Page 28 of In the Crease

I thought, once, about a plaid blanket and a dark pond and the warmth of a beautiful girl sitting close enough to feel through two layers of wool. The weight of her head on my shoulder on the drive home. The way she’d lifted it when I cut the engine, slow, like she’d been somewhere else.

I went back to my edges.

I skated until my legs were empty and the cold had worked all the way through me. Then I came off the ice and sat in the quiet locker room with my skates still on and my elbows on my knees, and I sat there for a while.

Nowhere to be but right there.

Then I got up and showered.

I came home to make lunch and sat at the table with my film notebooks.

Tuesday’s opponent. I opened the footage and watched.

A little while later I went looking for my Minnesota State sweatshirt.

I checked my gear bags. The closet. The back of the desk chair.

Nobody home but me.

I stood in the middle of my room.

I knew exactly where it was. I’d run through the gear bag and the closet and the laundry anyway, like maybe I’d find it there and not have to know what I knew, which was that I’d given it to Griffin’s sister at a bonfire on Saturday night and she’d taken it with her on the flight home and it was currently in Arizona.

I stood there for a moment in an apartment that felt different than it had three days ago.

It was a sweatshirt. I had other sweatshirts. The Minnesota State hockey department had given me a ton of them over four years. I was going to be fine.

I went back to the kitchen and thought about the contact in my phone. Her name and ten digits, sitting there, exactly where Griffin had put it—and decided not to think about it, which was a decision I was going to have to make more than once today and was starting right now, with at least five more hours in this apartment before I could justify going to bed.

I went back to the film.

At seven o’clock I called my father.

Erik Lindqvist answered in English, which meant he was settled and in a good mood. We talked about the season for the first twenty minutes—the last stretch of games, a defensive pair I’d been watching, a forward on Tuesday’s team whose backcheck timing I’d identified as exploitable. My father had seen the same thing and had thoughts about the slot. We compared notes and found two things I hadn’t caught yet. This was the best version of our calls—both of us fully in the material, building on each other. My father had played something like a dozen seasons in the Elitserien before Eden Prairie, before my mother, before me. The eyes didn’t go away.

At the end he asked, “How are you?”

Not how’s the season. Just how are you.

I looked at my film notebook. “Good,” I said. “Ready.”

“Ja.” There was a pause he used when he had something real to say and was deciding whether to say it. I could picture him in the chair in the living room in Eden Prairie, the lamp on too early because my mother hated the dark. I could hear his deep inhale. “The draft takes care of itself. Audrey takes care of you. You play your game, and you let the rest follow.”

“I know.”

“You know it. You’re not letting yourself know it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Fair.”

“Let it be done. Trust the work.” He let that land. “Du är redo.”

You’re ready.

“Thanks, Dad.”

We said goodbye. I set the phone down and sat in the kitchen for a while.

The film notebooks were open on the counter. The combine. Whatever came after.