Chapter 71 COLE GETS SERIOUS
Chapter 71 COLE GETS SERIOUS
POV: Reese Calloway
The call came at eleven and I picked up on the second ring with the locker room already audible behind his voice, the specific volume of twenty-some people in a confined space who had just done something worth being loud about.
"Hey," he said.
His voice was different.
Not managed, not careful, not the version that kept things at the surface while everything real happened underneath. Loose in a way I hadn't heard before, the specific looseness of someone whose body had just finished doing the thing it was built to do and hadn't yet reassembled the usual architecture around it.
I sat on the couch with my laptop closed beside me and listened to him talk.
The clinch had happened in the third period, a two-goal lead held through the final twelve minutes while the other team pushed and didn't get through. He described it the way he described things that had gone right, simply and without inflating it, the facts of it in order. Someone yelled something behind him and he said something back and I heard laughter close to the phone.
"I'm proud of you," I said.
"I scored tonight," he said.
"I know. I watched."
A pause. "You watched."
"Yes," I said. "I watched."
He was quiet for a second. The locker room kept going behind him, someone's music starting up, voices layering over each other.
"I love you," he said.
"I know," I said. "I love you too."
Tommy's voice came through clearly from somewhere close to Cole's shoulder, the specific volume of someone who wanted to be heard on both ends of a call without being handed the phone. I couldn't make out the words but I could make out the tone, which was Tommy being genuinely happy about something and not moderating it.
"He says hi," Cole said.
"Tell him hi back," I said.
The playoff run was six weeks and Cole was away for most of it.
Not all of it. Home games brought him back, three days here, four days there, enough to sit at the kitchen table and eat the food he brought from wherever he'd found something good and watch the east light move across the floor in the morning. But the away stretches were long and the schedule ran on its own logic that had nothing to do with what was convenient for the two people it separated.
I used the time.
The profile photo essay first, the final selections made and sequenced and delivered to the editor with the written portion I'd drafted across three versions until it said the thing I'd been trying to say about the past three years without explaining it too directly. The editor sent back one note. It's exactly right.
Then the new series.
Chicago in winter, just me and the camera and whatever the city showed me when I went looking for it without a subject or a commission or a brief. The light that came off the lake on flat gray days, the specific texture of the city moving through February with its head down. Faces, mostly. People moving through cold that required concentration and produced a particular quality of presence in the body, everything simplified to the task of getting from one place to the next.
I went out every day.
The series was the best work I'd done. I knew it while I was doing it, which had never happened to me before in three years of erasing myself and six weeks of building something real and two months of building something new. I'd always known after. Looking at the developed prints and understanding that what I'd captured was the thing I'd been pointing toward. This was different. This was knowing in the act of pressing the shutter, while the moment was still happening, that it was the one.
I sent Cole one photograph a week.
Not the magazine work, not the profile images. Just something I'd seen that day that was worth sending. The collapsed umbrella on a park bench after the snowstorm. The two women in matching coats who I caught mid-argument outside a coffee shop. The Mercy Row building seen from the street at dusk with one light on in the upper window.
He always responded.
Sometimes words. Sometimes just the timestamp of the text, sent within two minutes of me sending the image, which meant he'd looked at it immediately, which was its own kind of answer about what he did with the photographs when they arrived.
The call after the fourth round win came at nine, the post-game timing I'd learned to expect.
He was at the arena still, heading to the bus, the next city a flight away. His voice had the tired quality of someone who had played sixty minutes and won and knew there were more sixties coming and was glad about all of it.
He talked about the game for a few minutes and I listened and asked about the second period sequence he'd described, which I'd watched from the couch with the television on and my laptop beside me, and he walked me through it with the patience he had for explaining the game to someone who understood sixty percent of it and was working on the rest.
Then he went quiet for a moment.
Not the settling quiet of a conversation finding its natural end. Something else.
"I want to ask you something," he said. "When I'm back."
I looked at the television, still on from the game, the post-match coverage running with the sound low.
"Okay," I said.
"It's important." He said it the way he said things he'd thought about before saying, the deliberate placement that meant the word had been chosen and not fallen out.
"Okay," I said again.
"I'm not trying to scare you."
I sat up straighter on the couch.
"Too late," I said.