Chapter 3
Emile
The Stable smells like every athletic dorm that’s ever existed, which is feet and body spray and the low grief of a microwave four guys have wronged.
There’s a radiator that knocks all night and heats nothing.
And I love it about as much as I love the barn, which is completely, and against the advice of everyone including me.
Same room they gave me when I got here. Second floor.
The north wall of it’s thin enough that you learn your neighbor’s whole life through it whether you signed up for that or not.
I’m hauling my last box up when I find out whose life it’s going to be this year.
A door down the hall is open. And there’s a shelf being built inside it, books going up one at a time.
I don’t have to see the hands to know them.
Steady. No wasted motion. Every spine getting turned the same way before it goes on the wood.
Of course. Of course they put the saint next to me. And somewhere a scheduling committee’s high-fiving.
I don’t say anything. I’m capable of not saying things, whatever my file says.
I pause in his doorway a second with the box on my hip, and there he is with his back to me, standing the books up so the spines all face the same way.
He hasn’t heard me, or he’s heard me and decided I’m weather.
And I think, come on, nobody’s this much of a monk.
Nobody. I go put my box down in my own room and turn on my music.
Not loud. Just a thread of it, just enough to slide under the wall and let his side know the noise moved in.
His side goes quiet, and it’s a loud kind of quiet, the kind the whole hallway seems to lean toward. I grin at the drywall like a lunatic and go to team meet.
I unpack while the light goes down outside.
It doesn’t take long, because a backup travels light.
Pads, a couple of masks, a milk crate of tape, the speaker, a photo of my mother on the little dresser that came with the room.
Manon, at the kitchen table back home, two hours from anywhere, holding a coffee and squinting at whoever had the camera.
She calls on Sundays and asks did I eat.
I always say yes. Sometimes it’s even true.
I set the photo square to the corner of the dresser and then I laugh at myself, because square to the corner is his move, not mine.
And I’ve caught it off him through a wall in under an hour.
* * *
The Trough is our corner of the dining hall.
Has been forever. Will belong to whatever sorry freshmen inherit it when we’re graduated and gone.
Tonight it’s loud like it only ever gets the night before a season, everybody pretending they’re not wound tight by being twice as much themselves.
A sophomore guards a tower of trays like a trophy.
A freshman D-man’s already been nicknamed something cruel and wears it like he’s grateful for it.
He probably is. And a cruel nickname means they kept you.
Rocco Rizzo’s at the head of the table, because Rocco’s at the head of everything.
Our captain. Built low and wide like a fire hydrant, about that easy to move.
He does the thing he does, which is not much.
He sits there being the heaviest object in the room while the rest of us orbit and knock into each other.
He doesn’t give speeches at dinner. He doesn’t have to.
When Rocco wants the table quiet he sets his fork down, and the table goes quiet. Nobody’s ever worked out how.
“Fortin.” He tips his chin at me. From Rocco a chin is a whole paragraph. “Good summer?”
“Grew an inch.” I drop into the seat across from him. “All confidence.”
“You didn’t grow an inch.”
“You measuring me now, Cap? All confidence, then. Grew it in the hands, mostly. A guy in my job has to grow something over a summer or he turns up in the fall exactly as useful as he left.”
“This is my last one,” he says, out of nowhere, which is how Rocco says every single thing worth saying. “Senior. I walk in the spring and somebody else gets the letter.”
“Who?”
“Not decided.”
“It’s me. Say it’s me. Say it out loud in front of witnesses and I’ll get it in writing.”
“It isn’t you.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I did,” Rocco says, and goes back to his food. “That was me thinking about it.”
His and Casimir’s both. The whole senior class walks in the spring, and I try not to think about that, and I think about it anyway. A team’s only a team for a little while. Then it scatters, the corner table belongs to strangers, and you become a name a freshman says wrong.
The table takes it. A roll comes flying at my head.
And I catch it out of the air, take a bite of it, just to be a menace.
