Chapter 16 Davis
Ikonen tells Mueller "good stick" after a two-on-one drill, and Mueller almost skates into the boards.
It's two words. Ikonen doesn't stop moving, doesn't look back, just says it on his way past like it's nothing.
But Mueller pulls up short and stands there with his stick across his knees and this expression on his face like someone just told him he won a contest he didn't know he'd entered.
He doesn't move for a full three-count. Then he skates to the back of the line and does the drill again, harder, like he's trying to earn it retroactively.
I've been watching this happen to guys all camp.
Ikonen's approval is rare enough that it functions like a highly trafficked illegal substance.
One word from him and a player's whole day reorganizes around it.
Thompson has been chasing it like a competition he can win through effort.
Kowalski got a nod after a penalty kill last week and was visibly pleased for an hour.
Meanwhile, it did the opposite to Thompson.
The veterans are more subtle about it, but they feel it too.
That praise from this man who almost never gives it is significant.
You can't earn it by wanting it. You just have to be doing the right thing at the moment he happens to look.
Mueller doesn't know any of this. Mueller doesn't track interpersonal dynamics the way the rest of us do.
Which means he has no clue how significant it was, only that the captain gave him a compliment and his chest puffed out a bit and he wants to do the drill again.
I find this both endearing and slightly painful to watch.
Practice runs another forty minutes and I am sharp.
The positioning, the reads, the way my feet are getting to spots before my brain fully commits to going there.
Two weeks of camp have fine-tuned my mechanics.
I'm playing faster than I've ever played, and I can see the ice the way I always hoped I would at this level.
The question is whether the coaches see it too.
I watch for signals. Who gets reps on which line.
Who the coaches talk to after drills and what their faces look like when they do it.
Whether Bodie watches me or watches through me.
These are the calculations that every bubble player makes in the last week of camp, and I am absolutely a bubble player, no matter how good my feet feel.
Twenty-two years old, undrafted, no pedigree.
This morning there were two more empty stalls. A winger from Manitoba who'd been here since day one and a defenseman who'd been getting third-pair reps all week. Gone. No announcement, no goodbye. Just clean stalls and the rest of us pretending not to count.
Fifty-odd players came to this camp. The roster holds twenty-three. I can do that math in my sleep, and I do, most nights, lying in bed running the numbers like they'll come out different if I calculate them one more time.
After practice I do extra work. Skating drills, edges, transitions. The rink is mostly empty by the time I'm done. Just me and a couple of other guys who are doing the same. We don't talk about it. We just skate and refine.
I shower, change, and head for the cafeteria to grab some dinner before it closes. The hallways are quiet this late. Most of the guys are gone for the day. The building has that emptied-out feeling it gets after five, when the hockey is over and it's just a building again.
I hear him before I see him.
Not words. Just a low sound, almost a murmur, coming from the alcove near the equipment room. I slow down without deciding to, and then I see Ikonen.
He's crouched against the wall. The cat is in front of him, the black stray with the white chest patch that's been roaming the facility since the first week.
Ikonen has something in his hand. Scraps from the cafeteria, maybe chicken, pulled apart into small pieces.
He's setting them down one at a time, and the cat is eating from the floor near his feet, and Ikonen is watching the cat with an expression I have never seen on his face.
It's soft. That's the only word. His shoulders are relaxed and he's murmuring words I can't make out from this distance.
Maybe not even English. The biggest man on the team, folded down to make himself small, feeding a stray cat in an empty hallway with the patience of someone who has nowhere else to be.
I should keep walking. I know this immediately. I'm not supposed to see this.
I take a step and my shoe catches the floor wrong. Just a squeak, not even loud, but in the silence of the hallway it's enough. Ikonen's head comes up.
The shift is instant. The softness is gone. His posture straightens, his face resets to the neutral mask I see every day. The cat doesn't move. The cat doesn't care. But Ikonen is already standing, already the captain again, and the thing I just saw might as well not have happened.
We look at each other for a beat. I don't know what my face is doing but I try to make it do nothing. Pretty sure I am not successful.
"Davis." His voice is even.
"Cap." I nod once and keep walking. Don't slow down, don't speed up, don't look back. My footsteps sound too loud but I focus on keeping them steady.
Behind me, silence. I don't know if he's still standing there or if he's gone. I don't check.
In the cafeteria, I make a plate I don't really want and sit at an empty table and think about what I just saw.
Not the cat, exactly. The way Ikonen looked at it.
That thirty seconds in an empty hallway, where he was maybe a little different.
And the way it disappeared the instant someone else was present.
I think about my nameplate in its slot above my stall.
I think about the empty stalls that used to have nameplates too.
I think about the twenty-three spots and the math that doesn't care about my edge work or my positioning or how sharp I felt today.
But I'm not going to think about that. It's not mine to think about.
Instead, I think about this team. The rookies I eat lunch with every day.
The group chat that lights up my phone at odd hours.
Marchetti and his hockey romance book. Mueller freezing after two words from the captain.
Novák seeing everything and saying nothing.
Hájek texting his chicken emoji. The sound of guys on the ice in the morning and the way it echoes off the glass and the way it already sounds like I'd miss if it was gone.
I want to stay. I want it so badly it scares me, because wanting something this much means losing it wouldn't heal clean. Just this once, I let myself want it.