“He’s up. They’ve got him up.” Someone’s voice, far off.
“He’s walking. He’s walking off.”
Mäkinen comes off through the gate with blood on his face and his knuckles split, and he drops down hard beside me. He doesn’t apologize. Mäkinen never apologizes for the right things.
“Somebody had to,” he says. “I’m not sorry.”
Davis has my mask. Davis is putting my mask in my hands.
“Soucy. Gear’s on. You’re in. Look at me, man.”
Bodie is in front of me, both hands on my cage, turning my face to his. “Soucy. Soucy. You’re in. Look at me. You’re in.”
“He’s in protocol,” the trainer says somewhere behind him. “He’s done for the night.”
“Julien. Net. Now. You’ve got this.”
I get up. I put the mask on. I skate out onto the ice in the building that raised me with my brother on the other bench and my mother in section one-twelve with a cooler of tourtière under her seat. I find the crease. I scrape it square how I scrape it. The noise of the building drops away the way it always drops away, because this is the one room in the world where my brain isn’t a problem to be managed. It’s the asset. It’s the only asset I’ve ever fully trusted.
So I hold. They come and I read them and I get where the puck is going before it gets there, because I’ve watched this team on film for two weeks and they don’t know I’ve watched them. The shots come and I’m already there. My hands are still. The crease still. I hold the post he hit Soren into. I hold for the rest of the period and into the next, and every save is clean and every save is the asset doing what the asset does. Underneath it, where the crease can’t reach, the rest of me is filling up. Everything I didn’t feel when he went down. Everything I didn’t say for two weeks. The crease holds the water out for as long as I’m in the crease. The bill is going to come due the second I leave it.
The horn goes. We win it, 2-1. The series is 3-2 and we’re still alive. The building boos. My teammates hit me and I don’t feel the gloves on my back. Mäkinen’s blood is on my white sweater. Somewhere down a tunnel Soren is sitting in a dark room with a light in his eyes answering questions about what day it’s. I skate to the bench and the crease lets go of me, the way it always lets go of me when the ice runs out, and everything it was holding pours forward at once into a body that doesn’t have room for it. That has never had room for it. I’ve held everyone all night by holding the net. There’s nothing left to hold it with. There’s no room in me for one more unspoken thing. I’m full to the teethwith the worst-kept secret on a team full of secrets. I haven’t said it yet. I can feel that I’m about to.
?
Chapter 22: Lundy
The doctor left the light off and told me to keep it off, so I've kept it off. I sit in the gray dark of the trainer's room with the towel they gave me cool across the back of my neck and the building going quiet around me one corridor at a time. The headache lives behind my right eye and pulses with my heartbeat. Slow. Deliberate. Like something keeping time.
I'm not supposed to look at screens. I'm not supposed to do much of anything.
I sit and I wait and I track the team breaking down by the sounds through the wall, and I do the only math the dark allows, which is whether Jules held it.
I think he did.
Nobody has come to sit with me. That's a deal I made a long time ago without knowing I was making it, the one where I'm the man who sits with everyone and nobody quite learns to sit with me.
Tonight the deal holds.
I tell myself it's because the room has to stay quiet. Most of me believes it.
The door opens and the hall light comes in like a blade and then it's gone and he's inside it, still in his gear, Mäkinen's blood gone brown on the white of his sweater, his hands not still.
And concussed, in the dark, with my own pulse keeping time behind my eye, the first thing my body does is reach for him.
“You played out of your mind,” I say. “Twenty-six in relief, on this ice, with all of it on you. Come here. You okay? Let me see your hands.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You caught one bare-handed in the third, I saw it from the tunnel before they took me back. Sit down, let me look at it.”
“Stop.”
“Stop what. Let me just see the hand.”
“Stop. Just stop. Put your hands down.”
There’s a thing in his voice I’ve heard maybe twice. The flat hard register from the worst nights.
