Matt packed up his camera. His laptop and clothes were already in the suitcase, and his key was on the desk. The only thing left were the index cards organized and spread out on the floor. He bent down, looked at the timeline of Rory’s story, the painstakingly constructed puzzle, and then scooped them up and tossed them into the trash.
All that was left to do was say good-bye to Henny. Technically, he could just walk out, let the door lock behind him, and be done with it. Maybe he was procrastinating; when he got into his car and drove onto the highway, it would really be over.
He walked to the back deck, where he could usually find Henny sanding or painting first thing in the morning, but the tables were empty and she wasn’t outside. Her car was in the driveway, so he walked to the front porch and rang the doorbell.
“What are you doing out here? You lock yourself out again?” she asked when she finally opened the door. It took her so long to respond to the bell he thought maybe she wasn’t home after all.
“No. I’m checking out. I left my key on the desk. I just wanted to say good-bye.”
“So you’re not extending your stay?”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I have to get back to New York.”
Henny burst into tears. Okay, this was a bit more of a good-bye than he had bargained for. His phone rang, but he ignored it. Dropping his bag, he asked, “Is something wrong?”
“No, I’m fine.” She sniffed. “I’m sorry. This is very unprofessional. You were a model tenant. It was great to meet you. If you can rate me on the website, that would be helpful.”
“Sure. Not a problem. But maybe…can I come in for a second?”
Matt hadn’t spent any time on the first floor of the house. The living room was just as quaint and comfortable as his bedroom, with cozy reading chairs upholstered in pale blue and yellow, a white wicker couch decorated with starfish throw pillows, a white wooden coffee table, and, of course, painted signs everywhere.
“Oh, you know, I want to buy one of your signs before I go,” he said, an attempt to cheer her up so he could leave without feeling like he’d walked out on her. “Something to remember this trip by.” Though he wouldn’t soon forget it. The place where his film died.
The comment brought a fresh wave of tears. “You’ll be the last person to buy one.”
“Why’s that?”
“Nora took them down from the restaurant walls. She needs room to sell fancy, expensive photos!” She blew her nose loudly into a handkerchief. “My signs have been on the walls of the café since the day it opened.”
This is what he got for procrastinating.
“Well, um, maybe another place in town will sell them.”
“I’ve been looking around but any other place wants too much of a percentage of the sale. I won’t make any money. And I don’t want to raise the price.”
“Maybe you should sell these online. Then you keep most of the money and you have your own virtual store. I know you said you don’t like doing things on the Internet, but that’s really where things are at now. You can sell to people all over the country. All over the world.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe when my son comes to visit for Thanksgiving he can set it up for me.”
“It’s not complicated. I can get you up on Etsy in no time.”
She brightened. “Really? If you can do that for me, I’m happy to give you a few nights here free of charge.”
“Thanks, but—”
“I insist!”
“I appreciate it, but I was here for work and now things have fallen through. I don’t have any reason to stay.”
The doorbell rang.
“Now, who in heaven can that be? And I’m a mess.” She dabbed at her eyes.
“Do you want me to get it for you?”
She nodded. Matt walked to the door, recalculating his timeline. He could set her up on Etsy, then grab lunch, then hit the road. He’d be back in New York by four.
Matt opened the front door.
“I changed my mind,” Lauren said. “I’ll do the interview.”
He stared at her.
The irony of timing was too much for him. He didn’t even have money to pay the sound guy and his DP.
“What changed your mind?” he asked, really just curious about the extent to which the universe was fucking with him.
“You were right about one thing. I do care about the truth.”
He looked at his packed bag just inches away from her. He thought of the two dozen index cards in the garbage upstairs.
He thought of Rory, chasing the puck in the crease, forty seconds left on the clock, game six of the Stanley Cup semifinals. He shoots, he scores…
“Come back in twenty minutes,” he said.
Lauren’s decision to talk to Matt had been a knee-jerk reaction to Emerson’s warning, and now that the moment had arrived, she was scared.
She stood outside Henny’s front door, her heart beating so hard and fast she felt she could barely breathe. I can just leave.
But no. She’d been going over and over it in her mind, and talking to Matt was the right thing to do. Yes, when he’d first shown up, when she’d learned about the film, she saw it as Matt asking something of her, taking something from her. And then when Emerson told her not to talk to Matt, she realized that Matt was actually offering her something. The chance to tell her story. Maybe it could serve a purpose. The truth might matter.
“Hey. Come on in. Almost ready for you,” Matt said.
“Wow. Is Henny okay with all of this?” Lauren asked.
All the framed photos and Henny’s signs were gone from the walls, and most of the chairs and the sofa had been pushed to one side of the room.
