“Is it working?”
“It’s working.”
“Your brother’s going to come for you tonight,” he says, quieter now.
“My brother comes for me every night. He came for me when I was nine and took my cereal bowl because I needed it to be the blue one. This is just a bigger building.”
“I mean it. He’s been building to this all series. The crowd, his family in the seats. He’s going to make a statement.”
“Then he’ll make it. There’s a net between him and me. The net is the one place nobody has ever managed to make a statement I couldn’t answer.”
“What if he goes after me instead.”
“He won’t. You’re not the one he’s scared for.” I say it like the settled fact it’s. Soren takes it. Then it’s the twenty-two minutes and he goes still in his full gear with the low beat in his ears, and I sit and watch the biggest, calmest man I know build himself aquiet out of nothing. That’s the last thing in this night that goes as I expect.
On the bench in the second I track him the way I track him. Mäkinen drops onto the boards next to me, breathing hard from a shift.
“Your brother’s running him.”
“I see it.”
“He’s been running him all series. Somebody’s going to answer it.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying. Don’t.” Across the ice Matty parks himself at the top of Soren’s crease. Soren says something to him I can’t hear. Matty doesn’t move. “Marchetti and Zay aren’t talking on the bench. You see that?”
“They’re fighting,” Mäkinen says.
“They’re not fighting. Zay’s mad Marchetti blocked a shot with his face in the second. He gets scared and it comes out as mad. It’ll be fixed by the bus.”
“How do you know that.”
“I watch. It’s the only thing I’m good at that isn’t this.” Berger leans in from my other side, eyes on the net.
“Lundy’s standing on his head. Twenty-eight saves.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“The one in the first that hit his blocker and dropped didn’t get counted. Twenty-nine.”
“I’m checking.”
“Check. It’s twenty-nine.”
The puck goes into the corner to Soren’s right. Matty goes after it and so does the kid on our third pair. The puck squirts loose toward the net. Matty turns. There’s a half-second where I can see the whole geometry of it how I see every geometry. The angleand the speed of him. I think, he’s going for the puck. He isn’t going for the puck.
He hits Soren square. Soren’s head goes into the post. His body goes down wrong, folded. The way a body goes down when nothing in it caught the fall.
Matty is standing where the hit happened. For one second he’s looking down at Soren and his whole body is still in a way that isn’t hockey-still, not ready-still. It’s the stillness of a man who can see what he just did. Then his shoulders square and his chin comes up and the stillness is gone, sealed over. I note that too.
Mäkinen is over the boards before the whistle. He has Matty by the jersey and the gloves are off and they’re throwing and the linesmen are late. The bench stands up. The bench is noise. Davis is on the boards screaming something at the ice. Berger’s hand is fisted in the back of my sweater. Soren isn’t getting up.
Reste là. The two words come up in French from somewhere I don’t keep them. I don’t say them. I don’t say anything. My hands are flat on my thighs and they aren’t running the pattern and they aren’t moving at all. The bench empties toward the glass and I’m the one piece of it that stays in its seat. I watch the trainer skate out, I watch them get to him. A leg moves, an arm moves. They turn him over on the ice my father taught me to skate on forty minutes from here.
