Chapter 21
Emile
I win the net back the next week, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done on a sheet of ice.
I do it out of spite. Let me be honest about that, since being honest is the whole thing I’ve got left.
Not out of hunger. Not out of the clean want I’ve carried my whole life.
Out of a heart that got cut open in an equipment room, calisse, and cauterized on the spot by a man using the flat voice on me like a blade he’d been sharpening all season for exactly that cut.
He accused me of coming for his net. So I go and I take his net.
Clean. In the open. In front of the whole barn, the bad-font internet, the man with the little book.
It’s the best hockey I’ve ever played in my life.
And I play it wearing my broken heart like a chest protector, the one piece of armor nobody in the building can see.
There’s a thing that happens when you stop caring whether you get hurt.
Everybody thinks fear is the enemy of a goalie.
It isn’t. The enemy is caring too much about the wrong thing, and tonight I don’t care about a single thing except proving I didn’t need him.
I’m a wall he’d be proud of, me, if he weren’t the reason I’m made of brick.
I see everything early. And I read the play before it declares.
Their top line comes at me in a rush. I’m there, and there, and there, ahead of the puck every time, committed to reads that have no business being right.
Thirty-some shots and I turn away every last one of them.
A shutout. The horn at the end is the right horn and it’s mine.
And the scout writes so fast his hand must cramp.
The room comes off the bench and buries me.
A pile of guys, sticks, somebody’s glove shoved in my mouth, all of them chanting the thing they chant, which is my name.
You want to know what that sounds like? Exactly like the sound I used to invent for myself on a milk crate, in a town two hours from anywhere, saying it out loud into an empty garage so it would feel real.
In the room they’re loud like a team gets loud when it has decided a thing is settled.
“That’s the guy. That is our guy.”
“Fortin. Hey. Did you even see the one off the far post in the second?”
“I saw it.”
“You did not see it.”
“I’ve got the whole tape in my head. I’ll walk you through it on the bus, frame by frame, with commentary. Bring snacks.”
“Where’s Wrobel?”
Nobody answers that one. It isn’t a hostile nothing. It’s the nothing a room hands a question it’s been carefully not asking for weeks.
Rocco comes down the row and stops in front of my stall and looks at me a beat longer than a captain looks at a goalie who just posted a shutout.
“You all right?”
“I just shut a team out, Cap.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I’m all right.”
He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t move on either, not right away, and the not-moving-on is the whole conversation. I look at my skates until he takes it away with him.
I got everything. That’s the joke of it. I got the whole list, the net for good, the scout’s eye turned all the way to me now with no senior in the way of it. And the door I threw my body against for years, swung so far open it’s off its hinges.
It tastes like ash. You want to know what’s worse than ash?
It tastes like nothing at all. I stand in the crease after the horn with my mask shoved up, my teammates skating in from the blue line to bury me again, and I’m holding the whole dream in my two hands.
It weighs nothing. It’s a helium thing. It floats up out of my grip and I don’t even reach for it, because the one person on this earth I ever wanted to be picked by is watching from the far end of the bench with a face like a bolted door.
From where he’s sitting, it now looks like exactly the thing he said it was.
I look for him before I look for anything, which is the tell I can’t turn off, even buried under my own teammates.
I find him at the end of the bench in his gear, dressed and not playing.
Not standing, not clapping. Just watching me the way you watch a man wear the coat off your back out into the cold.
I want to skate over there, rip my mask the rest of the way off, and say it isn’t what it looks like, none of it is what it looks like.
But there’s no version of what I just did on this ice that reads as anything other than what he named in a gray room.
A coup.
That’s what it looks like, read cold, from the outside, with no idea what happens in the dark between two rooms. Want the summary?
The backup got into the starter’s head. Then into his bed.
Then he took his net, his scout, his last season, his whole future.
And he did it all with a smile on his face.
There’s no way on the ice or off it for me to prove it was ever anything but that.
I’ve got the net now. And having the net is the evidence.
The having is the whole case against me.
I built it myself, tonight, in a shutout, in the open, for a room full of witnesses who chanted my name while I did it.
I did the thing he accused me of. Not because it was true.
I need somebody to hear that, even if it’s only the inside of my own skull.
You listening? Not because it was true. Because he made it true by accusing me of it, because he stood in that gray room and turned the softest thing I ever handed a person into evidence.
I was hurt enough, gutted enough, to reach for the cruelest available proof that I didn’t need him.
And the cruelest available proof, the one thing guaranteed to bury the argument, was his net.
So I took it. To show him it didn’t matter.
To show him I could walk away from him and be fine, be better than fine, be a shutout, be the changing of the guard.
To hurt him back the exact amount he hurt me, which is the stupidest math a person can do.
The only way to win it is to lose the person you’re doing it over.
And now it’ll never look like anything but the con he named.
That’s the trap he built and I walked into it wide-eyed, because a hurt man doesn’t check where he’s putting his feet.
He accused me of a thing I hadn’t done. I was so gutted by the accusing that I went out and did it to spite him.
In the doing, I made his lie the truth. I handed him the proof of the very thing I came here to disprove.
I’m so good at winning arguments, crisse, they’re going to carve it on my headstone.
Won every point. Lost the game. Undefeated, me.
Ask anybody who’s still speaking to me, which is a short list and getting shorter by the week.
I go to the Hitch after. I don’t want the team. I don’t want the pile and the chant and the guys buying me the thing you buy the shutout goalie. I want the dark corner under the deer head, the one with the Renegades cap on it, and I want the drink Denny pours without being asked.
