Three seconds.
Four on the second dip.
Five on the third, which meant the air was getting rougher, which meant the weather was deteriorating, which meant by the time they landed in Duluth the wind would be pushing against the fuselage like something that wanted them to turn back. I understood turbulence the way I understood a lot of things—as something that could be measured, quantified, calculated. Four seconds meant the dip was minor. Seven seconds would mean something worse. I was counting to keep from thinking about the text message I had not sent yet. The text message I was going to send. The text message that would either get a response or would sit in the abyss of her silence until I understood that the waiting was going to kill me.
The seat next to him had been empty at takeoff. Three rows up, Wilder Pratt had been reading something on his phone. Five rows back, Beckham was sleeping like a man without troubles,his head tilted back, his body surrendered. The other players had distributed themselves across the remaining seats with the ease of men who had done this before, who were comfortable with the rhythm of game days and the particular exhaustion that came from knowing you were going to spend your evening getting punched in the face for a living.
Hudson Vance was in the back of the plane, headphones in, eyes closed, the enforcer taking his rest like a man who understood that sleep was a privilege. Theo Nash was reading a book—actual paper, actual pages, the kind of man who refused modern conveniences. Maddox was in the cockpit talking to the pilot about weather patterns and flight time and the storm that was coming south from Canada.
The seat next to me remained empty for forty minutes.
Then Wilder moved.
He was my captain. Thirty-three years old. Recently divorced. The kind of man who understood pain not as an abstract concept but as a fact of daily life. He sat down in the empty seat without asking, without saying hello, without the kind of small talk that a man might use as an opening to conversation. Just moved from his row and settled into the middle seat like he had decided something and was not going to discuss it.
They sat in silence for thirty minutes.
The engine roared. The plane tilted. I counted my heartbeats in multiples of three. Seventy-two beats per minute. Normal heart rate for a man at rest. Except I was not at rest. I was in a state of constant emergency, my body in fight-or-flight mode for five days running, my adrenals working overtime, my nervous system a live wire singing with the particular frequency of a man who had destroyed something and was now waiting to see if I could rebuild it.
At the forty-minute mark, Wilder said, “You ever been married, Iron.”
I did not look at him. I said, “No.”
Wilder said, “I have. Worst thing about it is when you fuck up and you can’t fix it. You can apologize. You can bring her flowers and book her a spa day and do all the things that are supposed to make a woman forget that you broke something in her. But the thing you broke is still broken. And she knows it. And you know it. And you’re just going through the motions hoping that one day she wakes up and decides to let it go anyway.”
I did not say anything. I was thinking about the door. I was thinking about the moment Maple had closed it, thinking about the sound of the deadbolt turning, thinking about the fact that I had three days now without seeing her, three days of her not coming into the diner, three days of her not being anywhere that I could touch her. Three days of looking at my phone and wondering if she would text, if she would call, if she would find me in the parking lot and tell me that the three days had been enough penance.
Three days of knowing that three days was not going to be enough.
Wilder said, “I was married for eleven years. Most of that time I was a good husband. Most of that time I showed up and I paid the bills and I was present for the moments that mattered. And then I fucked up. And it took her six months to leave. Six months of looking at me like I was a stranger who had taken the place of the man she had married. Six months of her sleeping in a different room. Six months of sitting across from each other at dinner and not being able to touch each other because the touching was gone, the thing that made us a couple was gone, and neither one of us knew how to get it back.”
I said, “I’m fixing it.”
Wilder said, “How.”
I said, “I’m staying.”
Wilder was quiet for a long moment. He was looking out the window at the same landscape I had been watching—the woods, the lakes, the small towns. He was thinking about something. Something that made his jaw tight and his hands flat against his thighs. His fingers were white at the knuckles, and I understood that Wilder was reliving something, that the memory of his marriage was still raw, that the sitting-in-silence with a man he cared about was dredging up particular ghosts.
Wilder said, “Okay. That’s one way.” His voice was quieter than it had been. “Most men run. They run to another woman or another job or another town. They run because staying is harder than leaving. But if you stay, if you actually put in the work, if you show her every single day that you’re not the man who lied, that you’re the man who’s trying to be honest—maybe that’s enough. Maybe she sees that and something shifts. Probably takes longer than six months. But maybe you get your second chance.”
Wilder got up and went back to his seat without waiting for me to respond.
The plane continued north.
I returned to the window. I returned to counting things. I did not sleep. I did not come close to sleeping. The particular exhaustion of insomnia was starting to hollow me out. My thoughts were becoming watercolor and unfocused. I knew I needed to sleep but my body would not allow it, my mind would not allow it, the particular punishment of staying awake was becoming the only thing I was willing to do to myself. When the plane landed in Duluth, I was as exhausted as I had been when I boarded, which was exactly as exhausted as I had been the moment I closed Maple’s front door on Day 28. Five days of not sleeping. Five days of sitting in the apartment knowing she was fifty feet away and not coming to me. Five days of understandingthat staying was the easy part and being forgiven was going to take longer than I had time for. I had hours. Maybe days. But the way Maple had looked at me, the way she had not looked at me—it seemed like she might need weeks.
The hotel in Duluth was a chain property. Two stories. Beige carpet that smelled like industrial cleaner and human desperation. The kind of place where the rooms all looked the same and that sameness was somehow worse than individuality could ever be. The team had reserved eight rooms. I was in Room 147, north side, overlooking the parking lot where the team bus was parked like a monument to the fact that this was temporary, that they were going back, that Frostbite Falls was waiting.
I sat on the bed. The mattress was too soft. The pillows were too synthetic. Everything about the room was wrong in the way that hotel rooms were always wrong.
It was 6:47 p.m. The game was at 7 p.m. I had forty minutes to change, to tape my shoulder, to do all the preparations that a man did when I was going to sit on the bench and watch other men do the work that I would never do again. Tape my shoulder because the mobility was still compromised from the old concussion, tape my shoulder and walk out onto the bench and stand there and watch the team play while my body ached with the desire to be on the ice, to be doing something, to be anything other than a passenger watching life happen. At least on the bench I could see the game, could concentrate on something other than the silence coming from Frostbite Falls.
My phone was on the nightstand.
I picked it up.
I dialed her number.
