Page 19 of Power Play
They ended up on the couch after, the too-short couch, Theo’s couch, both of them crammed onto it because the apartment had never gotten proper furniture and neither of them had wanted to be the one to suggest it, as though a second chair would be admitting they intended to stay. Shane put on the cooking show and yelled at it, and Theo pretended to read his Swedish book and read the same paragraph eleven times, and somewhere in the second episode Shane’s feet ended up in Theo’s lap, just ended up there, the same quiet gravity that had put Shane’s knee against his under a tablecloth in Ohio, and Theo looked at the feet, Shane’s terrible hockey feet, the toes that had been broken and reset, the ankle that swelled, and instead of moving them he put his good hand around one and held it,warmth on a cold day. Shane went still for a second, registering it, and then went back to yelling at the television, and let him.
He had braced his whole life for the big losses: the surgery, the plane, the not-singing years. He had a curriculum for catastrophe. He had no defense at all against a foot in his lap on a Thursday with snow falling. He sat very still and held Shane’s broken foot and watched the snow come down past the window and the whole impossible thing settled over him, a weight he didn’t want lifted.
He recognized it. That was the trap of it. He recognized it from the photo on the windowsill, the one he kept turned away, his mother, mid-laugh, in the kitchen in Gothenburg, the kitchen Theo had grown up in, the only place on earth he’d ever known this: home, the warm impossible thing he’d left at twenty because he’d wanted to be somewhere that didn’t already know his worth, and had spent seven years discovering that the price of being unknown was being un-homed, and here it was, ambushing him at a kitchen counter in Rockford, Illinois, generated by a loud broke American who’d married him for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
“You’re doing the thing,” Shane said.
“What thing.”
“The thing where your face goes — you’re somewhere else. You get this look.” Shane set his fork down. “You okay?”
And Theo wanted to say no. He wanted to say no, I am not okay, I am happy, and happiness is the most dangerous condition I know, because everything I have ever been happy about has been taken, my mother, my country, the scoring, the version of me people wanted, all of it taken, and I cannot survive being happy about you and then watching you drive to Chicago with the prize while I get on a plane, I would not survive it, I am not built to survive it, and instead he heard himself say, in the flat voice, the voice that had kept him alive:
“I’m fine. I should finish the forms.”
And he went back to the table, and Shane watched him go with a look Theo didn’t let himself read, and the snow kept falling, and the warm thing in the kitchen cooled by degrees, and Theo filled out evidence of bona fide marriage with a hand that did not shake, never shook, and wrote his name in the box marked signature and thought: you have to stop this. Before the call-up. Before it can be taken. You have to put it back while you still can.
He could not put it back. He knew that, too. That was the part that kept him at the table long after Shane had gone to bed, to the bed, the shared bed, where Theo would join him within the hour because they had stopped pretending about the couch, the knowledge, flat and final, that there was no version of this he walked away from clean. He’d built a deal to keep from being deported and somewhere in a cold apartment it had turned into the one thing he’d sworn off at twenty: a home he was going to lose.
In the bedroom, Shane was already asleep, sprawled, starfished, taking up two-thirds of the bed as he always swore he didn’t. Theo stood in the doorway in the dark and looked at him for a while. Then he turned the photo on the windowsill back to face the room, just for tonight, he told himself, and got into the bed, into the small space Shane had left him, and Shane, asleep, rolled toward him and threw an arm across him and held on, and Theo lay awake in the dark in the country that was trying to send him home and let himself be held by the reason he’d want to stay even if it didn’t, and that, more than any form, was the truest evidence of a bona fide marriage in the entire apartment.
He was happy. The math on that was catastrophic.
Chapter 8
The locker room was where it almost ended, two days before the marquee game, and Tripp Vandenberg was the one who nearly ended it, though he didn’t know it, then.