The place is warm and low and smells like fried everything.
The horseshoe is still nailed over the door, older than anybody who drinks under it.
The deer head still wears its Renegades cap, which it has worn since before I was born.
Half the town is in here off their shifts, a couple of old-timers at the rail, the little TV over the bottles running a pro game nobody in here pulls for.
It’s still the closest thing I’ve got to a living room.
Tonight I don’t want the family part of it.
I want the corner and the dark and the drink.
Denny pours it and sets it down on the wood in front of me. Then he doesn’t move off, and that’s the tell, because Denny works this bar the way he used to kill a penalty, always sliding, never in one spot long enough to get scored on. He puts both hands on the wood across from me instead.
“Thirty-four,” he says.
“You counted.”
“I watch the games. I’m not dead.” He looks at me a beat longer than the room would call polite, and there’s nothing in the look trying to be wise about it.
It’s a guy who came up the same tunnel not that long ago reading a guy who’s still coming up it.
“Worst night I ever had in this building, I got the empty-netter against these same guys. Whole barn saying my name. Never happened before, never happened again.” He shrugs one shoulder.
“Drove up the mountain after wanting to put my fist through the windshield. It’s never the hockey.
Everybody figures it’s going to be the hockey. ”
“So what is it, then. If it’s never the hockey.”
“You know what it is.”
“Humor me. Say it out loud so I’ve got something to argue with.”
“No.” He picks up a glass that doesn’t need picking up. “You’d win. You’re better at talking than me and then I’m up all night about it.”
Then he sets the bottle down next to my glass instead of capping it and carrying it back to the rail, and he goes off to work the far end and leave me alone, which is the second kindness and the bigger one.
The bottle isn’t the message. The bottle is Denny getting out of the way after he already said it, out loud, in plain words, in about forty seconds flat.
He sat in the seats they park you in when you don’t play.
He can tell a guy who lost from a guy who won and came out worse, and he can tell it in the time it takes to pour.
I sit there with the net I always wanted and the bottle Denny left. And somewhere in the low warm dark of the place, I finally understand what I’ve been doing my entire life.
Earning it. All of it. Every hour on the milk crate with a garage door for a net and a tennis ball for a puck.
Every early morning first-idiot-in. Every tell I studied in the dark of a film room.
Every guy I out-hustled to the corner seat on the bus.
Every drill I turned myself inside out to win.
Every party I filled with noise so nobody would notice I was the one who never got picked to lead the rush.
Ostie, you know how much noise a thing like that takes?
My whole life I’ve been trying to earn the thing that would finally make me worth choosing.
I thought if I just worked hard enough at being good, being funny, being early, being useful, somebody would eventually look at the list and put my name at the top of it.
And then the thing in me that’s been cold since I was a kid would finally warm up.
I thought the net was that thing. I stood at the end of a bench in clean dry pads and decided the net would fix the part of me that never got chosen first.
And I did it to him too. That’s the part that puts my forehead down on the bar.
I did the exact same thing to Casimir. I tried to earn him, like a crease, like a start.
Study his tells, learn his order, out-work the other guy for the right to stand in front of him.
I courted him the only way I know how to want anything, which is to compete for it.
I brought him flowers the only way I’ve got, by trying to be better than him, by going five-hole on him in a duel and calling it a love letter.
In my whole vocabulary the highest thing you can say to a person is this.
I studied you and I beat you. You were worth every hour of it.
Nobody ever taught me a softer word than that.
I grew up in rooms where you earned your seat or you rode standing, where love was a locker-room thing, gruff and sideways, a roll thrown at your head, a hand on the back of your neck you didn’t get to keep.
I didn’t know there was another language for handing a person your heart.
So I handed him a scouting report, and then I couldn’t understand why he flinched every single time.
And when he wouldn’t be earned, when he stopped being a wall to beat and asked me in his own bricked-up way to just be loved instead of won, I didn’t know how.
I short-circuited. Because nobody ever taught me the difference between being wanted and being chosen, so I’ve spent my whole life mixing them up, drinking one and calling it the other, wondering why I’m still thirsty.
Wanted is a thing you can earn. You out-work it, you out-hustle it, you make yourself so useful they can’t run the room without you.
Chosen is something else, and it doesn’t answer to work.
Chosen is a person looking at you with your gear off and your best game nowhere in the building, and picking you anyway, for no reason you could put on a résumé.
Who does that? I built my whole self to be wanted.
I never learned how to let myself be chosen.
I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if it had walked up and sat down next to me.
It did, in an equipment room, with a glove in my hand, and I tried to scout it.
I’ve got the net. I’ve never felt less picked in my life.
I lift my head off the bar. Denny is down at the far end with his back half to me, which is Denny for still here.
What are you supposed to say to a guy who says his piece and then quits looking at you on purpose so you can have the room?
Nothing. That’s the correct answer, and I’m the only guy in this town who has never managed it.
So I did the thing I know how to do. I competed harder, I took the net, I proved I didn’t need him. Proving is the only tongue I speak. I proved it so well I convinced everyone in the building, including, maybe, him.
I’m done confusing them. That’s the thought I walk out into the cold with.
I leave Denny’s bottle mostly full on the wood, which is its own kind of answer to the man who left it, and I go out into the dark of a town that took a couple of seasons to decide I was all right.
I don’t know yet what it’s going to cost me to fix this.
I know it’s going to cost. But I know, for the first time in my whole earning life, which of the two things I actually want.
And it isn’t the one they let you hang from the rafters with a date on it.