I make myself focus on the tape and not the texts. And the maddening, undeniable thing is that he is such a good hockey player. Better than good. So I type what’s true, because I will not let him turn me into a liar even in my own private war.
Player 11 — 1G, 1A. Strong rush instincts. Excellent puck movement in transition. Reads pressure two steps ahead.
I look at the word excellent.
I delete it and type competent. I look at competent, and it’s a lie, and I delete it. I type the word excellent again and leave it there.
I reach over to my desk and grab the paperback from my drawer. I need something to distract myself for a few minutes, but I’m barely reading the words on the page. The video is running in my mind on a loop.
I get two pages in, and my phone rings.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, answering her call. And I’m thankful for the distraction.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Her voice comes through warm and a little far away, the way it always does, like she’s holding the phone slightly off her ear while she does three other things. “Is this a bad time? You’re not studying?”
“I was just taking a break, reading a book. How are you?”
“Oh, fine, fine. How’s school? How are the girls — Kirra, Bree, and Lily?”
“School’s good. The girls are doing well.” I lean back against my headboard. “Bree’s doing a group project that’s slowly killing her.”
“Aren’t they always.” A little laugh. Then, lighter, the way she passes things along, “Your father called from the hotel last night. He’s so proud of how hard you’re working out there, honey. He said so twice.”
My stomach does a small thing it has no business doing, a quick clench and release, because proud of how hard you’re working is not the same sentence as proud of you, and I have spent my whole life parsing the difference.
And this is my mother. She tends to fib to make me feel better about things.
“That’s nice.”
“He said the Ermington boy is playing well. You’re keeping track of him for your father, aren’t you?”
I’m instantly annoyed but hide it. “Yeah, I’m tracking him.”
“Your father thinks the world of that boy.”
“I’m aware,” I say, in the exact same voice.
“Mm.” A pause, and I can hear her turn down a radio or a kettle, settling in. “And how are you doing, sweetheart? Not the work. You.”
I freeze for a second with the phone against my ear. Because nobody asks me that. My father asks about the reports. My roommates ask about my plans. The men on the Tuesday call ask what I noticed. My own mother is the only person in my entire life who asks how I am, the actual me, separate from what I produce — and the terrible, tender thing about it is that even she doesn’t quite know what to do with the answer if I ever gave her a real one. We’ve never built the muscle for it, the two of us. She asks the door, and I keep it shut, and we both call that closeness.
“I’m good, Mom.”
“Okay, honey,” she says.
And she doesn’t push. That’s the wound and the gift of her, all in one breath. She will always ask, and she will never make me answer. I have never once had a word for how much I love her and how alone that particular kindness has always left me feeling.
We talk for ten more minutes about nothing that matters and everything that’s safe — a soup she’s making, a novel she can’tget into, the church organist who quit in a huff over the hymn selection. Then she tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her too. I mean it more than I can say in the format we’ve agreed to use, and I hang up.
Then I get back to studying.
By evening, I’ve cleared everything. Homework. The paid assignment. And last, the Ermington report, polished and flattering and true, which I attach to an email and send to my father.
Sent.
I close the laptop and lie back on my bed in the dark with my phone in my hand, and the thread with him is right there, and the file is right there.
Linwood_Game1_FullTape.mp4.
