Page 68 of Filthy Goalie
He had said that some people say sorry by leaving. Some people understand that the damage is too great and they simply disappear. Some people run.
But Knox had not run.
Knox had stayed in the apartment that was not really his. Knox had maintained the generator. Knox had come to practice. Knox had done the work of being present even when being present was the hardest thing he could do. That was a kind ofapology. That was a man saying—I know what I did. I know it hurt you. I’m staying anyway.
I could feel my grandmother’s presence on the porch.
She had sat on this porch. She had looked at the house next to hers and she had made decisions about who was allowed in her life and who was not. She had managed loss and disappointment and the particular ache of running a business that consumed all of her time. She had done the work of staying present to the people she loved.
She would have told me to forgive him.
But she also would have told me to make him earn it.
I stood up. My legs were stiff from sitting. The cold had worked its way through my coat and into my bones. It was time to go inside. It was time to go to bed. It was time to begin the second phase of this particular journey—the phase where I would start to move toward him instead of away from him.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I was still in the phase of sitting on the porch and looking at his window and understanding that the next move had to be mine.
Tomorrow, I would drive to the rink. Tomorrow, I would walk out on the ice. Tomorrow, I would tell him what I needed from him. But tonight, I was simply going to sit here and feel the cold and understand that forgiveness was a process, not a moment. Forgiveness was a series of small choices, made over time, that added up to something that looked like healing.
At 11:43 p.m., I was finally ready to go inside.
The house was dark. The kitchen was dark. The living room was dark. I turned on one lamp—the one my grandmother had loved, the one with the amber-colored shade that made the whole room look like it was filled with honey-colored light.
I sat on the couch in that light and I understood that I was going to do this.
I was going to drive to the rink on Day 35. I was going to walk out on the ice. I was going to tell him what I needed from him. And then I was going to decide whether he was worth the risk of loving him again.
But he already was.
I already knew that.
The only question was whether I was brave enough to say it.
I wentto bed at midnight.
Sleep did not come immediately, but it came eventually—the deep sleep of a woman who had made a decision and could finally rest in the knowledge that the separation was not going to be permanent. In my dreams, I was on the ice. In my dreams, he was waiting for me. In my dreams, forgiveness was not complicated—it was simply a matter of walking toward him and understanding that the man standing on the ice was the man I loved, the man who had lied, the man who was trying to become better.
The dreams felt like a promise.
When I woke at 4:47 a.m. on Day 32, I was ready.
20
KNOX
Ihad not slept in five days.
I was aware of this fact the way a man is aware of a stone in my shoe—as a constant, dull pressure, something I had learned to walk with, something that had become part of the architecture of my body. My eyes felt like they were made of sandpaper. My shoulders ached. My jaw was tight enough to crack. The skin around my mouth felt raw from clenching, and there was a persistent ache in my lower back that came from sitting on a too-small couch in an apartment that was never going to forgive me for what I had done. I had worn the same thermal shirt for three days straight. It smelled like old coffee and the particular sourness of a man who had stopped showering and started sitting alone in the cold.
The Fury had a game in Duluth. A three-hour drive north. A road game that required the team to fly up on the small charter plane that Maddox had arranged for exactly this kind of travel. I sat in a window seat. Third row. The wing was loud, and the engine noise was a kind of white sound that should have put meto sleep, that would have put me to sleep if I were a normal man, if I were a man who could let my guard down for ninety minutes.
I was not that man.
I was watching the world drop away below me—the frozen lakes, the dark woods, the small towns scattered across the Minnesota landscape like dots on a graph. The snow was still deep on the ground, the kind of late-February snow that had not yet started to melt, that would still be there in patches until April. I could see the frozen surface of Frostbite Lake from up here, could see the small dark spots that were buildings in town, could see the arena where I coached, where Maple brought the diner’s pie, where I had first seen her in the stands and understood that my life was about to change.
I was counting things. The number of clouds. The number of times the plane dipped in turbulence. The number of seconds between the dip and the moment my stomach recovered.
