Mik passes my stall.
He does not stop. He does not speak. He does not make eye contact in the conventional sense. What he does is place his hand on my shoulder as he walks past, and the hand stays for exactly two seconds, and the weight of it is the weight of everything Mik has said and not said since the film room, since "the walls are optional," since the nod in the corridor after I talked to Cole.
Two seconds. The hand is heavy and warm and scarred at the knuckles (the same scarring as Wes's hands, the evidence of a sport that marks the bodies of the men who play it) and the two seconds contain: I see you. You're one of us. The wall is down. Welcome home.
Mik walks to his stall. He picks up his book (Tolstoy today, Anna Karenina, which I suspect is not a coincidence). He sits down. He begins to read.
The locker room continues. The music plays (Jonah's Tuesday playlist, which today features a K-pop group that is making three of the fourth-liners bob their heads involuntarily). Guys tape sticks. Laces get threaded. The pre-practice hum of a team preparing to do the thing they do fills the room with the communal, living noise of thirty men who share a purpose.
Declan sits on the bench near my stall. Not in the stall. On the bench, the wooden bench that runs along the wall where visitors sit, where Theo sits during team events, where Ren sat before he became a fixture. The bench for the people who belong to the team without being on the team. Declan sits there with hisbiscotti and his no-glasses and his warm, present, unprotected face, and he looks at me, and I look at him, and the looking is not hidden. The looking is not managed. The looking is just two people in a room, seeing each other, in front of thirty men who have decided that the seeing is ordinary.
The ordinary is the point. The ordinary is the revolution. Not the speeches or the SI covers or the kisses on ice. The ordinary. The biscotti. The bench. The nod. The two men walking in together and the room absorbing them the way a body absorbs a breath: naturally, without effort, because breathing is what the body does.
JAMIE
That night, in Declan's apartment, I lie with my head on his chest and my phone in my hand.
The phone is heavy. Not physically. The phone weighs six ounces. The phone is heavy because of the call I'm about to make, the call that will travel from East Atlanta to Duluth, Minnesota, and that will change a relationship that is twenty years old and built on hockey and a frozen rink and a man who taught me to skate by standing at the far end and not moving.
"I want to call my dad," I say.
The sentence is quiet. The sentence is the last wall. Every other wall has fallen: the search bar, the naming, Becca, Cole, Mik, the team, the locker room, Declan. This wall is the oldest and the tallest and the most frightening, because this wall is my father. Tom Kowalski. High school hockey coach. The man who stood still and let me come to him.
"I'll be right here," Declan says.
"I know."
His hand is on my back. The hand is warm and steady and the steadiness is the thing I need because the steadiness is theopposite of what's happening in my chest, which is a seismic event that would register on instruments.
I dial. The phone rings once. Twice. Tom Kowalski answers on the second ring because Tom Kowalski always answers on the second ring, because availability is a form of love.
"Hey, Dad."
"Hey, Jamie. How's it going?"
His voice is the voice I've heard every day of my life. The Duluth cadence. The coaching cadence. The specific, measured rhythm of a man who speaks the way he watches film: one element at a time, each word evaluated before deployment.
"Good. We're playing well. Coach has me on the first power play unit now."
"I saw. Your entry on that play against Columbus was textbook. The weight transfer on the inside edge, the way you loaded before the pass. That's the technique we worked on at the outdoor rink."
"Dad." I close my eyes. Declan's heartbeat is under my ear. The heartbeat is steady. My heartbeat is not. "I need to tell you something."
The pause on the other end is three seconds. Three seconds is an eternity in Tom Kowalski's conversational rhythm, which is already slow, which is already deliberate, which already processes before it produces. Three seconds from my father is the equivalent of a standing ovation from a normal person. Three seconds means he has heard the weight.
"Okay," he says. "I'm listening."
I'm listening. Not "what's wrong." Not "are you hurt." Not "is it hockey." I'm listening. The same two words Becca used. The Kowalski family response to weight: I'm listening. The space cleared. The rink empty. The far end of the ice, where he stands, where he waits.
"I've met someone." My voice is steady and I don't know how it's steady because everything inside me is shaking. "His name is Declan."
His name is Declan. Four words. The last wall.
My body goes rigid. The rigidity is the bracing, the impact position, the body preparing for the hit the way it prepares for a hit on the ice: weight low, core tight, ready to absorb. I am bracing for my father's silence or my father's confusion or the devastating pause that would mean my father is recalculating everything he thought he knew about his son.
The pause is five seconds. Five seconds that I count because counting is what I do when I'm afraid and the counting gives the brain something to hold while the body absorbs.
"Tell me about him," my father says.