It was a nothing moment. They were horsing around after a good practice, the room loose, and Shane had chirped, a nothing chirp, and Theo, without thinking, without the careful vigilance he’d maintained for months, had reached over and tugged the back of Shane’s hair where it had grown too long, a small proprietary gesture, the kind of touch you only give a person whose body you consider partly your own. His hand knew its mistake the instant it moved. Saw Shane go still. And across the room, Tripp Vandenberg looked up from his phone.
Just looked. His clever eyes went to Theo’s hand, still half-raised, and to Shane’s face, and a small line appeared between his brows, the look of a person filing something away that didn’t fit.
“Married life suits you, Lindgren,” Tripp said, lightly. A joke: the married meaning roommates, the joke the room made about any two guys who lived together. But he was watching when he said it, and Theo made himself laugh, made himself say, “He is a terrible roommate, he soaks the dishes,” and the room laughed and moved on, and Tripp went back to his phone, and the moment closed over.
But Theo had seen the line between Tripp’s brows. And in the parking lot after, he said to Shane, low, “We are getting careless. The hair. In the room. I did not think.”
“It was nothing. Guys touch each other all the time, it’s a hockey room, half these idiots slap each other’s—”
“It was not a slap.” Theo’s voice was flat with the fear he wouldn’t show. “It was the touch. There is a touch you give a teammate and a touch you give someone who is yours, and they are not the same, and I used the second one, in the room, in front of Vandenberg, who is not stupid and who wants the call-up I might be standing in front of.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I keep forgetting to be afraid. That is the danger. You make me forget to be afraid. And forgetting to be afraid is how this ends: not with a kiss someone walks in on, with a hand in your hair that lasts half a second too long.”
Shane was quiet. The lot was cold. “So what do we do,” he said. “Go back to hating each other in the room? I don’t think I can. I tried, the other day, I tried to chirp you mean like I used to and it came out—” he stopped, shook his head, “—flirting. I’ve lost the ability to be mean to you. It’s a real problem.”
And Theo, despite everything, despite the line between Tripp’s brows and the call-up and the season clock, his mouth did the almost-smile. “You have lost the ability to be mean to me,” he repeated. “This is the saddest thing you have ever said. You were so good at it.”
“I was elite at it.”
“You were top of the league.” Theo let himself have one second of it, the warmth, before he put it away. “We be careful. In the room, we are roommates. Cold. Normal. And the hair,” he reached out, one more time, deliberate now, and tucked the long strand back where his careless hand had pulled it, in the privacy of the dark lot where no one could see, “the hair I touch at home. Only at home. Yes?”
“Yeah,” Shane said, and his voice had gone soft and wrecked. “Only at home.”
They drove home in two cars, the small ridiculous parade, and were careful, and it lasted exactly until the marquee game, when Theo’s body failed in front of a sellout crowd and being careful stopped mattering at all.
* * *
It was a marquee game, the kind the AHL didn’t get often: a Saturday, a sellout, scouts in the building, a divisional rival they hated honestly, and the kind of energy that had the barn humming like a live wire. Theo loved games like this. They were the only times he still played like the player he’d been at twenty, before the ice narrowed and the math changed, when hockey had been a game he played for joy and not survival.
The warning came in the second period.
The shoulder had been talking to him all week, low and steady, the way a bad joint does when the weather turns or when he’d slept wrong, and he’d been managing it as he always did: taping it himself, keeping the arm tight in his battles, letting Pete believe it was the same chronic nothing it had always been. He’d hidden it from everyone. Everyone except Shane, who knew, who watched, who had started (Theo had noticed, had filed it, had gone hollow with it) taking the right-side battles when he could, quietly, on the ice, so that Theo’s bad shoulder ate fewer hits. It was against everything they were as a pairing. Shane was the one who pinched, who gambled, who needed Theo behind him. And he’d been rearranging his game by inches to put his body between Theo’s shoulder and the boards, and saying nothing about it, and Theo had let him, and that was its own kind of falling, the kind you don’t survive.
