Page 33 of Gave Proof Through the Night

Now I’m weirdly craving nacho fries.

By the time I hit the ice, three separate guys have already called me Zesty. Once in passing, like it’s the funniest thing anyone’s ever said. Once by a guy I am fairly sure I have not been formally introduced to. I have officially lost control of the narrative, and it’s not even noon.

“Precio! Nyberg! Twiles! Line one!” Coach Badaszek doesn’t look up from his clipboard. “And somebody figure out why it smells like a food court in my rink.”

Honestly, I don’t know how the smell still lingers. It must have gotten on my jersey. I skate my drill. I take my reps. My body runs the breakout perfectly on autopilot. Up the boards, I find Twiles cutting through the middle, and hit him in stride. My body does all of it correctly, muscle memory running the whole operation, while my brain, unsupervised, wanders off entirely.

It wanders, predictably, to her.

And the part that’s starting to feel less like coincidence and more like the universe running some kind of bit at my expense… She keeps showing up.

Monday morning, I was on my jog along the river when there was a whole cluster of people in the park doing slow-motion tai chi in the grass. And there she was, dead center, moving through some pose with her eyes closed like she owned all the serenity in the world. I was running past sweating and gasping like an idiot, and she opened one eye at exactly the right moment and waved. Like running into me at six in the morning during meditation was just a regular occurrence for her.

I almost ran into a trash can.

Then Tuesday, while I was at the corner store for my pregame gum (I chew the same brand, every game, since college, a superstition I will defend to my grave), and I was standing at the display rack with a fistful of gum packs, and she was walking out the door, breezing past with a bag of something and a coffee, tossing me a nod, like we were old neighbors. Like this is just where she lives now. My whole orbit.

Today is Wednesday. I genuinely cannot wait to see where she turns up.

She has to live near the Four Seasons. There’s no other explanation. It’s the only thing that actually makes geographic sense. Except it doesn’t, not really, because the tai chi park is nowhere near the corner store, and the corner store is nowhere near the Coffee Loft, and if you drew a map of everywhere I’ve randomly run into this woman in the last few days it would look less like a neighborhood and more like a conspiracy board with too much red string.

“Precio!” Badaszek’s whistle cracks like a rifle. “This is a drill, not a Jet 2 Holiday. Focus.”

“Yes, Coach.”

Jake skates past, smirking. “Now who has the porcelain doll ghost face?”

“I do not!”

“Whatever you say, Zesty.”

Ugh!

We run special teams for the back half. I feed Stone a puck down low, he buries it top corner, throws his arms up like he just discovered hockey personally, and somewhere in the split second before the whistle blows again I’m thinking about an eyebrow with a scar through it and a laugh that haunts my daydreams. Maybe she’s the ghost.

Stone skates up beside me during the water break, entirely too observant for a man who claims he doesn’t gossip. “Whoever she is, she’s got you skating like you left the stove on.”

“There’s no she.”

“Sure.” He says, then adds, “Zesty.”

Oh que la chihuahua.

After practice, I shower and swing by my hotel room for a stack of postcards I need to mail before the day gets away from me. I’ve got cards for my dad in Mexico City, a handful of cousins, and a few more for family out in LA. It’s a genuinely embarrassing quantity of cardstock for one guy to be hauling through a city he’s been in for less than a week.

I’m one block from the post office, stack tucked under my arm, when Chase Sullivan falls into step beside me like he’s been waiting on the corner specifically for this. Sullivan plays for the East Stripes for this tournament, but we played together on Team USA in February, winning Olympic Gold together. But during this tournament, he’s the enemy. Not that any of that matters off the ice.

“The hotel does that, you know. Concierge mails stuff. Full service.”

“I know.”

“So why are you personally hauling what looks like forty pounds of postcards to an actual post office?”

“Because I want the good stamps.”

He blinks at me, entirely too delighted. “The good stamps.”

“They released a whole series for the two-fiftieth. There’s a Declaration of Independence sheet which has feather quills spelling out 1776, like the Founding Fathers used.” I hear how much enthusiasm is in my own voice and choose not to be embarrassed about it. “You don’t get that from a concierge. Concierge gives you a boring flag stamp.”