"Bodie loves me," he says. The horn goes. The building makes the sound a building makes when it gets what it wants.
He drives me home, because his is the car we came in, and there's no version of tonight where I take a different car without it being a sentence one of us would have to say out loud. The blinker ticks four times coming off the ramp.
He puts the car in park outside my building. He doesn't say anything dry. I don't give him anything to catch. I take my bag, the paper still folded in it. I go up.
?
The apartment is quiet and the tank holds its steady seventy-eight degrees and Gaspard lifts his head off the back of the couch and decides I'm worth getting up for. He crosses the room. That's the only thing all day that came toward me without a reason.
The paper is still in my bag. I take it out and unfold it on the counter and look at the grid I never read to him, and the clue for seven across is there. I don't need the answer because the answer was never the point.
I sit on the floor with my back against the cabinet and Gaspard settles across my knees and I replay it.
I said I don't need you to fix me.
I meant stop. Stop arranging every room before I walk into it. The fear was real. His care carries a shape I know, the same shape my mother's house carries, the shape that says I love you by saying let me do it for you so you never have to find out if you could. I wasn't wrong to feel it. The pattern was there. The brain that catalogs forty shoulder-drops is the same brain that catalogs every time someone rearranges a room on my behalf, and that brain was reading a real pattern, not inventing one.
But fear makes the read louder than the room. I heard managing when some of it was just love that hadn't learned my shape yet. And instead of saying this is the part that scares me, I said the cruelest possible version. The one that fit in the smallest sentence and landed in the largest wound.
I don't need you.
He heard it in a dark room where his whole wound lives. The question of whether anyone has ever wanted him past the usefulness. I handed him the answer he was most afraid of, and he believed me, because I said it in the voice he trusts. He left because I told him the kindest thing he could do was disappear. Giving people what they need is the only language he speaks. I was the one who told him what I needed was his absence.
The fear was mine. The cruelty was mine.
Gaspard shifts his weight against my knee and the grid sits on the counter above me with its empty squares. I think about every room Lundy walked into early. Every meal that appeared without my asking. Every morning he drove because driving wasa thing he could give. I cataloged every one of them, and what the catalog said, underneath, was this costs too much. I cost too much. The boy who needed the extra time and the adjusted room and the careful quiet grew up, and his mother loved him by making him smaller, and the bill kept growing. The first person who loved him without making him smaller was still paying.
So I stopped the bill. That's what I did. I looked at a man who was spending himself on me and I said stop, because the old math says the kindest thing the expensive thing can do is take itself off the shelf.
The math is wrong. I know the math is wrong the way I know the tape is on top of the pad after I've checked it twice, which is to say I know it and the knowing doesn't stop the checking. But this isn't the checking. The checking is the count, forty-five minutes, the routine climbing under stress because that's what the disorder does with a real stressor. This is older. This is the belief under the belief. I'll always cost more than I'm worth. Love is a ledger. The balance was always going to come due.
He didn't leave because I was too expensive. He left because I told him to.
The fear was mine. The cruelty was mine. The wound I gave him is the one I was trying to protect him from, which is the kind of arithmetic that doesn't fit in a crossword grid.
Gaspard pushes his head into my hand. The count is at forty-seven and climbing and I let it climb.
Chapter 25: Lundy
"You're going far side," I tell the kid on the half-wall, because it's in his hips. He's telegraphed it since the second period and nobody has made him pay. "You've gone far side every time you've cut in off that wing. Six times. Change it up. You're getting boring."
He cuts in off the wing and he goes far side and I'm already there, glove up. The puck hits the webbing with the sound that means we're still up one with four minutes left in Game 2.
The play comes back the other way and I find my defenseman through the traffic. "Davis. Strong side. He's looking for the bumper, not the shot. Take the bumper. I've got the shooter." Davis takes the bumper. The puck squirts to the corner and the clock keeps moving, which is the only thing I'm asking the clock to do.
They try the back door late and we're already there. We win Game 2 three to one. The series is even and the room afterward is the good loud. I take my pads off slow. I let the room have its noise.
Soucy is two stalls down, gear half off, hands moving through the pattern that brings him down off a game watched from the bench. My body knows the path between the stalls. I keep it in the stall.
The path stays empty.
My phone has a missed call when I check it, and I know who it's before I look. Exactly one person calls during the playoffs instead of texting.
"Hey Dad."
"There he's. Good game. Your glove was quick tonight."
"Your kid on the half-wall telegraphs. Tell your video guys. They're letting him get away with it."