Chapter 29 Theo
THEO
Mars was on the ice. In hockey skates. Attempting to figure skate.
This was, objectively, the funniest thing I had ever witnessed, and I have witnessed Axel fall off a shelf into a bowl of pasta, which previously held the top position on my lifetime list of comedic events.
Marcus Santos, the starting goaltender for the Atlanta Reapers, a man whose body was a precision instrument calibrated to the hundredths of a second, a man whose positioning was so exact that coaches used his film as a teaching tool, was incapable of performing a basic forward crossover on figure skating edges.
"The blade is wrong," he said, gripping the boards with both hands, his legs at an angle that defied the principles of human anatomy.
"The blade is a figure skating blade. It's designed for edges and rotations."
"It's designed for torture. Hockey blades have a curve. These are flat. These are ice knives."
"They're not flat. They have a rocker. You're just not used to the contact point being further back."
"I'm used to the contact point being where God and the Bauer engineering team intended it to be, which is not here."
He pushed off from the boards. Took two gliding steps. The figure skating blade caught a toe pick, which was a feature that hockey skates did not have and which Mars's muscle memory was not prepared for, and the NHL's starting goaltender went down in a controlled but undignified pile at center ice.
I laughed so hard I could barely stand. The laughter echoed in the empty rink and Mars lay on the ice looking up at the ceiling with the flat, evaluative expression of a man who was processing a data set that did not match any existing model.
"The ice is attacking me," he said.
"The ice is being ice. You're being a hockey player on figure skating blades, which is the ice sport equivalent of wearing ski boots to a salsa class."
"I have never salsa danced."
"This surprises no one."
He got up. Fell again. Got up. Fell again.
Each fall was controlled, the goalie's instinct kicking in to protect the body even as the body refused to cooperate with the blade.
Each time he got up, he adjusted something: his weight distribution, his knee bend, the angle of his ankle.
The analytical brain, which could not be shut off, was processing each failure as data and feeding it back into the system.
On the seventh attempt, he completed a full lap of the rink. Slow. Unsteady. The most inelegant skating I had ever seen from a professional athlete. But a lap. A complete circuit.
"I did it," he said.
"You looked like a giraffe learning to ice skate."
"A giraffe on ice is still on ice."
"That is technically accurate."
I skated to him. Took his hands. The hands that stopped pucks and held mine in the dark and that were now gripping my fingers with the specific, death-grip intensity of a man who did not trust the surface beneath him.
"I'm going to teach you a spin," I said.
"No."
"A basic spin. Two-foot. Not even a real spin. A rotation."
"I am a goalie. I rotate constantly. I butterfly, I slide, I push. I do not spin like a figure skater."
"You're going to spin like a figure skater. Once. For me."
He looked at me. The goalie's eyes. Dark. Steady. Reading me the way he always read me, with the total attention that was not analysis but love, and the love was visible because the mask was off and the mask was not coming back on, not here, not at 5 AM, not in our rink.
"Fine," he said. "One spin."
I showed him the position. Two feet, shoulder-width apart. Arms out for balance. The rotation initiated by a slight twist of the hips and shoulders, the body following the head, the head following the intention.
He attempted the spin. The rotation was approximately 270 degrees, which was three-quarters of a revolution and which, by figure skating standards, was not a spin but was, by hockey goalie standards, an act of considerable bravery.
He came out of the three-quarter spin with his arms windmilling and his balance compromised and his face wearing an expression that combined triumph with the specific, existential confusion of a man whose body had just done something his brain did not authorize.
Axel, who was in his carrier on the bench, watched through the mesh with an expression of supreme feline contempt.
"I spun," Mars said.
"You rotated."
"A rotation is a spin."
"A rotation is 360 degrees. You did 270."
"I did 270 more degrees than any other NHL goalie has ever done in figure skating blades at 5 AM in a suburban rink."
"That is a very specific record."
"All the best records are specific."
I kissed him. On the ice. In figure skating blades and hockey skates.
The kiss was brief and cold because the rink was cold and our mouths were cold and the cold was part of it, part of the language of two people who had built their relationship on a frozen surface and who were not interested in warmer venues.
The rink at 5 AM. Our rink. The place where a goalie watched a skater through glass and the glass became a door and the door became a bridge and the bridge became a life.
The reading lamp was here. Not the lamp from my nightstand, though that lamp was now on Mars's nightstand at his apartment because his apartment had acquired a reading lamp the way it had acquired a second toothbrush and a cat carrier and a sewing kit and the accumulated evidence of a life expanding from one to two.
This was a different lamp. A small, battery-powered LED that I used for costume sketching at the boards, the portable version of the light that had become the symbol of the Power Play series, the light that said: someone is here.
Someone is paying attention. Someone bought a lamp because of a sentence you said five years ago, and the buying was love, and the love was permanent.
The lamp sat on the boards, glowing amber in the blue-grey light of the predawn rink.
Mars's coffee was in the cup holder of row three, where it would go cold, because the coffee always went cold, because Mars Santos did not drink coffee at the rink.
He held it because the holding was ritual and the ritual was identity and the identity was goalie and the goalie was the man I loved.
We skated together. Badly and beautifully.
Mars on hockey skates that he'd changed back into because the figure skating blades were, in his words, "an affront to the laws of physics and the sovereignty of my ankles.
" Me on my blades, weaving around him, showing him edges and turns that he would never master and that he attempted anyway because the attempting was the point.
The morning light came through the windows. Atlanta waking up. A city that had no business loving hockey but did. A team that had no business producing four love stories in one season but had. A rink that had no business being the most important building in two people's lives but was.
"Mars?"
"Mm."
"A goalie's job is to stop things."
"Yes."
"What happens when a goalie lets something through?"
He looked at me. The eyes. Dark. Open. The mask off. The face real.
"When a goalie lets something through, the usual result is a goal against. Which is failure. Which is the thing I've spent my entire career trying to prevent."
"And what did you learn when you let me through?"
He was quiet. The ice hummed beneath us. The lamp glowed on the boards.
"I learned that the thing on the other side of the mask isn't a goal against. It's a person. And the person is worth every goal I'll ever let in."
I took his hand. We stood on the ice in the morning light and the standing was the simplest thing in the world, two men on a frozen surface, holding hands, and the simplicity was the beauty, and the beauty was the point.
Between the lines. The space where the game lives. Between the glass and the ice. Between the watching and the flying. Between the fear and the landing. Between the mask and the face.
Mars Santos found me in the space between, and I stopped falling.
Or maybe I kept falling. But the falling, with him, was the same as flying. And the distinction, which had once seemed like the most important distinction in the world, turned out to not matter at all.
Because the landing was always going to be clean. The landing was always going to be him.
Last line: A goalie's job is to stop things. Pucks, shots, goals. I spent my whole career stopping. Theo Kimura taught me what happens when you let something through. And what comes through, when you're brave enough to let it, is everything.
-e