Chapter 17
Emile
I’m good in his net. That’s the problem. Right there, and there’s no way around it.
I take the games and I win most of them.
Not all. Nobody wins all. But most. And I win them the way you win when the building has decided you’re the answer, which is a different way than you win when you’re clawing for a chance.
Confidence is a real thing, it’s not nothing.
A goalie who believes the net is his plays two inches bigger than a goalie who’s auditioning for it, and I stopped auditioning the Tuesday the leg went.
My two inches showed up. My numbers show it.
Confidence. The thing every coach won’t shut up about, and it turns out they were right, which is its own small insult.
The student site that ran my name in a bigger font runs it bigger still, and the word changes.
That’s what I clock, lying awake. The word.
It was a controversy before. Controversy means two guys, one net, an argument that’s live.
Now it isn’t a controversy. Now it’s a changing of the guard.
The senior went down. And the kid stepped up.
Who writes a sad story about a changing of the guard?
That’s the hopeful kind, the passing-the-torch kind, the kind that feels good to type.
Nobody types the version where the kid would give the whole torch back to see the senior stand up off the ice on a Tuesday.
There’s no font for that one. Somebody should invent one.
Real small, all lowercase, printed sideways down at the bottom where the leg is.
The scout comes back.
I clock him in the first period, same seat off the near blue line, same still apartness, same notebook, and this time I can feel it.
I don’t even have to see the pen move. This time he’s writing about me.
The seat that spent my best road game watching an empty crease is spending this one watching me fill it.
I got the thing I wanted. I got the eye.
It came in the ugliest possible package.
And it’s still the thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid.
I hate that both of those are true. Two things that shouldn’t fit in one chest at the same time, and here they both are, taking up room, elbowing each other.
I should be on the roof of the world. This is the exact thing, the one I’ve been walking at since before I had a word for it.
My mother texts me after the wins now, the wall of it with no periods, so proud, and eat something at the bottom every single time, as if a save percentage has ever once reminded me to eat.
I read it. I can’t make myself feel the thing the words are for.
She’s watched me dress for other people’s seasons my whole life and now she gets to watch me play mine, and she’s happy, honestly happy.
I lie about being happy back. How do you tell your mother the crease came to you off a stretcher?
And every single night I stand in a crease that’s warm from a body that isn’t mine, stopping pucks the way a guy stops pucks when the whole barn has agreed he’s the guy now.
I feel like a thief. Not a thief who broke in.
Worse. A thief in a house where they left the door standing open on purpose, where the owner’s lying hurt down the hall, where everybody keeps telling the thief how well the house suits him.
“You’ve come into your own, eh,” a freshman says to me in the room, meaning all of it kindly, meaning nothing but the good version.
“Told you he’d be fine,” says a D-man who does not know my name in a hallway.
“How’s it feel, though?” the freshman says. “Honestly. How’s it actually feel?”
“Great,” I say. “It feels great. The coat fits great.”
“The what?”
“Nothing.”
Ostie. What do you say to that? Thanks, the coat fits great, sorry about the leg?
You can’t say it isn’t my place, because the guy who lives here is in a brace on the bench.
And saying it sounds like a man fishing for people to tell him he earned it.
I’m so tired of earning things, me. I could lie down on the ice and not get up.
That’s a joke. Mostly. Ask the trainers, they’ll tell you I’m a delight.
And I’m easy, me. Feed me, ice me, tell me I look good in the coat, wind me back up and point me at the crease.
He’s around. Casimir. It guts me daily. He doesn’t disappear like a lot of guys disappear when they’re hurt, off to rehab and out of the room.
He’s there, on the bench in a suit with his leg in a brace, watching.
Sowa keeps him close and Casimir keeps himself close, because a man who lives by order doesn’t let himself drift even when the order has nothing left to hold.
But he isn’t watching me like he used to watch me.
He used to watch me like weather he was trying to forecast. Like a threat to manage.
Like a problem with a solution he hadn’t found yet.
Now he watches me the way you watch a man wear your coat.
Correct fit. Wrong owner. Nothing you can say about it that doesn’t sound small.
I try to give it back where I can. That’s the part that kills me, because I try, and every try lands wrong.
