Chapter 8
What It Costs
I know something feels wrong the second I walk into the rink. The air is too quiet in the specific way that means Calder is already here but not on the ice.
I find him in the corridor outside the locker rooms, back against the wall, phone pressed to his ear.
His hockey bag sits at his feet like he dropped it there mid-stride and forgot about it.
He has his practice jacket on, which means he got here early enough to change, and then something stopped him getting as far as the ice.
He sees me. Raises one hand in a brief acknowledgement and keeps talking.
I can't hear the other side of the call. I can hear his side, which is mostly short answers and long silences.
"Yeah."
A pause.
"I know."
Another pause.
"How long?"
His voice sounds different. Quieter somehow. The edges are gone. No dry amusement. No irritation. No hockey-player certainty. Just something tired and careful that I don't recognize.
I drop my bag near the boards and step onto the ice alone.
The rink feels different without the sound of pucks against the boards filling it.
I run through edge drills while the quiet sits around me, and through the glass partition I can see Calder still in the corridor, one hand now pressed flat against the wall above his head while he listens to something.
The call goes on longer than I expect. I finish my warm-up and start on jump entries and he is still out there, still in the same position, the flatness of his voice carrying faintly through the glass even if the words don't. At some point he turns so his back is fully to the partition and I stop being able to see his face.
I miss the next entry. Not badly. Enough. My eyes flick toward the corridor again before I can stop them.
I land a combination cleanly and glide toward the boards to grab my water bottle just as the corridor door opens.
Calder steps through it with his phone still in his hand and his bag over one shoulder.
His expression is the controlled version, the one I recognize now as what he defaults to when something has happened that he is not going to discuss.
"Sorry," he says, which is the first time I have heard him say that word and mean it about something other than a near-collision on the ice.
"Don't worry about it."
He nods once. Then he just stands there. Still holding the phone. Still looking at the ice like he is trying to remember what he came here to do. I push off toward the boards.
By the time I've changed out of my skates and packed my bag, Calder hasn't moved very far. He's on the bench now, elbows on his knees, phone hanging loosely from one hand.
I watch him for a second. Then I walk over.
"Come on."
He looks up.
"What?"
"Come on."
I hook a fistful of his practice jacket and pull. For a second I think he's going to argue. Instead he stands. We leave the rink. We are halfway down the street before he seems to fully register that we left.
"We're not training," he says.
"You're not training. I did twenty minutes while you were on the phone."
"I have a session."
"You have forty minutes before your session." I adjust my bag higher on my shoulder. "Your coach probably expects you to be late anyway."
Calder looks at me for a second. Then he keeps walking. I take that as agreement.
The bakery is warm and surprisingly busy enough that we have to wait for a table.
Calder stands beside me in the queue with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes on the menu board, and I don't ask about the call because it is obvious he is not going to tell me about it and equally obvious that he is still half inside it.
The woman behind him in the queue recognises him and does the particular thing people do when they recognise athletes in ordinary places. A second look. A tiny adjustment. Calder doesn't notice.
That tells me more about where his head is than anything else could.
We get a table near the back. He orders black coffee. I order my vanilla latte. We sit down and for a few minutes neither of us says anything, which would have been unbearable three weeks ago and is somehow completely fine now.
"Regionals this weekend," Calder says eventually.
"Yes."
"You ready?"
"I've been ready for six weeks. The question is whether my body knows that."
Something shifts briefly at the corner of his mouth.
His coffee arrives. He wraps both hands around the cup and looks out the window.
For a while he doesn't say anything. Then he asks what time my warm-up group starts, whether Coach is travelling with me, and whether the judging panel is the same one from Nationals.
Small questions. Ordinary questions. The kind people ask when they are slowly finding their way back to themselves.
I answer them all. By the time the coffee is half gone, the familiar version of Calder has mostly returned, but I can still see the effort in it now.
And somehow that feels different.
"You always call home before competitions?" I ask, because it is a reasonable thing to ask and also because I am giving him somewhere to put it if he wants to.
He glances over. "My mum. She likes to know the schedule."
"That's nice."
"She asks the same questions every time. How long is the drive. Will I eat before or after. Whether the hotel has a pool, which I have never once used."
He says it in the tone of someone recounting something faintly absurd, but there is nothing in his voice that actually finds it absurd.
"She doesn't really follow hockey. She knows I play and she knows when the important games are because I tell her, but the details don't land the same way they do for people who grew up watching it."
"Does that bother you?"
He thinks about it for a second.
Which means he is actually answering the question.
"It used to. Now I think it's just what happens when you go far enough from where you started. There's a gap. You can describe what's on your side of it but you can't really make someone see it from the other side."
He picks up his coffee. For a second it looks like there is more.
Not hesitation exactly. More like a door he opened without meaning to and immediately noticed.
I watch him decide not to walk through it.
Then he takes a drink instead. I don't push.
Pushing would make him aware that he has said more than he intended to.
And then the whole thing would disappear.
We talk about Regionals instead, and then about the team's upcoming road stretch, and then about whether the bakery's pastries are better on weekdays or weekends, which becomes a surprisingly lengthy argument.
By the time we are nearly done with our coffees he is fully back to the register I recognise, dry and precise and one degree warmer than he would probably like.
His phone buzzes on the table. He checks it and starts gathering his things.
"Session," he says.
"Go."
He stands and pulls his jacket on and picks up his bag, and I look out the window at the street because there is nothing that needs to be said and saying something for the sake of it would ruin the particular quality of the last hour.
He is almost at the door when I say it.
"The gap goes both ways, you know. They can't see your side but you can't fully see theirs anymore either." I keep my eyes on the window. "That's not a failure. That's just what it costs."
The pause lasts long enough that I glance over to check whether he left.
Calder is still standing there.
"Yeah," he says.
The word is quiet, not defensive or dismissive, just accepted, and then he nods once and heads for the door.