Page 31 of Power Play
Shane spent four nights on Wozniak’s couch and was a disaster on all of them.
He told Wozniak it was a roommate thing, a blowup about the thermostat, you know how it is, and Wozniak, who was a good and uncomplicated soul, accepted this and gave him a pillow and a beer Shane didn’t drink and asked no questions, and Shane lay on the couch in the dark and stared at a stranger’s ceiling and missed his husband so badly it had a physical location, a weight under the sternum, the same place a blocked shot lived.
He called his mother on the third night because he couldn’t not. He’d meant to keep it light. He did not keep it light.
“You sound like the bottom of a well,” Marion said. “What happened.”
And Shane, who carried, who never brought her his problems, who had lied to her about a fund for months: Shane broke, on a stranger’s couch three hundred miles away, and told her. Not all of it. But enough. That there was no fund. That a man had paid for everything and it had cost the man everything. That the man loved him and Shane had run, two duffels and a head start.
Marion was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was the one she used to use when he was small and had done what he already knew was wrong.
“You ran because he loves you,” she said. “Not because he doesn’t. Because he does.”
“Mom—”
“No, I want to make sure I understand my son. A good man, a man who emptied his entire life out to keep my legs working, looked you in the eye and told you he loved you. And you packed two bags.” Her voice wasn’t angry. It was worse than angry; it was sad. “I told you in my kitchen, baby. You’d rather die than be carried. I watched you decide it at nineteen, when your father left and you appointed yourself the man of everything. And I let you, because I was sick and scared, because being carried was easier than fighting you about it. That’s my fault. I should have fought you.” A breath. “He’s not your father, Shane. He is not going to leave you for needing him. The man stayed up all night not answering his phone rather than let you talk him out of doing right by you. That’s not a man who leaves. That’s the opposite. You found the opposite and you ran from it because you didn’t recognize it. Go home.”
“I don’t know how to be—”
“Carried. I know. Learn. He’s already teaching you. You just have to stop fighting the lesson.” Her voice dropped. “Go home, baby. Before you’re too proud to have a home to go to. I didn’t raise you to win the argument about who gets to suffer most. Go home.”
Shane lay on the couch after she hung up and did not sleep. In the morning he heard, through the channels a hockey market runs on, that Theo Lindgren had walked into Mercer’s office and told the coach the truth about his shoulder and pulled his own name out of the call-up. Shane sat up so fast he knocked the stranger’s beer off the table, and he was in his financed car before he’d found both shoes.
* * *
The drive was eight minutes and Shane made it last forever.
He knew this road. He’d driven it home behind the Volvo’staillights all season, the patient car that followed him home like they were a thing that went home together, and he drove it now alone with both hands strangling the wheel and one shoe on. Somewhere around the third light he caught himself doing the thing. Planning the exit. Already rehearsing how he’d make it okay for Theo when Theo came to his senses, already packing a bag in his head, because that was the move, that had always been the move, you left before you got left, you carried your own bags out the door so nobody got to watch you be the one who couldn’t keep anything. His father had taught him that without ever once saying it. You learned it from a man who packed a car in the dark and didn’t take you.
And Shane heard his mother’s voice say he’s not your father, he is not going to leave you for needing him, and for the first time in his life, Shane looked at the running and recognized it as running, named it flat and exact: this is the move that loses him. He had spent a season learning to defend a lead. He knew, finally, what it cost to stop drifting up-ice on the gamble and just hold. So he held. He drove to the apartment instead of away from it. It was the bravest thing he’d ever done. It was just driving home.
He came in Shane-furious: loud and wet and barely holding together.
“You told Mercer about the shoulder.” He didn’t even take his coat off, standing in the entryway where it had all started. “You told him it’s recurrent. You took yourself out. For me. That’s your visa, Theo, no NHL look means no contract means they put you on a plane, and you walked in there and torched the one thing that could’ve kept you in the country, you absolute—” His voice broke. “I won’t take it. You hear me? Chicago calls, I tell them no. I’ll turn it down, I’ll—”
“You will not.”
“Watch me—”
“Shane.” Theo crossed the room. He was done with the wall; he’d left the wall in Mercer’s office. “Listen to me. For once in your stubborn life, do not talk, and listen. You think I did this for you. I did not do this for you.” He took Shane’s face in his hands, the good arm and the braced one both, careful, as careful as he was about everything that mattered. “I did it for me. Do you understand the difference? My whole life I have given things to people so they would keep me. The money to your mother, I made it small so you would take it. I needed you to need me, and I called it love, and it was not.” His thumbs moved over Shane’s cheekbones. “This is the first thing I have ever given that I did not disguise. I am not making it small. I am not pretending it costs nothing. It costs me everything, and I am telling you the price out loud, and I am giving it to you anyway, not so you will keep me, you might not keep me, I might be in Sweden by summer, but because I want you to have it. Your mother. The show. All of it. I want it for you more than I want it for myself, and wanting something for someone else more than for yourself, with nothing disguised and nothing owed—” his voice finally went, the iceberg gone “—that is the only un-fake thing I have ever done. So let me. Let me want you to have this. Not because I owe you. Because I love you, and this is what it looks like when I am not hiding it.”
Shane was crying and didn’t try to stop, didn’t narrate it, didn’t make a joke to take the curse off it. New. His hands came up and gripped Theo’s wrists, not to pull them away, just to hold on, to confirm they were real. Every instinct he had was screaming the old screams: fix it, even it, give back right now so the ledger’s clean, so you’re not the one who owes. He’d spent his whole life keeping the ledger clean. You didn’t get left if nobody could say you took more than you gave.
And here was a man who had torn the ledger up. Who’d emptied his only account and pulled his own name out of theshow and stood in a cold entryway telling Shane the price out loud and handing it over anyway, with nothing owed, nothing to pay back, no way to make it even. There was no evening this. Nothing to carry back. No way to owe his way out of it. Shane could not provide his way out of being loved.
“I don’t know how to be carried,” Shane whispered. “I’ve never. My whole life I’m the one who—”
“I know,” Theo said. “Your mother told me. In the kitchen, when you were at the sink. She said you would rather die than be carried.” He pressed his forehead to Shane’s. “Do not die, Shane. Be carried. Just this once. Take the call. Save her. Let me give you the only real thing I have. And then,” he swallowed, “and then we figure out the rest. The ninety miles. The visa. Tripp. All of it. Together, this time. You do not carry it alone and I do not give it away alone. We figure it out like married people. Badly. Together. Yes?”
And Shane Novak, who had carried everything his whole life, who had run from a motel with two duffels and not looked back, stood in his own entryway with his hands on Theo’s wrists and let himself be held.
“Yeah,” he said, wrecked, into Theo’s neck. “Yeah. Okay. Together.” And then, because he was Shane: “But for the record, you’re an idiot, and we are absolutely figuring out the shoulder, you’re getting the surgery, I don’t care what it does to your numbers, your numbers, I’m gonna kill you—”
“You are talking again.”
“I’m gonna talk forever, you signed up for it, it’s in the folder—”
And Theo laughed, the real one, the one that hurt his face, and held his husband in the cold apartment while the season clock ran down, and somewhere in Chicago a hole in the blueline waited, and for the first time the two of them stood on the same side of it.
