26. Jett
JETT
Coach kept us late on a Wednesday for no reason except that he could, and because he'd decided over the summer that the way you defend a title is you make November hurt worse than April, so we ran a forecheck drill until the legs went and then we ran it four more times after that.
I had a good practice.
That sentence does not sound like much. For most of the guys, "good practice" is the baseline, the thing you turn in on a Wednesday, nothing to write home about.
For me, for about eight years, there was no such thing as a good practice, because there was no such thing as a practice I treated like a practice.
Every drill was a game. Every rep was a thing to win.
I came to the rink the way I came to everything for most of my life, which was loud, and at a hundred miles an hour, and braced, because somewhere underneath all the noise was a kid who'd learned young that if you weren't the loudest thing in the room then the room belonged to somebody else, and the somebody else was never kind with it.
I'd skated like that for eight years. It had won me a lot of hockey games.
It had also, I was starting to understand, been a thing I did so I wouldn't have to be quiet, because quiet was where the kid lived, and I'd spent my whole adult life making sure I was never quiet long enough for him to catch up.
I wasn't loud at practice on Wednesday. I was just good.
I made the reads. I moved the puck. I chirped Moose when Moose ate it in the corner, because some things are sacred and Moose eating it in the corner is one of them.
Tank chirped me back about something my mother would not have approved of, and Langley laughed so hard he blew his gap and Coach made the line skate it again, which was Langley's fault and somehow became mine, the way everything in a locker room eventually becomes the loud guy's fault.
For thirty seconds it was just the noise a room full of men makes when none of them is carrying anything.
But I didn't need the chirping the way I'd needed it before.
Didn't reach for it like a guy reaching for a railing.
I ran the forecheck drill the fifth time the same way I ran it the first, which I'd never once managed in my life, and when Coach finally blew it dead and let us off I skated to the bench not emptied out and not braced for the next thing but just, for once, done.
The good kind of done. The kind where the body's been used up and the head's quiet and the quiet doesn't have any teeth in it.
Stone caught me at the gate.
He didn't say anything, which was Stone. He pulled his helmet off and shook the sweat out of his hair and looked at me, the captain look, the one that took inventory, the one he'd been giving me for eight years. I waited for it the way you wait for a guy to total up a number.
He didn't total it out loud. Stone says about a third of what he's thinking and makes you earn the rest. But I could read the number on his face anyway, because I'd been reading Stone for eight years, and the number on his face was a thing I hadn't had words for myself until I watched him land on it.
For eight years I'd played like the ice was on loan and the bill was coming, like somebody would skate out and take it from me the second I stopped moving.
I hadn't played like that this week. I'd played like it was mine.
That was the read on his face. He'd clocked it before I had.
Stone knew the whole of it. The conference room, the name, the history, all of it.
He'd kept it the way he kept everything, in a vault with a door that didn't open, and he'd watched me carry it for weeks before any of it turned good, and now he was watching it be good, and a man like Stone does not have a lot of words for a thing like that.
What he had instead was the door of the vault, and the fact that he'd never once gone near it, and the way he reached out now and clapped me on the side of the helmet with a hand that didn't have a single question in it.
That was the thing I noticed. The hand. He'd been clapping me on the helmet for eight years, and all eight years there'd always been a small thing in it, a checking-on-you thing, a you-good thing, because Stone had figured out before anybody that there was a kid under the noise, and he'd been keeping a quiet eye on the kid the whole time without ever once making me talk about it.
The hand this week didn't check on me. It just clapped me on the helmet, the way you clap a guy who's fine. The way you clap a guy who's home.
Then he went up the tunnel without a word, because the words weren't his to spend on a Wednesday.
I stood at the gate a second longer with my gloves hanging off my stick and the big empty barn ticking and settling around me the way a building does after the noise of thirty men leaves it, and I let myself have the quiet.
The whole sheet of clean ice. The work lights.
The cold. The one room that had been mine for eight years, except for the first time in eight years I was standing in it not needing it to save me from anything, because the thing it used to save me from had a kitchen island four miles up the hill with her laptop bag on it and her coffee cup in the spot that had become her spot, and the kid under the noise had finally, somewhere in the last little while, gotten to stop running.
I went up the tunnel into the quiet locker room and got dressed and drove home the long way, windows down, not loud, not braced, the desert going by, a man going home to a woman who knew the worst thing about him and had decided to stay anyway.
Good practice.
Best one of my life, if you want the truth, and not one person in that building could've told you why except the captain, who wasn't going to tell anybody anything, because that was the whole reason you could trust him with it.
She woke up before I did.
This was a first. She'd been sleeping for twelve hours by my count, sometime around eight last night to eight this morning, and at some point in the night she'd become a different woman than the one I'd carried off the rug at five and put in the bed at five-fifteen and pulled the duvet up to the chin of at five-eighteen.
The woman I'd put down to sleep had been a woman who hadn't slept the night before.
The woman sitting against the headboard at eight forty-six on a Friday morning was a woman who'd slept through the night for the first time in I didn't know how long, and the difference was visible from across the room.
She was looking at the windows. Both hands wrapped around a mug. She had on, again, one of my old practice shirts, the gray one I'd been giving up to her in increments since Saturday and which had now, possibly, become hers.
"Morning," I said.
"Morning."
"You got me coffee."
"I got you coffee. I brought it up while you were asleep. It is now cold. You have to go down and make a new one."
"That is not very kind."
"It is extremely kind. I had to walk all the way down to the kitchen barefoot, in clothes that were not mine, in a house I have not yet figured out the layout of, twice, in order to bring you a cup of coffee that was warm when I delivered it. The fact that you slept through its warmness is on you."
"Hartley."
"Yes."
"I love you."
"I love you too. Go make coffee."
I went down. I made coffee. I came back up with a fresh one and climbed into the bed next to her and sat with my back against the headboard the same way she was sitting and drank my coffee and watched the morning come up the way it had come up on every morning of my life in this house, and which had never, before this week, looked the way it looked with her in the bed next to me.
We didn't say anything for a while.
This was the new thing. I had not, before this week, been a person who shared silences with other people.
I'd been a person who filled rooms with noise.
I'd been hired by every team in my career partly for the noise.
The version of me built specifically to be loud was the version that paid the bills, and the version that paid the bills hadn't had a lot of room in it for quiet mornings on his own bed.
I was learning quiet mornings on my own bed.
I was, possibly, going to be good at them eventually.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"I want to talk about the dance."
I had not, fully, been expecting that.
I'd braced for a lot of things. The LLCs, in detail. Brynn. The article. The deal we'd cut on the rug. Her mother, who she'd called from Brynn's on Wednesday night and still hadn't told me a single word about. I had a whole list ready and a face ready to go with it. The dance was not on the list.
I set my coffee on the nightstand.
"Okay," I said.
"Not because I want to apologize to you again.
I have apologized to you. You have accepted the apology.
I'm not going to relitigate the apology.
I want to talk about it because I haven't yet asked you any of the questions about it I want to ask you, and I've figured out, sometime in the last twelve hours, that I've been not asking the questions in the same way you've been not telling me about the money.
The not-asking is, possibly, the part of myself I've been continuing to be uncertain about, and I'd like to stop being uncertain about it. "
I sat with that.
"Okay," I said again.
She turned to face me. She set her own coffee on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She pulled her knees up under the duvet.
"What did you do," she said. "After you walked home from the gym."
"Specifically."
"Specifically. That night."
I thought about it.