Chapter 7
WALL
THERE ARE TWO Milwaukee numbers in my phone, one sentence playing in my skull on a loop, and only one treatment that works for either: puck, arriving at full speed.
Practice, hour two. Nothing has beaten me all morning.
Kane winds up and rips one through a forest of legs, and somewhere between his release and my glove, my brain tries to start a thought that begins with you can come n— and the puck mercifully interrupts.
Save number forty-something. I've stopped counting, because counting is a thought, and thoughts are how the trouble gets in.
Becker skates a slow, wounded circle in front of my crease. "That one was going in."
"It wasn't."
"I visualized it. I did the work." He points his stick at my glove like it owes him money. "Forty saves, Wall. You've blinked twice in an hour. What the fuck is wrong with you?"
Three weeks of this. Ever since Milwaukee, my save percentage has climbed to a number the analytics people are describing as unsustainable.
It is sustainable. What’s sustaining it lives in Milwaukee and I've been ignoring both of its phone numbers.
Not thinking about that.
Ace comes in on a rush and tries to go far side. My blocker's already there. He peels away shaking his head.
"He's doing it again," Groover announces to the bench. "The thing where he knows."
I always know, though. Reading shooters is the job. The difference lately is that reading shooters is also the only room in my head with the lights on, so I've moved in, full time.
Jinx arrives at my post the way he arrives everywhere: sideways, like the ice might be listening. "Walk me through your morning," he demands.
"No."
"Wall." His voice drops. "I need to know what, so I can reproduce it."
Petrov saves me by shooting. I catch it without looking, which is a mistake, because Jinx makes a sound like a man witnessing scripture. "What did you eat," he says. "Exactly."
"Chicken and rice."
"What type of rice? We need specifics."
I give him a brand name I make up on the spot, and from that moment forward my meal prep is a religious site.
He forbids anyone from touching my gear.
He forbids me from washing my chest protector, which I will be ignoring for the good of the room.
When Hammer leans on my crossbar during a water break, Jinx physically escorts him away from it.
Coach Martin watches all of it from the bench with his whistle in his mouth, looking uncharacteristically pleased, the picture of a man whose goaltender is stopping everything and whose policy on miracles is, don't audit them. At the end of the last drill he skates over, taps my pads once.
"Whatever you're doing," he says, "keep doing it."
Absolutely not.
What I'm doing has a shelf life, an area code, and two unanswered texts, and if I keep doing it much longer I'm going to have to look up what it's called, and the last time I tried that, incognito mode was involved.
"Sure, Coach," I say.
He skates off happy. One of us should be.
The whistle goes for center ice, and we gather around Washington the way we've gathered around Washington for eight years: expecting systems talk, getting ready to tune out the parts about backchecking. He waits until the last straggler coasts in. Then he doesn't talk about backchecking.
"Six-thirty. My place. Bring your people."
That's it. That's the speech.
A beat of silence while a dozen professional athletes process the absence of hockey content, and then everyone talks at once.
Becker’s head emerges from under Kane’s arm. “Why?”
“Because I’m inviting you.”
“That explains the mechanism, not the motive.”
"Six-thirty," Washington says, already turning, and this is the part I catch. Gone before anyone can get a read on his face.
He's protecting something. Something real, with weight to it, and a cold little draft comes in under my chest protector and sits there.
"What is dress code?" Petrov calls after him.
Washington skates away without answering, which Petrov takes hard, and the rink he leaves behind converts instantly into a betting floor. Becker has his phone out taking odds. New jerseys. Secret award. Leila's pregnant. Washington is running for office. Snooze puts ten dollars on "new patio".
I don’t place my bet. I just carry the draft under my ribs into the shower, out to my car, and all the way home, where I stand in my kitchen portioning a double batch of the good orzo into a container, because the man said bring your people, and this is what I've got.
***
LEILA WASHINGTON OPENS the door before I knock, and looks at the container in my hands for exactly as long as it takes to read the label, which states, WALLACE. RETURN AFTER USE.
Her mouth does the same thing her husband's does when he's decided not to laugh. "Your dish has terms and conditions."
"The container has been through a lot."
"Kitchen. And thank you, honey." She steps back to let me duck under the doorframe, and as I pass she gives me one more look, quick, up and down, the full triage scan.