“Yes, she’s fine with it. Don’t worry. We’ll have this room back in shape by the time she gets home tonight. Can you have a seat in that chair?” He directed her to a dove-gray armchair that had been angled in front of the window.
“We’re going to…like, get right into it?” she said nervously.
“Let me check the setup here,” he said, twisting the legs of a tripod to stabilize it. She perched on the edge of the chair.
“And you said this would just take an hour?”
“Lauren, if you can just slide back an inch,” he said.
Lauren fidgeted nervously in her seat. Matt moved from behind the camera and sat across from her. He grabbed some papers from a nearby end table and handed them to her.
“Before we start shooting, I need for you to sign this release.”
“What? I never agreed to sign anything.”
“It’s standard operating procedure, Lauren. You don’t have to sign it, but if you don’t, I can’t film you.”
She glanced down at the pages in her hands.
“You don’t have to answer any question you don’t want to, and you certainly don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.”
“But everything I say on camera you can use or edit?”
“Yes. Once you’ve spoken on camera, the material becomes, essentially, property of the film company.”
She scanned the paperwork, then looked up at him.
“I need to know why you’re doing this film,” she said. “Why this? Why Rory?”
He met her gaze, and the intensity was unnervingly familiar to Lauren. There had been only one other person she’d known who could convey all his passion and focus in a quiet glance.
“My older brother, Ben, was a Marine,” Matt said. “He enlisted right after 9/11. Fought in Operation Enduring Freedom. And we lost him in 2004. There was no fanfare. He wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times. There was no memorial in an arena televised for the world to see. No one except for the people who loved Ben cared that he was gone. He was just another statistic. But when your husband died, he became America’s hero. I couldn’t tell my brother’s story, but I knew I could at least tell Rory’s.”
She nodded slowly. And signed the release.
“I have to mic you up,” Matt said. “Normally I have a sound guy, but you threw me a curveball today.” He knelt in front of her chair, leaning close to feed a wire down the front of her shirt. Her pulse raced from his nearness. “Sorry—almost done,” he said. He reached around her to clip a sound pack to the back of her jeans.
She felt relief when he stepped away and looked at her from behind the camera.
“One more thing. I just need to fix this so it’s not visible.” Matt moved back to her and reached around her waist to adjust the sound pack. Then he checked her mic before returning to the chair opposite her, picking up a laptop, and resting it on his knees.
She exhaled.
“You ready to get started?” Matt said.
“Um, yeah.” She was still unnerved by his nearness, the way it had felt to have him invade her personal space.
“Okay, so just look at me. As if we’re having a conversation. Yeah, like that. I know it’s strange, but try to forget about the cameras.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“When I ask you a question, I need you to respond by repeating part of it. So if I say, ‘What is your name?’ you say, ‘My name is Lauren Kincaid.’ All of my questions will be edited out, so for this to make sense, you need to repeat the question.”
Lauren swallowed hard. Behind the cameras, a tall square light beamed down on her.
“So, just to get the ball rolling: Tell me your name and your relationship to Rory Kincaid.”
“My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid is my husband.”
“Lauren, I’m sorry—can you repeat that but using past tense.”
It took her a few seconds to register what he was saying. When she got it, she took a short breath before saying, “My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid was my husband.”
“How did you two meet?”
“We met in high school. I was writing an article for the school paper about the hockey team, and I interviewed him.”
“What was your first impression of Rory?”
“When I met him, I guess you could say the school had put him a little bit on a pedestal. The hockey team was doing great, he was the captain even though he was only a junior, and he was the lead scorer. He was the lead scorer in the entire division.”
“So he was a big deal.”
She nodded. “I interviewed him for the school paper, but the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about him too.”
“What did the Inquirer article say?”
“It was about Philadelphia-area high-school athletes who had the attention of college scouts all over the country. The only one mentioned from Lower Merion School District was Rory. They even ran a photo of him.”
“Do you have a copy of that?”
“Somewhere. I can look for it.”
“That would be great. Okay, so, when did you first go to one of his hockey games?”
“After I interviewed him for the article, I went to his game that Friday night. They played against Radnor and won in a shutout.”
As much as she’d tried to be a neutral observer of the game, reporter-like in her attitude, she couldn’t take her eyes off Rory during the three twenty-minute periods. Even when he was on the bench, she watched him drink from his Gatorade bottle or wipe his brow with one of the white towels the team assistant handed around. He scored a hat trick. After his third goal, the crowd tossed their LM baseball hats and ski hats onto the ice. The energy in the rink was electrifying, and Lauren was hooked—on hockey, and on Rory. “Rory scored all three goals.”
