. I can hear it. You get this voice when you’re running on coffee and spite.”
Shane sat on the floor of his rented bedroom in the place he shared with two other guys off Kishwaukee Street, his back against the bed, and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that he’d named Gerald sometime in November, and he did not tell her about the call to the clinic, or the no about the payment plan, or the number that had been sitting on his chest for a month like a man kneeling on it. He had never told her any of it. That was the architecture of his life: she didn’t know how bad it was because if she knew how bad it was, she would refuse the treatment to spare him, and then she would get worse, and it would be his fault for telling her.
“I got news about the program,” he said. “The experimental one. The funding came through.”
