Page 28 of Five Hole

It is right there. Closer than it has ever been. The winter I stopped sleeping. What was in the house. Why the plates, why the candle a thumb from the curtain. I have never said it to a living soul. Not Sowa, who knows the shape of it and has the grace never to reach for the middle. Not anyone since my grandmother went into the ground.

Here, with his hand open on my chest and his breath gone even and slow, I get closer to saying it than I have ever been. I feel my throat get ready to make the shapes.

I could start with the house. That is how I would have to start. Not the order, not the shelf. The house first. The cold rooms of it and the mill whistle across the valley. The way you learn as a small boy to read a grown man’s boots on the stairs, fast or slow, and what each one means for the night. I could tell him the whistle is still in me. That a horn in a barn is a mill whistle to my body, no matter how many times I explain to it that it is only a horn. I could tell him my grandmother’s hands over mine, and what she taught them, and why. I could tell him she gave me a country to live in that was only as big as a shelf. That I’ve lived in it ever since. That it’s the smallest safe country in the world and I have been the only citizen.

The words are right there. I have never had them this close to the surface. It would take so little.

Then I feel how much it would be to hand him.

How completely it would put me in his hands. This boy who is taking my net a start at a time, with my own coach’s blessing and my own rope in his glove. Who has been gathering me since the first day. I have no proof of that and I do not need proof. I read shooters for a living and I know the feel of being read back. Somewhere in that boy is the whole map of exactly how to take me apart, and he has never once said so, and I have never once asked. He is warm against my side. He is also the living reason my crease is not mine tonight. The old thing closes my throat before the words can get out.

The gap. The one place I cannot let anyone through, even now. Even him. Especially him, because he is the one who could get all the way in. A thing that gets all the way in can bring the roof down. From the inside.

“What?” he says. He felt me go still. He always feels it. He’s learned my body the way I learned his. “You were going to say something. What was it?”

“No,” I say.

He waits. He knows it’s a lie. He’s lying against a man who has studied him at close range all season, and he knows it the second the word is out. He does not call it. That is new. He has always called it before, the bald lie handed over like a dare, and he takes the dare and turns it back on me. Tonight he doesn’t. He lets the lie stand in the dark between us.

Is that mercy? I can’t tell. I don’t know if he is learning, finally, to keep his own ledgers quiet. To hold a card back the way I hold every card back. Either way it costs me more than the calling would have. A man who lets your lie stand is a man who has decided the lie tells him something.

I board the window back up with him lying right next to me. Brick by brick, over the exact place I nearly opened. It is the loneliest thing I have ever done, and I have done a great many lonely things, on purpose, for years, as a way of life. I do it because the alternative is a fall and I do not know the bottom of it. A man who has spent his life keeping the dark on the far side of a wall does not go looking for the bottom of a fall. Not in the one season he cannot afford to land wrong.

He falls asleep with his arm across me. I lift it off a knuckle at a time, the way I did the first night, and I stand up in the dark of my own room with the day scattered on the floor around my feet.

So I pick it up. His jeans off the chair, my shirt from by the door, every piece back where the room says it goes, quiet enough not to wake him. When I finish, the room is perfect. I am still holding the thing I did not say, and a perfect room has not moved it one inch. I tell myself it was the right call. I do not believe me. You cannot lie to a body trained to read the smallest tell, and mine is reading my own tell in the dark, the way it read the scout’s pen. It knows the flat voice for what it is. A wall. Not the order. Nobody has ever put a name to the difference for me. I feel it anyway, standing in a squared room over a warm bed, holding a secret I could have set down in it and chose to carry back out into the cold instead.

I could still wake him. One word would do it. I stand there long enough to be sure I am not going to, and then I get back in and put his arm across me where it was. Because safe is the country I was raised a citizen of, and I have never once applied for another passport.

Chapter 15

Emile

It happens on a Tuesday, which is the stupid part, which is the part I can’t get past. Who loses everything on a Tuesday?

Not a big game. Not a game anybody will circle. A nothing game, midweek, the kind you win and forget by the weekend. Half the barn empty, the seats up top folded and dark, the sound gone thin and papery with nobody in the building to give it any weight. You can pick out one voice at a time in a barn like this. A dad three rows up telling his kid to watch the goalie, watch how he never chases. The kid watching the wrong end. The concession guy calling last call on the pretzels.

Casimir’s back in his net where he belongs and I’m on the bench where I belong, the depth chart reading how it’s supposed to read, one and then two. And I’m fine with it tonight, I am, because he handed me a start on the road and a word in a hall. I’ve decided I can be patient. That’s new for me. I’ve wanted the net so long and so loud that learning to sit and wait for it feels like learning to breathe underwater, but wanting him turned out to be a bigger engine than wanting the crease. So that’s the decision. Patient. Starting tonight.

This one doesn’t come true.

I keep circling back to it because some part of me still thinks if I circle it enough times I’ll find the version. The version where I was watching, really watching, where I saw the skate coming and yelled something, where it went different. And there’s no such version. I was thinking about a diner. That’s the truth I have to live in.

I’m on the bench with a towel around my neck and a water bottle I’m not drinking, doing the backup thing, which is watching a game you’re dressed for and won’t play unless the worst happens. You learn not to hope for the worst. It’s the first lesson and the ugliest one. Every backup learns it. And every backup lies about having learned it. Ask any of us. Same lie, every time. You sit and you track the play, you keep your legs warm enough to go if the phone rings and cold enough that you’re not the guy praying for it to ring. I’ve gotten good at that particular temperature. Years of practice at it.

Down the bench a freshman leans over, like they always lean over, because the backup is the only man on this bench with the time to answer a question.

“Fortin. What’s he doing right now? Looks like he’s doing nothing.”

“He is doing nothing. That’s the trick, that. That’s the entire job.”

“Doesn’t look like a job.”

“Sit still for a whole period sometime. In all that gear. With a building full of people waiting to find out whether you’re a fraud.” I don’t take my eyes off the ice while I say it. “Then come tell me what it looks like.”

The kid laughs. I don’t. I watch the man in the paint do nothing, beautifully, and I let my head go where it’s been going all period, which is to a diner on the road home where Bev keeps the grill on late for a bus full of us.

Their winger comes down the wing in the back half of the third and cuts hard to the net, nothing unusual in it, a play you see forty times a night, a hundred, a play so ordinary your eye almost doesn’t follow it all the way in. There’s a scramble in the blue paint the way there’s always a scramble, three bodies, a puck, everybody’s stick. And I’m half watching, half thinking about the bus, about the diner on the way back. Then it isn’t a normal scramble anymore.