Eleven

We had no more games against Buffalo that season, and by the time the regular season was almost over I was dying from lack of touch. From time to time Miro would actually talk about therapy, and from what he told me it was going quite well.

You see, I trusted him. He didn’t tell me everything—naturally. He’d never been that kind of a person, and it was fine by me. Sometimes I’d get frustrated with him, sometimes he’d get frustrated with me, et cetera.

But when I brought around the suggestion of having him come live with me during the playoffs which the Sabres had so obviously not made it into, it was a mutual thing.

“Move into your house? What the hell for?”

“God, I don’t know. Maybe I miss you or something?”

“Fuck off, liar,” and a hung-up phone.

An hour later.

“Okay, I’m coming.”

“Great!”

“It’ll be fun, I can hang out at your house and stuff, it’ll be great.”

“Okay, um, Mirs?”

“Yeah?”

“When are you coming?”

“Day after my last game.”

“Your last game is tomorrow.”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

I surveyed the house and made a mental checklist—clean kitchen, throw out dying ivy plant, put cushions back on couch, make house presentable, get real food.

Obviously, I was still running around like an idiot cleaning up when the back doorbell rang. Damn procrastination, it’ll fuck you over.

“Come in, it’s open.”

“God, traffic is absolutely brutal coming in from the airport—” a long pause, “what in the name of all that is holy have you done to your head?”

I touched my head, then blushed.

“I shaved it. For you. Like, you’re going through a hard time, so it’s solidarity. Right?” I said haltingly. “Do you like it?”

He stared at me in shock for a minute more. “Will you be very upset if I say no?”

“Do you hate it that much?”

“I do.” He grimaced. “You look like a big old penis-head.”

I sighed. “Well, I can’t do anything about it now. And dammit, where’s your sympathy?”

“I don’t have sympathy for people who voluntarily turn themselves into penis-heads, thank you. Anyway, like I was saying, it’s horrible coming in from the airport. You’re lucky I got here now and not at, say, midnight.”

I nodded like I was listening, then directed him into the bedroom to put his stuff away. “What’s for lunch?” he asked, coming back. “And what’s upstairs? I hadn’t noticed you have an upstairs here.”

“Whatever’s in the fridge, and one storage room.” Because of the way my house is built, you don’t notice the staircase unless you really look for it and make a wrong turn in the corner of the house, and I never go up there. It’s a horror show.

He wandered past me into the kitchen and I heard him opening and closing all my cabinets. I can live with this, I thought. I like this.

Surprisingly, it was pretty calm during the playoffs. I was constantly at practice, getting myself so wound up that when I got home I could hardly walk and I’d enlist Miro to help stretch me out afterwards; Miro was constantly hanging around the house, cooking and generally doing nice things. God, I love him.

There were still those weird times in the middle of the night when I’d wake up and just lie thinking for a while, and it was really weird to wake up and realize that the person beside you isn’t asleep, they’re lying awake and thinking too. I’d be thinking about how weird life is, and how easily things fall into place, and how lucky I was to be in the right place at the right time.

“Miro?” I asked.

“What?”

“Are you awake?”

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me. “Yeah, why?”

“Will you be completely honest with me if I ask you something?” I took a deep breath. “Please?”

“It depends,” he said slowly. “What do you want to know?”

“Do you still burn yourself?”

He sighed heavily, then sat up all the way and crossed his legs under the blankets, thinking for what seemed like an eternity. “I thought we’d been through this already.”

“Not recently. Please, Miro? I just want to know.”

He paused again for a long while, staring at some unseen point in the darkened room. “Yes. I do,” he said quietly. “Not much, and not often, but it’s like an addiction. I can’t just give it up. Sometimes I honestly feel I could die.” He sighed.

I looked down. I really, really, really didn’t want to think about him wanting to die any more than I wanted to think about my parents having sex, or my dentist going “You’ve got ten cavities!” and laughing maniacally, or getting a bill in the mail that read “URGENT” and said “You owe eighty million dollars to Visa by last Wednesday, heh heh heh,” or anything like that.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked again. He looked away and then back at me.

“Yeah, shoot.”

“Okay. When I was at your house after the Olympics, I, um, saw you. Doing that to yourself. I got really freaked out,” I trailed off. “I was afraid you’d hate me.”

He leaned forward until I could feel his breath hot on my cheek. “I’m sorry I did that to you. Marian, I could never hate you. You know that.”

Well, actually, I didn’t know that. I was freaking out inwardly still—wondering when this weird sensation of being comforted would end, this weird feeling of wanting to cry.

I started to laugh. Damn, I have to get over this crap reaction of “tense situation = laugh like a psycho.” It tends to weird people out a little. Okay, a lot. Oh, shut up.

