Broken Good
The next afternoon, having won their second game of the tournament, the team, in Mark's definition, was officially on a winning streak he hoped would extend until the end of the tournament. As he pulled on his jeans and sweater after toweling himself dry from him shower, he was so proud of them all and loved each one of them for themselves. He could list each player's scars, recite each one's quirks, and describe every one's idiosyncratic hobbies. On ice, helmeted and in full equipment, he could recognize each player by their distinctive skating stride, and, off the ice, he could be blindfolded and still pinpoint who laughed at whose quip. Their fierce dedication to the sport and absolute faith in one another was always as warm and reassuring as his mother's hand on his back. That was why it hurt so much to steal from a teammate or to imagine a teammate robbing him and Mac.
Standing on tip-toe to reach the top shelf (and reflecting that one of the millions of perks of being a midget in a world designed by towering trolls was that he had developed extremely strong toes in the process of grabbing at things that were practically out of his grasp), he tugged down a plastic bag loaded with assorted candy canes he had purchased at a pharmacy before the game. It was time to begin his mission to distract Rizzo and steal the gregarious BU boy's key.
Wishing himself the fairest of fortune in his scheme and shoving down the pangs in his conscience that accused him of being a thief and a liar, Mark removed a candy cane from the bag, ripped apart the wrapper, and popped it into his mouth. Then, channeling every chatty person he had ever met and doing his best to act as though he was convinced that everybody in the locker room was riveted by every thought that made its long, lonely journey across his mind, he commented cheerily to the team at large, "I love candy canes. They're the best holiday candy ever. They're so sweet, but they've still got this kick to them. Man, they should sell candy canes year round."
"Then they might not be as festive and special, Mark," pointed out Buzz lightly, as he passed en route from the showers to his locker, bundled in a turquoise towel. "Can't have too much of a good thing. Especially if it's candy. That results in serious stomach discomfort."
"You're right. Too much sugar causes stomachaches that are anything but sweet." Mark's eyes widened as if he had suddenly recalled, after the exam, an answer to an important test question he had left blank. "Oh, and I'm being so rude, aren't I? I'm not supposed to eat candy without offering it to the whole class. That's what all my teachers always said, and they were never wrong about anything. Do you want a candy cane, Buzz?"
"You bet." Buzz smiled warmly as if Mark was always this outgoing and energetic, instead of this talkative mood being as uncharacteristic as Rizzo remaining quiet for an entire day. "There could be no better way to celebrate a victory."
"That's what I think." Enthusiastically, Mark bobbed his head in affirmation. Then, he rummaged about in the bag until he found a candy cane the color of melted milk chocolate, which he thrust at Buzz, remarking, "Here's a hot chocolate candy cane, because you're such a warm personality."
Before Buzz could reply, Mark tossed a peppermint candy cane at Bah, who had been walking alongside Buzz. As a slightly bemused Bah caught it, Mark grinned and explained, "Peppermint is perfect for someone as hard-working and traditional as you."
Deciding that the third Conehead would make as good a next target for his generosity as anyone in the locker room, Mark sauntered over to Pav, who was humming tunelessly to himself as he packed his pads into his duffel.
"Do you know something awesome about candy canes, Pav?" inquired Mark solicitously, noticing with a somersault in his intestines that every eye in the locker room was fixed on him and every ear was straining to hear his next word.
Look at me, Dad, he thought, willing himself not to panic under all this scrutiny even though he felt like a bug under a magnifying glass, I'm the life of the locker room. It's kind of fun, I admit, but it's also really scary, because everyone's staring at me like I have green skin and an antenna. You always made it look so easy, laughing and clapping everybody on the shoulder, but it's draining for me. I feel like a fish in a bowl, and I just hope I'm the type of goldfish that grows when it's placed in a bigger bowl.
Mark half-expected Pav, who was such a hermit that he made Mark seem like a Hollywood star who forever courted the paparazzi, to ignore him, but, instead, Pav simply shook his head.
