"You could see them after. I'd cover for you."
"I know you would. That's not the hard part."
"What's the hard part."
"Being in that house and having everyone watch me be fine." He caps it there, the way he caps things that mean more than the words. "I'm better at fine when nobody's grading it."
"You're allowed to not be fine in front of me."
"I know. You're the room where I don't have to be."
My phone buzzes in my stall. I flip it over expecting the group thread, but it's my father. Unusual enough that I read it twice.
Watch your five-hole on the cycle entries. They run it off the far dot. Don't cheat the post.
No sign-off. No good luck. Just the note, clean and specific, as he's sent them since I was fourteen and he was coaching peewee in St. Louis and couldn't stop himself from fixing my game from across the rink. Karl Lundmark. He broke down three NHL goaltenders in the '90s and built the systems that did it. Then retired and coached the next wave of guys who'd do the same thing. He's never once in my life watched me play without sending a note after. Always after the whistle. Because before would be coaching against his own kid, and that crossed a line he drew the day I was drafted.
Except tonight it came before.
I look at the text again. He knows their cycle entries because his team runs the same scheme. He isn't coaching Montreal. But if we get through this series, he's standing behind the bench on the other side of the Final, and he sent me a scouting note on the team I'm about to play. In two weeks he will be the one I'm playing against. He won't send the note then. I know that the way I know every line he's ever drawn. The steadiness of his hand while he drew them is the first thing I learned about what it costs to love someone and compete against them at the same time.
His phone has been lighting the edge of the bench since warmups. Face-down. A steady pulse against the wood.
"Matty texted you?"
"Eleven times. He wants to put me through the glass on my own home ice and have my mother watch. He says it'll be character-building."
"That's a brother."
"That's Matty. He'll mean it for sixty minutes, and then he'll find me at center ice and ask if I'm sleeping enough."
Then it's the twenty-two minutes. The low beat in my ears and everything else falling off the edges. I don't know why twenty-two. I stopped asking a long time ago. The building shakes through the wall and inside the count it doesn't reach me. Up in one-twelve there's a woman who taught her son to set the table right before anyone had a name for why he needed it, and tonight her two boys are on opposite benches in the wrong sweaters. I hold that. Then I let it go. The count doesn't have room for it.
On the ice it's a different gear and I find it the second my skates hit the sheet. The barn comes down on us in the first shift and stays. Their top line cycles low and I read the half-wall how I read a room. Their winger cuts from the left circle. I have his hands before he uses them.
"Glove side," I tell him through the cage. "You go glove side every time you cut from there. Show me different."
He goes glove side. Quessa takes the rest off the post and I smother the rebound and he skates away telling the linesman something that isn't true. The crowd wants Matty every shift and he gives them their money. He's bigger than the tape says, and he plays the front of my net like he's looking for an address, bumps me after the whistle, a question more than a hit. I hold my ground. Say nothing. The answer he wants isn't one I'm giving him in front of nineteen thousand people.
"Gertie. Thank you," I tell the left post after she eats a one-timer that had eyes. I mean it. Somewhere along the way, I stopped saying it because he asked me to and started saying it because I believe it. "I've got the back door, you're good, you're good," I tell Davis, and he trusts it and steps up and we kill the look. "See it. See it. There." Between shifts I find Jules on the bench. Helmet off. Gone still in a register I've only seen twice,the stillness that isn't calm, where everything in him points at one place and nothing moves. He's watching his brother. His hands are flat on his thighs and not running the pattern. That's worse than fast.
"Quessa, this one's low," I say, and she's, and it isn't, and we move on. We score on a broken play late and the air goes out of the place through everyone's teeth at once. We hold the lead the way you hold a lead in a barn that wants you dead, with your back teeth and your blocker. The horn is the sweetest sound a road team owns. Down the line Matty finds Jules at center ice and says a few words, fast and low, mouthguard out. Jules answers. It doesn't land soft on either of them. Then we're into the cinderblock quiet and the door closes on Montreal.
?
The room empties by degrees until it's the two of us and the hum of the lights. Jules drops onto the bench beside me. Gear half off. Color back in his face now that the building's behind a door.
"We stole that one," he says.
"We held that one. There's a difference."
"You held that one. I sat on a bench and watched my brother try to relocate your spleen."
"He was being polite. For Matty."
"For Matty, that was a love letter."
I'm peeling tape off my wrist and my hands won't quite settle. That's when I see my stall. The heat pad is already plugged in, warming on the shelf where I keep my neck guard. The ice pack is in a towel, rolled tight, sitting next to my water bottle at the angle I drink from. My shower kit is unzipped and turned to face me so I can reach the soap without bending. All of it done while I was on the ice.
