Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Rook
Tuesday. Game day.
I got to the rink at six because I couldn’t lie still.
Varga slept the way he sleeps when something good is coming, flat on his stomach with one arm hanging off the bed, and I was on my side next to him until I heard the first birds of the morning.
Then I got up, made coffee in the dark kitchen, and drove to the Performance Center.
I was on the ice before anyone else, even before Cross. I took the first lap slowly and let the cold seep down into the bottom of my lungs.
By tonight it would be complete.
I kept turning the thought over in my head, and it didn’t scare me anymore. We had a plan. Light skate this morning. Then the game tonight.
We’d tell the room first, before the game, and then the world in a statement after. It would be our words, with our timing. I’d sit down with Kovac the morning after and give him the full story. We had every piece in place.
Easton’s text still echoed in the back of my head. Spend it on the next one.
I wanted time to skip ahead to the moments before the game.
The Zamboni doors opened at the far end and the equipment kids clumped out in their shower sandals. I left the ice and went to my stall, waiting for the rest of the team.
Dahl was early. He was two stalls down on the other side, dressed in a suit.
It registered in a low key. A game-day blazer at eight in the morning meant a healthy scratch. Trier would be on the second pair, and Mikkelsen would get more time. Somebody had to come out, and that somebody was a thirty-two-year-old depth defenseman on a one-year deal.
He was me at twenty-one, except I was climbing then, and now he was sliding. I never lived in that territory.
He held his tie in his hands. The winger they’d brought up Friday walked in. “Morning,” he said in a cheerful voice.
“You’re up because somebody’s hurt,” Dahl said. “That’s the only reason any of us are ever here. Don’t get comfortable.”
The kid laughed uncomfortably. It was an unsolicited comment from a man who’d found the one person in the room more disposable than himself and wanted him to feel it.
I’d dressed beside Dahl for a season and a half, and I couldn’t have told you his hometown.
Half the stalls had turned over since I joined the Ironhawks.
I still knew the core of the team cold. Cross’s silences were readable and Pratt’s goalie superstitions familiar.
Dahl was no more distinctive to me than a mild breeze off the lake.
The same for four or five others I’d never engaged in genuine conversation.
The Rook and Varga Show started up when I began taping my stick.
Varga arrived mid-monologue. He pinned Mikkelsen to the wall.
”—no, listen, listen, because this matters.
The man is from Maine. You know what they eat in Maine?
Fish. For breakfast. A whole fish looking at you.
“ He steered the kid toward his stall by the shoulder.
“So when Rook tells you the place on Damen is overrated, you have to run the comment through a filter.
You have to ask yourself: has this man, one time in his life, correctly identified a sandwich? And the answer, Rafe—“ a beat “—is no.”
I didn’t look up. He knew I’d heard him from the door.
Trier arrived complaining about the cat sitter and then the lineup. Then he got around to me.
“Old married couple,” he said. He jerked his chin toward my stall and then Varga’s. “You two. I told Kovac that. You fight about the thermostat.” He was delighted with himself. “Twenty years from now you’ll be in a cabin somewhere fighting over the duvet.”
He meant it as a harmless poke. The words were a little on the nose, but we were just a day out. I responded in a deadpan tone. “He’s wrong about the thermostat. We don’t fight about the thermostat.”
Laughter bounced around the room. Trier’s joke should have died there.
Dahl, in his bitterness over the scratch, picked it up. “You ever actually watch them, though?” He hitched a ride on Trier’s chirp, and his tone turned dark. “Like watch them. The married thing.” A beat. He looked at me. “Do you ever wonder if it’s not a bit?”
Nobody laughed.
Dahl took the silence from the room as a cue to keep going.
“I’m just saying.” He spread his hands. “Neither one of you’s ever—and you live where, Rook?
Have you ever had anybody over? Varga’s got that place in the city nobody’s seen the inside of.
” He laughed briefly, inviting the room to come along with him.
“I’m asking. It’s a question. Guys ask questions. ”
“What is your problem?” Trier asked.
“I don’t have a problem. It’s a compliment. We hear the joking, but there’s never an actual bad word. That’s a real partnership. I’d kill for chemistry like that with my girlfriend.”
Four stalls down, two guys put their heads together and whispered low. Behind me, near the showers, somebody spoke, but I couldn’t make out the specific words. The Friday call-up looked from Dahl to me to Varga and back.
You can’t answer whispers and vague comments. If you push back, you’ve confirmed there’s something to push back about, but when you let it sit, it travels. Dahl had built a door that only opened toward us, no matter which way I leaned on it.
A name flashed in the back of my mind.
Easton.
Varga moved. He got up off the bench and stepped into the middle of it. He was loud and huge.