She's been running this team's family wing since before I made the roster, and she reads bodies faster than I do.
I keep mine boring. Her eyes narrow anyway, one degree, filing something.
The house is already loud. Half the roster's cars are outside and all of the roster's volume is inside, and the first thing I see from the hallway is Becker at the kitchen island with his chin parked on Kane's shoulder, arms around his waist, stealing cut vegetables from directly under the knife.
Kane holds down our blue line, and has held down Becker since the last training camp.
He slices peppers into strips so uniform they look artificial, catches Becker's next theft by the wrist without looking, eats the pepper himself, and turns his head just enough for the kiss Becker was going to extract anyway.
"Hostile work environment," Becker tells me over Kane's shoulder.
"You don't work here."
"I'm doing surveillance. Twenty bucks says intervention, and the target is you, big man. You've been weird for two weeks and now there's a mandatory dinner? Do the math."
I set my orzo on the counter, and Kane slides it away from Becker's reach with the flat of the knife. No wonder the room works better with him on it.
"Ignore him," Kane says. "He's been building theories all day. There are slides."
"There are contingency decks," Becker corrects. "Preparedness is love."
Through the kitchen doorway, the living room is staging its own event.
Ace is attempting to set a bakery box down on the coffee table, and Devon, who arrived attached to Ace and immediately annexed the rest of the team, is directing the landing with one finger, air-traffic style, until the box sits level.
Then he hooks the same finger into Ace's collar and pulls all of him down into a kiss that a bakery box should not have earned.
He spots me next, and his eyebrows conduct a brief ceremony. "There he is. The tomato's really more of a rosé now. I support the journey."
"Thanks."
"That was a review, not a compliment."
Deeper in, by the fireplace, Groover's boyfriend has the floor. Mateo talks the way I organize a crease: thoroughly, and with citations. "—because an unexplained compulsory summons is a textbook authority display. He's manufacturing informational asymmetry. Classic. There are papers on this."
Groover kisses him.
"I wasn't finished," Mateo says.
"You're never finished. I was buying the room time."
"That was paragraph two of six."
"See, this is why I love you. You provide an outline."
Petrov sits in the corner armchair with a liquor bottle across his knees like a customs officer. When Hammer reaches for it, Petrov moves it out of range without a word. "This is Boris," he says. "Boris is for correct occasion. We do not know yet what occasion is. Boris waits."
Snooze is horizontal on the loveseat, asleep from the shins up. Nobody wakes him. It's understood he'll surface when the food does.
And through all of it, Washington moves plate to plate, hand to shoulder, filling drinks and answering absolutely nothing, while the theories climb over each other in his living room.
Devon asks Leila, point blank, if anyone in the house is pregnant.
Leila says "no" with a serenity that ends that market.
Becker's odds board updates in real time.
Jinx wants to know why there are four candles on the mantel and whether that number was chosen or accidental.
I watch Washington work the room, and the draft under my ribs picks up.
He touches everyone. That's the tell nobody else is reading.
Washington's a hand-on-the-shoulder guy on game days, but tonight he's making rounds like he's counting us, and when he passes Leila in the kitchen doorway she catches his sleeve for half a second, just fabric, just two fingers, then lets go.
She knows. Whatever it is, she's known long enough to be calm about it.
Once the plates are mostly empty some thirty minutes later, Washington takes a spot by the fireplace.
He doesn't tap a glass. He stands there being Washington, and the room quiets in concentric rings, fastest nearest him, until even Becker's laptop bag stops rustling.
Snooze wakes up like a submarine surfacing, senses the pressure change, and sits up straight.
Leila crosses the room and sets her palm flat between his shoulder blades.
"I wanted you all here," Washington says, "with the people who put up with you, because you're going to hear this soon enough, and I wanted it to be from me." He looks around the room, unhurried, and his eyes touch each of us. "This is my last season. When it's over, I'm retiring."
At first, there’s a moment of nothing, space filled only by the refrigerator humming two rooms away.
Then a noise comes out of Becker. It starts as a word, fails the physical, and exits as something between an accordion hitting stairs and a smoke alarm losing power. Kane puts a hand on his back and rubs a slow circle.
"Breathe."
“Why?” Becker demands. “What has breathing done for us?”