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“Then it’ll be your sentence you’re serving,” I say, “and I’d rather serve mine.”
She puts the pages down. “Is he going to read this?”
“No.”
“He might.”
“Then that’s his business,” I say. “It’s not mine to put this in front of him.”
She signs the page as witness. I sign under her. My hand is fine. The crooked knuckle on the right catches the edge of the table, as it has since I was nineteen.
Sentencing is set for a Tuesday in the second week of June, in a courtroom with eleven people in it, four of whom are there for the case before ours.
Vera Lindqvist isn’t in the building. She’s been arraigned in a different courtroom in a coat the color of wet sand. Across a corridor, she looks at me and inclines her head about an inch. It’s more of a goodbye than most people get from her.
I’m released pending sentencing on my own recognizance. For seven weeks, I go every morning to an office over a sewing-machine repair shop and do four people’s tax work while the bruising fades through green into yellow along my jaw. Two of the four leave. The retired client with the daughter’s tuition reads about me in a newspaper and comes in anyway on Thursday. He sits down and says, well, it’s still my money, isn’t it. I have to stand in the corridor for a minute before I can go back in. He doesn’t ask whether I did what the papers say. He asks whether I still have the tax folder from March. The ordinary question lands harder than sympathy would have.
The ribs knit at six weeks. The eye doesn’t go back to what it was. It never will. A flat patch sits under the left one where the bone healed wrong. The skin over it doesn’t feel like the rest of my face.
The judge is a woman of about sixty. She reads for six minutes without expression, then speaks directly to me.
“Eighteen months,” she says.
Halloran’s hand comes onto my forearm, which means take it, which I was going to. The government wanted four years. She’s been saying two since April.
I’m permitted to surrender voluntarily. Eight weeks.
Out in the corridor, Halloran tells me eight weeks is unusual. She says I should thank the letter from Frances Yeardley, which I haven’t read. Then she tells me what to do with my apartment, the practice, the license, and my clients. I write it all down in a black notebook with an elastic across the front, on a fresh page, in five-line entries.
The elevator down is full, so I take the stairs.
On the second flight, my ribs make me stop. I stand on a landing in a federal building on a Tuesday in June, holding the rail. Thirty-eight years old. A license to hand back. A practice to close. No car. No savings. Eight weeks to manage all of it.
Then I go down the rest of the stairs and out through the doors into the heat.
23
The club lawyer wants to meet at the arena, which tells me who he works for before he opens his mouth.
Not downtown at his own office with his own name on the door. The arena. A small conference room off the executive corridor, with sponsor logos on the wall. A jug of water. The same pastries they put out for season-ticket renewals.
It’s the twenty-seventh of May. The building is empty for summer: ice out, floor down, a truck backed into the loading bay for a concert in three weeks.
He’s about fifty and very pleasant. He has a folder, a fountain pen, and a two-handed handshake.
“I want to say first that this is a process, and processes have shapes,” he says. “This one is simple: they ask. We listen. We go away. We come back. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“The interview’s set for the eleventh of June. Between now and then, you don’t speak to the league or compliance. You don’t speak to anybody. If Frances Yeardley calls your phone, you hang up and call me. During the interview, you answer nothing without me in the room. If I put my hand flat on the table, you stop talking mid-word.” He pours me a glass of water that I don’t want. “Now. My understanding of the situation, and correct me, is that you’re a young goaltender who had a difficult stretch in the back half of a lost season while there was family stress at home.” He looks up. “Is that a fair summary?”
Somebody in the loading bay drops a section of staging, and the whole floor shakes.
“No,” I say.
He waits.
“I’m not going to use you.”
