Page 133 of Power Play

“I wasn’t going to.”

A while later I’d have to get up anyway, brace and all, and cross the hall, and open my daughter’s door the two inches I opened it every night of my life, with no memory after of doing it. I was the same man either way, the one who gave a woman her orders in the dark and the one who left a nightlight on. That could wait. For now there was the dark, and her weight, and the slow of her breath leveling out toward sleep against my neck.

She’d come to me. I lay there and kept coming back to it. A little before eleven she’d crossed the cold floor on her own and knocked low on my door and handed me every piece of herself without my asking twice. In this room we still spoke the one language we’d never once fumbled. She was still loud for me in the dark and still mine with the lights off, and a man could live a long while on that, could tell himself the rest was only the season, the calendar, the long haul to May.

I had it exactly backwards, and slept on it as if it were a win.

The standings were the only thing in the house moving in a direction I liked.

The knee was good inside a couple of weeks, as the trainer had sworn it would be, and I was back out for the stretch run with a joint that barked in the cold and a brace folded in my bag to show for it. We stayed hot. We won the Monday I returned, won the Wednesday, won a back-to-back on the road that we had no business sweeping, and climbed. Cole scored a greasy one off his shin that he’d describe as a snipe until the day he died, and Jenna sent me the clip, and the city had decided we were real. There was talk on the broadcast that got a building humming, about seeding and home ice, about going deep, and the word that kept coming up, over and over, from the desk and the drive-home radio and the between-the-benches guy, was May.

If we did it right, we were playing in May.

A man heard that in a good season and stood an inch taller. I was on the couch with Iris asleep against my ribs the night it finally landed wrong, the between-the-benches guy saying the word again, and it took me most of a period to work out why. If the season ran to May, everything ran to May. Every arrangement under this roof was built on a calendar, and the calendar had just gotten longer, and across the room the woman I’d hand my life to went quiet every time the broadcast said it, counting down to a date she’d never once said out loud to me.

I didn’t have the word for it. I never did. I pulled Iris’s blanket up over the both of us and told myself the race was good news, which it was, and which was also the trap. The best thing happening to me was the exact thing turning the woman across the room quiet and careful by the week, and I couldn’t carry the two of them in the same hand.

She asked it at dinner, as kids always asked the thing the grown-ups had agreed by silent treaty not to ask, between one bite and the next, with her fork upright in her fist.

“When I’m five,” Iris said, “is D still going to live in the little house?”

She said it with a number in it, five. It wasn’t someday or maybe. It was a birthday she could see from where she sat, close enough to spend. She asked it to the table at large, the same as she’d ask whether the moon followed the car, expecting the answer adults always had ready.

I had a forkful of chicken halfway up and I put it back down.

Delaney was across from me with her water glass in her hand, and she went absolutely still, the stillness of someone caught thinking the same thought in the dark and startled to hear it said in daylight by someone three feet tall. Her knuckles went white around the glass and then, on purpose, loosened.

Neither of us said anything.

It wasn’t long, a second or two, but it was long enough for a kid to feel, because kids felt everything, and Iris looked from me to Delaney and back, and an old alarm moved behind her eyes, the one I’d spent four years making sure never had a reason to ring.

“Eat your peas,” I said, which wasn’t an answer. “Gerald’s watching.”

It worked, because she was Iris and Gerald was in fact watching from beside her plate. She ate the peas. She told us Gerald hated peas but was being brave. Delaney laughed, a little too fast, and told Iris bravery around peas ran in the family, and we folded the moment up and put it away where we put things.

Still, Delaney’s knuckles had gone white on that glass, and my daughter had put a number on it. When I’m five. She’d said it as if it were a real date on a real calendar, a question I’d built this entire house so she’d never have to ask.

I didn’t sleep.

A little after two I gave up on trying and went out to the kitchen and sat at the table in the dark, and the house went on around me, the ice maker, the air kicking on, Zamboni’s feet on the tile, out on cat business of her own. Down the other hall, Iris’s door stood open its two inches with the hall light on.

Then, near four, from down the side hall off the kitchen, the typing started.

It was the quietest sound in the house and I’d known it for months. Through the fall it had been a good sound, a woman doing work that was hers in the one hour nobody needed her, and I’d leave her to it. She’d slam the laptop if I got close to it in daylight. At four in the morning she thought nobody could hear, and after Christmas Eve I never said another word about it, because some things a man left alone.

Now it was the only one of her sounds still in my house.

The mug had gone back to the casita. The cardigan was off my chair. The paperback was gone, and the toothbrush, and the laugh that used to be for me. One by one, so slow I’d mistaken each for nothing, she’d been carrying herself back down that hall, and I’d stood in a clean kitchen calling it tidy, but the typing stayed. Every night, the typing stayed, steady and low and purposeful, the one thing she hadn’t packed up and carried out.

I sat in the dark kitchen with both hands open and useless on the table and let her write, one door away, and the question in me had gotten to the size of a fist, and I’d been carrying it for weeks, and I didn’t have the first idea how to open my mouth and ask it.

When I’m five. Iris had asked it for me, clean, in one breath, as I never could.

I didn’t get up and go down that hall. A man who walked down it at four in the morning had to have the next sentence ready, and I didn’t. I sat there and let her type, and counted the keys, and they told me nothing I could use.

CHAPTER 32

Delaney