Chapter 65 The Contract Review
CALEB
The contract review was on a Monday morning in a conference room at the organization's facility and I arrived seven minutes early and sat in the chair on my side of the table and looked at the view through the window while the management team arranged their papers and Porter sat beside me with the particular stillness of a man who had been in many of these rooms and knew that the ones that had already been decided did not require any special energy from the people sitting in them.
This one had already been decided.
I had known that since December when the voice on the phone said the good kind of developments and something in my chest had rearranged itself into a configuration that felt like the future settling into a shape.
The offer was a three year contract extension. Full organizational roster rather than affiliate placement. The city was the one they had named in December, two and a half hours from Hamilton, a number I had been running in my head since the call with the specific attention you give to distances that are going to matter to your life.
Two and a half hours was not insurmountable.
Two and a half hours was, in fact, considerably better than what it had been for the past two years.
I asked two questions about specific clauses and Porter answered them and I signed on Tuesday and called Mia before I called anyone else because she was the person I went to with things that mattered and she had been for two years and I was not going to change the order for the sake of conventional sequencing.
She picked up on the first ring.
Three years, I said. Full roster. Same city.
She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when something had landed properly and she was making room for it.
That is not the development level anymore, she said.
No, I said.
That is the actual thing, she said.
Yes, I said.
How do you feel, she said.
I thought about the honest answer, the one that was not a performance of appropriate emotion or a calculation of what I was supposed to feel at this specific milestone, but the actual experience of sitting in an apartment in a city two and a half hours from Hamilton after signing a three year professional hockey contract.
Like something I have been building toward became the thing itself, I said. Not the representation of it. Not the rehearsal of it. The actual thing.
She was quiet again.
You worked for this, she said. Not your father. Not the scouts or the contracts or anyone's version of what your career was supposed to look like. You worked for this.
I know, I said.
Are you letting yourself feel all of it, she said.
I am feeling all of it, I said.
Good, she said. You are allowed to.
We talked for a long time after that, not about the contract specifically but about the year that had produced it. The positioning work with Reeves that had become a reflex rather than a decision. Harrington saying good read and then you are going to be useful on this team. The December drive to Hamilton that I had not announced because the distance had become something heavier than a number that weekend and the only solution was to close it. The Thursday with my father and the specific quality of okay that had followed me out of the city apartment and into the January air.
And then she said: Mom had her Thursday appointment.
I went still.
Dr. Patel used a new phrase, she said. Not responding. Not stable. No evidence of active disease.
Those exact words, she said.
I put my hand flat on the counter and stood in the apartment kitchen and felt those words arrive in the specific way that words arrive when you have been waiting for something like them for a very long time without being certain they would ever come.
No evidence of active disease was not the word cured. Oncology did not use that word casually and I had learned enough from two years of paying attention to Mia's conversations with Dr. Patel to understand the careful architecture of the language. But no evidence of active disease was its own specific thing. It had weight and direction and it leaned toward something rather than simply away from something else.
Mia, I said.
I know, she said.
We stayed on the phone in silence for a while, the way we had learned to be in silences together, not filling them because they needed filling but letting them hold what they needed to hold.
She is still here, I said eventually.
She is still here, she said. And she is annoyed at me for putting it that way, by the way, she told me when I called. She said she does not think of it as still here anymore. She thinks of it as just here. Just living.
I thought about that distinction for a long time.
There was an entire philosophy inside it. The shift from surviving to simply existing without the qualifier. From holding on to just holding.
I called Porter that evening and told him I had something to take care of in January before the schedule got heavy.
He said: The girl.
I said: Her name is Mia.
He said: I know her name. I have read Shaw's article several times. I think everyone in this organization has read it at least once.
I put the phone down and opened the browser on my laptop to the page I had been looking at since February of the previous year and felt the specific readiness of a person who has been building toward a moment for long enough that when it finally arrives the only question is not whether but when and where and how to make it exactly what it ought to be.
January, I thought.
The skating rink in the park.
The string lights on in the afternoon.
The same ice where she had grabbed my forearms and looked down at her feet and I had said look up and the park had opened around her and she had seen the whole thing.
Same place.
Different question.
The same answer I already knew she was going to give.