“It’s a good seat.”
He had the Civil War book open on his knee. It was the one he’d been reading since August, and he wasn’t turning pages. We were in 14A and 14B on a Sunday morning flight out of O’Hare, one armrest between us, both of us using it. His forearm rested against mine from elbow to wrist.
“The seat cushion’s a flotation device. I’m taking yours, Rook. I’m two hundred pounds. It takes extra to make a man that size float.”
We’d done a thousand flights two rows apart, and now his arm was warm against mine, and nobody on this plane knew either of us. I kept finding reasons to shift my weight so the contact changed and connected slightly different parts of our bodies.
“You’re fidgeting,” he said.
“I’m settling in. It’s a process.”
We had a scheduled day off, and once Mark knew what the trip was for, he pulled levers to get us out of practice after it too. That bought us an overnight in Maine.
We talked logistics low, into the plane’s white noise, two heads tilted together over an armrest. We had a game on Tuesday, the day after our return.
“Mark says he’ll keep the beat guys off us until we’ve said it to the public Tuesday,” I said. “And Kovac?”
“Second session’s set. He gets me the morning after.”
The plane started down. We’d flown nonstop from Chicago to Portland. Below us, the coast materialized beneath the clouds, gray water broken into a thousand inlets by black points of rock.
Rook was quiet. He looked down at the place that had made him.
I put my hand over his on the armrest. He turned his palm up under mine and didn’t look away from the window.
***
The house didn’t run out to meet us.
That was the first difference. There was no golden retriever to knock me into the snow. Rook’s parents’ house sat low, gray, and shingled against the winter weather.
A woman opened the front door when we were halfway up the path. She was small and gray-haired with Rook’s piercing eyes.She wore a cream-colored cardigan. “You made good time,” she said.
That was it. She held the door open . Inside, she took our coats and hung them on pegs over other coats.
“She’s glad we’re here,” Rook whispered under his breath. “This is pleased.”
I looked at her again through Rook’s translation. She smoothed my coat and then touched her son’s face. It wasn’t a closed door. It was only a different dialect of welcome, with the volume set low.
Rook’s father entered the room. He was a big, almost bald man. He had sawdust on one sleeve of his flannel shirt. I shook the offered hand.
“Tide’s out,” he said. “Good drive up?”
“It was.”
“Okay,” he said, and let go.
Rook had told me his father would shake my hand and say one sentence. I thought he was managing my expectations. Standing in the entryway with the man’s grip still warm in my fingers, I understood I’d been shown the Maine equivalent of a marching band.
Rook’s parents had known for a week. He called his mother before the trip, standing in the kitchen while I watched a baking show. They needed time to process the news. My family processed everything at full volume in real time. These people took it in, recovered, and accepted me before I ever arrived.
Rook’s sister spoke my language. She came in late to dinner, stamping snow off her boots, and she was loud. She took my face in both cold hands.
“You’re real,” she said. “He brought you. I’ve known since the soup in your apartment.” She smiled and laughed at the same time. “I needed your name, and he wouldn’t give it to me. For a month, I thought you might be Pratt, but I knew a goalie wouldbe hard to love. Since then, I had narrowed it to three options. Don’t ask me which.”
She probably thought I was Coach Markel. “Rook is very private,” I said.
“He’s a safe. He’s a beautiful Maine safe, and I’ve spent my entire life trying to crack him.” She let go of my face and hugged her brother hard around the neck and shoulders.
