Page 27 of In the Crease

The flight home was three hours. Window seat again. I watched Minnesota disappear under the clouds and let myself have the flight.

The pond and the fire and the tailgate and the four seconds. Nothing appropriate and what it had felt like to give it back to him and have him understand exactly what I was returning. Two people holding the same line, both knowing it, both choosing it. I was proud of that, and I was also going to be thinking about it for a long time.

That was the right call. Both of us knew it. Both of us made it.

The desert came up to meet me the way it always did. Brown and flat and mine. The mountain ranges at the edges, the grid of streets and rooftops. Recognition. Home.

I was glad to see it.

I unpacked that evening in my childhood bedroom, everything back where it lived—sweaters in drawers, my dad’s fleece in the hamper.

I put Ryan’s sweatshirt on the shelf in the back of the closet and went to make dinner.

I tried not to think about it.

Unsuccessfully.

Chapter Eleven

Ryan

The apartment was quiet.

The sky was the flat undecided gray of a February Sunday. Griffin had taken the Silverado and driven her to the airport. It was his send-off to make, even if I wanted to be alone with her, to say some other kind of goodbye. To make some kind of arrangement to stay in touch. To talk more.

Griffin came in around nine.

“Flight was on time,” he said. “She texted from the gate.”

“Good.”

He looked at me. Not the goalie eyes—just Griffin. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I meant it. “You?”

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Good weekend?”

“Good weekend,” I said.

He went back to bed in his own room and was out in fifteen minutes.

I ran the dishwasher and swept the kitchen floor and moved his gear bag from the hallway to his room, where it would reappear in the hallway by the next afternoon. These were the rhythms, and they continued without requiring anything from me, which was useful right now.

I went to the rink.

No practice on Sundays in February, but I had an arrangement with the building manager going back to freshman year. The nine-to-eleven slot was reliably empty.

The locker room smelled the way it always smelled, rubber and cold and the faint chemical bite of ice resurfacer, the combination that had meant hockey to me since I was six years old. Everything I’d wanted. Everything I was still working toward. I’d been in love with this smell longer than I’d been in love with anything.

I laced up in the quiet and stepped out.

The building was completely empty. Overhead lights at half power, throwing everything into a flat gray that made the ice look almost silver. Boards clean, glass clear, the only sound the low hum of the refrigeration system under the surface. No one watching. No position to hold. No one I was supposed to be for the next two hours.

I pushed off from the boards and felt it. The first stride catching, the familiar give of good edges under my weight, my body finding the rhythm before my head did. The cold came up off the surface and hit my face, and I breathed it in. This was the version I loved best. Not games, though I loved games. This—the empty building, the half-light, the ice doing what ice did when no one was asking it to perform.

I ran edge work until my legs warmed, then the offensive patterns I’d been drilling all season. I put myself through situations. Puck deep in the corner, one man back, three seconds to make the call. I ran each one until the decision arrived before the thought. That was the standard. When the body knew before the brain, it was in.

After forty minutes I stopped running sets and just skated, laps, building speed, the cold air moving past my face. My mind went quiet the way it only did when I was on the ice. Not empty—just still. It was the stillness of having one thing to do and doing it.