Page 63 of Filthy Goalie
Maddox answered on the first ring. I was still awake. Or I had been waiting.
I said, “I told her.”
Maddox said, “How did it go.”
I said, “She closed the door.”
Maddox said, “The literal door or the metaphorical door.”
I said, “Both.”
Maddox said, “Then you have some work to do.”
I said, “I do not know how to undo this.”
Maddox said, “You don’t undo it. You sit with it. You let her be angry. You let her be hurt. And eventually—I am not telling you when, I am not even telling you if—maybe she decides that the thing you did was done for the right reasons at the wrong time, and maybe she decides that is close enough to forgiveness.”
I said, “What if she does not.”
Maddox said, “Then you will have ruined the best thing that ever happened to you and you will have deserved it. But you will have told her the truth. And that is something.”
I hung up.
I sat in the dark apartment and I understood that I was now living in the space between the moment of confession and the moment of forgiveness, and I did not know if that space was going to last three days or three weeks or the rest of my life.
I thought about the fact that I had picked her up in front of the entire team on Day 22 and had announced my love for her with my hands on her hips and my eyes on hers. I thought about the fact that on Day 23 I had told a five-year-old that I loved her. I thought about all of the declarations I had made and all of the lies I had kept silent, and I understood that the two things did not balance, that love and secrecy were not the same thing, that you could not save someone and love them at the same time if you were willing to lie about what you had done.
At 3:14 a.m., I gave up on sleep.
I got up and I put on a thermal shirt and I stood at the window and I looked at Maple’s house. The lights were off. She was asleep or she was lying in the dark, and I did not know which was worse—the idea that she had managed to sleep knowing what I had done, or the idea that she was awake in the dark, thinking about the man in the apartment, the man who was supposed to love her but had instead chosen to protect her in a way that made me a liar.
I stood at the window and I counted the seconds between my heartbeats and I understood that this was the work now—this was the thing I was going to have to do. I was going to have to be present and honest and patient, and I was going to have to accept that maybe it was not going to be enough.
The apartment was cold.
Maple was fifty feet away.
And between them was a door and a lie and the question of whether the man who had bought her debt could also buy her forgiveness.
At 11:47 p.m.,I sat in the apartment above the garage and I understood that I had destroyed the thing I had been trying to protect. I had made myself into the villain of a story where I was supposed to be the hero. I had proven exactly what I had been afraid of proving—that I was not good enough to hold something this fragile.
The apartment was cold. The heater was running but the cold was the kind that came from inside, the kind that no amount of propane was going to fix. I looked at Caleb’s photograph on the nightstand. The wooden box was where it always was. I did not open it.
I thought about the thirteen years I had carried my brother’s death. I thought about how I had turned that grief into the particular art of silence. I thought about how I had somehow convinced myself that keeping things quiet, keeping things hidden, keeping things from the people I loved was a form of protection.
But it was not. It was a form of destruction. It was the slow elimination of intimacy, one silent moment at a time. It was the particular way that men who had been broken by loss could break the people they loved without ever meaning to.
I sat on the too-small couch in the dark apartment and I understood that Maple was fifty feet away and that she might as well have been on another continent. The door between them was not just a door. It was a wall. It was a monument to my own failure to be the kind of man who could tell the truth about what I knew.
I did not know how long it would take her to forgive me. I did not know if she would forgive me at all. I knew only that I had made a choice and the choice had consequences and the consequences were that she was going to wake up in the morning in her own house while I sat alone in the apartment above her garage, understanding that I had ruined the best thing that had ever happened to me.
And I had deserved it. I had earned it with every hour of silence. Every moment of withholding. Every lie told by not telling the truth.
I lay on the couch and I did not sleep. I had not slept in three days. Sleep was for men who had not destroyed the thing they were supposed to protect. Sleep was for men who had not lied to the women they loved. Sleep was for men who deserved rest.
I held the photograph of Caleb and I thought about what my brother would have done. Caleb would have told the truth immediately. Caleb would have been the kind of man who believed in transparency and honesty and the particular strength of vulnerability. But I was not Caleb. I was the man who had been at the wheel. I was the man who had told my brother to sleep. I was the man who had spent thirteen years carrying that weight in silence. I was the man who thought that silence was mercy, when really it was just cowardice.
At 3 a.m., I got up and I looked out the window at her house. All the lights were off. She was sleeping or pretending to sleep, and either way, she was sleeping without me. She was sleeping in her grandmother’s house, in her own bed, in the knowledge that the man in the apartment above the garage had known something about her life and had chosen not to tell her.
