Rafe
Chapter seventeen
Istopped behind a salt truck, and while I sat there, I remembered the headboard.
It wasn’t the crack on the skull. It was the part after, when I’d reached up and held onto the slats because I needed something to hold on to. The wood had been smooth under my fingers. It was hand-planed. Even then, with everything else going on, my brain paused to check the finish.
The salt truck moved, and I followed it through the intersection.
My phone sat in the console. It had been buzzing all morning. It was likely Hal, Mark, the team chat, and Mom, plus everybody else trying to carry me through the worst week of my life on my behalf.
I woke at six with Niko’s arm across my chest. I listened to him breathe. His forearm had sawdust in the hair on it, fine as flour. For a few minutes, I thought about nothing. I hadn’t done that for nearly a week.
Then I remembered there was a world out there, and I got up.
Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life, but the night nearly made up for it. Niko and I locked the rest of the world out of his bedroom, and it was just the two of us.
We’d laughed. I didn’t expect that.
The phone buzzed once again. At the light on Chicago Avenue, I looked.
Niko: You left a sock.
I had my thumbs on the screen before the light changed.
Rafe: there’s another one. couldn’t find them
Niko: You left without wearing socks?
Rafe: wearing yours.
The light turned green. I set the phone down and drove.
The practice facility came up on my right, the river behind it low and gray between crusts of ice. There were two extra vans in the media lot. A man stood by the players’ entrance with a camera bag on his shoulder. When I turned, he straightened up.
I pulled down the ramp into the garage, picked up my phone, and left the truck.
Practice ran clean. Coach Markel had the cones out for the fake bump before half the guys had their helmets buckled.
We went to work. My first rush, a defenseman jumped the lane the same way St. Louis had taught the whole league to jump it.
I kept the puck and went through the door behind him. Pratt barely got a pad on it.
On the second rush the lane stayed closed, so I bumped it to Heath and we cycled.
“Good,” Coach Markel said.
When I turned the corner, I wished I hadn’t. The scrum was usually a dozen. It was thirty-some now. There were faces in the crowd I’d only ever seen on television.
Varga was already wading in. “Okay,” he said. “Big crowd today. Wonderful. I have thoughts on our playoff chances—“
They let him talk.
Since October, Varga’s voice had been like a snowplow I walked behind. He’d take the first questions and answer them. The media would laugh and forget at least half of what they wanted to ask me. Sometimes I made it through with just a nod.
Today was different. When Varga paused for breath, every lens in the hallway swung around to point at me.
“Rafe.” Deckert had the first one for me. He was near the front, wearing the same gray parka he’d worn since November. “The pass in the St. Louis game. The hat trick you gave away. Was that part of it? Was the nice-guy stuff part of the arrangement?”
“Varga was open,” I said.
It was the whole truth. I’d said it from the beginning. This time when it landed, they heard something else.
“Follow-up,” Deckert said. “The dinners, the gala, all of it staged and paid for. What do you say to fans who feel like the farm-kid thing was—“ he chose the next word carefully ”—produced?”
“Nobody produced Saskatchewan,” I said. “It’s just there.”
“Last one,” Deckert said. “You could have ended this any day you wanted to, but you didn’t. Walk me through a morning where you decided to keep it going.”
I didn’t have an answer because I hadn’t had any mornings like that. I tried to deflect. “The team put out a statement—“
“Not the team. You.”
“Okay—enough.” Varga arrived, starting up the plow again. “He has video at eleven. I also have video at eleven. We’re done here.”
“Lucas, one more for Rafe—“
They tried to go through him. I’d never seen that. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and turned me up the hallway.
“Video,” he said.
We walked. In a low voice he asked, “You good?”
I lowered my head, and no words came.
I sat in my stall after video with my phone out, staring at the screen.
Mom: Marlene keeps sending me things and I keep deleting them. Dad says the fake bump is going to get you ten goals by April. Are you sleeping?
Rafe: I’m okay and sleeping a little. tell Dad they’ve started scouting the bump already, he’ll like that.
***
On game day, I took my laps during warmups and stretched at the red line, same as every game night since September. During the second lap, I realized something was missing.
The spot where the glitter kid stood was empty. Nobody took his place. It was empty, a gap in the row at the glass like a missing tooth. The bedsheet with my number and Max’s inside a heart was gone too.
The first shift, I touched the puck at our blue line, and the crowd made a sound I’d never heard.
