Page 22 of Power Play
“Shane.” Theo put down the list. “Look at me. We will not get the answers wrong, because we are not going to memorize answers. We are going to tell the truth. That is the whole secret. The lie is only the reason we married. Everything else is real. You do not have to remember which side I sleep on, you have to know me, and you do. You know me better than anyone has known me in years. You watch me do my shoulder in the morning. You leave tea out for me at nine-fifteen and think I do not notice.” Shane’s head came up. “I notice everything. It is my one talent. So tomorrow, when they ask, do not perform. Just answer. The truth will hold because it is the truth.”
Shane stared at him. “You know about the tea?”
“I know about the tea.”
“I never said anything because I didn’t want to make it—”
“Weird. I know.” The ghost of the almost-smile. “You make everything weird by trying not to make it weird. It is one of the things I—” Theo stopped, the sentence walking toward a cliff, and stepped back from the edge. “Anyway. Go to bed. You sleep on the right. I sleep on the left. Tomorrow we tell the truth and you stop trying to memorize a man you already know by heart.”
And Shane went to bed on the right, and Theo joined him on the left within the hour, because they had stopped pretending about the couch weeks ago, and Shane lay awake in the dark next to the man he was going to perform a marriage for tomorrow and realized, with a dread he couldn’t un-know, that none of the answers were answers. They were just facts about a life he was already living. The divorce written into the deal was going to take a cut it had no right to. The call-up was coming. He lay there doing Theo’s arithmetic for once, cold and clear, and did not sleep, and in the morning they drove to Chicago to convince the government of what had stopped being a lie somewhere around Cleveland.
“You’re nervous,” Theo said, in the waiting room. They were sitting in the molded chairs, knees almost touching, and Theo said it without looking, eyes on the far wall.
“I’m not nervous.”
“You are clicking your tongue.”
Shane stopped clicking his tongue. “How do you—”
“You do it before you lie. I noticed it the first week.” A pause. “It is a bad poker tell. We should fix it before you do team media for a living.”
“Shut up.” But the grip in his chest eased. I notice you. I have clocked every tell. Nobody paid attention to Shane. Shane was the one who paid attention, who carried, who managed his mother’s appointments from three hundred miles away and remembered everyone’s birthday.
“Lindgren. Novak.” A clerk at a door. “Officer Reyes will see you.”
* * *
The officer was tired and thorough and not unkind, and she had their folder and a computer and a list of questions she’d asked a thousand couples, and she separated them at first (standard, Dana had warned them, they ask you apart and compare) and then brought them back together, and Shane sat in a hard chair holding Theo’s hand on the table between them, the tungsten bands clicking together when their fingers shifted, and somewhere in the second half of it he stopped performing and didn’t notice he’d stopped.
“Mr. Novak. Whose idea was it to move in together?”
“His,” Shane said. “He’ll tell you it was practical. Cheaper, closer to the rink. But honestly I think he just got tired of me being three guys’ problem across town and decided to make me his problem instead.” True. All of it true. Theo’s thumb moved against the back of his hand.
“Mr. Lindgren. What does your husband do that drives you crazy?”
“He soaks the dishes,” Theo said, deadpan. “He calls it a technique. It is not a technique. He talks during television. He cannot be quiet for the length of one program. He blocks shots like he is trying to die and then complains that his body hurts.” A beat. “He gives everything away. To everyone. And keeps nothing for himself, and thinks no one notices, and it makes me—” Theo stopped. The officer waited, pen up. And Shane turned to look at him, because this wasn’t on the list they’d rehearsed, this wasn’t the couch-moving cover story, this was Theo’s flat voice cracking open in a federal building, and Theo finished, quietly, looking at the table, “—it makes me want to be the onewho notices. That is what drives me crazy. That he does not let anyone take care of him. I am still working on it.”
The officer wrote a note. Shane couldn’t breathe. The hand he was holding had gone tight in his, and somewhere between the metal detector and this chair the lie and the truth had become the same sentence, a lurch that bottomed out his stomach, and they were both just sitting in a government office telling the truth to a stranger because it was the only place safe enough to say it, because here it counted as evidence and not as feelings.
“Last one,” the officer said. “Mr. Novak. Where do you see this going? Five years.”
And the rehearsed answer was we take it day by day, an answer that didn’t commit, and Shane opened his mouth to say it, and what came out instead, click-free, no tell, was: “I see him better. The shoulder, I mean. I see him getting it taken care of, not hiding it. And I don’t know. I see us not having to do interviews to prove it. I see it just being true and nobody needing us to prove anything.” His voice roughened. He pushed through it. “Five years, I see a guy who finally lets himself be wanted. That’s where I see it going. Took me a while to figure out that’s what I wanted to see.”
The officer looked at them for a long moment over her glasses. Then she stamped the form, and slid the folder back, and said, “You’ll get the decision by mail.” She almost smiled. “Off the record, you two didn’t need most of what’s in this folder. Congratulations. Watch the shoulder, Mr. Lindgren.”
They walked out into the cold Chicago afternoon not holding hands, because the building was behind them now, and the cold where Theo’s hand had been spread through Shane’s whole side, and he got in the car, and pulled onto the highway, and made it about thirty miles before he broke.
“You meant it,” Shane said, eyes on the road. “In there. The stuff about wanting to be the one who notices. About me not letting anyone take care of me. That wasn’t the rehearsed answer.”
Theo was quiet in the passenger seat, the sling making him sit at a careful angle. “No,” he said. “It was not rehearsed.”
“And the five-years thing. The folder doesn’t have a five-years thing.” Shane’s hands were tight on the wheel. “We never rehearsed five years.”
“No.”
“So.” Shane swallowed. The highway unspooled, the divide made of asphalt, ninety miles of it. “So we just told the truth. To the government. Because it was the only place safe enough to say it. That’s messed up, Theo. That’s a messed-up thing, that the safest place for either of us to say a true thing was a federal building with a lady taking notes.”
“Yes,” Theo agreed, and his voice went raw under the flatness. “We have never said this much. And it counts as evidence and not as feelings. So it was allowed.” He looked out the window. “I do not know how to say those things when they are only feelings. I know how to say them when they are evidence. It is a defect. I am aware of it.”