Down the way somebody argues whether a hot dog’s a sandwich.
Loudly. With citations. Girard, our quiet junior D-man who says maybe nine words a season, picks that moment to spend one of them.
“It’s a taco,” he says, then goes back to his food, and the table detonates.
Vinh nearly puts a drink up his own nose.
Somebody bangs the table so hard the trays jump.
The freshman with the cruel nickname laughs the loud grateful laugh of a kid who can’t believe his luck at being here.
I file the taco line away for the group chat, because it’ll run for a week.
Good chirps run for a week. Great ones you’re still saying at graduation.
I love this. That’s the part nobody tells you the backup gets to keep. I don’t get the net. But I get this. The corner table. The roll out of the air. The boys. Ask me when I got here and I’d have told you the net was the only thing worth having. I’d have been lying. But I’d have told you.
Tucked in next to Vinh Tran, who’s telling a story with both hands, is Bruno Thibault. That’s the one that gets me, if I’m honest, and I try not to be.
Bruno doesn’t play anymore. Coach invented a title so he could stay, student assistant coach, which isn’t a job that exists in this program and is his job anyway.
He’s in this building more hours than most of us.
And here he is on a Tuesday with the team, because Vinh’s here.
The two of them have ended up with half a bench to themselves, and a couple ends up with half a bench without noticing they did it.
Vinh gets to the end of his story. Bruno laughs, this big helpless laugh that uses his whole body, then puts his hand flat on the back of Vinh’s neck.
Just lays it there. Warm. Easy. Vinh leans back into it without even looking, like the hand’s been there his whole life and will be there the rest of it.
And I sit there with a torn-up roll and watch. A guy who used to fight the whole league on other people’s behalf lets another guy hold him by the back of the neck. In the middle of the Trough. In the open. In front of the team. And not one person so much as blinks.
How? One word, and it’s all my head will make. How do you let a hand land on you like that and not spend the rest of the night waiting for the bill?
That one, I’ve got nowhere to put, so it goes in the drawer where I keep the things about people that don’t fit anywhere yet. It’s a big drawer. It gets more use than I’d like. I shut it. Vinh catches me looking and grins, and I go find something else to do with my face.
Bruno catches me on his way back from the drink station and knocks his knuckles against my shoulder, easy, same as he does with everyone. “Fortin. Staying out of trouble?”
“Never once in my life. You?”
He laughs like that’s the correct answer, which it is.
He doesn’t sit back down right away. He stands there a second being enormous and kind, which is all he has ever been.
“You settled? Room all right?”
“Same one they’ve given me since I got here. I’ve worn a groove in the floor.”
“Second floor.” He says it like he already knew, because he did. “Who’d they put next door to you?”
“Guess.”
“Ah.” That’s what I get. Not a wince, not a laugh. He knocks two knuckles on the table like a man checking that the wood is real, then leaves it there between us without picking it up. “Long season, then.”
“Everybody keeps saying that to me tonight.”
“Everybody’s right.”
And I think about how a guy like that used to drop the gloves for the whole bench. Now here he is on a Tuesday with a hand that only knows how to be gentle. People change shape. And nobody warns you. I file that one too. The drawer groans.
Down the table the hot-dog-sandwich argument mutates into a hot-dog-taco schism. A freshman makes the mistake of taking it to the head of the table.
“Cap. Settle it. Sandwich or not?”
Rocco looks at him a long moment. “Eat your dinner,” he says, and goes back to his own.
It’s the funniest thing anybody’s said all night, precisely because he didn’t mean it to be.
Then somebody’s got a clip up on a phone, a save from a summer-league game somewhere, and it gets passed down the table until every goalie in the room, which tonight means me, gets asked to grade it. I give it a six.
“A six,” Rocco says, and doesn’t smile, which is what makes it land.
“My mother’s a four. She knows why.”
Half the table chokes on their dinner. I start a second, smaller war.
Moose Tessier comes through with the sign-out sheet.
