IKONEN: Nobody wanted us. We found each other. Now we're here. [a beat] I stopped being surprised by this group a long time ago.
COACH BOUDREAUX: Nobody picked this team to win a game in April. We're playing for the Cup in June. I'll let that speak. That's all for today.
Chapter 24: Soucy
The car is quiet in a way the car isn't supposed to be quiet.
There's a paper folded in my bag because I folded it and put it there instead of reading him a clue. That's the system. The system has run every morning for two hundred mornings and it isn't running now, and the not-running of it sits in the footwell the whole drive like a thing I should pick up and can't.
"Light's bad on Tenth," Lundy says.
"It's always bad on Tenth."
"Construction."
"I know about the construction."
The blinker ticks four times and stops. I count the ticks because the ticks are there to be counted, and counting them is better than the alternative, which is the size of the spaces between his sentences.
"Door code changed," he says. "Playoff security. Same as last round plus the year."
"I have it."
That's the carpool. Every line is a fact that needed to move from his head to mine, and not one of them is the thing. Theblinker ticks four times coming off the ramp and I've lost count of a thing I wasn't counting.
The goalie room is mine for forty-five minutes, the one structure on this whole team nobody rearranged to be kind to me. It's the one thing I built. On a morning like this morning I want the thing that's only mine. I lay the pads out. Left, right. The tape goes on top of the left pad where the tape goes. I check that it's on top. It's on top. I check again, because the check is the routine and the routine is mine.
Thompson comes in with two coffees and sets one by my left hand, far from the edge.
"Forty-five," he says. Not a question. He knows the number.
"Forty-five."
"You're at what."
"Nine."
He sits. He doesn't talk while I work. That's the entire reason Thompson is one of two people with access to the part of me that lives under the part everyone gets. He learned that the way to be in a room with me is to be in the room and require nothing of it. I'm at nine. I go to ten.
"Lundmark's running their forecheck heavy on the weak side," he says, after a while, which is how Thompson hands me film without asking if I want film. "Berger saw it on the bus."
I give him the read on their forecheck. The overload, the trap, the clean look that isn't clean. He lets me talk because that's what Thompson does.
"That's a lot of words for you."
"You asked."
"I didn't ask anything. I said a sentence."
"You said a sentence at me with your eyebrows doing the thing."
He laughs into the cup, both hands around it, shoulders going. Most people never get to the part where Thompson laughs likethat. I'm at fifteen and the count is flowing and the hands are quiet, and the hands going quiet on a day like this isn't nothing.
"Their five-hole guy on the second unit telegraphs. Drops his shoulder before he goes low. You'll see it from the bench before anybody on the ice does, and it won't matter, because you're on the bench."
"I'm aware of where I am."
"I know you are." He turns the cup a quarter turn, sets it down, looks at the wall instead of at me, which is how Thompson asks a real question. "Car was okay this morning?"