Matt asked if Rory was thinking at that time about a career in the NHL, and she told him that he liked hockey but he was also interested in astronomy.
“Astronomy,” Matt repeated.
“Yes. In high school, he was always reading astronomy books. And he was really gifted in math, so he knew astronomy was something he could get into someday.”
When she’d met him, he had a Rottweiler named Polaris. The North Star, he’d explained to her. The brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor.
Matt nodded, consulting his laptop. “Were you at the game the night the puck hit him in the jaw?”
“Yes. I didn’t see it happen because I was…talking to someone. But I went to the hospital immediately after.”
“Was there any talk at that time that he might have sustained a concussion in addition to injuring his jaw?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
Matt asked more about how Rory had homed in on a hockey career, and she told him about the agents showing up at Harvard by his junior year.
“They threw around such crazy numbers in terms of money,” she said. “Rory’s mom was a widow, and he worried about taking care of her. Once the money became a reality, there was no question he would go into the NHL.”
“And yet he opted to play for only two seasons,” Matt said.
Lauren swallowed hard. “That’s right.”
Matt asked about Rory’s injury in December of 2009, and she repeated what she’d told him off camera: Dean Wade was wrong. Rory hadn’t gotten a concussion. “He was back on the ice the next game.”
“But a few months later—the fight with the Flyers’ Chris Pronger. That was unquestionably a concussion,” he said.
“Yes,” she conceded. “It was. And a fight with the team we’d grown up watching. Talk about insult to injury.”
Rory would be out of play for a few weeks at least. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Rory had been scheduled to represent the United States in the Winter Olympics alongside an LA Kings teammate, goalie Jonathan Quick.
Lauren didn’t rush to buy a plane ticket after that injury, but then his mother called to say she was spending a week with Rory and maybe Lauren could find time to come the following week. With a lump of alarm in her throat, she’d said of course.
She had one day of overlap with Kay. Looking back on it, that was a mistake in planning. Rory’s mother busily cooked for him and fussed around the apartment, making Lauren feel extraneous. Kay talked endlessly about Emerson, who had just announced he was going back to West Point as an instructor.
“Your father would be so proud,” Kay said with a sniff over lasagna that night.
After dinner, Rory retreated to the bedroom. He watched CNN, as he apparently had been doing all day long for the past seven days. He was obsessed with the November shooting at Fort Hood.
“Try to get him out and about,” Kay said on her way to the airport in the morning. “I know you’re not much on cooking, so maybe a restaurant here or there will do him some good.”
Lauren convinced him to walk the few blocks to Hugo’s for dinner that night, but he was sullen and quiet. She’d been told that depression was a side effect of the concussion and tried to reassure herself—and him—that it was temporary.
“What am I doing with my life?” he said, slumped back in his seat at the restaurant, looking out at Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Come on, Rory. This is irrational. You’ll be back on the ice in a few weeks. This happens. It’s part of the deal when you play at this level—you know that.”
“What do you know about it?” he snapped.
“I’m just trying to help!”
“Well, don’t.”
She wanted to say fine, he could wallow in his self-pity by himself. She had exams to take. Instead, Lauren tried turning the conversation to more positive things, like their plans to spend July at the shore house. Her grandmother had died earlier in the year. She’d left the Green Gable to Beth, who told Lauren and Stephanie they could have the house for the summer—it was too soon for her to be there without her mother. A quick negotiation determined that Stephanie would have the house in June, Lauren would take it in July, and they’d split August depending on their schedules.
“It will be good to have some time for just the two of us,” Lauren told Rory. “In the place where it all started. Prom weekend, remember?”
He grumbled a response.
Later, when he was in the shower, she went outside and, standing among the exotic plants outside the apartment building, called Ashley Wade.
“Don’t take it personally,” Ashley said. “They all get nasty when they hit their heads. Trust me, in two months you’ll tell him, ‘You were a real jerk back then, you said such and such,’ and he’ll laugh and say he doesn’t remember.”
But she would remember. And for the first time in a very long time, her future with him seemed uncertain. He wasn’t the Rory she knew, and this made her nervous.
She called Emerson—a mistake.
“You can’t freak out over every little injury,” he said. “You’re dating a professional athlete.”
Lauren didn’t say any of this aloud to Matt.
And then Matt leaned slightly forward, not glancing at his computer but looking straight at her. He said, “His style of play changed after that. Everything changed after that, didn’t it?”
Lauren stared at him. She began to speak, then stopped. It would be a betrayal of Rory to reveal his weakness to the world; it was the last thing he would have wanted. “I don’t know what you mean by that.” Her hands fluttered to the mic clipped to her shirt. “Your hour is up.”