Our equipment manager since before the flood, a man who’s seen everything twice and comments on roughly none of it.
He hands the freshmen their gloves. Moose does a thing, older than any of us, sacred.
He gives every freshman the wrong size the first time.
Straight-faced. He hands a kid with paws like dinner plates a pair built for a much smaller man.
And waits. This year’s freshman jams his fingers in about halfway, looks up in slow dawning horror, and the table loses it.
Moose watches it happen with the face of a man watching the tide come in on schedule.
He gets to me. He looks at me over the top of the sheet with the same look he’s given me every fall since I got here, and the look says he remembers exactly what I am and has decided to allow it.
“You again,” he says.
“Me again. Miss me?”
“No.”
“There it is. That was a hesitation.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Everybody at this table heard a hesitation. Ask them. Ask the freshman with the little hands.”
He almost smiles, and a Moose almost-smile is a thing you tell your grandkids about. He hands me my real gloves. Right size. No bit. From Moose that’s basically a graduation gown.
“Sign the sheet,” he says, already moving, and doesn’t look back to check that I do.
The depth chart goes up after dinner. Marquette posts it on the corkboard outside the room, and the whole team drifts over to read a thing every one of us already knows.
Goaltenders. Wrobel, C. Fortin, E.
I read it slow, like it might have changed since dinner. It hasn’t. It never does. Somewhere a printer spits out the same two names in the same two spots every fall. And every fall I stand here and let it land on me like it’s news.
One and two. His name and then mine. His net and then the bench. Same as it’s been. Same ink. Same order. I stand there and read it anyway, and I feel the animal in my chest get up on its feet and stretch.
He’s reading it too. Off to the side. Apart the way he’s always apart, near the room and never in it. I drift over, because around him I can’t not, it’s a documented condition. I pitch it low, just for us.
“You ever get sick of reading your own name up there?”
Nothing. Never anything.
“Enjoy the top of the list, Wrobel. Lists change.”
He doesn’t look at the board. He looks at me. No heat in it. Flat. Which is somehow worse than heat.
“Not that one.”
Here’s the stupid part, the part I’ll be sore about at lights-out.
It lands like a win. His. He got the last word, it was three words, and they were the right three.
Some piece of me that’s spent its whole life wanting to be worth answering lights up.
Like he handed me a present and didn’t even mean to.
I want to say something back. I’ve got three things loaded and I fire none of them, because his eyes are still on me, flat and level.
And for once in my life I understand that the smart move is to let the man have the point and walk away carrying it.
So I do. I tip him a nod like I meant to lose.
He doesn’t tip one back. He turns to the board again, which is his way of ending a thing.
Long season.
* * *
I take the long way back to the Stable, through the cold, because the animal in my chest won’t lie down.
The streetlights buzz. My breath goes out ahead of me.
The town’s small enough that the last of the shops are already dark.
A dog barks at me from a porch and thinks better of it.
I pass the barn on the way and it sits there black and huge, holding all of tomorrow inside it.
I put my hand flat on the cold brick of it for no reason I could tell you, then feel like an idiot and keep walking.
My room’s dark and the thin wall is right there. On the other side of it, quiet, is a saint arranging his day into rows.
I turn my music on. Low. Not for me. For him. To let his side know the noise moved in, that he’s not as alone over there as he’s decided he is.
I lie in the dark and wait for his side to tell me to knock it off. A thump on the wall. A door. Anything. That’d be a whole speech, from Casimir. That’d be him admitting he can hear me at all.
Nothing comes. His side stays quiet.
But it’s a listening kind of quiet. I’d bet my next start on it, if I had a next start to bet. He’s over there awake, letting my music fill the crack. Neither of us is going to say a word about it tomorrow. Somehow it’s the most either of us has said all day.
So I let the song run all the way out and I don’t put on another one, and neither of us moves. Two guys awake in the dark with a wall between them, both of us pretending otherwise. First idiot in. First idiot still up.