Chapter 42 Championship Morning
MIA
I woke up at six without an alarm because the day was already awake before I opened my eyes, the light through the curtains different from every other morning I could remember and the building silent in the held-breath way it was silent before something shifted, and I lay there for a moment and let it be what it was.
Then I got up from my bed.
Mom was already in the kitchen.
She was at the table with her tea and her pink beanie sitting slightly crooked and the book she was not reading open in front of her, and she looked up when I came in with the expression she had been wearing all week, the one that said she understood the full shape of what was happening even without being told, which was the expression of a woman who had been reading people correctly for twenty years and was not going to stop now regardless of the condition she was doing it from.
She made pancakes from scratch.
She moved slowly and carefully around the kitchen, taking her time at each step, and I sat at the table and watched and did not say a word about resting because I had learned this year the difference between rest and life and that insisting on one sometimes stole the other without asking.
She set the plate in front of me.
The morning light came through the window at the angle it always came through in this apartment, landing on the table the way it had been landing since before I could remember, the same patch of light, the same table, everything else in my life changed completely and this small thing exactly the same.
Jamie came out at seven with his school clothes and his hockey bag over one shoulder and sat down and accepted pancakes without ceremony and ate with the efficient focus of someone who had multiple things to get to and was allocating his time accordingly.
Are you nervous Mia, he said to me.
About what.
The championship game. You have basically been on the team all season.
I am the manager, I said. I have always been part of the team.
It is different now, he said, and we both knew he was right.
Caleb arrived at eight thirty.
Mom called from the kitchen before he had cleared the threshold: I know you are here, sit down, which was her greeting for him now, direct and warm and completely specific to who he had become in this kitchen over the past months.
He ate pancakes and talked to Jamie about the semifinal and the system adjustments Coach had made going into the final, and Jamie listened with the full concentrated attention he only gave to things he had decided were worth his time.
I stood in the doorway and let the morning be what it was.
All of it at once. This table. This light. This specific combination of people that had assembled itself out of so many impossible things.
We left at ten.
Mom walked us to the door.
She took Caleb’s hand at the threshold and held it in both of hers and looked up at him with those sharp tired beautiful eyes.
Play the way you have been playing all year, she said. Not for the scouts or the cameras. The way you play when it is just the game and the ice.
Yes ma’am, he said.
She looked at me.
Stop counting, she said.
I looked at her and didn’t know what else to say.
My breaths, she said. Through the wall. Every night. I know you do it. Stop the act. I am still here. Act like I am still here.
My throat closed around something.
I know, I said.
Then act like it, she said, not unkindly, and kissed my cheek and stepped back into the apartment.
Caleb took my hand on the first step down.
The arena was full when we arrived and the noise had a different quality from regular season noise, layered and expectant and aware of itself.
I went to the manager’s bench and did the hundred small invisible things that I had been doing every game day for two years.
Then I looked up. I saw Walter.
He was in the front section east side with his program, calm and completely present. Beside him Catherine Kessler sat in her grey coat with her hair down and found me across the building and nodded once.
I nodded back twice.
Caleb came out for warmup and when he came near the bench I was already watching.
He tapped the ice.
I nodded to him.
He skated back to center.
Whatever happened in the next sixty minutes was going to belong to both of us.
All of it.
And for the first time all morning, the thought did not feel like pressure.
It felt like permission.