Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
David had almost forgotten how it felt to play for a good team.
In the first two games of the preseason, David doesn't get a single point. No one on his line — ostensibly the first — gets one. He imagines there’s some discussion about that in the papers, and he's certainly getting questions about it in postgame interviews, but it’s a more muted reaction than he’s used to. The games are meaningless, from a points perspective, and the line's a new one, but David doesn't think that's why they're quiet. He thinks it’s because the Capitals win both of those games.
David wonders how many games the Islanders won without a single point from the Chapman-Kurmazov-Bradley line, or before that, Chapman-Kurmazov-Eisler. He doesn’t think it was very many.
David scores twice in the next game, gets an assist on a goal by Oleg. They win that game too, a veritable rout, three goals from the first line, one goal from the second, one from the third, one from the D. It’s against the Islanders, so David probably shouldn’t feel this good about it, especially when the Verizon Center starts up a ‘Gregoire’ chant, despite the fact that all but one of the goals weren’t his fault. Gregoire played well, too well to deserve the mockery, but he’s not David’s goalie anymore, so he supposes he shouldn’t care.
“How did it feel to score your first goal for the Capitals against your old team?” he’s asked after. Then from another reporter, “How does it feel to score the game-winning goal against your old team?” Other questions follow, similar enough to blur together.
His first goal, but it doesn’t count until the season starts. A game winner, but the game doesn’t mean anything. His old team. That’s what they keep saying, over and over, like David would forget he ever played for the Islanders if they didn’t remind him.
“It was a preseason game,” David says. “It always feels good to win,” he adds, when apparently that isn’t answer enough.
David had the game winning goal, but it was a 6-2 final. Even if David’s line hadn’t scored a single goal, the Capitals still would have won the game. He knows what it’s like to be the best on a great team — the Remparts were a force to be reckoned with, and Team Canada medalled both times he played with them. He isn’t unfamiliar with the concept. But with the Islanders, if David or Oleg slumped, the whole team slumped with them, and it’s early, maybe, to make assumptions, but David doesn’t think it’d be the same on the Capitals.
David’s not sure how he feels about it.
*
The next game, David scores, and Quincy insists on buying him a drink after the game. The following game he doesn’t score, but Oleg does, and Quincy insists on buying him a drink too. David wonders what his bar tab must be like. Every away game they’ve played, win or lose, has been followed by a team outing, so it must be huge.
David isn’t sure if they’re more frequent because the season hasn’t begun in earnest, if it’s an attempt to facilitate bonding before everyone’s exhausted, but the team goes out a lot more often than the Islanders did.
Oleg goes to all of them, and David goes with him. It wouldn’t be fair if David left him to be one of the only outsiders. There are a few members of the roster that weren’t on the team last season, but they were playing for the Hershey Bears, so they’re hardly strangers. With the big moves the team made so they could afford to sign Oleg and David, he supposes there wasn’t a lot of room to make other deals, and the roster’s much the same as it was last season. Everyone seems to know everyone, seems to already get along.
Oleg doesn’t actually appear to need David there. He gets along well with Quincy, as far as David can tell, talks a lot to Salonen, who reminds David of Oleg, reserved, quiet, older, with young daughters of his own. David was caught between them during the first team dinner, watching them exchange picture after picture of little girls on their phones. He’s made sure not to sit between them at dinner since, just in case they feel inspired to exchange a series of almost identical photos again.
After a win in New Jersey, David has already made it to the bar they’re congregating at before he realises Oleg didn’t come along. He frowns, sends Oleg a text. Apparently his youngest, Tatiana, is sick and was asking for him, so he stayed back to Skype.
David wants to go back, but he thinks that would look more conspicuous than if he had never come at all. He decides to stay for a drink, leave after – that’s usually what he does, but of course, he usually sits with Oleg while he does it.
He doesn’t really expect anyone to talk to him — Oleg tends to carry the conversation with whomever, and David sits beside him and says something if he’s asked a question or it feels right to. The Capitals have taken over a large table, but it’s full of a lot of younger guys, all around David’s age. David feels more comfortable with teammates closer to Oleg’s age – they’re less likely to talk about ‘chicks’ and drinking and whatever else, more likely to talk about things David is interested in. Also more likely to discuss their children, but that’s a price David’s willing to pay.
Lombardi’s in the middle of the group at the table, anyway, and David doesn’t really want to sit with him, so he gets a spot at the bar. It feels less awkward than sitting at the table and probably being ignored. Unless he’s getting teased instead, he supposes. He doesn’t know which it’d be. Lombardi reminds him of Benson, so David figures it’s safest to avoid him.
David’s probably not being fair: Lombardi hasn’t said anything to him. David hasn’t exchanged more than an introduction and some small talk with him, but he’s noisy, always at the centre of things.
He has that look too, that unofficial uniform former USNTDP guys wear when they’re not wearing their hockey uniforms, like they all shop at the same stores, go to the same place to get their hair cut, recycle the same chirps. If Lombardi suddenly came out with ‘stuck up blond bitch’ David wouldn’t be particularly surprised. He’s around David’s age; David doesn’t remember him from Juniors, but he could have been there, could have been in that room, cracking jokes about the pretty boy on Team Canada.
