He picks his cup back up. The conversation already loosening in his hands.
“I am here so that later, whatever you do, you cannot tell yourself no one ever showed it to you. That is the whole favor. It is the one you did me.”
I have nothing.
There’s always something. A warm thing to hand across a table, a way to make a hard moment breathable. I’m sitting here with my hands empty and my coffee cold and nothing in the chamber at all.
“Okay,” I say, which isn’t a word that means anything right now.
“Okay,” he says, and lets me off the hook the rest of the way, same as I once let him. We spend twenty minutes on the next game in our series and whether Baz’s sequel casserole counts as a war crime. Whether Mishka needs a second opinion on his attitude.
Tikh doesn’t bring it up again, he already did the only thing he came to do. He’s enough of a craftsman to know that saying it twice would only give me something to argue with.
I drive home the long way, except I don’t decide to, I just look up and I’m three exits past mine with the radio off.
An off-day hands you too much room and nothing to put in it.
I wipe down my kitchen counter that’s already clean. I text my mother back. I do the things a settled man does on a quiet afternoon. The whole time the two facts sit with me where I can’tquite see them but can feel the weight. Like someone next to you with their eyes on the side of your face.
I’ve been learning his routine the way I learn a shooter's tendencies. By watching. What I haven’t learned is how to stop. I know his count before he knows I'm counting it, and that knowledge sits in me like scouting notes I can't unfile.
That night I do my twenty-two minutes of meditation.
I built them plank by plank. Years of them. The breathing and the sequence that take the day off me one layer at a time and leave me somewhere I can sleep from.
People think I came out of the box like this. Settled, the guy the room leans toward.
I didn’t. The calm isn’t something I was handed. It’s a room I rebuild every night. It’s never once not been there when I opened the door.
I count the breath out to four, the count that empties my head. Tonight it just delivers me back to the same lit room with the same two things sitting right there.
I run the whole thing to the end. Land exactly where I started. The letting-go that usually comes as easy as the next breath is gone. The snag that’s always slipped loose on its own is still there in the morning where I left it. And the morning before that. It’s been sitting there longer than I let myself count.
I start the twenty-two minutes over.
The second time through I quit pretending the breathing is the problem.
I sit on the floor of a room I built on purpose to be calm in. The facts stay where they are. I can’t make them leave. I don’t put a name on it.
Naming it is a door I’m not ready for. A friend left it standing open across a table this afternoon, and I’m not going to walk through it tonight just because somebody held it for me.
But I don’t get up either. I don’t reach for the release again.
For the first time in years the calm doesn’t come when I call it. I stay down there on the floor with the thing that’s keeping it away. I let it be in the room with me. I don’t look straight at it. I don’t look away.
Chapter 7: Soucy
The room is still loud when we leave, celebrating the series-tying game that gets us to game seven. One win away from the next round. Marchetti running a chant about Berger’s spreadsheet. Baz explaining Bug’s entire existence to Davis, who doesn’t own a cat and didn’t ask.
We slip out the way we always slip out. Two goalies and a quiet exit. A parking garage that smells like spring and exhaust. Lundy drives us home through a city that’s still up celebrating a thing it didn’t think we’d hand it.
“They’ll be at the bar till two,” I say.
“You want to go?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
