Chapter 59 The New Place
CALEB
The city was different from Hamilton in ways I had not anticipated.
Not worse. Just new in the specific way places are new when they have not yet accumulated the weight of your personal history. Hamilton had the rink I had been skating since I was eight and the cancer center on the east side and the park with the string lights and the corner where I had stood with a phone against my ear learning things I had not known about the girl I was falling for before I knew I was falling. This city had none of that yet.
It had other things.
The rink was newer than anything I had trained in before. Full NHL dimensions. The first time I stepped onto it I felt the extra width in my feet before my brain registered it, the additional space on the perimeter that changed how you read the play.
I adjusted in three days.
The coaching staff was what Porter had promised and then slightly more than that. Three coaches with different approaches that somehow did not contradict each other. The skills coach was specific in the way that made you feel seen rather than corrected. The defensive coach was the one I spent the most time with and he had the quality of knowing exactly what he was looking at and saying so without wasting words.
On my first day in his session he watched me run a defensive zone sequence and then said: You catch yourself. Before the instinct pulls you forward. You catch it and choose differently.
Yes, I said.
When did you learn that, he said.
Someone told me the ice was my answer, I said. So I stopped answering everything else and just played the ice.
He nodded once and moved on.
The billet family this time was a younger couple. Late thirties. Two kids who were old enough to be excited about a hockey player in the house. The younger one, a nine year old named Fiona, asked me at dinner on the second night if I knew any famous people.
I know a future nurse who is going to be very well known in oncology, I said.
She considered this.
That is not famous like hockey famous, she said.
She was not wrong.
I called Mia every night.
Sometimes long. Sometimes ten minutes at the end of a day that had taken everything and left just enough for her voice and same time tomorrow and then sleep. She always met me where I was. Not where she might have preferred me to be. Where I actually was. That specific skill of hers, of finding the person rather than the version of the person they were supposed to be, was the thing I had understood first and articulated last.
Presence, she would call it when she talked about nursing.
That was the word for what she had been doing with me since October of last year.
Eli texted every few days.
Updates about his own life with occasional questions about mine that were really just openings for more updates about his own life, which I did not mind because Eli's life was reliably interesting and I had been listening to it for four years.
He was staying in Hamilton. A local program had offered him a contract in the spring and he had taken it without drama, which was very Eli, and was settling into his own new beginning with the same even disposition he brought to everything.
I am happy here, he texted on a Tuesday.
Good, I replied. Me too.
He sent a photo of a labeled soup can in his cabinet.
I stared at it.
I replied: That is not mine.
He replied: I know. I labeled my own in the same system. In your honor.
I put the phone down.
Walter called the Thursday of the second week.
He called rather than texted, which meant he had something specific to say.
Your father called me, he said.
I held the phone.
What did he say, I said.
He congratulated me on your contract, Walter said. In a way that suggested the credit was partly his. I did not argue with him about it.
How did it feel, I said.
Like talking to someone who is still learning what he cannot control, Walter said. There was no cruelty in it and there was something almost like genuine feeling underneath the performance. I thought you should know.
I sat with that.
I am going to see him, I said. Before the season starts. I have been putting it off all summer.
Walter was quiet.
Why now, he said.
Because I want to look at him from where I am standing right now, I said. Which is somewhere he did not put me. And I want him to see it.
Walter was quiet for a longer moment.
That is either very wise or very risky, he said.
I have been told those are the same thing, I said.
He laughed.
Come for dinner at Christmas, he said. I will make soup.
I will bring my appetite, I said.
He hung up.
I sat in the billet room with Fiona's drawing of a hockey player taped to the wall and the label on my toothbrush holder and the strip of water visible from the window at the right angle and thought about home.
Not the new city.
Hamilton.
Mom's kitchen table. The slightly squeaky faucet. The pill organizer on the counter.
My phone buzzed.
Mia: Are you still awake?
Yes, I replied.
She replied: I did my first clinical observation today.
I replied: How was it?
She replied: I watched a nurse work a full shift and I understood everything she did before she explained it.
I smiled at the phone.
That is because you have been doing it for two years, I replied.
I know that now, she replied.
Same time tomorrow? she replied.
Same time, I replied.
I put the phone down.
The city outside was quiet.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
And so was she.