Page 130 of Power Play

I waited until his breathing went long and even. Then I slid out from under his arm, slow, as I’d practiced, and found my shirt on the floor where he’d dropped it, and I didn’t stay in his bed. I had a mug down the hall and a laptop and one hour before the sky went gray, and that hour belonged to nobody but me.

There was one thing I didn’t carry back.

At four in the morning, while the house was black and Iris and Eli were both asleep and nobody in the world knew where I was or what I was doing, I wrote.

I had the laptop on the little desk in the casita and the good lamp, the one that used to live by his end table, which I’d brought back to my own room with the paperback and turned to face the wall, so no line of light would show under the door off the hall, so if he got up for water he wouldn’t see the casita glowing and come knock and find me out. The lamp pointed at the block wall and threw a soft circle on the paint and left the keyboard lit enough, and I wrote.

I wasn’t going to tell anyone it was a book. It wasn’t a book. It was a document, pages and pages of a document, about a woman who was braver than me and a man who said the thing out loud, and it had no agent and no plan and no number attached to it and it was never, ever going to be the thing to save me. Saving me was the teaching job’s job. I knew the difference. Steph had wrapped her own glasses on a kitchen floor and I wasn’t going to be a woman who bet a rent payment on a feeling.

I wrote it anyway. Every single morning, while I dismantled everything else, while I carried the mug and the cardigan and the paperback back one piece at a time, while I filled out the forms for the life I’d driven across a country to escape, the writing was the one thing I didn’t retract. I took back the mug. I took back the sweater. I took back the book I was reading and I’d take back myself soon enough, in an afternoon, in boxes I’d carry to my own car with nobody loading me onto a plane.

I kept the writing. It was the one thing with no end date on it, no clause, no landlord, no district, no plane. Nobody could put it in a box. Nobody could decide it was good value and move it to Buffalo. It would come with me in the car or it would come with me nowhere, and either way it was the one possession in my life that no man had signed for and no season could run out from under.

The lamp threw its circle on the wall. The cursor blinked. Down the side hall and across the kitchen, everyone in the house was asleep, in a house belonging to a man who thought he’d fixed it, and I put my hands on the keys in the one hour that was mine, in the one room with my name on nothing, writing the one thing nobody could trade or break the lease on or carry out in a box, and for that one hour, before the sky went gray and I had to go be the day’s person again, it was the only thing in the whole state of Arizona that was mine.

CHAPTER 31

Eli

I knew the house was wrong before I could have named one true thing about it.

It was the same wrong I’d get on a dark road I’d driven a thousand times, when a car two up twitched and my foot came off the gas before my head had a reason. I’d set her mug out the night before, the green one with the chip she pretended she couldn’t feel against her lip, beside the machine with the lid of the tin cracked so the good beans were on top. I did it most nights. I never said I did it. It was mine to do.

In the morning the mug was gone and the counter was clean.

It wasn’t the clean of somebody wiping up a spill. It was model-home clean. The paperback she’d kept on the end table by the lamp since October wasn’t on the end table. The oatmeal cardigan she left over the back of my chair so often I’d stopped seeing it was off my chair. I stood in my own kitchen before six with the stove light on and the window black over the sink and ran my thumb along the lip of the counter and couldn’t find one thing to argue with. The house had never looked better, and it had the empty order of a room somebody had moved out of.

I got the eggs on. I told myself a clean house was a good thing, which was what a man told himself at a quarter to six when he didn’t want to know what he knew.

Iris came up the hall at ten past with Gerald by the neck and a paper crown she’d worn to bed sitting crushed over one ear, and told me the crown was for being the boss of breakfast, and I told her the boss of breakfast could set two forks, and she did, and put them both on her own side of the table, and I let that be the hill nobody died on.

Delaney’s door opened at twenty past. She said good morning to my daughter first and to me second, warm to Iris and short with me, as she’d been since around New Year’s, and I kept deciding it was nothing. She crossed to the machine. The mug was in her hand. She’d carried it over from the casita full.

It wasn’t the first morning she’d done it, and it sat in me again, because the green mug by the machine had been mine to fill since September, my one unspoken job in her mornings, and a mug carried full from the casita meant she’d stopped needing it done. A man knew when he’d been let go, even from a job nobody knew he’d taken.

I took a knee-on-knee on the road in February, and they sat me down for it, and the sitting down was the problem.

Stepping into a man was the part of the job I was paid for and the part nobody stood up to clap for. A winger came down the wall with his head up and his feet moving, and I closed the gap and took the angle and wore what he brought, because if I didn’t eat it our goalie did. That night I stepped up on their winger at our own blue line and read him half a beat early, and he cut back into me instead of around me, and our knees met in open ice with his weight and mine both behind them. I went down and I got up. I finished the shift, on a leg that had quit telling the truth about which way it bent, because a man finished the shift. By the time we reached the room the trainer had my knee in his two hands, working the joint side to side with his thumbs and watching my face more than his own work while he did it.

The staff called it a grade-one sprain, the lowest reading they handed out, the ligament stretched and sore and nothing torn through. There was no break, nothing cracked, no scan with a mark on it worth pointing at, only a knee that had been bent a way knees weren’t built to bend and had come home swollen and furious. It would heal clean on its own if I’d leave it be, and leaving it be was the catch. Lower-body, day-to-day, the staff told the room and the paper, and they held me out a week or two to let it settle before I put a real load back through it. Any other week I’d have laced it tighter and played through it, and I had, until they pulled rank and strapped me into a hinged brace and sent me home by noon with a bag of ice and orders to be a civilian. I’d still be at the rink mornings, they told me, for treatment and the bike and what upper-body work a bench-bound man could stand, and home by lunch, a schedule built to make a man feel useful that did the reverse.

The hurt I could have carried in my teeth. Any day of the week I’d take the hurt over the bench, and here they’d handed me the bench. I was built to be at a set place at a set hour with a set job, and the one job left to me was to sit in a house and let a ligament settle. The team played the Tuesday and my name wasn’t on the sheet. I sat through it on my own couch with Iris narrating the game to me, which was the only hockey broadcast I’d ever enjoyed, and Cole scored and pointed at the camera as if he’d invented the idea of it, and Iris informed me he was the fastest one, and I told her he’d be glad to hear a professional weigh in. I had a beer going warm on the table and my daughter against my side and a brace on a knee that worked fine for every use but the one I wanted it for, and I sat in it restless down to the feet, a healthy man in a house with nowhere he was allowed to be.

My life was built to aim me at the rink. With the rink taken away I had all that aim and nowhere to point it, and I stood around my own kitchen all day while the game went on without me.

I was home every afternoon of it, with Iris back from preschool at noon and a braced knee I wasn’t allowed to test and nothing on earth to do but notice things, and I caught all of it.

The casita door stayed shut more. Her coffee happened over there now, and the second toothbrush she’d kept in the hall bathroom had gone back with it. When I came into a room she’d find a reason to be leaving it, friendly about it, a plate to carry or a load to move, never once rude, and she was funnier than ever with everybody who wasn’t me. She’d be on the phone with Maren at the counter, lit all the way up, with the laugh that started low and got away from her, telling some story with her whole arm, and then she’d hang up and turn around and I’d get three words and a kind face.

I’d have taken rude. Rude I could’ve fought.

The group chat didn’t help.

Cole: how’s the knee forty-four. and before you say fine

Cole: you stepped up on that guy and ate his knee. on purpose. who raised you

Kasperi: A defenseman raised him