Campus · Northbridge Ice
Don't Answer
Part 1 · the long cut · 10 min
My dead brother had saved the hockey captain in my phone as “Don't Answer.”
I know because the name was sitting on my lock screen at one in the morning, glowing up at me from the bar top between a bottle of blue sanitizer and a pint glass somebody had used as an ashtray. Don't Answer. Capital D, capital A, the apostrophe Theo always forgot everywhere else and never forgot when it mattered. He did that thing where he gave people nicknames instead of names, so that half my contacts were jokes only he understood. Mom was Warden. Our landlord was Mustache. I was never allowed to know what he'd saved me as in his own phone. He said it would go to my head.
I hadn't looked at those names in two years. I'd stopped seeing them, the way you stop seeing the crack in a ceiling.
This one I had never seen at all.
I found it because I was wiping down the bar at The Last Call, which is what you do at one in the morning when the only customers left are a guy asleep on his own forearm and the jukebox. The phone had been buzzing against the wood for an hour. Unknown numbers text bartenders all the time. Drunk regulars who got my number off the tip jar sign-up sheet Theo made me put out, back when he thought I needed more friends. Wrong numbers. Scams about packages I never ordered.
So I ignored it. Buzz. Wipe. Buzz. Refill the limes. Buzz.
It was only when I finally picked it up to shut it off that I saw it wasn't unknown. My phone didn't recognize the number. My brother's old contacts did. The number had been in there the whole time, filed under a name I would have remembered if I'd ever seen it, which meant Theo had put it there and never used it where I could see.
Theo has been gone two winters.
People say that like it's a unit of time, but it isn't. Two winters is two first snows I didn't text him about. Two Frozen Four brackets I didn't fill out. It's his number four still hanging from the rafters at the Harlow, and me walking the long way around the arena so I don't have to see it through the glass doors.
After the funeral, everyone told me to clean up his stuff when I was ready. I'm still not ready. I never changed anything he put in my phone. Not the stupid nicknames, not the ringtone he set for himself, a goal horn so loud I jumped every time, not the photo of the two of us eating gas-station hot dogs in a snowbank that he made my contact picture for Mom as a joke.
I never thought I'd need to change anything. Nobody was going to call from those names again. That was the whole point of leaving them.
I unlocked the phone and read the texts in order, the way you read a letter you already know is bad.
“You close at 2 right?”
That was forty minutes ago.
“I'm outside.”
Twenty minutes ago.
“I'm not leaving until you do.”
Two minutes ago.
I looked up at the front window. The neon Last Call sign buzzes and blinks, so the street outside is either pink or dark, pink or dark, and from behind the bar you can't see much of anything except your own reflection holding a rag. I looked at my reflection. She looked like someone who should call the police.
Instead I went and flipped the sign to closed, because apparently I am the kind of person who reads “I'm not leaving until you do” from a dead man's contact and decides to go see who it is.
The man outside was Declan Shaw.
I knew who he was the way everyone in Northbridge knows who he is. His face is on the banner that hangs off the parking garage by the arena, twenty feet tall, one glove raised. The Wolves' captain. The one the pro scouts fly in for. Six-three, and in person he was built like the reason the banner needed extra rope.
He was standing across the street under the one working streetlight, hood up, hands jammed in the front pocket of a black sweatshirt that said nothing, snow collecting on his shoulders like he'd been placed there and told to wait. He didn't pace. He didn't look at his phone. He just watched the door, and when it opened he straightened up very slightly, the way you do when a teacher walks back into the room.
I had my keys laced through my fingers the way my brother taught me. Declan Shaw looked at the keys, and then at me, and something almost like approval crossed his face.
He did not cross the street. He waited for me to decide.
I crossed it.
“How do you have my number.”
It came out flat. Not a question. I'd been practicing it in my head the whole walk from the bar to the curb, trying to find the version that didn't shake.
Up close he looked tired in a way the banner didn't show. There was a healing split over one eyebrow, and snow in his lashes, and he didn't blink at me, not once, like he'd been bracing for this and wasn't going to flinch now that it was here.
“Theo gave it to me.”
The snow ticked against my jacket. Somewhere down the block the plow was scraping the avenue.
“The night before.”
He didn't have to say before what. There is only one night in my life that the word before refers to. I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, the way the phone call landed, two winters ago, at a quarter after six in the morning.
“Theo didn't have friends on the team,” I said, which was a lie, and he let me tell it.
Then he started talking, low and even, like he was reading off a list he'd memorized.
He knew I worked Tuesdays through Saturdays and closed on Fridays. He knew my name was Maya but that nobody called me that except professors and my mom when she was angry. He knew I took my coffee with too much cinnamon and one sugar, stirred with the wrong end of the spoon, because that's how Theo used to make it for me when I was twelve and pretending to be old enough to drink coffee.
He knew because Theo told him. Every week. On the bus to away games, in the locker room, in the parking lot of the Harlow after practice. For two years my brother had been describing me to someone I had never met, the way you describe a place you're planning to take somebody.
I had spent two years thinking I was the only person left who remembered those things. It turned out I had never been the only one.
“He made me promise something,” Declan said.
“What?”
He looked away for the first time, down the street toward the arena, where the Wolves banner was lit up and flapping in the dark with his own face on it.
“And he told you not to answer if I ever called.” He almost smiled, but it didn't reach anything. “Both of those things are going to be a problem.”
I understood then that the name in my phone was not a joke. My brother had never once in his life warned me about someone. Not boyfriends. Not the guy with the van. He believed in letting me make my own mistakes, loudly, and then helping me bury them. For Theo to leave me a warning, even a sideways one, meant he'd been sure. Sure about Declan. Sure about me.
Declan took his hand out of the sweatshirt pocket.
For one second I thought it was going to be something normal, a business card, a set of keys, and I was already embarrassed by how badly I wanted it to be normal.
Then he held up Theo's phone.
The case was the ugly orange one I bought him as a joke for his birthday, the one he used anyway out of spite. The corner was cracked in the same starburst it had in the last photo anybody took of him. The one we searched the car for. The one the police said must have gone into the river with the rest of that night.
The one we never found.