Chapter 3 Jamie
JAMIE
Three weeks in, I've learned the unwritten rules.
Jonah picks the locker room music on Tuesdays.
This is not negotiable. Jonah's taste in music is eclectic in the way that a tornado is eclectic: it touches down unpredictably and destroys whatever genre conventions were in its path.
Last Tuesday was Korean hip-hop. The Tuesday before that was Dolly Parton.
The Tuesday before that was a playlist labeled "Vibes (Jonah Version)" that contained seventy-three songs spanning nine decades and four continents.
Nobody objects because objecting to Jonah is like objecting to weather.
It exists. It's happening. You put on a jacket and you deal with it.
Nobody touches Mik Volkov's book. He keeps one in his stall at all times, placed spine-up on the shelf above his gear, and the book changes every three to four days but the position never does.
Currently it's Dostoevsky. Previously it was a biography of a Russian chess grandmaster.
The book is not decorative. Mik reads during breaks with the absorption of a man who has trained his brain to enter and exit a text the way he enters and exits a defensive zone: quickly, completely, without residual awareness of the space he just left.
I've watched him close the book mid-paragraph, step onto the ice for a drill, execute the drill flawlessly, return to his stall, open the book, and resume reading at the exact word where he stopped. The precision of it is terrifying.
Wes Chen bakes bread. This fact was presented to me by Jonah as casually as one might mention that a teammate collects stamps.
"Wes bakes," Jonah said. "He's really good.
If he brings you a loaf, eat it. Don't ask about it.
Just eat it." I have not yet received a loaf, which I interpret as meaning I have not yet crossed whatever invisible threshold separates "new guy" from "person worthy of bread.
" I'm trying not to take this personally.
Mars Santos arrives first and leaves last. He parks in the same spot every day (third from the left in the second row, closest to the side entrance) and he walks the same route through the facility (lobby, left corridor, locker room, ice) and he speaks to approximately four people per day, two of whom are goalposts.
I find Mars comforting. Not because he's warm (he isn't) but because his consistency suggests that the world is a place where routines can survive, and routines are the thing I rely on most when everything else is unfamiliar.
Luca Moretti is L. I figured this out on Day 4 when I saw him placing a fresh plate of biscotti in my stall with the stealth of a man who has been running a clandestine baked goods operation for years and has perfected the logistics.
The sticky notes have progressed from encouraging to funny.
Today's says: "Your shot release is disgusting (compliment).
Callahan pretended not to be impressed, which means he's very impressed. - L."
The biscotti are a constant. Every day. Fresh.
With a note. The consistency of it is doing something to me that I can't quite categorize.
In Duluth, kindness was present but practical.
My father's kindness was a hand on my shoulder after a bad game.
My mother's kindness was a meal that appeared without being asked for.
Luca's kindness is different. It's preemptive and excessive and served with powdered sugar and exclamation points, and it asks nothing in return, and the asking-nothing is the part I don't know how to process.
Road trip. Nashville. My third.
I'm roomed with Jonah, which the travel coordinator arranged because Jonah is the team's universal solvent. Everyone is comfortable around Jonah. He creates comfort the way the sun creates light: involuntarily, constantly, as a fundamental property of his existence.
The hotel room is standard. Two queen beds, a desk, a window overlooking a parking garage.
Jonah treats it like a living room. Within ten minutes of check-in, he has ordered room service, turned on a nature documentary, distributed his belongings across every horizontal surface, and initiated three separate text conversations while narrating all of them to me.
"Ren says hi. He's at the rink with the kids today. Little Marcus scored his first goal. Well, it went off his shin and kind of dribbled in, but a goal's a goal. Ren sent a video. You want to see?"
I watch the video. A small boy in a Reapers jersey (number 31, Mars Santos, the goalie who talks to his posts) falls over, accidentally kicks the puck with his skate, and the puck slides across the line at the approximate speed of a tired caterpillar.
The boy's celebration, however, is vigorous and joyful and involves a full lap of the offensive zone with his arms raised.
"That's amazing," I say, and I mean it, because there's something about the purity of a child's celebration that makes the complicated feelings in my chest temporarily simple.
Jonah talks for another hour. About Ren.
About the youth program. About his parents in Minnesota (his mother, Eunhee, has opinions about sesame oil that Jonah describes as "architecturally significant").
About the team, the playoff push, the culture.
He talks the way some people breathe: without thinking about it, without stopping, without any awareness that the air he's producing is keeping other people alive.
I laugh at his jokes. I eat the room service fries he ordered "for the table" (the table being the two of us).
I contribute approximately twelve percent of the words in the conversation, which is significantly above my average and which I credit to Jonah's supernatural ability to make silence feel collaborative rather than awkward.
He falls asleep at eleven. Mid-sentence.
One moment he's explaining why the Beltline is the best running path in the Southeast and the next moment he's asleep, fully clothed, phone on his chest, mouth open.
The transition is instantaneous. Jonah Park enters unconsciousness the way he enters everything: without hesitation.
I lie awake.
The hotel ceiling is white and textured and anonymous. The sounds of Nashville are muffled through the window. Jonah's breathing is steady and unselfconscious. The room is dark except for the glow of the city through the curtains.
I think about the couples. I think about the bar after tonight's win, where I sat with my Sprite and watched Wes text Luca with an expression I've never seen on his face (soft, unhurried, the murder face replaced by something almost gentle).
Where Mars was on the phone in the corner, speaking Portuguese to someone in a voice that was warm in a way I didn't know Mars could be warm.
Where Cole and Mik left together, Cole's hand on the back of Mik's neck, casual and owned, the gesture of a man touching something that belongs to him.
I think about the journalist. The one with the glasses and the notebook and the questions that are different from the other reporters' questions.
After the game tonight, in the media scrum, he asked me about a specific crossover pattern on the power play entry.
Not "how does it feel to be a rookie?" Not "what's the biggest adjustment?
" He asked me about the mechanics of a skating technique, the weight transfer on the inside edge, the timing of the push.
A technical question. A hockey question.
A question that assumed I had something worth saying beyond "good" and "the speed. "
I answered in full sentences. Three of them.
Maybe four. I talked about the edge work and the hip rotation and the way you can feel the lane open before you see it, and the words came out without the usual filtering, without the internal checkpoint where every sentence gets evaluated for risk before it's allowed to exit my mouth.
He listened. Not politely. Not with the half-attention of a journalist waiting for the sound bite he can use.
He listened with his whole face, pen still, eyes focused, and the quality of his attention was so different from the way other reporters listen that my body registered it as a distinct physical sensation. A warmth in my chest. A loosening.
I don't know his name. I know his face. Glasses, sharp features, dark skin. A professional presence that fills space without dominating it. He stands in the press scrum the way Mars stands in the crease: alert, still, reading everything.
I know he listened. I know he heard me.
I lie in the dark in Nashville and think about a journalist whose name I don't know and whose questions make me speak in full sentences and whose listening made my chest warm, and I think about the search bar on my phone, and I think about the cursor, and I think about the word I would type if I were brave enough to type it, and I am not brave enough, so I think about crossovers instead.
The crossovers are simpler. The crossovers have mechanics and physics and a correct way to execute them. The crossovers do not require bravery. The crossovers do not make your chest warm when someone asks about them in a hallway.
Except tonight, they did.
I close my eyes. Jonah snores softly in the next bed. Nashville hums outside the window. I fall asleep thinking about edge work and attention and the specific quality of being listened to by a person who heard more than the words.