Chapter 32: Lundy
"Forty seconds, Soren. Forty seconds." Davis is gripping the boards next to me on the bench. Not looking at the ice. Looking at me, like I'm the one who can do something about it.
"I know."
"He's got it. Look at him. He's got it."
"I know he does."
I have the best seat in the building. I can't use a single thing it shows me. Their six skaters cycle the puck low and Soucy tracks it through the bodies, square and set, exactly where the geometry says. There's a part of me that wants to be out there. A strap to fix. A word to say. There's nothing. There has been nothing for days. Tonight, for the first time, the nothing doesn't feel like failing. It feels like front-row seats. The puck comes to the slot off a scramble and their best player one-times it. The shot that ends seasons, the shot Karl drew up for exactly this moment. Soucy is already there. He's been already there his whole life. The puck dies in his glove. The horn goes.
The horn goes.
It is not supposed to happen, is the thing. An expansion team in its first year. A roster stitched together out of the players nobody else thought worth protecting. A backup who came here to spend a career behind a starter. And a Cup. None of it was ever supposed to add up. A season that was dead on a stool at the end of the bench nine days ago is the last team left standing on the ice, and the horn does not care what was supposed to happen. The horn just goes and goes and will not stop.
For half a second nobody moves, the way nobody moves at the top of a fall. Then the bench empties over the boards in one body, gloves and sticks in the air. The building comes down. I do not go.
I stay where I am with my hands on the boards. I watch.
I have spent a full season watching this man make himself small. Watching him angle a chair toward the exits and apologize with his shoulders for the room he was using. Watching him file himself under the least space a person can take and still be in the world. Watching the team learn his routine and protect it without being asked. Every act of that care landing on him as a debt instead of a gift. And now I watch the whole team bury him. Twenty bodies folding down onto one goalie at the bottom of a pile at center ice. He is not bracing. He is not apologizing. He is somewhere underneath all of them. Taking up every inch of space twenty grown men can pile on top of. Chosen and wanted and swarmed. I have never in my life seen anything I wanted to keep this badly.
For a full season the most useful thing I knew how to do was make his small-ness survivable. Move the jacket off his hook. Sit two stalls down and not say anything. Fix the thing before he noticed it needed fixing. And there is nothing to fix down there at the bottom of that pile. There is no small-ness to make survivable. There is just a man being loved out loud by twenty people at once. Not one of them needs me to manage it. I get tostand here on a leg that does not work and watch it happen. I feel only the one clean thing. I am glad. I get the crutches under me. I go over the boards last, slow, the leg taking what it can, because tonight I do not need to be first. Tonight I get to be the one who watches.
By the time I reach the pile they're peeling off him, hauling him up. His mask is off and his face is doing the thing I've only seen it do twice, and I get a hand on the back of his neck.
"Hey. Hey. I've got you. Come here."
"We won," he says, like he is reading it off a card he does not believe.
"You won. You. Say it the right way. You won it."
"We won it."
"Close enough. I'll take it."
Then the room finds us. The room has always known where to find us. It closes in loud.
Across the ice, Avi has both hands in Ash's hair, pulling him close. Ash's face is buried in Avi's neck. Neither of them is pretending it's about hockey.
Baz has Tikh by the front of his jersey. Holding him steady with both hands. Tikh is the one crying, which I've never seen. The quiet one finally making noise. Baz is just holding him there like an anchor that's been waiting for this current his whole career.
Berger is over at the boards, listening to something Mercer from Miami is saying. For once in his life, Berger is not talking. Not rating anything. Just leaning into him.
Marchetti lifts Zay off his feet with the shoulder that's supposed to be icing, and Zay doesn't tell him to put him down, which is how I know even Zay has run out of rules tonight.
Somewhere in the noise Soucy's hand finds the back of my jersey and holds. Not pulling. Just holding. I let it stay therebecause his hand on my back in a room this loud is as private as a locked door.
"About time," Thompson says, both arms around the both of us. "Both of you. The whole room had money on it. I held the book."
"I had you two at minus four hundred in October," Berger yells, skating back over to hang off Soucy's shoulder pads. "Nobody took the bet. Nobody bets against a lock."
"Wait, were we not supposed to know?" Fontenot asks, a confused look on his face. "Did we know? I feel like I knew."
"Everybody knew, Fonty."
"Everybody knew."
"Seven games. Seven. I aged a lot tonight, I'm forty now." Berger again, somewhere behind me.
