Chapter 13 Jamie
JAMIE
The puck leaves my stick and I know before it reaches the net.
This is the thing about shooting. The good shots, the ones that are going in, have a different feeling at the release.
The weight transfers cleanly through the wrists, the blade makes contact at the correct point on the puck, and the follow-through is automatic, the body completing the motion with the satisfied precision of a machine that has executed its design function perfectly.
The puck rises off the ice, rotates, and travels to the upper corner of the net at a speed that the goalie cannot reach because the goalie committed to the blocker side a tenth of a second before the puck went glove side, and the decision that the goalie made was the decision I wanted him to make, and the wanting was the read, and the read was right.
The light goes on. The horn sounds. And eighteen thousand people in downtown Atlanta make a noise that enters my body through my chest and changes the chemical composition of my blood.
First NHL goal.
The bench explodes. Bodies pour over the boards.
I am hit from three directions simultaneously by men who are larger than me and moving faster than seems necessary for a celebration, and the impact drives me backward until I'm against the boards and the pile is five bodies deep and the noise is inside me and around me and everywhere.
Someone grabs me. In the pile. Arms around my shoulders, a full-body embrace, and the body against mine is warm and solid and the embrace lasts a beat longer than the others.
Not by much. A half-second. A fraction of a fraction.
But my body, which has been lying to me for nineteen years and which stopped lying three weeks ago in a hotel room in Philadelphia, responds to the half-second with a clarity that is not ambiguous.
Heat. Low. Immediate. The kind of response that is not intellectual and not emotional but purely, specifically, physically real.
I pull away. Not violently. Not noticeably. The pile is dissolving anyway, bodies peeling off and skating back to the bench, and my extraction is just part of the general dismantling. Nobody sees the pulling-away as different from the natural conclusion of the celebration.
I skate to the bench. I sit down. I stare at the ice.
My heart rate is elevated and the elevation is not from the goal.
The elevation is from the half-second. From the warmth of a body against mine and the response that the warmth produced and the absolute, terrifying certainty that the response was not a misfire.
The response was a signal. A clean, unmistakable, 2,100-hertz signal (Mars would understand this metaphor) from a body that has finally started telling the truth.
The game continues. I play the third period on autopilot.
My legs work. My hands work. The hockey brain does what the hockey brain does, which is process information and execute decisions at a speed that conscious thought cannot match.
The other brain, the one that is currently replaying the half-second on a loop and analyzing the heat and the pulling-away and the sitting-on-the-bench-staring-at-the-ice, that brain is not doing well.
The horn sounds. We win 4-2. I have a goal and an assist and a plus-two and the locker room is happy and loud and someone sprays Gatorade and Jonah is attempting to start a chant and the chant is my name, which is mortifying and wonderful and I am smiling because I scored my first NHL goal and I am dying inside because of what happened after.
The press conference. The podium. The lights. Twenty reporters and cameras and the full machinery.
Declan is in the third row. Glasses on. Notebook open. Professional.
"First NHL goal," he says. "Walk us through what was going through your mind."
What was going through my mind was: the puck is going in.
What was going through my mind after was: someone hugged me and my body responded in a way that I can no longer pretend is about anything other than what it is.
What was going through my mind on the bench was: the walls are optional and the walls are cracking and the crack is getting bigger and I don't know how to fix it and I don't know if I want to fix it.
"Relief, mostly," I say. "You work your whole life for a moment like that and when it happens, the first feeling isn't joy. It's relief. Like, okay, I did it. The wait is over."
This is a good answer. Media-trained. Emotionally resonant without being revealing. The kind of answer that makes the highlight reel and the tweet roundup.
It is also, underneath, the most honest thing I've ever said in a press conference.
The wait is over. The wait for the goal, yes.
But also the wait for the knowing. The wait for the Philadelphia hotel room and the search bar and the hour of reading and the name that settled into my chest like a building settling on its foundation.
The wait is over. The knowing has arrived.
The relief is real, and the relief is terrifying, and the terror is real, and the two things coexist in my chest like two tones played simultaneously, consonant and dissonant at the same time.
Declan writes in his notebook. I watch him write.
His pen moves with the quick, precise strokes of a man who has transcribed a thousand press conferences and can write without looking at the page.
He looks up. Our eyes meet. The eye contact is a half-second, the same duration as the hug in the celebration pile, and in the half-second I see him see something.
Not the goal. Not the media answer. The thing underneath.
The thing that the recorder can't capture and the notebook can't contain.
He looks down at his notebook. I look at the next reporter. The moment passes.
In the parking lot, I call Becca.
She screams. The scream is so loud that I hold the phone six inches from my ear and can still hear it. "JAMIE! FIRST GOAL! I'M CRYING! DAD IS CRYING! MOM IS MAKING SOUNDS THAT AREN'T WORDS!"
My father gets on the phone. Tom Kowalski does not scream. Tom Kowalski speaks in the measured cadence of a man who processes emotions the way he processes hockey: systematically, carefully, one element at a time.
"That's my boy," he says. His voice cracks on "boy." The crack is the only time in my life I have heard my father's voice break, and the breaking is a sound I will carry in my memory the way I carry the sound of the goal horn and the feel of the puck leaving my stick.
My mother gets on. She is, as Becca reported, making sounds that aren't words. The sounds communicate joy and pride and the particular, raw, overwhelming love of a mother watching her child achieve the thing he left home to achieve.
They pass the phone around for ten minutes. Becca screams again. My father says "we're so proud" in a voice that has re-composed itself. My mother finds words: "I love you, Jamie. I love you so much."
I say "I love you too." I say "thank you." I say "I couldn't have done this without you." I say all the things a son says to parents who sacrificed mornings and money and miles of frozen highway so their kid could chase a puck.
I do not say: something happened during the celebration that scared me. I do not say: I know something about myself now that I didn't know three weeks ago. I do not say: the goal was the best moment of my career and the half-second after was the most frightening moment of my life.
I hang up. I sit in my car in the parking lot of the arena. The Atlanta night is warm. The parking lot is emptying. The dashboard glows.
The goal is real. The goal is recorded. The goal exists on highlight reels and stat sheets and in the memory of eighteen thousand people who saw it and in the memory of my parents who saw it on television and in the memory of a journalist in the third row who wrote it in his notebook.
The half-second is also real. The half-second is not recorded. The half-second exists only in my body and in the chemical memory of a response that I can no longer explain away as anything other than what it was.
The best moment of my career was also the moment I became most afraid.
Not of the goal or the pressure or the expectations.
Afraid of myself. Afraid of the body that responded.
Afraid of the wall that cracked. Afraid of the knowing that is no longer theoretical but physical, proven on the ice in front of eighteen thousand witnesses who did not witness the real event, which happened in a half-second, in a pile of bodies, in the specific heat of an embrace that lasted one beat too long.
I drive home. I eat the protein meal from the fridge without tasting it.
I lie in bed with the lamp on (the seventeen-dollar Target lamp, the one warm thing in this apartment) and I stare at the ceiling and I think about walls and doors and half-seconds and the way the journalist's eyes found mine in the press conference and the way his pen stopped moving for a fraction of a second when our eyes met.
He saw something. I don't know what he saw. I know what I felt.
The feeling has a name. The name is mine. I am not ready to say it to anyone except a search bar and a hotel room ceiling and a sister in Duluth who already knew.
But the name is getting louder. And the walls are getting thinner. And the door that Mik pointed to and Gerald acknowledged and Declan, without knowing it, illuminated, that door is getting harder to ignore.
First NHL goal. 4th overall pick. Franchise cornerstone. The future.
And a half-second that rewrote everything.