Chapter 37 Luca
The third period ice is not the first period ice.
Forty minutes of playoff hockey have ground the surface into something heavier.
The edges catch where they glided clean.
The snow builds in the corners and along the boards where the Zamboni can't reach.
The building has not sat down. I am not sure the building remembers how to sit down.
Eighteen thousand people on their feet through a tied game in April, the noise a pressure I feel behind my eyes and in the bones of my face.
The tying goal is now on the scoreboard.
It’s number eleven, Mercer. A wrister, high glove side, on the power play.
A clean goal. I saw it from the bench, saw the net bulge, and watched the away bench erupt.
Nothing was wrong with any of it, except I know what it means for the man who scored it to still be playing hockey in April.
He told me in a kitchen days ago that his playing days are almost over.
Nobody in this building knows that. The scoreboard knows his name and his number and the time of the goal.
It does not know that a man just scored in what might be the last game of his life, and that the goal was beautiful, and that I am proud of him in a way I cannot say out loud in a room with eighteen thousand people in it. Not tonight, but soon.
I come over the boards. First shift of the period.
My legs are good. The cold fills my lungs on the first stride and my edges bite and my stick is on the ice and the game is the game.
The game does not care what I carry onto it.
The game only asks what I do with my feet and my hands and the six inches of blade between me and the surface.
I have always liked that about the game.
It is the one place where the noise in my head is quieter than the noise in the building.
Their center drives wide. I close the lane, angle him toward the boards.
The contact jolts through my shoulder and I hold my ground and the puck squirts free.
Hájek picks it up along the wall. Cycles it back to the point.
The possession continues and the clock continues and the third period of a tied playoff game is a specific kind of time where every second has a weight you can feel in your legs.
The bench. Water. My lungs pulling cold air through the bottle.
Down the bench, Soucy is in his pads with his mask pushed up on his forehead.
His gloves are off. His hands are on his knees and I watch his fingers move.
Right hand. Thumb to index finger, thumb to middle, thumb to ring, thumb to pinky.
Back. Pinky, ring, middle, index. The sequence runs twice, three times, four.
Steady. Rhythmic. His eyes are on the ice but his hands are somewhere else, running a pattern that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with something I don't have a name for.
He catches me looking and his hands go still on his knee. I look away.
Marchetti drops beside me. His breath is short. His jaw is set.
"They're collapsing the neutral zone," he says. "The seam is gone."
"It'll open."
"When?"
"When they get tired of collapsing it. Nobody runs that structure for twenty minutes. Their legs won't let them."
He shakes his head. Not disagreeing. Processing. Marchetti processes out loud the way other people breathe. His mouth guard dangles from his cage and his eyes are already back on the ice, reading the play, reading the gaps.
I watch him take the ice. The stride that has not changed since the first day of camp. The legs, the hands, the focus underneath the noise. He is the best linemate I have ever had and he does not know half the reasons that sentence is true.
My shift. I take a pass from Jensen at the hash marks and carry it wide. Their defenseman reads it, steps up, takes the body. Clean hit, nothing dirty. I keep my feet. Cycle the puck back and the play develops and the building pushes the noise higher.
Eleven minutes. Lundy makes a save in the crease.
Blocker side, hard. The puck bounces into the corner and the whistle comes and the building exhales.
Down the bench, Soucy's body goes completely still.
Not the stillness of a backup watching the game.
A different stillness. His mask is up and his eyes are locked on the crease where Lundy is resetting, shaking out his glove, tapping his posts the way goalies tap their posts.
Soucy's hands are flat on his pads. The finger pattern has stopped.
His whole body is pointed at the crease like a compass needle that has found its north and cannot look anywhere else.
I have seen that look. I have worn that look. I know what it costs to sit still while someone you love does something dangerous and the only thing you are allowed to do is watch.
I look away from that, too.
Eight minutes. Six. The shifts get shorter. Thirty-five seconds, thirty. The clock compresses the game into something dense and airless and the building can feel it. Every whistle is louder. Every save is bigger.
Four minutes. The scoreboard reads 1-1 and the third period is running out and the season is running out and on the other bench is a man who is running out of time on the ice.
I do not think about that. I think about my edges and my stick and the next shift. The game asks me to be here and I am here. The rest of it will be true when the buzzer sounds. Right now the only thing that is true is the puck.
Two minutes. Coach sends me over the boards. Marchetti is on my left. Hájek on my right. The ice is heavy and slow under my blades and my legs are burning and the puck is in the corner on their side and Marchetti is going to get it because Marchetti always goes to get it.
