"Soren. I'll eat."
I leave the food on a low warm because he won't eat it while I'm watching and he might eat it after I go. Gaspard has gone to sit on the back of the couch where the light from the tank reaches him, blue and slow, the bamboo shark a pale drift behind theglass in the world Jules built and runs alone. I stand in the doorway of an apartment I'm not going to sleep in tonight and watch the man I can't get through to sit very still in front of a finished word he wouldn't give me. I tell myself it's the city and the brother and the series. Most of me believes it. The part that reads shooters for a living knows the read I'm refusing to make, and across two hundred feet of memory Matty is still looking at me from the far bench, deciding. I still don't have the answer. I'm beginning to understand the answer was never going to come from him.
?
Chapter 21: Soucy
“One-twelve again,” Soren says, sitting down beside my stall in the visitors’ room. “Your mother’s got the tourtière in a cooler under the seat. She told me. She texts me now. Did you know your mother texts me?”
“She got your number from Matty. She’s been texting you since Tampa.” The pattern runs under my hands, thumb to index, middle, ring, pinky, back. Steady. The crease is two hours out and the crease is where I go quiet. My body knows it’s coming and starts settling early.
“She asked if you’re eating. I said yes. Was that a lie?”
“Partially. Tell her I’m eating. She’ll know you’re lying and she’ll like you more for covering.”
“Your family runs on covering for each other.”
“My family runs on knowing exactly what’s wrong and never once saying it out loud. We could win a Cup at it.” It comes out dry, the deadpan flat. He laughs the way only three people laugh at the things I say, and I keep the sound of it how I keep all of them. I don’t think about how the sentence is also a descriptionof the last two weeks. I’ve decided not to think about that until after the game.
“She sends me recipes,” he says. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Make them. It’s the highest honor she gives. She’s vetting you.”
“Am I passing?”
There’s a half-second where the honest answer and the easy answer are the same length in my mouth, and I let the easy one out because the honest one has a knife in it I’m not holding tonight. “You’re passing.”
He lets it go. He always lets it go, which is the whole problem and tonight is the whole mercy. He nods at Ash across the room, asleep against the wall with his headphones on. “Ash and Avi don’t sit together on the plane so nobody knows, and then they fall asleep on each other by hour two.”
“Everybody knows. They’ve known since October. Ash announced it by trying to hide it.”
“That’s how you announce things. You try to hide them and you do it loud.”
“Is that what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know. Are we hiding?”
“Half the room set a fish-food trap for us. Thompson stepped back at a show so you could step in. Tikh’s known since the kittens. We’re the worst-kept secret on a team full of badly-kept secrets.”
“I’m okay with being a badly-kept secret,” he says. “If it’s you.”
I look at the tape on my left pad and not at him, because if I look at him he’ll read the thing I’ve been holding under my tongue for two weeks. The room is no place for it. The crease is coming. The crease is the one place none of this can reach me. “Yeah.”
He pulls the folded paper out of his bag, creased to today’s grid. “Crossword. Pre-game. One clue, for luck. Nine across.”
“We don’t do it for luck. We do it because you can’t sit still in the twenty-two minutes without your hands moving first.”
“Same thing. Nine across. ‘Sentinel.’”
“Seven letters?”
“Seven.”
“Watchman.”
“You didn’t even look.”
“I don’t have to look. You picked it because of the net. You’ve been picking goalie words all series. You think I don’t see you doing it.” I see all of it. I see him reaching for me sideways in the only language he has, the same as my mother with her clock, the same as Matty with his forearm. Tonight, for once, I let it be only the warm thing and not the other thing too.
