Chapter 18 #2
Three-on-three. The most ruthless format hockey has ever invented. The format in which goaltenders win or lose entire seasons.
My format.
The puck drops at center.
Saint Aldwin’s star forward, the redshirt sophomore with the broken nose and the league-leading shot velocity I have been watching grainy footage of for the past six days, jumps the puck off the boards on a small backhanded pass from his centerman, breaks down the wing with the kind of long predatory stride that ends most overtime periods in the loss column, and comes flying into the offensive zone at the angle every shooter chooses when he is about to bury a one-timer.
I read it. I read the angle. I read the shoulder. I read the way his head drops to track the puck onto his blade.
He shoots.
Top corner. Glove side. The shot he has been making for three seasons. The shot Saint Aldwin came out of regulation prepared to bury into the back of my net.
I move my glove. I do not lunge. I do not stretch. I simply put my catching mitt in the place that the puck was going to be a sixteenth of a second before it got there, and the puck disappears, with a soft satisfying thwack, into the leather web of my glove.
Time stops.
Just for a beat. Just for the beat where the entire Whitfield Arena registers that the goalie has, in the most quiet undramatic way available to her, robbed the star forward of Saint Aldwin in overtime on the first night of the season.
Then time un-stops.
Whistle. The puck is mine. The break is over. The rush dies in the corner.
Five seconds later Matteo wins the puck off the wall, feeds Rémi at the line.
Rémi swings it back to Jude. Jude carries through center, drops it back to a streaking Matteo at the high slot, and Matteo — because he is Matteo — buries the overtime winner in the top corner on a wrist shot the Saint Aldwin goalie does not even get a glove on.
Final score: two-one. Wolves.
Final save: the puck is still in my catching mitt.
The Whitfield Arena erupts.
Not the way the arena erupts for a normal exhibition winner.
The way it erupts when the room has been silently rooting, throughout, for an outcome it had not believed it would actually get.
Section nine is on its feet. The older women in the matching scarves directly behind our bench are clapping each other on the back.
The Omega bench, which I have been pretending I am not aware of all night, has come out of its seats in a wave I can hear from the crease.
And the JumboTron lights up.
It catches, in the camera-finding sweep of a director who has clearly been waiting for the moment all night, an Omega in section nine who is mid-clap, the camera operator having cut directly to her face the way camera operators cut to faces that read.
She is maybe nineteen.
Her hair is a wild deliberate explosion of color — black at the roots, purple through the lengths, an electric streak of blue at the temple, a sliver of pastel green tucked behind one ear.
Round wire-rim glasses. A North Star jersey two sizes too large.
Cheap glitter eye makeup. A small handmade pin on her chest I am too far away to read.
And her face, on the big screen, lit up by the moment she has not yet realized she is on — her face is the entire reason I do this.
She is beaming. She is clapping in a way her wrists cannot quite keep up with.
Her eyes are the largest part of her face, and they are doing the precise twinkle of hope that I, an old jaded goalie who has spent five years carefully not believing in things, have not seen on another Omega’s face in years.
Oh.
Oh, sweetheart.
Something in my chest does something inconvenient. I drop my mask back over my face to hide what is almost certainly happening to my eyes, and tap my pipes twice in the small private ritual I run at the end of every game I have ever won.
Then he is there.
Jude has, in the small chaotic flood of his teammates pouring off the bench, beaten the lot of them to me.
He hits the brakes in front of my crease with a perfect skidding stop that throws a clean wave of ice shavings against the front of my pads, gloves already off, both hands coming up to lift my cage cover before any of the rest can get close enough to tackle me into the back of my own net.
He looks at me.
Properly. Whole-face. The captain mask gone for half a second.
“O’Shea.”
“Kavanagh.”
“That,” he says, very evenly, with the cleaved-out precision of a captain delivering the highest praise he is professionally permitted to deliver, “was the best set of saves I have witnessed at this level in a long. Ass. Time.”
I beam.
I cannot help it. Inside my mask, behind the cage, with at least three thousand pairs of eyes on us, my face does the giddy traitor thing, and Jude, with his hands still on the lifted front of my mask, sees it land, and the corner of his own mouth lifts the way it does when he is letting me have a real one.
Then the rest of them get to us.
Matteo tackles me into the back of the net the way I knew he would the second the buzzer went, Rémi catches my arm to keep me upright before Matteo can take both of us all the way to the ice, Petrov and Linder and Hargrove pile on around the pile, and the post-game scrum becomes the noisy laughing knot of bodies it always becomes when a team has actually executed the thing it was supposed to execute.
From inside the pile, somewhere near my left ear, Matteo says, breathless and grinning, “YOU MAGNIFICENT PINK BASTARD.”
Tactical disaster. Going to be a lot of these now.
I think I am going to live.
It takes me a full fifteen minutes to extract myself.
Handshake line with Saint Aldwin. The post-game salute to the home crowd, which the Omega section refuses to let us cut short.
A brief on-ice interview I am not yet eligible to do, which Jude handles with the practiced ease of a captain who has done six of them.
A coach-handshake at the bench, Coach Whitlock’s congratulations the precise temperature of a fridge that has not been plugged in, Coach Marek’s cooler than that.
And then, finally, the corridor.
My borrowed practice bag over my shoulder.
The pads tipped down. The cage of the mask flipped up because I am too tired and too sweaty to keep it shut.