He wins the board battle. His shoulder into their defenseman's chest, the puck jarring free along the wall. It comes to Hájek at the blue line. Hájek looks up. I am already moving.
The lane opens between their defense pair. I have been seeing lanes since I was nine years old on a rink in Zurich, and this one is there for a second, maybe less, and I am through it.
Hájek sends it. Flat and hard. Tape to tape. The pass arrives at exactly the speed my stick needs it to arrive.
1:34 on the clock.
The ice opens in front of me and there is nobody between me and the goalie.
The building sound lifts into something enormous and then it tips over into its own kind of quiet, the way a wave becomes still at the top before it breaks.
I cannot hear eighteen thousand people. I can hear my blades on the ice.
I can hear my breathing. I can hear the puck on my tape, the small scrape of rubber on composite that is the most specific sound I know.
My legs drive into the surface. My hands are steady.
The goalie comes out, cutting the angle, his pads squaring.
I pull to the forehand. He commits. I roof it.
Glove side, the puck rising off my blade and into the top corner of the net, and the sound it makes hitting the mesh is the smallest, most precise sound in the building.
And then the building comes apart.
Marchetti reaches me first. His gloves grab my jersey and his helmet cracks against mine and his voice is in my ear, something about destiny or history or the future, I cannot make it out over the noise and it does not matter because his arms are around me and the ice is under my knees.
"Berger!" Hájek is there, slamming into the pile.
"Franchise history, baby!" Thompson, from somewhere.
The pile builds. The team around me and the noise above me and the puck in the net and 1:23 on the clock and we are going to win this game.
I look across the ice.
He is on the bench. His helmet is off. His hands are on the boards.
His face is still and his eyes are on me and in this building of eighteen thousand people who are screaming, one man is sitting on the away bench and looking at me with an expression I have seen exactly once before. In a kitchen. Three days ago.
Nobody sees it. The cameras are on the pile. The broadcast is running the replay. Eighteen thousand people are looking at me and he is looking at me and they are not the same thing.
I hold it for one second. Then Marchetti pulls me up and the pile swallows me and the second is over and the game is not.
The final eighty-thre seconds are the longest of my life.
They pull their goalie. Six on five. The puck in our zone, the shots coming, Lundy eating rubber, the building counting down because the math is simple now and the clock is the only thing left to beat.
Lundy covers the puck with nine seconds left.
Faceoff. Jensen wins it clean. The puck goes to the corner and the clock runs and the buzzer sounds and the glass shakes with the noise.
2-1.
The celebration is a wave. The team pours over the boards and the pile in front of Lundy is twenty men deep.
Helmets off. Sticks on the ice. Gloves in the air.
Marchetti is screaming. Davis is screaming.
M?kinen has his hand on his forearm where the tattoo is and his eyes are closed and his mouth is moving and whatever he is saying is not in English.
And then it settles. The way it always settles. The referees signal and both teams line up and the ritual begins.
The handshake line.
Single file. Glove on glove. The words the same from every mouth. Good game. Good game. Hell of a game. Good luck. You look the man in the eye and you shake his hand and you move on. The ritual does not require originality. It requires you to be present and to mean it.
I go through. Face after face. Glove after glove. Men I played with a year ago and played against tonight.
And then his hand is in mine.
His glove meets my glove and the grip is firm and warm through the leather and his face is the real one. Not the careful version. Not the contained version.
"Good game," he says.
"Good game," I say.
His hand holds for one beat longer than the line allows.
Half a second. His thumb presses once against the back of my glove.
The pressure is small and specific and it carries everything his mouth cannot say in front of forty men and sixty cameras and a building full of people who do not know what they are seeing.
I press back.
He lets go. He skates toward the tunnel. His shoulders are set and his stick is across his body and his stride is steady and even. This is the last time Wes Mercer will skate off a sheet of professional ice and no one knows. He does not look back. He doesn’t need to.
The tunnel takes him. The Miami jerseys follow. The ice belongs to the Firebirds.
Marchetti grabs my arm. "Berger. Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere." I turn back to the ice. To the building. To the team. "I'm right here."
"Good. Because we have a series starting Tuesday and I need you loud."
"I'm always loud."
"Prove it."
The ice is still cold. The lights are still on.
Eighteen thousand people are still on their feet and the season is not over.
Marchetti is ahead of me, skating toward center ice where the team is gathering, and the next round is waiting and the ice is ours and I put my stick down and follow him into it.
The End