"They look like hockey sticks," Mark chattered on inanely, improvising as he went along. Throwing a candy cane to Pav, who caught it smoothly, Mark wondered inwardly how talkative people like Dad and Bob Suter managed to speak as they thought, unafraid of sounding stupid, while he had to fight with every word his instinct to reflect and edit before opening his mouth. "If you got a big one, you could fool a teammate into thinking it was their stick, and it would make a wonderful smash when it hit the ice, wouldn't it?"
Pav hesitated, contemplating this, and then rewarded Mark with a thin smile and nod.
"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard." Steve Christoff snorted. "Believe me, that's saying something, because I've played for Herb for four years, and half of his favorite expressions can't be understood without a major disruption of brain tissue or the space-time continuum."
"A lemon for a lemon." Clicking his tongue reprovingly, Mark strode over to Steve and deposited a yellow candy cane into the other forward's palm. "That should provide enough commentary on what I think of you and your attitude."
Steve opened his mouth to retort, but was chopped off before he could begin by Rob, who was chatting to Silky and Rizzo near the latter's locker, shouting across the room, "Get over here now, Magic! We want some candy canes. Don't you dare snub us."
"Just because you aren't first, Robbie, that doesn't mean you're being snubbed." Mark wrinkled his nose as he appeared behind Rizzo's shoulder. "You're so sensitive to everything."
"Give out the candy, and drop the attitude, Mark." Rob scowled and then continued in a stage whisper to Silky and Rizzo, "Don't worry. When he gets like this, you just have to be firm with him like he's a disobedient, hyper, but ultimately friendly puppy."
"Does he, um, get like this often?" Silky, tactless as ever, wanted to know, casting Mark a nervous glance as if they had never met and Silky, sensing he was a nutcase, wished to keep it that way.
"Only when he has sugar-high." Rob shrugged. "I told him to lay off the candy canes, but he insisted they would provide him with a nice energy boost in the game. You see the side effect of his nice energy boost is him acting like a complete lunatic, but dealing with a sugar-high Magic is just one of the noble sacrifices I make as his roommate, because I understand that genius is difficult—especially for those, such as me, surrounding the genius."
"Have you tried a shock collar?" suggested Silky, his gleaming eyes still directed on Mark instead of Rob, although he was addressing the latter. "That might help you control your roommate when he gets like this."
"Nah, I haven't." Rob offered his evilest smirk. "I bet lovely Leslies has, though."
The mocking emphasis his roommate put on his girlfriend's name was too much for Mark, who observed airily, "That's better than anything your dear fiancée has done to try to control you, Mac. Wasn't it gelding she tried last time?"
"That was way below the belt!" Rob yelped in indignation, planting his hands on his hips. "Literally, and since I do still have stuff to hit below the belt, that hurts."
"Nobody here is going to investigate that claim too closely, and you shouldn't make jokes if you can't bear one just as keen." All innocence, Mark chuckled and slipped a jade green candy cane between Rob's fingers. "Here's a sour apple candy cane to make you feel better. It reminds me of you, because it's so tart."
"Never become a doctor." Rob rolled his eyes. "Your bedside manner would leave a ton to be desired."
Ignoring this declaration, Mark snaked his arm around Silky's shoulder and dropped an amber candy cane into Silky's jacket pocket, announcing, "It's molasses, Silky, so it should move at your pace."
"Ha ha." Silky made a flat noise in his throat that sounded like anything but a laugh. "Jokes about my supposed slowness aren't older than Paul Revere's corpse or anything."
"Disgusting metaphor." Reproachfully, Rizzo shook his head. "Did you seriously have to go there with the maggots and everything?"
"It's the first thing I thought of, so, yeah, I did." Shrugging, Silky tore open the wrapping of his candy cane and began to suck on it.
"That's not at all a creepy thought to have for no real reason." As usual, Rob's voice was sagging with sarcasm like bread soaked in olive oil too long. "Oh, and eating right after you think about maggots munching on a dead body is one hundred percent normal, too."
"Who cares what's normal?" blustered Silky, folding his arms across his chest. "Normal is so uncommon that the only freaks are painfully normal folks like you, Robbie."