I am halfway down the rubber-matted hall toward the girls’ locker room — the one tiny converted utility closet they have given me at the back of the visitors’ wing for the dignity of changing alone — when I see him.
Coach Declan is standing at the corner. Arms crossed. Black jacket. Black jeans. The professional face I have, for two weeks now, been the only person in the building able to read through.
My stride slows by a beat. The pre-emptive brace of a woman who has spent two weeks taking her cues from him strictly inside the visible architecture of practice, by mutual unspoken treaty.
He nods at me.
Once. Small. The fractional dip of his chin he has used since I was thirteen years old to tell me the work I had just done was sufficient.
“O’Shea.”
“Coach.”
“See you tomorrow morning. Six sharp. We have training scheduled.”
That is it.
That is the whole sentence. He has not, in the past nineteen minutes since I robbed Saint Aldwin’s star forward in overtime on the first night of the season, said one single word about the actual hockey I just played.
No nod at the glove save. No reference to the eleven-stop streak.
No professional acknowledgement, of any kind, that the goalie he personally signed off on importing across an ocean has, in her first official game, delivered on the entire ten-year project I now know lives behind his eyes.
You magnificent immovable bastard.
Twice, now. Two for two.
And the rest of me — the very tired, sweaty, post-game version of me that has been running on adrenaline and a single banana since pre-game warmups — does, on the inside, the small humiliating thing it has been doing since I was sixteen years old in his Yorkshire rink.
It wants more.
Not from anyone. From him. Specifically.
It wants the good job, O’Shea that lands in your chest like a brick of warmth.
It wants the dry one-line postgame text he used to send my Nokia at midnight after a road game when I was a junior.
Any single piece of evidence — a sentence, a flick of the eye, a hand on the back of my shoulder — that the man who taught me how to read an angle has registered that the angles tonight were, frankly, perfect.
He gives me none of it.
I hate, in equal proportions, that he has held it back and that I have noticed he has held it back.
“Six sharp,” I confirm, in the level voice of a woman who is, by surface measure, fine.
“Good.”
That is it. He turns. He walks down the corridor in his unhurried granite step, and the cedar-and-snow trace of him follows him, and I stand in the hall with my bag over my shoulder and a heart in my chest that has, very embarrassingly, just done the precise small fall it has been refusing to do for five years.
I push through the door of the girls’ locker room.
It is, as always, a converted utility closet with a single bench, a chipped mirror, a hook on the back of the door, and a faint chemical smell of the bleach the cleaning crew applied at six this morning.
I do not turn on the overhead. The mood lighting of the safety bulb in the corner suits me better.
I sit on the bench. I drop my bag at my feet. I unstrap a glove. I let it fall.
I pull my phone out of the small zip pocket of my pads.
The lock screen is full of notifications I do not have the energy to read yet.
Texts from Matteo. Texts from Jude. A single text from Rémi that says, simply, proud of you.
A flood of Instagram tags. A small alarming influx of follower-request notifications from people I do not know.
The TikTok app, sitting on my home screen, has a small red badge that I am, professionally, terrified of opening.
I open Pinterest instead.
The board that has been nagging me for ten days is right at the top. I tap into it.
Hockey Houses with Warm Lights.
That is the title I have given it. In a soft little italic font, like I were sixteen and writing it in the back of a school notebook.
I stare at the title.
Iris O’Shea. You are twenty-four years old.
You are a Division One starting goaltender.
You have just robbed a redshirt sophomore on national livestream in overtime.
And you are sitting in a converted utility closet with a Pinterest board called Hockey Houses with Warm Lights, secretly designing a future you have not been promised.
Cheesy.
It is so cheesy.
I tap the three-dot menu. Delete board. Confirm.
I stare at the empty space.
I undelete the board. Hands shaking slightly. The recently-deleted folder is generous about second chances and Pinterest is, blessedly, not a witness in any current legal proceeding I am party to.
Not the night for this kind of decision.
In the morning. Decide it in the morning. With actual sleep.
I slip the phone back into the pocket of my pads. I tip my head back against the cinderblock wall behind the bench. I breathe out long and slow and let the exhale carry the last small hot bead of game-adrenaline out of my chest.
And the small private chamber that has held the post-game encounter with Coach Declan for the past four minutes opens, briefly, and gives me, very dryly, the assessment.
I stood up for myself. In the corridor. The level voice. The non-reaction. The clean refusal to chase him for the validation he refused to offer.
I am, by my own standards, satisfied.
I am also, by my own standards, very much aware that the satisfaction is the surface of something I have not yet bothered to read the depth chart on.
Because the elephant in the corridor with us is still in the corridor with us.
The elephant has been in every corridor we have shared for two weeks.
The elephant has been on every sheet of ice, in the dark kitchen at five in the morning, in the cabinet, in the strawberry shake.
The elephant has a face and a Yorkshire accent and a hand he once put on the back of my shoulder when I was sixteen after a third-period save, and the elephant is not, by any rational measure, going to stop being in the room because I have, in three separate ways now, declined to look at it.
I push myself up off the bench. I pull my own bag onto my shoulder.
And I look, one last time, at the corridor through the half-open door of my converted utility closet, the spot where his back disappeared down the hall in his unhurried granite step.
How long, I ask the small, faintly steaming silence of my own little locker room, are you actually going to be able to run from the elephant in the room?