The locker room after was the locker room after every loss. Tape peeling. Gear coming off in the order each player’s bodyhad memorized. The industrial cleaner cutting through the sweat and rubber and the particular quiet that existed when fifteen men were processing the same failure and processing it alone because that was how locker rooms worked, each body in its stall, each mind running the game back play by play.
Milo’s stall was in the corner. He’d chosen it his first season because the corner meant one neighbor instead of two and the wall on his right side meant nobody could approach from his blind side and he didn’t have to manage the peripheral attention of a body next to his. Three seasons of sitting in this corner and the choice had calcified into habit and the habit into identity. He was the corner guy. The team knew it the way they knew the schedule and the nutritionist’s meal plan and the training staff’s taping preferences. Nobody sat in the corner except Milo.
Kovac noticed the flatness first. His look during practice the next morning lasted a full second longer than it needed to, which for Kovac was the equivalent of pulling Milo aside and delivering a speech. He didn’t tap the boards. He just looked, and the looking said everything.
Brody noticed faster because Brody had been watching longer.
Post-practice. The locker room emptying. The showers running in the background, the drain sound and the steam curling over the tiled wall. Brody sat across from Milo’s stall with his hair going three directions and his elbows on his knees and said nothing for about thirty seconds, which was a personal record. Brody Sullivan was not a man built for sustained silence. He filled rooms. He talked on the bus and in the weight room and during meals and between periods and the fact that he was sitting across from Milo’s stall with his mouth shut was itself a statement louder than anything he might have said.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“Feel like it,” Milo said. The same two words from the same mouth and this time they landed different because this time there was nothing underneath them. No anger. No resistance. Just the fact.
Brody worked the towel over his hair. The Boston vowels came out flat and steady. “I’m going to say something and you can tell me to fuck off and I will. But I’m going to say it.”
Milo pulled off his skate. Set it in the bag.
“Whatever this is,” Brody said, “fix it. I don’t know what it is. I don’t need to know. But whatever you had going that made you play like a person instead of a machine, you lost it, and you need to get it back.”
Milo looked at him. Brody’s face was doing what it did when he was serious, which was nothing. The joking gone. The easy filler gone. Just a man sitting across from another man and saying the hard part out loud.
“I don’t know how,” Milo said.
Three words he had never said to another person in his life. They came out quiet and plain and Brody heard them and nodded once and didn’t make it bigger than it was.
“Figure it out,” Brody said. “You’re smart enough. You’re just scared.” He stood. Slung the towel over his shoulder. Stopped. “Being scared is fine. Everybody’s scared. Scared and doing nothing about it is the part that’ll kill you.”
He walked to his stall.
Milo sat with his feet on the cold rubber mat and his skate in the bag and the room emptying around him and thought about the wordscaredand how it had never been applied to him by anyone who knew him and how it was exactly right.
* * *
He was on the couch in the apartment that night with thetelevision on and the sound low, not watching, just letting the screen fill the room with light that wasn’t the refrigerator’s, when the post-game coverage came on.
Chicago had played that night. Fury won. The post-game scrum was the standard setup: reporters with microphones, players with wet hair and towels over their shoulders, the fluorescent-lit concrete background of an NHL media room. Milo’s thumb was on the remote when Cole Kiernan’s face appeared on the screen.
Of course Kiernan made it look easy. The man was insufferable. He sat in front of the microphones with the confidence of a person who had decided to stop being afraid and was now mildly annoyed that anyone had ever asked him to be. His hair was doing the post-shower thing. He looked like a man who had just won a hockey game and knew the next question wasn’t going to be about hockey.
“Cole, there’s been a lot of talk about your relationship with Viktor since the All-Star break. Can you tell us where things stand?”
Kiernan looked at the reporter. Not the media look. The real one.
“Yeah,” Kiernan said. “He makes me better. At hockey, at everything. I’m not interested in pretending that’s not true.”
Into a microphone, in a room full of cameras. Not a speech. Not a statement. Just a man answering a question like the answer was obvious and he was tired of acting like it wasn’t.
The reporter asked a follow-up. Kiernan answered it. The scrum moved on. The screen cut to highlights. Milo sat on the couch and the remote was in his hand and his thumb was on the button and he did not change the channel.
Kiernan had not prepared it. It hadn’t been a coming-out moment. It had been the truth, and he’d said it the way you saidthings that were just true, and the room had kept going, and nobody had died.
Milo sat on the couch with the remote in his hand. The apartment was quiet around him, the television still running, the highlights playing, the screen casting its light across the ceiling in moving patterns that changed with every camera angle. He sat with the remote and the sound low and the apartment holding its breath the way it had been holding its breath all week, and he thought about Cole Kiernan sitting in a media room and sayinghe makes me betterinto a microphone, and he thought about what it would feel like to say something like that out loud, and his chest did something new.
Not the constriction. Not the fist closing. The opposite. Pressure pushing outward against his ribs, against the inside of his throat, a fullness that wanted out, and for the first time in his life Milo didn’t clamp down on it. He let it press. He let it sit in his chest and push against the walls he’d built to contain it, and the walls didn’t break, but they flexed, and the flexing felt like something he could survive.
Milo picked up his phone. His sister’s name on the screen. His thumb hovered.
He thought about the clock. Wrong by eleven minutes. His mother buying a second one instead of asking his father to fix the first. The rug over the board. The three hundred jars his father kept in the basement, each one labeled in angular handwriting, each one a small act of ordering the world that didn’t require saying anything to anyone.