"We can't give you a normal candy cane, Rizzo," Mark put in before Rob could offer a rejoinder. His hand dove into Rizzo's windbreaker pocket, where Mark had covertly observed Rizzo placing his key when they were changing before the game. As he dropped the cotton candy pink cane he held in his fist into Rizzo's pocket, he grabbed the key, tucked it up his sleeve, and removed his fingers from Rizzo's pocket, continuing in a voice he hoped was happy enough to provide a distraction from Rizzo's lighter windbreaker, "You need bubblegum flavor, because you're such a bubbly personality."
"You're rather bubbly today, too." Guffawing, Rizzo pounded Mark merrily on the back. "Robbie just invited Silky and me to go bowling with him. Do you want to come along?"
"No. I promised—" Mark, about to say Leslie's name, remembered Rob's urge to taunt him whenever he brought her up, and changed his sentence a split second before it was too late—"Diane that I would call her after today's game, you see."
"Of course." Somberly, Rizzo nodded, and Mark knew that he would encounter no teasing about Diane. In the locker room, jokes about his developmentally delayed sister were as off-limits as ones about Jim's dead mother. There were certain wounds too raw to be poked at, and teammates instinctively recognized which scars should never be torn open again. "Our loss is Diane's gain. Tell her I said hey, all right?"
"Sure." Mark nodded, swimming in guilt for using his disabled sister as an excuse for not going bowling with Rizzo while he raided the BU boy's hotel room in search of the lost Christmas tree. He was, he chided himself severely, the world's worst older brother. It was awful enough when he complained about his lot in life, as if it were terrible torture to have to run up a hill when he should just be grateful he had two functioning legs, or as though it were a dreadful burden to have a coach who dared to be critical when preparing a team for the Olympics, and forgetting as he internally cried himself a river that there were probably millions of people who would go into spasms of delight if they could inherit his so-called problems. However, taking advantage of his littlest sister's disability was a new low for him…
"Good man." Rizzo patted him on the shoulder, and Mark corrected inwardly, I'm only a good man if you consider a liar and a thief a good man. If not, then I'm a scumbag playing on your sympathies for my developmentally delayed sister…
Vowing to himself that he would atone for at least a portion of his crimes against Rizzo and his younger sister by keeping his promise to call Diane some time that evening, Mark snatched up his duffel from his locker and headed out of the room. As he walked down the hallway that led out of the rink, Ken Morrow caught up with him.
"Great game." Tearing himself out of his conscience's lecture about his reprehensible conduct, Mark forced a grin that pained his teeth and lips but that he didn't dare remove, because then someone might glimpse the ugliness that lurked beneath the pleasant exterior. "Really solid defense on your part. You're like a rock, and I mean that in the best possible sense."
"You're like lightning. You really lit up the scoreboard, Magic." Ken returned the compliment, and then went on, "Anyway, I overheard you telling Rizzo that you were going to give Diane a call. That's great."
"Yep." Despite his strongest efforts to contain himself, the bitterness burst from Mark's lips in a stream as they exited the rink, gusts of wind greeting them with blows of snow to the face. "I don't phone her as much as I should. The Olympic player gets busy, and his little disabled sister gets forgotten."
"I'm sure you love her," answered Ken quietly as they turned down the street toward Mirror Lake and the hotel. "That means you could never really forget her."
"Maybe I don't forget her." Mark bit his lip and stared at his shoes sloshing a path through the snow on the sidewalk. "Perhaps I remember all too well how painful it is to talk to her on the phone, fully aware that she barely understands a word, and so I do the cowardly thing—the easy thing—and don't call her as much as I should."
"It hurts to look at a sibling you love and know you can do what they can't." Ken paused, and then proceeded gingerly, seeming to select every word with tremendous care, "Really, you'd rather that they could be the one who could do what you couldn't. Look, Mark, my brother and I used to dream of being in the NHL and everything. Everyone thought that, if either of us made it in a big way, it would be him, because he was so much more driven than me, and I was just as cool as a cucumber about everything. Then my brother got injured, and it was just me who would have to try to live the NHL dream for both of us. After my brother's injury, I knew that every moment I spent playing hockey was a gift I could never earn, but I admit there hasn't been a second that went by since when I haven't wished that it was my dream that died, not my brother's."