I defer. In the room before a game I ask him how he’d play their top line, their power play, the winger who fakes and waits, and I mean it.
Every word. I’m not performing humility for the room, I actually want to know, because he knows things about this position I won’t know for years.
I’d be an idiot not to drink from that while it’s standing right next to my stall.
He answers flat and correct, the whole diagram of it.
And I go out and do exactly what he says.
It works. It always works. And I skate off thinking I handed him a piece of his net back, thinking I gave him a way to still be the goalie, from the bench, through me.
He hears it as charity. I can watch him hear it.
Every time I ask, his jaw does the straight-line thing, the small furious muscle in the cheek, the tell I’ve had filed since the first day.
And I understand, too late, standing there feeling generous.
A proud man doesn’t want your questions.
A proud man doesn’t want to coach the kid who took his crease.
A proud man wants his crease. There’s no version of me asking him how to play the top line that doesn’t sound, to him, like the guy in his coat asking him to help tailor it.
There’s a night it goes bad out loud. Not loud for anybody else. Loud for us, which is about two degrees off flat.
“Their power play,” I say, over the end of his stall, in the room before. “The umbrella. How do you take the one-timer away?”
“Sag off the half-wall. Give him the pass. Take the shot.”
“Give him the pass?”
“He is a better passer than a shooter and nobody has told him that yet.” Correct and cold, the whole diagram of it, and not once does he look up from the strap he is checking.
“Calisse, that’s good. Thanks.”
“You do not need it.”
“I’m asking anyway.”
“You’re winning.” Now he looks at me. “Stop asking me how.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It is exactly what you are doing. You are handing me a job so I have something to hold.” He turns back to the gear that has no game to go to. “Go get dressed.”
And I get it then, all the way down. He doesn’t hear a teammate.
He hears a kid being kind to a man on the way down, and kindness from the guy holding your net is the one thing a proud man can’t swallow.
I made it worse by trying to make it better.
Me and him lately, in one line. Every reach lands as a shove.
I should get a shirt printed. Emile Fortin, professional wrong move, available for weddings.
So I stop asking. That lands wrong too. There’s no move.
Every move I have is wrong, because the only right move is one neither of us can make, which is me giving the net back.
And I can’t give the net back. Marquette put me here and the leg put me here, and handing it over would be a lie about hockey told to fix a truth about us.
Casimir would smell that lie from across the barn.
There’s a night I lie awake alone, because he’s stopped knocking in the rhythm.
Two fingers, once, my own thing he stole and gave back to me.
It’s gone silent on the other side of the thin place.
The wall between us used to be a listening wall, a wall we both lay against, a whole marriage conducted through drywall.
Now it’s gone quiet in the bad way, the dead way, and I lie on my side of it with no low sound coming through.
I know he’s over there awake, keeping his order, refusing to want the music.
So I finally say the true thing to the ceiling.
Out loud. Into the dark. The thing I’ve been walking around for a year.
I don’t want to beat him. I never wanted to beat him. Not really. Not underneath.
I wanted to be picked.
And the net doesn’t fix that. That’s the joke of my whole life, delivered late.
I’ve got the entire thing I said I wanted and I’ve never felt less picked, because the one person whose picking would have meant anything is lying down the hall behind a dead wall watching me wear his coat.
I got his crease by accident instead of getting his heart on purpose.
So I decide. Lying there, alone, with a dead wall at my back and the net I always wanted parked in my stall like a prize I can’t stand to look at.
I’m going to give something up. I don’t know what yet.
But something real, something that costs me what it has to cost to be believed.
The only language either of us has ever been fluent in is the language of what you’ll put your body in front of.
He blocked a shot with his body in a season opener to close a hole I would have left open.
That’s how this man says a thing. And I’ve been saying everything with silence.
I’m done. I’m going to say it the only way he’ll hear it.
In the open. Where it costs. And let him watch it cost.
I don’t know yet. The thing I’m going to put my body in front of is the net.
I’ve been brave about all the wrong things.
Brave enough to throw my body across a crease.
Brave enough to want the net out loud in a room full of guys who outranked me.
And a complete coward about the one thing I couldn’t earn back if I lost it.
I don’t know the shape of it yet. I only know the direction. Toward him.