It started down in the corners of the lower bowl and then moved through the building. It wasn’t everyone, but they were booing.
I passed the puck to Heath and skated into position.
The boos happened at specific moments. They came every time I touched the puck and stopped when it left my stick. They weren’t booing the team. Varga carried through the neutral zone to the same noise as always, and Heath won a board battle and got an appreciative roar. It was about me.
On the bench, nobody said anything about it, but Heath sat closer than he needed to. Varga talked even more than usual.
It didn’t matter for the game. On the ice, it was hockey as usual. Their D was heavy and slow to pivot, and Coach Markel said they’d give us the wall all night.
In the second period, eight minutes in, their weak-side man jumped the fake bump exactly as we’d drilled it. The door swung open behind his shoulder, and I went through and shot far side. It caromed off the post into the net.
The roar started because a goal is a goal, and the score was tied. Then I heard it catch. The sound came apart with boos landing inside the roar like hail inside rain. Entire sections suddenly went quiet.
Heath grabbed my helmet at the glass. Varga arrived yelling in Hungarian, the same as always. We skated to the bench through the noise, and Coach Markel looked down the line. “Same look next time.”
We won 3-1.
The scrum in the hallway was even bigger than at practice. I wouldn’t have thought the hallway could hold it.
Cross came out first after a quick shower on purpose. He did that only when he had a reason.
“He’s our teammate, and he had three points tonight,” Cross said. “Anything else is noise.”
Then he returned to the locker room, and they all waited for me.
I was still at my stall in my undershirt when Trier sat down next to me, in Pratt’s spot, with his phone out.
“Blood work came back,” he said, as if he were telling me something on an ordinary day.
“I want to walk you through it, in case you didn’t read it from the list.” He held his phone in front of me.
“This is the T4 number. Down from October. That’s the medication working.
It’s the gel you rubbed in her ear, so some of this is because of you.
This next one’s kidney function. At fourteen, that’s the one you monitor every ninety days without exception—“
“Trier.”
”—and hers came back like a nine-year-old’s. The vet used the word remarkable. I have it in writing.“ He scrolled with his thumb, unhurried.
“That’s good,” I said, and meant it in more than one way.
“It’s adequate,” Trier said. He put the phone away and looked at me for a second, and said nothing else. Then he got up and left through the doorway, straight into the lights, and gave them a long, dry answer to a question nobody had asked.
They got their ninety seconds of me. I gave them all the boring answers Varga had taught me. Mark interrupted, and it was my opportunity to leave.
My phone buzzed on the way to my truck.
Niko: 3–1. Chet said your goal was “a dagger from a difficult angle.” He was very worked up. I know what a dagger from a difficult angle is now.
He’d watched. That meant he would have heard the crowd. Chet would’ve talked about the crowd. Niko said nothing about that.
Rafe: did you hear the post clink?
Niko: Like a wrench on a pipe.
Niko: Shop’s open tomorrow after your video thing. Blanket chest needs sanding. Come be useful. Bring lunch, I forgot to shop.
Useful. I sat in the cold truck in the concrete garage and looked at that word until my eyes stung.
Rafe: what kind of lunch
Niko: Sandwiches, I don’t want to wash dishes.
***
After video the next day, Coach Markel caught me in the hallway. “Rafe. Minute.”
His office at the practice facility was the size of a closet, and it smelled like dry-erase marker and the burnt bottom of a coffee pot. He leaned against the desk and folded his arms as the door clicked shut.
“What do you need?” he asked.
I stood there.
What did I need? I needed Max to answer a text. I needed to unsay what I’d said to Marta, and I needed it to be the night in Niko’s bed forever. I couldn’t say any of those things to Coach Markel.
The silence was long enough to be my answer.
“Okay,” he said. “Then here’s what I’ve got.
Your ice time doesn’t change. Your matchups don’t change.
You’re on the first power-play unit tomorrow because you’ve earned the first power-play unit, and if any of that ever stops being what you need, you walk in here and say so.
I’ll change it right away.” He picked his tablet up off the desk, signaling the end of the meeting.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Go home,” he said. “Watch TV, and not hockey.”
I brought Italian beef to Niko’s shop, wrapped in paper. He looked into the bag, smiled, and said, “Acceptable.”
After we ate, he set me up at the sawhorses and showed me the sanding stroke once. It was long, with the grain and the full length of the board. “Patience,” he said. “That’s the most important thing.”
He liked what he saw on my first try. He made a slight correction, and then he worked while I worked.