As they arrived at the lakeside hotel and stepped into the bright, enveloping warmth of the lobby, Mark murmured, "Ken, you're such a great guy. There should be more people like you on this planet. Then there might not be less suffering, but it would be a lot easier to deal with, you know."
"You're like me." Ken clapped Mark's shoulder as they wended their way through coffee tables and upholstered furniture toward the elevator bank, where he pressed the up arrow, and they waited for an elevator to land with a clang. "That's what I'm telling you, so you realize that if you ever need to speak with anyone about Diane or anything else, you can feel comfortable approaching me, since I swear I'll do my best to be a sympathetic ear."
An elevator heralded by a ding and a glowing up arrow arrived in the lobby. After moving aside for a knot of suited businessmen probably in a hurry to attend some fancy dinner conference flocking off the incoming elevator, Mark and Ken boarded it, hit the button for their floor, and watched the metal doors close around them.
"Thanks." Mark swallowed the lump in his throat, and then changed the subject as the elevator shot up the shaft. "Do you mind if I drop by your room to check up on Bob? His mom would want me to make sure that he isn't jumping on his bed with his broken ankle or anything."
"Of course I don't mind if you come visit." Ken grinned as the elevator opened its doors with a ding that announced they had reached their floor, and they entered their corridor. Walking down the carpeted hallway that muffled their every footfall until they came to the room Ken shared with Bob, Ken added, "Somebody beside me is welcome to make sure that Bob doesn't hurt himself for a change."
Smiling at this comment, Mark watched as Ken removed a key from a sweatpants pocket and twisted it into the lock.
"I'm back," said Ken as he and Mark stepped into the hotel room, shutting the door behind them. "Did you miss me?"
"Words fail to describe how much." With a snicker, Bob glanced up from the comic book he was perusing on his bed. "You'll have to look at the mound of Kleenex in the garbage to get an idea of the number of tears I shed in your absence."
"They were probably more from joy than sorrow." Ken chuckled.
"Probably," agreed Bob, laughing.
"You seem to be doing well," Mark noted, plopping at the foot of Bob's bed without permission, since the beauty of friendship was in never having to ask if you could sit down and just doing it.
"My ankle is feeling better," reported Bob, "but I'm going stir-crazy. It's like when you're little, and you pretend to be sick so you can stay home from school. At first, you welcome the chance to lay around and do nothing. Then, after a few hours of extreme boredom, you realize that doing anything—even reciting stupid multiplication tables all day—is a hundred times better than doing nothing. Herb's practices and conditioning may brutal, but they're much more fun than taking it easy on my ankle all the time."
"I'll bet," Mark replied, smiling slightly. "Herb may be a lunatic, but his practices aren't nightmares. I mean, he gives us free reign to be fast and creative, and he doesn't yell at us when our experiments make a mess as long as we clean up afterward, and don't repeat sloppy mistakes."
On a whole, Herb Brooks wasn't the raving madman Mark had immediately judged him to be when Olympic training started. Although Herb always reserved the right to lash out at any player at any time, everyone on his team recognized that Herb probably wouldn't scorch their ears for attempting a new technique and failing monumentally. Their coach would rather them make errors of commission, so they could learn from their mistakes, than errors of omission, in which they had no hope of emerging from their daze long enough to achieve anything.
Besides, Mark had noticed, Herb, no matter how furious he seemed, never actually lost control when he was taking a player to task, and Herb tended to save his most burning diatribes for players like Dave Silk or Rob McClanahan who played hot—riding a wave of adrenaline and challenge to a rocky shore—rather than players like Ken Morrow and Mark who played cold—avoiding every emotional crest and trough that could distract them from the glistening horizon ahead. Herb knew how to motivate players of both styles, neither of which was inherently better than the other, and he was glad to be the enemy a hot player could push against to succeed. Agree or disagree with his methods, Mark thought nobody could deny that Herb understood exactly what he was doing and was in total control at all times…
"Yeah." Bob stared out the window at the pewter gray ripples on Mirror Lake's surface. "Playing hockey on this team has been so much fun that I don't want to imagine being kicked off it."