“Are you okay?” Miro asked, sounding confused and bewildered and very much like a little boy.

“I feel like a grown-up.” I giggled. I heard the grin in his voice when he spoke again.

“Fuck off. You’re just a little boy.” He paused. “And an idiot. And you speak bad English.”

“I will not, I am not, I am not, and I do not!” I stuck out my tongue. He pushed me over and patted my head, which was obediently growing more stubble, albeit slowly.

“Do you still think I look like a penis-head?” I asked. Miro sat back up and ran his hands over my head.

“After a lengthy examination, I have concluded that yes, you do, and never shave your head again. Thank you.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” I whined.

“No, it’s not. It’s the fact that you have a scary head.”

“How can someone have a scary head?”

“I don’t know, but you’ve done it.”

“Define scary. Is it bumpy or what?”

“Who knows? It’s dark.”

I shoved him in the shoulder and we lay still, reflecting on things that had finally come full circle.

The worst day was probably when I came home from our last playoff game, the one we got knocked out in. I slammed into the house, slammed into my room, and slammed into my bed, generally acting like a spoiled kid. Miro made me food and left it outside my door; he swept up when I threw a dish at the wall; he obediently slept on the couch when I locked him out of the bedroom. But I still felt like an idiot when I came out.

“Miro?”

“Ah, I see he’s finally come around.” Miro set down his newspaper and gestured for me to sit down. “To what do we owe this favor?”

I put my head on the table. “I was an idiot and I’m sorry and do you hate me very much?” I mumbled, thoroughly trying to enjoy the taste of humble pie. I also made a mental note to give my tabletop a good scrubbing, it was kind of gross up close like that.

Miro came over and sat down next to me. “I promise I don’t hate you, stop asking me that. I’m not going to hate you because you’re moody. That’s the part I have to put up with.”

I tried to hit him, but missed because well, you see, I had my head down on the table. Duh. “Shut up.”

“I won’t.” But the next thing was him kissing me and then I didn’t feel so bad about not being in the playoffs anymore.

We left not long after I got knocked out of the playoffs, destined to spend a good chunk of time shuttling back and forth between our respective towns. Except first off I was making him stay at my house for a while to fully experience the weirdness of my family. Well, okay, I thought it was good idea.

I let us in and threw our stuff down in the kitchen, then beat a path to the fridge (not coincidentally, the same path of travel I take every time I go home). “Hey, Mom, we’re home.”

“Hi, honey. Since you’re home, could you mow the lawn before it gets dark?” she hollered back.

“I can’t, I brought Miro.”

“He can help, can’t he?” My mom swept into the room with a mouthful of pins and a swath of fabric in her right hand, hugging Miro and then me. “Welcome, Miro. Stay as long as you like and make yourself at home, okay?” She turned back to me. “Your brother went out, so would you please mow the lawn? It’ll only take a little while.”

I rolled my eyes. “I just flew twenty hours to get home so you could make me do the lawn? Thanks, Mom.”

“You slept the whole time,” she accused.

“You win.” I left back into the garage.

Miro followed me into the garage a few minutes later, holding a gigantic cookie. “Your mom’s nice. Like, I knew your dad before, but I’d never met your mom. She’s really nice.”

“Because you walk into the house and she makes you do yard work?” I rolled my eyes, tossing him a rake. “Most people don’t find that nice or enjoyable, you know.”

“I like it here.” He looked up at the sky, then rolled his head all the way around to see my neighborhood. It was evening already, the time of day when no one is doing anything much, after dinner and before sleep. It was almost strangely peaceful, like the opening scene of some movie like “Night Of The Damned,” before the zombies start coming out and demanding brains from the happy, peaceful citizens. But my neighborhood (thankfully) houses no zombies, and the only things breaking the stillness were the mower and a few passing cars and someone’s windchimes.

We spent a lot of that summer lying in the hammock in my backyard, swaying back and forth and talking for hours on end. A lot of our conversations tended toward either the deeply thought-provoking or the deeply, deeply imbecilic.

“Miro?”

“What?” he answered, perturbed that I had distracted him from watching a couple of rabbits sniffing around over by the fence.

“If you retire one day, I bet you’ll get a shitload of people wanting you to endorse their stuff. Like Speedo.”

He looked at me. “Speedo? Please be kidding me.”

“No, it’ll be cool!” I rambled on. “The copy can be something like ‘Have a devil of a time at the beach this summer.’”

“Marian, you are obviously on large amounts of drugs.”

“I am not! Or maybe something like, ah, ‘Now everyone can see that Satan really does wear a Speedo.’ Or ‘Speedo: Satan’s Swimwear or Choice.’”

