The bar had never been this quiet.
Milo
Milo went to the rink before dawn because the rink was the one place his brain shut up.
Fresh ice, empty arena, the overhead banks at half-power. His blades cut through the top layer with the sound of fresh ice in an empty building, clean, each stroke opening into nothing. No pucks. No drills. Just laps. His legs building while cold air came through the vents of his helmet and his lungs worked through the flat mineral taste of arena air.
I can’t survive it twice.
Adrian’s words. Four days, and they refused the box. He’d tried anger, reached for the usual shape and found it collapsing against the facts of what Adrian had said and why. He’d tried the clinical framework he used for line matchups and deployment problems. That lasted about forty minutes before the variables stopped being variables and became Adrian’s voice and the bar gone cold and the cloth moving and not moving and the hiss of the needle on nothing.
He’d tried the rink. He was trying the rink now.
He pushed off the far wall and came back along the left wing and the sentence kept pace. Sweat built under his helmet. His thighs moved past the burn into the register he could hold for an hour. The upper bowl lights clicked on, fluorescents humming, the flat white wash spreading across empty red seats in their thousands. The rink went from his to shared.
He kept skating.
* * *
Practice. He ran the drills. The puck went where he directed it, the timing clean. Kovac came by during the third-line drill and his look landed on Milo a half-second longer than passing required. Eyes narrowed. Stick tapped the boards once. He moved on.
Kasner was chirping at practice, the way Kasner always chirped, the inexhaustible optimism of a second-line center who’d been in the league two years and hadn’t yet learned that some mornings were not for chirping. He said something to Milo about the new stick tape color and Milo looked at him and Kasner’s chirp died in his mouth and he went back to the drill. Brody, across the ice, watched this happen and said nothing.
The game was a home game against a bottom-feeder, the Hounds up three-nothing by the second. In the third Milo read the left wing’s angle and fed the pass inside the defenseman’s stick. Tape-to-tape into the net. The goal horn hit him through the ice first, the vibration rising through his blades into his legs before the sound reached his ears. The arena’s full voice. He skated back to center, tapped Brody’s shin pad at the glass, and stood at the face-off dot while his name echoed in the upper bowl and came back carrying nothing.
The goal had been correct. The pass arrived, the puck went in, the arena was loud. None of it opened anything. The release that should have followed the horn, the loosening, wasn’t there. He used to feel it. Earlier this season, the weeks when he’d been playing better, the weeks when he’d been going to the bar and the studio and coming to the rink with something under his ribs that wasn’t anger, the goals had felt like goals. They’d carried weight and heat and the particular satisfaction of a thing doneright. Now the puck went in and the horn went off and the arena screamed and Milo skated back to the dot and felt like a man going through correct motions in the correct order and producing nothing.
He skated the rest of the period and the Hounds won and it was fine.
Locker room after. Kasner’s music too loud, the way it always was after a win. Guys talking over each other, the particular energy of a team that won a game they were supposed to win, which was louder than the energy of a team that won a game they weren’t supposed to because winning what you were supposed to required celebration and losing what you weren’t supposed to required only relief. Milo went through the gear routine. Skates off in order. Pads. Base layer. The ritual of undressing that he’d done a thousand times in a thousand rooms.
Brody came out of the shower with his hair going several directions and sat across from Milo’s stall with his elbows on his knees.
“You look like shit.”
“Feel like it,” Milo said.
His own voice, the real answer coming out in the space where the fake one should have been. He heard it and didn’t take it back. He pulled off his skate and set it in the bag.
Brody worked the towel over his hair. Eyes on Milo. Not the sidelong check, the full look, the look Brody gave him when Brody was done being patient. “Get it sorted.”
Not advice. The weight of someone who’d been waiting for Milo to say something real. His nod was small. He stood, slung the towel over his shoulder, and walked to his own stall.
Milo pulled off the other skate. Sat with his feet on the cold rubber mat and the room full of Kasner’s music and didn’t go anywhere for a long time. Then he went to the shower andstood under the water until the heat ran out and the cold hit his shoulders like the rink coming back for him.
* * *
He called his sister from the apartment kitchen one night.
Standing at the counter with no lights on, the refrigerator humming, the city’s orange through the south windows. The granite under his hand was cold and carrying nothing. No dish, no cutting board, no evidence that anyone had ever prepared food here. His phone in his other hand, her name on the screen, and at some point his thumb pressed it.
She picked up on the second ring. “Hey, you.”
Her voice through the speaker. The voice he’d known his whole life. His shoulders dropped.
She’d learned the same lessons from the same house. You waited for the other person to come to you, and if they didn’t, you let the distance pile up like snow on the porch until someone decided to shovel. He’d last called her in the spring. She hadn’t called either.
“Hey,” he said.