Frowning, Mark reflected that hope and reality, where injuries were concerned, often lay in inverse proportions. Bob didn't have to spell out his fears so explicitly; they were exactly the ones Mark had been sternly forbidding himself from harboring for days, since he knew that doubt was like dye. Once it spread through the fabric of excuses he had woven, he would never be able to erase the stain.
"What nonsense are you spewing now?" Mark arched an eyebrow. "How can you even talk about being cut from this team?"
"Face it, Mark." Bob's mouth firmed into a grim line. "I'm not the kind of player anyone would want on their team right now."
"What are you talking about?" demanded Mark, figuring that pretending ignorance would be less agonizing than acknowledging his fears about Bob's tenuous position on the roster. "It's not like you're a serial killer. You don't torture chipmunks or do anything revolting, except try to burp 'God Bless America' at the dinner table—"
"I only did that once," Bob protested, and, before Mark could counter that once was more than traumatizing enough, added flatly, "but think about it. I'm damaged goods, and nobody, especially someone as impartial and pitiless as Herb Brooks, keeps things that get broken. Sooner or later, they get tossed in the trash."
"Bob, you're not being sent off, believe me." Mark's jaw clenched. "And if you are, I'll run away with you."
"Pinkie promise?" pressed Bob, as if they were Pee Wees.
"Pinkie promise." Like a Pee Wee, Mark hooked his pinkie around Bob's and squeezed as if that would be enough to keep them on the team together forever.
"Where would we go?" asked Bob, as though they needed to plot their itinerary immediately.
Back to when we were Pee Wees, and being kicked off an Olympic team was an impossibility, Mark thought, but, since he couldn't begin to describe how they could travel back in time, he suggested, "Budapest. I don't really know where that is, but I like the way it explodes off my tongue like a firecracker."
"Or Shanghai." Bob picked up the exotic theme and ran a mile with it. "That's in China."
"Or the Galapagos." Mark was resolved to prove that he wasn't a complete geographical ignoramus. "That's off the coast of Africa where Darwin did a lot of his research on evolution."
"We could travel the world together." Bob's eyes shone like the sunset. "It would be our own friendly freak show: the boy who breaks and the boy who always holds himself together."
Wishing that he really could always hold himself together, Mark pushed himself off Bob's bed, muttering, "I've got to go. I owe Diane a call."
I'm getting really good at lying, he told himself bitingly. I'm becoming a master at saying something that sounds like I'm about to do one thing when I'm actually about to do something else entirely. In this case, I owe Diane a call, but instead of picking up a pay phone and chatting with her (or to her), I'm going to sneak into Rizzo and Silky's room like a thief in the night.
"You do that," Bob responded, as Mark faded back into the hallway. "Tell her I said hi and that I hope she is doing great. If anyone deserves happiness, she does."
Mark nodded to show that he had heard and understood his friend. Then, he shut the door, and, deciding that all of their teammates should be returned to their rooms so they should not notice if he slipped into Silky and Rizzo's instead of his and Rob's, he walked two doors down, slid Rizzo's key into the lock, turned it with a twist that seemed to reverberate down the empty hallway like a judge's gavel, and entered the room Silky and Rizzo shared.
As he closed the door behind him, Mark, wrinkling his nose, observed that the room was littered with a lot more detritus than his and Robbie's. Bracing himself for the rank stench of old sweat, he combed through a mound of dirty clothes over a foot in height, but found no Christmas tree and no ornaments or lights.
Undaunted because he had not anticipated recovering the stolen tree or its decorations that easily, Mark moved over to the dresser, beginning to examine the drawers, placing his hands on stacks of clothing to feel for any tell-tale bulges that might conceal ornaments or lights.
Still empty-handed at the end of this portion of his search, Mark crossed over to the closet. After rifling through all the clothes on the hangars and climbing onto a chair in order to inspect the shelf at the top of the closet (a task that required him lugging the desk chair over from the opposite side of the room, because no hotel room was ever designed with the needs of vertically-challenged beings like him in mind), his search remained fruitless.