By this point he was laughing so hard he almost tipped the damn hammock over and freaked the poor bunnies right out. However, Mission Make Miro Laugh: accomplished. A huge swell of pride in me almost blew my head off.

“How are you going to explain away the diacritical marks? No Slovak speaker is going to get it. And plus, no one on earth will ever pronounce my name correctly again.”

I watched him wipe the tears off his face. “So? Come on, you think it’s hysterical.”

“That I do.” He still reached over and gently whapped my head. “It’s a good thing I love you, otherwise I wouldn’t put up with you.”

“Yeah you would.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Your brat brother would drive me insane in like, two minutes. I’ll never understand how you grew up with him.”

“I got a lock on my bedroom door when I turned thirteen.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

I was in that bedroom, complete with lock on the door (unlocked—Marcel and I have kind of learned to reconcile our differences. He knocks now), at the end of summer. Miro was gone, hanging out with his dad in Topolcany and getting ready to go back to Buffalo. It was one of those endlessly gorgeous sunset evenings in which everything is sheathed in gold and scarlet, and the clouds are piled high and fluffy, casting gold and scarlet shadows. The kind of night where if you’re sitting very still outside, and no one in the area is running a weedwhacker or anything, you can almost hear music playing on the wind.

My window was open, trying to cool off my room before those giant puffy clouds took over and it would start to rain in the night. If a strong wind had picked up and blown directly into my room, it couldn’t have done much damage anyway, because I had taken out every article of clothing I kept in that house and was earnestly trying to figure out how to get it all in my poor suitcase.

At this juncture, Marcel walked into my room, gnawing on a greasy chicken leg. “Whatcha doing?” he asked, between non-delightfully non-charming bites.

“What does it look like I’m doing, Marcie? I’m packing, you dumbass.”

“Don’t call me Marcie. No one’s called me that since I was five years old.”

“Don’t barge into my room without knocking eating gross chicken. Go finish it and then come back and talk to me.” He obligingly did so, and came back. Without knocking. Fucker.

“What do you want now?” I asked without looking up. Another shirt got catapulted into the “coming with me” pile.

“You’re going early?” he asked. I threw a really hideously awful turquoise-and-gold 1980s shirt that I had forgotten I even owned into the “stay, for ever” pile.

“No, not early. I’m going so I can get settled a few days before training camp starts so I don’t have to run around like a crazy idiot once camp is over. Nobody wants that.” I looked up at Marcel, who had curled up in my desk chair.

“When are you leaving, then?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

Strange silence (seeing as how Marcel was still in the room, and he is never ever quiet). (Ever.)

“Are we all going for Christmas to my place in Montreal?” he asked. I nodded and returned to my clothes.

“As far as I know. Unless you get traded again, in which case we’re probably all coming to my house.”

Another awkward pause. My pile of “coming with me” looked to be shrinking next to the “staying in Slovakia, for ever and ever, world without end, because dear God I can’t believe I ever wore that and actually thought I looked good” pile, which was increasing exponentially.

Finally I sat back on my heels and looked at Marcel. “What’s wrong with you? Chicken bone in your throat?”

He looked down. “No, nothing. I’m just tired.”

“No, you’re not. If you were tired, you’d be asleep right now, not wasting your time talking to me about things you already know.”

He looked back at me then, really hard. “I guess I’m just jealous of Miro and I don’t want you to go back to Ottawa, because I like it when you spend the summers here.”

I gazed, open-mouth in awe, at my little brother. “You have never, ever been jealous of anyone in your whole life. Not even me. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me!” He rolled his eyes so far back I thought I was going to have to retrieve them from a dusty corner of my room. “You and Miro talk for hours, and he’s cool and all, but you’re cool too. I miss you in the regular season.”

I honestly thought my head was going to come off. “I’m not going to disown you or anything just because I’m in love! I’m not going to forget about you and Gabby and Zdeno and stuff. Miro can be like another cool brother to you.”

Marcel grinned. “Except cooler, because he doesn’t have so many ugly-ass shirts hanging around.”

“Hey!” I balled up a monstrous black-silver-teal shirt and threw it at him, causing him to lose his balance and fall out of my chair, into the pile of “ew, nasty” clothes.

I almost died laughing. “You ass, go away.”

“You go away.”

“You go away first, this is my room.” Neither of us budged, and at last I was forced to continue sorting and throwing the truly bad stuff on top of him.

A few minutes later the Great Ugly Clothing Monster sat up and spoke. “So you really do love Miro, then.”

“I do,” I said slowly. Sock Monster got up and started to leave.

“You’re lucky, then.”

“I am lucky to have him,” I said slowly. Nobody heard it but me, but that was enough. With some things, I didn’t have to show up and be brave and courageous all the time. Sometimes the only person I had to prove things to was myself.