David knows he’s assuming the worst, knows his assumptions are unfair. Jake was part of the program. Jake was on that team. Jake was the captain of that team, and David can’t imagine him calling anyone a stuck up blond bitch, even if they were one.
He’s still startled when Lombardi comes up beside him when David’s halfway through his drink. He has a mostly full drink in his hand, so it’s probably not to order, unless he’s ordering for others, so it’d be rude for David to ignore him, noticeable.
“Hi,” David says, cautious.
“Hey,” Lombardi says, “You played in the Q, right?”
“Yeah,” David says, “With the Remparts.”
“You play with Devon Hines?” Lombardi asks.
David did play with Devon Hines. He also tutored Hines, because jumping from Connecticut to Québec wreaked havoc on his grades, and apparently David’s Ontarian French was easier for him to get, maybe just because it wasn’t the rapidfire Québécois that even David frequently lost the thread of.
He hasn’t seen him since he left the Remparts; Hines was drafted a year ahead of him, but it wasn’t high, and he doesn’t know if Hines is in the AHL or washed out entirely. David liked him well enough, but not enough to follow his career.
It occurs to him that he can ask. “He’s with the Wolf Pack,” Lombardi says. “Figured I’d call him to see if he’s in town when we hit up Hartford Sunday, if you want to tag along.”
“Maybe,” David says. “If I wouldn’t be intruding.”
“As long as you’re cool listening to a bunch of boring stories about the mullet I had when I was sixteen,” Lombardi says.
“How many stories can you have about a mullet?” David asks.
Lombardi laughs. “If you’re Hinesy, like, twelve. If you’ve got any really awful stories from Québec, I could use the ammo.”
That makes more sense: searching for humiliating stories from every source you can get. Pretend to invite someone along in order to secure the ammunition. David imagines that if he asks Sunday, Lombardi will say Hines isn’t in town. “Sorry,” David says. “I can’t think of anything.”
Lombardi shrugs. “Let me know if you think of any.”
“Did you play U18 for the US?” David asks. “Or U20?”
“World Juniors?” Lombardi asks. “I fucking wish, I was like 5’8” until I hit eighteen, then I had college shit. Why?”
“No reason,” David says. “I just thought you looked familiar.”
*
Their final preseason game is in Hartford, and at practice the day of, Lombardi skates over to him when he goes to grab his water bottle, says, “Still want to see Hinesy?”
David blinks at him twice. “Sure,” he says. “He’s in town?”
“Yeah,” Lombardi says. “Grab some lunch after practice?”
“Okay,” David says.
Hines meets them for lunch at a restaurant near the facility. He seems surprised to see David, but David doesn’t think he looks unhappy about it.
“Holy shit, you’re alive,” he says, and Lombardi says “Told you,” as if David’s mortality was up for debate.
Hines doesn’t have a dozen stories about Lombardi’s hair at sixteen, but he does bring it up, pulls out his phone, saying, “Wait, I have a picture,” and Lombardi dives across the table, presumably in an attempt to block him from showing David.
They touch a lot in general — David’s sitting beside Lombardi, but even though they’re separated by a table, he and Hines keep shoving at one another. At one point David gets kicked in the shin, and when he startles Hines says, “Shit, was aiming for Robbie, my bad.”
He repeats it in French: not verbatim, but a general apology, then asks David some simple questions on how he is, still in French. David supposes he wants the practice. He sounds rusty, but David’s probably rusty as well, so he has no room to judge.
“Canadian bullshit,” Lombardi says, after Hines has exchanged a few sentences with David, and David tenses, but Hines responds with “Excuse you, Mr. Speaks Italian To Look Fancy”, and David’s mostly forgotten it by the time they’ve stopped wielding butter knives at one another.
It’s ridiculous: they’re both older than David, but he feels like he’s back in the Q, tuning out arguments so he could study. Hines was usually sitting beside him, doing the same, unless the arguments were in English, and then he’d always join in.
David had thought, at the time, that the only reason Hines didn’t join all of them was that he didn’t understand French well enough to follow the thread of the argument in the first place. He thinks he might have been right, but it doesn’t bother him as much as it did when he was seventeen.
After lunch, David and Lombardi share a cab back to the hotel. “Good to see Hinesy, huh?” Lombardi asks.
“It was,” David agrees.
“Who knows, maybe he gets called up, we get to play him, buy the loser a drink,” Lombardi says.
It isn’t likely. David looked Hines up after his conversation with Lombardi, and he’s pulling second line minutes with the Wolf Pack, getting third line points. He’d have to leapfrog a half dozen players to make the NHL, even if the Rangers suffer a rash of injuries, and at twenty-four, it isn’t particularly likely he makes the show.
“I hope so,” David says, quirks his mouth in response to the sharp edge of Lombardi’s grin.