Beginning to wonder whether Rob had been wrong to suspect Rizzo and Silky of the Christmas tree theft, Mark returned the chair to the desk, and started exploring, no longer truly expecting to uncover any evidence of culpability in the Christmas tree crime, in the drawers for ornaments, lights, or even the tree itself. When, as he had surmised, he located nothing of interest in the desk drawers, he walked into the bathroom, telling himself that this was his last chance to vindicate what he was doing—to make it an investigation, albeit a deceptive one, rather than a completely baseless betrayal.
He glanced at the sink, spotting nothing but the same sort of toiletries he and Rob possessed. Moving over to the shower, he yanked back the curtain, wishing he could be greeted by the sight of the tree, but only seeing shampoo and soap bottles.
Pulling the curtain back to its original position, Mark left the bathroom and crossed over to the desk, where he placed Rizzo's key, thinking, Rizzo, I'm sorry I stole your key, snuck into yours and Silky's room like this, and rummaged through yours and Silky's things. I was so wrong to believe either one of you were thieves. I hope that neither one of you find out about this, but, if you do, I hope that you'll forgive me.
Informing himself in no uncertain terms that he was a liar and thief utterly unworthy of friends as loyal and honest as Rizzo and Silky, Mark checked that everything was how he had found it since Rizzo and Silky didn't deserve to anguish over whether someone had stolen their belongings. Then, after ascertaining through the peephole that the hallway was clear, he exited the room as silently and as swiftly as a ghost.
Convinced that he might feel a little less like a totally despicable individual if he at least kept his promise to call Diane, Mark walked over to the elevator bank, pressed the down arrow, and waited for a descending elevator to arrive.
A minute later, one halted at his floor with a ding, and the metal doors opened to reveal an elderly lady as doughy as a cinnamon roll with hair as silvery as the melted sugar on the pastry's top, and a rail-thin, balding gentleman who was probably her husband.
"Hello," Mark said, putting on his bland, mingling smile as he joined them in the elevator and the doors slammed shut. As the elevator resumed its descent, he checked that the lobby level was indeed lit up. Seeing that it was, he leaned away from the buttons and resigned himself to a journey with fellow passengers who smelled like mothballs.
"Hello, son," croaked the elderly man, who, at his advanced age, was still taller than Mark.
Mark hoped that this would be the end of their polite chitchat, because small talk with male strangers who believed he was in such desperate need of a father figure that he wanted to be referred to as "son" by complete strangers seldom went well.
"Are you here on vacation with your family, dear?" the old woman, who had plainly not sensed Mark's desire to be finished with this conversation, asked.
"Nope." Mark shook his head, wishing that the elevator would arrive at the lobby any second now. "I'm attending a hockey tournament with my team. It's just us boys and the coaches."
"You don't look a moment older than thirteen!" gasped the old lady. "Coaches really are taking babies out of their mothers' arms these days. Your poor mother must be worried sick about you. I mean, what if you get injured, and she's not here to dry your tears?"
"I'm legally an adult, ma'am." Mark's face was frozen into the smile that meant he was wishing he could be alone to bury his head in his palms and scream for an hour. He hated being confused with a pubescent—absolutely hated it. "Mom believes I can find my own Kleenex now, and so do my coaches."
The old woman opened her mouth to reply—probably something to the effect that Mark couldn't possibly be an adult when he could not be over the age of thirteen, as if she, who had just met him, was a better authority on his birth than he was—but she was mercifully cut off by a ding as the elevator finally reached the lobby.
"After you." Mark waved the elderly couple out first, hoping that they might not be blind enough to miss the flash of his engagement ring. "Have a good evening."
Once the elderly couple had hobbled out of the elevator into the lobby, Mark stepped out of the elevator and strode over to the pay phones encased in their private, glass bubbles.
Finding a vacant one, he walked through the door, pulled the requisite change out of his wallet, dumped it into the slot, and began to dial his home number. He was about to punch in the last digit when he lost his courage, and his finger stilled. Coward that he was, he couldn't bring himself to talk to Diane knowing that she could barely understand a word. Speaking to her face-to-face, he could see her smile, which allowed him to pretend that she understood whatever he was trying to communicate to her, but, over the phone lines, there was only her silence and befuddlement. He loved her but so much was lost in translation over telephone wires…
"Your call could not be completed as dialed," an automated female voice trilled from the receiver next to his ear. "Please hang up and dial again."
