Page 59 of The Reckless Rookie

Ryan finds me coming down the slot and I step into it, and it goes top corner over the glove through a screen, and the barn comes up out of its seats, and I let the clean glad noise be enough. Sully told me in a losing room that first night, you want to hurt a team like that, put one behind their goalie. Took me a season and a ranch to learn how to hear it. Tonight it’s where the heat goes now. I found somewhere to put it that isn’t a man’s face.

By the middle of the second I’m playing the best hockey of my life and I know it in my hands, that rare clean feeling where the game slows down and I’m a half-step ahead of all of it, reading it the way she reads a yard. I’m on every loose puck before it’s a puck. I block two shots I’ll feel for a week. I kill most of a penalty by myself and don’t come off. Every shift the building gets a little louder for me, and every shift their bench gets a little more desperate to make me what I used to be, and I keep skating, and it keeps not working, and I can feel the whole game bending our way one clean shift at a time.

Here’s what I don’t have room to notice until later, watching it back.

The whole bench is waiting for me.

Every shift I come off, somebody’s eyes hold a beat too long. Sully. Ryan. Roman, who stood in a tunnel weeks back and handed me a countdown like a man who’d already decided how it ended. Three more rounds of you not swinging. This is the game that sends us to the Conference Final, and they’ve spent it doing everything to me that ever worked, and Roman’s on the bench counting. I made this decision weeks ago, alone, on a black road and in a bunk, the way she taught me, so that by the time I hit the ice there’s nothing left to decide. The fight isn’t something I’m resisting out here. I declined it a long time ago, in the quiet, where deciding happens.

They can’t see that from the bench. All they see is a guy eating runs at his knee and chirps about a hospital and answering none of it, and I understand later that’s the whole point. The not-answering had to be invisible to me to be worth anything. If I’d felt like a hero doing it, it wouldn’t have been the thing.

Second intermission, up a goal, and Mack finds me at my stall before I’ve got my helmet off.

“Your phone.” He’s not joking, which for Mack is its own alarm. “Sierra caught me in the tunnel just now. Said Catt’s been trying to reach you and couldn’t get through, so she went through her.” He watches my face. “Something about the horse, man. She said it sounded serious.”

Sierra found the one route into the room and used it. Catt reached through the one person who could get to me.

I dig my phone out of the bin. One text. Her name on my screen for the first time since the barn, since she called me a good worker.

Bonita’s foaling. Early and wrong, the foal’s breech. I’ve got no right to ask you for anything. But you love her and I thought you should get to know. Come if you can.

I read it standing in the tunnel with a Conference Final on the far side of one period, and I don’t wrestle it, because there’s nothing to wrestle.

Six months ago I’d already be in the truck. I’d have torn the gear off and run for the lot and driven north with the hazards on and left my team a man short in the biggest game of the season, because that’s what the old me did. He ran at the thing coming apart and let everything else burn.

I’m not him anymore. The team needs me. Tonight, this period, they need me on the ice. And Bonita needs me too, and I can’t be both places, and the barn is an hour north whether I leave in this tunnel or after the horn. So I finish the game the team needs, and then I drive to the horse who needs me, and there is no version where I do those in the other order.

I thumb four words back to her. Coming when it’s over. Then I hand the phone to Mack for the bin. My voice isn’t working right, and he doesn’t say anything about it, because he can see what’s on my face and he won’t insult it by pretending it’s nothing.

Then I go back out for the third with a horse dying an hour north and a Conference Final in front of me, and I do what I’ve always done with something too big to carry.

I put it in the game.

They see the change in me and read it wrong. They think something finally cracked, and they come harder, and they’ve got it backward. I’m not cracking. I have never been more together. Everything that used to come out of me as a swing comes out as hockey now, and the third period I play is the best twenty minutes of my life on a sheet of ice. I win every wall. I plant myself at the net-front and take the cross-check that comes with standing in the blue paint each time and never turn around, because that’s the whole job now, the one I learned out here: you eat it and you don’t answer it. And when the puck comes loose to the slot, I put it through everything and in, and we’ve got the lead and the building coming down around it, and none of it touches me, because the part of me that would enjoy it is standing in a barn I can’t reach.

And a team playing for its life is a hard thing to bury.

They tie it with the net empty and six skaters on, a scramble that finds a stick in the blue paint with a minute left. And then they get the next one in overtime, four minutes in, a point shot through a screen our goalie never sees until it’s behind him.

That’s the game. That’s the season not ending tonight the way I wanted it to, which was with a ticket to the Conference Final punched and nothing left to prove.

Their bench pours over the boards. Ours stands and watches them do it, because that’s the tax on a game you had in your hands and let get away. We don’t clinch. Series even, three-three, a game seven in two nights that right now I cannot make myself care about, because I did everything right tonight, the best game of my life, ate everything they fed me and answered none of it and buried what I could, and it wasn’t enough, and there’s no fight to have with a puck that went through a screen in overtime.

Playing the game of your life. Losing it. Those two weigh the same.

Roman finds me in the room, where nobody’s talking, because a game you had and lost in overtime is its own kind of quiet.

“Whole building watched them go at your knee and your record all night,” he says, to his laces, not to me. “A game that sends us to the Conference Final, and you didn’t so much as drop a glove.” He looks up. “I counted. Told you I would.”

“You did.”

“Number’s zero.” Flat. Then he gets up, crosses the room, and puts his hand on the back of my neck, the way you only do it to a guy who’s yours. “Had you wrong. Took me all year. We’ve got one more game in us, and I’d rather walk into a game seven with the man you turned into than the one I was scared of.” He lets go. “Now go do whatever’s had you staring at that tunnel since the horn. It’s bigger than this. Go.”

I’m out of my gear faster than I’ve ever been out of it. No shower. I pull jeans over the whole wrecked night and I’m in the truck with a text I’ve read six times, and I point it north.

There’s a game seven in two days. Somewhere under all of it I know that, the biggest game of my life still out ahead of me, a place in the Conference Final still there to win or lose. It doesn’t touch me tonight. Tonight there’s an hour of black road and a barn at the end of it, and a horse who taught me everything I spent tonight not doing, and a woman who cut me clean and cruel and then, of everyone, reached for me.

I don’t let myself hope about that last one. Hope’s just another way of not counting the cost.