I feel a grief that has nothing to do with the man in the bed and everything to do with the man who was never in the bed. The father who didn't exist in this house. The one I kept waiting for anyway.
I breathe in and I go in.
He looks up when I cross the threshold.
Same eyes.
That's the thing. Everything else has gotten smaller but the eyes are exactly what they have always been — assessing, flat, running the same internal assessment they have been running on me my entire life. He looks at me the way he has always looked at me. Like he is checking something.
"You're late," he says.
"Traffic on the 9," I respond.
"Sit down."
I sit. I put my coffee on the nightstand. I look at him and brace myself for whatever he wants to say.
"You look thin," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You're not eating correctly. You can't sustain that level of play without eating correctly." He shifts against the pillows. He doesn't acknowledge that it costs him energy to do it. "I watched your last game."
"I know."
"Your defensive reads are better." He says this the way he says everything good — quickly, moving past it, not letting it land. "You're still dropping the shoulder."
"I'm working on it," I say.
"You've been working on it for years."
I look at the curtains.
"Don't look away when I'm talking to you."
I look at him.
We talk for a while about things that aren't the thing I’m here for. My game. My coursework. My father has opinions about all of it — measured, certain, the particular authority of a man who has never once doubted that he knows best. His voice is slightly thinner than I remember. He runs out of breath at the end of longer sentences. But the content of the sentences is exactly what it has always been.
I answer when I'm supposed to answer.
My mom comes in once, quietly, to check the water pitcher on the nightstand. She looks at me over his head with an expression I have been reading since childhood — distant, in the wayof a woman who learned a long time ago what the options were and made her peace with them, choosing to stay anyway, waiting it out. I look back at her. She goes.
I drink my coffee. I look at the curtains.
I drove two and a half hours.
I sit for forty minutes talking about Harlow and I think about the drive back and I think about what I said I came here to do and I think about the way the drive back is going to feel if I don't do it and I think about how it's going to feel if I do and neither of those things is good but one of them is worse.
"Why," I say, abruptly.
He stops mid-sentence.
"All of it," I say. My voice does the right thing. Stays level. Doesn't give him anything. "The rink. The beatings. Everything. I need to know why."
He looks at me then. Not softly, not fatherly, not with love. Not with the careful expression of a man who has been lying in a bed thinking about what he's done and arriving at something like remorse. He looks at me the way he has always looked at me. Like the question is slightly beneath him. Like the answer is so obvious that I should be embarrassed to need it said out loud.
"Because you needed to be the best and were going to ruin everything if I didn’t help you," he says. Flat. Certain. No apology in it, no warmth, no hesitation. A fact.