Mark put down the receiver, dropped more coins into the slot, and punched in Leslie's number this time.
"Hello?" The music of Leslie's voice fluted through the receiver after two rings.
"Hi, Leslie." Mark smiled, hoping she could hear it in his tone.
"Hi, Mark," she said, and he could hear the grin in hers. "How are you?"
"All right." Mark twisted the cord around his fingers. "It's everyone else who suffers because I'm a terrible person."
"You're not a terrible person," corrected Leslie fiercely. "You're a very good one, in fact, because I don't have bad taste in fiancés. Sure, you mess up sometimes like everyone else, but the important thing is you learn from your mistakes, and you don't repeat them ad nauseum."
"I was going to call Diane tonight," mumbled a shame-faced Mark into the receiver, "but I couldn't bring myself to do it."
"Okay, that is kind of bad," Leslie admitted, and that was one of the fifty million reasons why Mark loved her: she didn't lie to him, not even about himself. "But I know that you love Diane so much it hurts. You understand, in a way she doesn't, all that she can't do and might never be able to do. It's not surprising that becomes overwhelming sometimes. Not calling Diane doesn't automatically make you a monster, Mark; it just makes you human."
"Yeah, a selfish human." Sighing, Mark pinched the bridge of his nose. "You don't have to make excuses for me, Leslie."
"Actually, I do," insisted Leslie. "If I don't make excuses for you, you'll beat yourself up more than you already have. I know how hard you are on yourself. For others, you find forgiveness when they mess up, but for yourself, it's all criticism. Nobody can be perfect. You've got to stop expecting that of yourself."
"I would like to be perfect," muttered the part of Mark that empathized all too much with Rob McClanahan's obsession with re-taping his sticks until all the tape was exactly even. "I should be perfect."
"No, you really shouldn't," Leslie countered. "It would be very annoying and daunting to the rest of us mortals if you were. We like you with the few faults you have, thanks."
"Leslie." Maybe, Mark thought, Rob was right, not that he would ever say so to his smug roommate. Perhaps he did pronounce Leslie's name differently than anyone else's—like a caress, letting the inflection of his voice be the only intimate touch that could float through phone wires. "I love you, beautiful."
"When you proposed to me, I dared to hope that was what you meant." Leslie laughed.
"You're supposed to say, 'I love you, too, handsome,'" Mark reminded her, chuckling.
"I love you, too, handsome and humble," she assured him, all sweetness.
"You're making my ears turn red." They really were blazing like beacons, shouting to the world to stare at him, because all he wanted was for nobody to look at him while he melted through the floor in a puddle of love and embarrassment.
"Maybe you really are modest, after all," she taunted, utterly unsympathetic to his plight. "Perhaps you are the most humble man on Earth, destined to be forever unable to brag about your greatness."
"My money is running out," Mark told her, as a warning beep sounded from the receiver. "I'll call you again soon. I promise."
"That's a promise you'd better keep," Leslie advised him crisply. "My life is a desert drear without the oasis of your conversation."
"Have I ever lied to you?" Mark arched an eyebrow, even though he was well aware that she could not see his quizzical expression.
"No," she answered dryly, "and you shouldn't dare to lie to me about this, either, or else I'll yell at you until your ears really turn red."
"I'm going to marry such a charming, even-tempered woman," teased Mark. Then, more seriously, he added, "Goodbye, Leslie. I love you."
"Love you, too," she responded. "Goodbye, Mark."
Once they had hung up, Mark left the pay phone booth and returned to his hotel room. He had just finished making himself a peanut butter and raspberry preserve sandwich when Rob burst through the door accompanied by Rizzo and Silky. They brought with them the odor of beer and greasy food.
Rob, who apparently had been planning to rub Rizzo and Silky's noses in the tree Mark was supposed to have recovered, shot Mark a pointed, inquisitive glance that Mark responded to with a quick, quelling headshake that meant he would explain everything later.
"How was bowling?" Mark asked before Rizzo's or Silky's attention could be captured by the silent exchange between him and his roommate.