Neither of us talked for almost an hour. I loved it.
Late in the afternoon, Niko took me upstairs. He pulled out plastic containers of vegetables chopped for soup.
“You said you forgot to shop.”
“I forgot to shop for lunch. Soup was the plan for dinner.” He started the vegetables in a skillet and heated broth in a pan. “I thought you were a little slow yesterday on the penalty kill.”
“I was fine on the penalty kill.”
“Chet thought you looked slow.”
“Chet didn’t say that.”
“You don’t know whether or not he said that.” I spotted a half-smile.
***
The next night the crowd did its thing. They had it down to a science. Booing when I had the puck and cheering my teammates. When I scored, half of them grudgingly appreciated it.
We won 2-1, and I gave the media my ninety seconds. I praised my teammates and felt for our road-weary opponents. Mark interrupted, and I headed for the exit.
I was in the truck with the engine warming when the team chat lit up. A run of messages stacked up.
Heath: oh no.
Rook: somebody get his coat.
Trier: let him cook.
Kieran: Varga stayed?
I sat in the truck and watched it all unfold.
Kieran had caught it all on video with his phone. Varga went back to the hallway, showered, dressed, and alone. He planted himself in front of the cameras.
“Okay. I keep hearing a question this week, and tonight I answer it. Not to a single reporter. To everyone at the same time. Listen up. I’ll only say this once.” He’d had his jacket over his shoulder, but he put it on before he continued.
“The pass from Mikkelsen in St. Louis. Everybody thinks they’re so smart about it. They say he gave away a hat trick for marketing. They say it was calculated.” He sneered when he said the word.
“Okay. I was on that ice. There was an empty net, and I was wide open. You know how often I am open like that? Never. For my entire career, I’ve been yelling and nobody passes, because the yelling is a decoy, everybody knows—“ two reporters laughed, and he pointed at them, ”—no.
No laughing. This is a lecture. I’m Professor Varga. ”
They stopped laughing.
“He passed me the puck because I was open. That was the right play. The open man is the guaranteed goal. That’s it.
That’s the entire—“ He stopped and started again, louder.
“I have played this game with men who would run over their own mothers on skates for a hat trick. Lovely men. I love them. They would do it. Their mothers know.”
He started to turn, but then he changed his mind.
“If you want to write that the nice guy is fake, then fine. Write it. That also means you need to explain the pass. You can’t.
You don’t fake decisions at full speed on the ice.
If this were marketing, we needed the other team in on the plan. They are fake, too.”
He turned and called once more over his shoulder. “Now I’m going home. My fiancé is holding dinner, and he gets grumpy.”
He walked out of the frame, and there was silence.
I watched it all over again, and then I sent a message:
Rafe: thank you, Lucas
The reply came in seconds.
Varga: good assist tonight. sleep.
I sat there for a while longer. The garage emptied around me, headlights sweeping the pillars one vehicle at a time. The phone buzzed again.
Niko: Saw the clip. Max sent it with fourteen exclamation points.
Niko: He’s loud, and he’s smart. He leads with the wrong foot on purpose. Max wants to know if he gives media lessons.
I drove home with both hands on the wheel, and the building was behind me, and the clip was out there doing whatever it was going to do. It didn’t make the week weigh any less.
I ate leftover Italian beef and then sat on the sectional, pulling up the thread with Max. Nothing past you okay? I’d sent days ago.
I started typing. It came out longer than anything I’d ever typed into a phone.
I mentioned that nobody had gotten hurt until somebody did, and that the papers had made him the victim and me the machine, and both of us knew that wasn’t the truth of it.
I said I needed to know which kind of quiet this was, and that whatever the answer was, the dinners were real, and everything about him was fun.
When I finished, I stopped and read it. Then I started taking parts out. Finally, I was left with five words.
Rafe: no rush. I’m here whenever.
I sent it. Delivered.
While I sat there with the phone in my hand, the apartment was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator take a breath. The screen lit up while I was holding the phone.
Not Max. It was Niko.
Niko: Max just texted me.
The skin at the back of my neck prickled.
Niko: He’s okay. He wants to come by the shop tomorrow. He just wants to see me.
Max was alive. He wanted to talk to his brother in person. That made some sense.
Rafe: okay. tell him I said hi
Rafe: or don’t. whatever’s right. you’ll know
The dots came up. Stopped. Came up again.
Niko: I’ll know after tomorrow.