She said, “You have to tell me now. I can’t sleep not knowing.”
I said, “We’re going to go to bed. I’m going to hold you. And in the morning, over coffee, I’m going to tell you everything. But tonight, I need you to trust me that the secret is not a secret that changes how I feel about you. It’s a secret that changes how you feel about what I did.”
She said, “That’s cryptic.”
I said, “Yeah. I know.”
I kissed her.
It was not the careful kiss from the restaurant. It was the kiss of a man who had picked her up in front of the entire team and was about to lose something because of the honesty that was coming. It was the kiss of a man saying goodbye to a version of them that was based on unknowing. It was the kiss of a man who understood that the next day was going to change everything.
Tomorrow, the knowledge was going to change things.
Tonight, I held her and I did not sleep and I counted the hours until dawn. I counted the minutes. I sat in the dark of her apartment and I held her against my chest and I felt her heart beating and I understood that this was probably the last night that she was going to sleep easy, the last night that she was going to trust me completely. The last night before the secret became a problem that required solving.
But I was going to tell her.
And that was going to have to be enough.
14
MAPLE
We got to his apartment at 9:47 p.m., and Knox turned on the lights like he was showing me something I had not yet seen, which I suppose I hadn’t, not really—not the home part of it, not the private space where he lived when he wasn’t being careful about what I was allowed to know. The kitchen was small and the living room was smaller and there was a couch that looked like it had come from a thrift store and a TV that was bolted to the wall. There were no pictures on the walls except one—a framed eight-by-ten on the bookshelf above a radiator that was hissing warm air. A younger Knox. A man who looked like Knox but who was smiling, actually smiling, his arm around Knox’s shoulders, both of them in hockey goalie gear but standing on what looked like a college campus, not an ice rink. The brother. It had to be. The smile was the same shape as the one Knox had just given me in front of three thousand people.
I stepped inside and I let the door close behind me. The apartment was different in the evening light, smaller and more intimate, the kind of place that made you understand that Knoxwas not someone who needed much. He was someone who could exist in small spaces and be content. That should have told me something about his capacity for loss—a man who could live small had already learned to live without. His boots were by the door. His coat hung on a single hook. The propane heater smelled like it always did—sharp and alive and keeping death at bay.
Knox went to the kitchen without being asked and he opened the fridge and he pulled out a pie box—pie, leftover from the diner, apple this time—and he set it on the counter with two forks. Just two forks. No plates. No ceremony. No pretense that this was anything but what it was—two people who needed to eat and did not need the theater of plates. He broke off a piece and he ate it standing up, looking out at the snow through the small kitchen window that faced the side of Maple’s house, and after he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “You want some.”
It wasn’t a question.
I came around the counter and I stood next to him and I broke off my own piece, and we stood in his tiny kitchen eating pie like two people who had somehow decided together that this was how the night was going to go—simple, quiet, the diner’s last apple pie being finished by the goalie coach and the diner owner in the apartment above the garage at nearly ten o’clock on a Monday night, snow falling outside, the world continuing on without us. The apples were still slightly warm. The cinnamon was doing that thing where it becomes more cinnamon as it cools, the flavor intensifying instead of fading. I had made this pie on a day that felt like a thousand years ago. My hands had shaped this dough. My hands had layered this filling. And now Knox was eating it like it was the most important thing he had done all day.
I said, “You ever cook anything besides beans on toast.”
He said, “I worked the line at a diner in Spokane the first two years of juniors. Short-order. Eggs. Hash browns. Burgers. The grill at your place is calibrated about thirty degrees too hot, by the way. The flat-top sizzles wrong. You can hear it on the eggs.”
I stared at him. He kept eating pie.
He said, “I’m just saying.”
I said, “You know how to cook on a flat-top.”
He said, “I know how to cook on most things. It’s been a few years. The hands remember.”
Knox said, “My brother’s name was Caleb.”
The pie was sweet and the cinnamon was still warm and I understood that he was trusting me with a name I had not yet heard him say out loud.
I said, “Tell me.”
He set the fork down. He did not look at me. He looked at the snow and the window and the particular way that someone looks when they are deciding whether to open a door they have kept locked for thirteen years. His hands were steady on the counter, but I could see the muscles in his forearms tightening, the small movements that mean a body is holding something back.
He said, “He was older. Two years older. He played goalie. Better than me, actually—bigger, faster, better instincts. He was at Boston University on a full ride. I was nineteen, playing junior. We had different paths that looked like the same thing.”
I broke off another piece of pie. I did not say anything. I had learned from the steakhouse date that Knox did not need encouragement or questions; he needed silence. He needed the room to be safe enough that the words could come. He needed to know that I was not going to run or judge or try to fix it. I was just going to listen. The pie crust crumbled in my fingers. I ate it anyway.
He said, “We had a tournament weekend. He had come down from BU. He drove. I was on his couch the whole weekend,watching him play, watching him be the older brother he had always been. Sunday night, we were driving back. He was tired. I told him to take the passenger seat and let me drive the rest of the way. I told him to sleep.” Knox’s jaw tightened. “He said okay. He laid the seat back. He was asleep before we hit the highway.”