"Great." Rizzo launched into what would doubtlessly be a long answer as Mark bit into his sandwich. "We had five games. Robbie and I each won two before Silky won the last one. He needed to have the bumpers up, and Robbie and I had to aim at the gutter a few times, but he did it in the end. It's just lucky he doesn't want to be on an Olympic bowling team."
"Do they have an Olympic bowling team?" demanded Rob, probably calculating his odds of making it if he ever wished to try out for the team.
"They shouldn't." Silky sneered. "Bowling isn't a real sport. It's just weightlifting for losers."
"Steady now." Rizzo clapped Silky gently on the shoulder. "I told you to go easy on the Buds after your first three. You know you aren't a pleasant drunk."
"I'm not drunk," snarled Silky, nearly slurring the syllables.
"Tell me that with a straight face when you're all hungover tomorrow." Rizzo shook his head, and then, casting around for a change in subject, wanted to know, "What happened to the Christmas tree you guys had in here? Did Santa steal it to give to his elves?"
"No." Rob smirked. "Silky here isn't the only one who can't hold his booze. After last night's binge, Mark and I wanted to discover what a Christmas tree falling out of a window sounded like."
"Ah." Rizzo guffawed. "And what did it sound like, Mac?"
"Nothing spectacular." Rob gave a dejected sigh. "It just made a thump as it landed in a snow bank. Really, it was so boring and disappointing that we decided not to go to the bother of finding it. What a waste of fake timber that tree was, and the world would be improved without it, in my opinion."
"Your love of fake nature stuns me." With a final chortle, Rizzo guided Silky to the door, tossing over his shoulder, "I've got to get Silky safely tucked into bed before he hurts himself. See you two tomorrow."
Once the door had shut behind Rizzo and Silky, Rob hissed, "Mark, I thought we had an agreement, but, obviously, you weren't ready to keep your end of the bargain. You should've just told me that you didn't want to be a part of my plan, instead of lying by acting as though you were going to do something you weren't."
"Don't accuse me of lying to you, Mac." Mark's mouth tightened. "I've lied to a lot of people today for your sake, but you aren't among them."
"That's funny." Rob rolled his eyes. "You say you didn't lie to me, but you plainly didn't keep your promise to sneak into Rizzo and Silky's room."
"For your information, I did." Mark's spine stiffened. "Maybe you should ask before you accuse next time."
"I'm asking now." Rob folded his arms across his chest. "Where the heck is the Christmas tree if you searched in Rizzo and Silky's room?"
"I have no clue." Mark's voice and eyes were cold as winter wind. "You see, the flaw in your otherwise brilliant plan was that there was no Christmas tree in that room."
"Did you search everywhere for it?" Rob's forehead furrowed.
"Yes." Mark's gaze widened emphatically. "And I didn't find so much as an ornament from our tree."
"Then we've got to think of where else Rizzo and Silky could have hidden the tree." Rob massaged his temples. "Those BU boys don't have wood carvings for brains, after all, so this is going to be more of a challenge than I thought."
"I realize that it is practically impossible for a prideful person like you, Rob, to admit you were wrong, but could you at least refrain from acting according to theories that have just been proven to be woefully inaccurate?" Mark gritted his teeth. "Let's try to stay on the right side of the fine line between stubborn and stupid, shall we?"
"I know you want Rizzo and Silky to be innocent." Rob's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Still, all the proof I provided against them yesterday stands—"
"Oh, please be quiet." Mark held up a silencing palm. "You're the one who is so blinded by your need for Silky and Rizzo to be guilty that you can't see the fact that there was absolutely no evidence to be found against them in their room."
"That just means they're clever, not innocent." Tutting his tongue impatiently, Rob pressed, "Can we at least agree that we have to keep looking for our tree?"
"I'm glad that you at least have the wisdom and maturity to understand that it's more important to find our tree than to pin the blame on Rizzo and Silky." Mark offered a terse nod. "As long as you can stay focused on our true goal of locating our tree, we're united by a common purpose and can work together to solve this mystery."
"Wonderful. My vengeance can wait until the tree is recovered." Rob grinned wolfishly. "Tomorrow, Magic, our search intensifies, so get a good night's sleep."
"