“Dahl. You’re worried about my marriage? Brother, you’re scratched—go worry about your gap.” The room came halfway back, laughing nervously. “I’ll watch you. How’s that? I’ll put your neutral zone in a film festival. It’s a horror movie. It’s got jump scares—“
The loud guy was stepping in front so nobody looked behind. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever watched him do, but it wouldn’t work.
Dahl’s questions were already spreading beneath the surface. Trier said something else about his cat, and it changed the subject, but underneath the phones were already out. I saw three held low against thighs with the screens tipped away.
A thumb moved. A guy past Dahl read something, glanced up at me, and then read it again.
And I didn’t know the men behind those phones. They weren’t the core. They were the men I’d never engaged with.
Markel’s whistle pulled us onto the ice.
We all had to skate.
It came onto the ice with us. At the first water break, I coasted past the bench, and two guys stopped talking when I got close.
They picked it up again when I was gone.
At the second break, I caught one word going past a cluster at the far boards.
It was my name, “Rook,” and I didn’t hear the rest.
I read flinches for a living. The hum was real. They were talking, but I didn’t get to hear the words. That was worse than knowing what they were.
Markel called a breakout. On the third rotation, I drew the right side, and the puck came around to Varga on the half-wall. He looked for me, and I wasn’t there. I read the pressure a half-beat late, and the lane I was supposed to fill stood empty. His pass died on the far boards.
It was the same miss as the morning after the fight. He looked at the dead puck and then at me.
Markel blew it dead. He stood at the blue line and looked at the empty ice where the pass had died. Then he read the entire length of the bench, end to end. He heard the hum.
“That’s enough for the morning. Off. Treatment if you need it, or eat something. We’ve got a game tonight.”
It was an hour early. Half the room took it as a gift. The other half—the part brandishing phones—filed off not looking at me. I glided to the gate behind men who wouldn’t meet my eye.
Markel had reached for the one dial he could turn. He lowered the volume. He couldn’t touch the content, but he could make it quieter.
Heath caught my eye coming off. He had nothing to say.
Pratt looked up from his stall when I came in. It was the long read, the one he does from the wrong end of the rink. He held it a beat and went back to his tape.
Rafe had one glove off. The kid had spent a season gathering evidence, and the evidence coming in this morning was Dahl and the phones. He saw Varga being loud in front of it. He was learning the wrong lesson in real time, but I couldn’t stop it.
I left the locker room as quickly as I could. There’s an equipment room off the tunnel, half-size, with a skate sharpener and a wall of sticks. I went in and put my hands on the bench, taking thirty seconds to breathe.
The door opened behind me. I knew it was Varga before I turned. He shut the door behind him, which we didn’t do because it was what would get noticed. He did it anyway.
“It’s out,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I had it. In the room, I shut it down, and they laughed, but it didn’t hold. Some of them are on their phones now. It’s out.”
“Ahead of us,” I said.
“Who even is Dahl—“ He stopped because neither of us knew. We’d staked everything on the core we knew, and it leaked out through the men in the room we didn’t know.
Varga looked at me. “We can’t do it tonight. If we do it tonight, it’s a reaction. It’s us answering Dahl. I’m not letting the first time we say it out loud be us answering a guy like that.”
“No,” I said.
“So we pull it.”
“We have to.”
He reached out and placed his hand flat on the center of my chest. “We’re still here.”
I could barely stand it.
I called Mark before we left the room, phone at my ear.
He answered without a hello. “Rook. You’re set for tonight; I’ve got the—“
“We’re not doing it tonight.”
Silence. “Okay. Talk to me. Yesterday you were—what changed?”
“Nothing I can get into right now.”
“Rook, I’ve built a runway. If something happened, I need to—“
“Nothing happened you need to manage.” That wasn’t entirely true. Nothing happened he could manage.
He was quiet for a second. “All right. I’ll park it. Nobody will hear it from me. The runway is there, in case you want it again.” He paused. “I don’t need the why. I need to know that the two of you are okay.”
I looked at Varga. He was watching me.
“We’re okay.”
“Okay. Have a good game, Rook. Whatever it is—it will keep.”
I told Varga I was going to the truck. He didn’t follow. The Rook and Varga Show had a dent, but it was still in place.
I told myself I needed air. I shut the truck door behind me and put both hands on the wheel.
I couldn’t control Dahl, but there was one channel open that I could shut down. Kovac had the promise of a morning-after piece. If the truth were going back in the drawer, then I had to close the door on him too.
Kovac wasn’t a problem. I knew that. He’d always been a decent man to me, but his voice wasn’t ours.
Easton flickered up. Spend it on the next one. It couldn’t reach me.
I pulled out my phone and typed a message.
Rook: Daniel. Need to pull the second session. And the piece. All of it. Sorry to do it like this. Can you call me?
The dots came up immediately.
He was there. I sat with both hands back on the wheel, waiting to find out what the only person I’d told the truth to years ago had to say to me now that I was trying to put the truth back in the closet.