Chapter 3 Nate - April 2017, Chicago
Game day has a shape and I have never once changed it.
Wake at nine forty. Eggs and oatmeal at ten. Nap from one to two thirty, and it doesn't matter if I sleep, it matters that I lie down. Warmup at five. Same order. Same corner. Same three rotations of the same stretch that stopped doing anything physical for me years ago.
Then four minutes in the tunnel with my eyes closed and my back against the cinder block, and nobody talks to me, because they know.
There was a lot to hold up that night. My father was two floors above me in a broadcast booth with a headset on and a monitor in front of him, and he'd be saying my name to about a million people.
My grandfather's name was on a banner in a rafter in a building four hundred miles from that one and I could still see it when I closed my eyes.
There were nineteen guys in that room who were counting on me and eleven thousand people out there who'd paid to watch.
And there was a cocktail napkin in my wallet, which I did not think about. What I did was open my wallet before chapel, the way I always do, to take my phone out, and confirm that it was still in there, folded behind my license, and then close the wallet.
That's just knowing where your things are.
I saw my mother twice from the ice during warmups. First when I did my lap, section 118, up high, because she will not sit in the network suite.
Second time, she was talking to somebody. A woman in a red parka, gray at the temples, and there was a thermos between them, and my mother was laughing.
It was a war. Duluth was not supposed to beat us on paper and on paper is not where they played. They forechecked us into the boards for forty minutes and we hung on and answered and hung on, and it went to overtime, one to one.
Six minutes into overtime we took a penalty. Bad stick. It happens. I was out on the kill.
They got a zone entry and we broke it up and the puck came around the wall to me at our blue line with a little room, and I dropped my left shoulder like I'm going up the wall so the first forechecker commits, and then reverse.
I drop the shoulder a half beat before I reverse. It's a tell. It is so small that no video coach in the country has ever flagged it, not once, not at any level, not in eleven years of me being filmed. My own father has never mentioned it.
And Riley Kowalski was already gone. He was moving to where the puck was going to be before I moved the puck, and he took it off my stick with a stick lift so clean I did not feel it leave, and then there was nothing between him and our goalie but ice.
I turned. I was maybe seven feet behind him. He went forehand, backhand, and put it in.
And then it was over.
I've replayed every mistake I've ever made and I can always find the moment. Every single time. There's a frame where I did the wrong thing and I can point at it.
This one wouldn't replay. There was no frame. There was me with the puck and there was the roar, and the middle of it was just gone.
The horn was going and going. The lights went to a strobe. Confetti came down out of the ceiling, and it landed on the ice and got in my skate blades so my next stride felt wrong.
I stood at center ice and did not move.
Eleven guys in white came off the bench and buried the one guy in the whole arena who had seen it coming. His helmet came off. Somebody's glove hit the ice and slid past my foot.
And I stood there and I found out, at twenty-one, the thing that most people learn at about seven years old, which is that wanting something has nothing to do with being owed it. Nobody had ever bothered to teach me that because everything had always shown up.
While I was standing there with my eyes stinging behind my cage and my chest hollowed out, some part of me that I don't have any control over was watching Riley Kowalski scream into that pile of guys, mouth wide open, no sound getting through, head back.
And it was taking notes on the exact shape of it.
That is what scared me. Not the losing. I know how to lose. Nobody in my family had a protocol for that other thing.
The handshake line takes about ninety seconds. Their guys came through. Most of them said the same three words. A couple said good series, a couple said nothing at all, one kid was crying and laughing at the same time and hugged me, which happens.
Then Riley. He was soaked. One of his teammates had already emptied a water bottle over his head, and it was in his hair. A cut over one eyebrow from the second period had opened again. He was hoarse. He looked like the game had happened directly to his face.
He took my hand, and then he didn't let go.
It was a second, maybe less. It was long enough that the guy behind him had to stop.
"Even," he said. "One each."
"What?"
"You got the trophy. I got this." He was breathing hard. "That's even, Sinclair. That's the score."
And my face did a thing.
It wasn't a smile. It was the top corner of one, on the left side, for about a quarter of a second, and I have had that reflex trained out of me since I was a child, because you do not smile in a handshake line when you have lost. It looks like you don't care. It looks like winning didn't matter.
It got out anyway. Just barely. Just long enough for exactly one person on earth to see it.
He saw it. Something went across his face.
Then he let go and moved down the line and said something to my goalie. I went to the bench and got my stuff.
Up in section 118 my mother was standing with her hands over her mouth. She was not looking at the pile at center ice. She was looking at me, and it was the way she looks at me, which I have never been able to stand and have also never once asked her to stop.
The apparatus started before I got my skates off.
My father found me in the hallway outside the room, which he is not supposed to do and always does. He still had his network lanyard on.
"Nathaniel." He put a hand on my shoulder pad, right on the top, and squeezed once. "Listen to me. That was a hell of a year. Nobody's taking that away."
"Yeah."
"What we've got to manage now is the narrative, because they're going to run the turnover for two weeks, and the turnover is not what happened tonight.
What happened tonight is you played thirty-one minutes on a bad ankle and got outshot for a period and a half by a better forecheck.
That's the story. You give them that story in there, calm, no excuses, and it's the story by Tuesday. "
"Okay."
"You want to say it back to me?"
"Thirty-one minutes. No excuses. Better forecheck."
"That's it." He squeezed once more. "That's my guy."
Then he checked his watch, because he had a hit at eleven fifteen.
He did not ask me how I was. I don't think it occurred to him that it was a question. In his world I was a piece of equipment that had just been through something and he was doing preventative maintenance, and that is a kind of love. It really is. I've thought about it a lot.
My mother was waiting at the end of the corridor by the family room, and she didn't say anything at all. She reached up and put her hand along my jaw, just held it there, the way she did when I was fourteen and got cut and had to skate the next day.
"Okay," she said. "Eat something."
"Yeah."
That was the whole conversation.
My phone had forty-one messages on it by the time I got to the bus. They were from coaches, teammates from juniors, my billet family from Michigan, three guys from my draft class, a girl I went to prom with in high school.
One of them was from my grandfather.
Big Jack: Proud of you. Always.
Four words. It's the only one I read twice.
On the way out through the concourse, past a barricade with a bored security guy on it, I saw my mother again. She was hugging somebody. The woman in the red parka from section 118.
And my mother handed her back the thermos. She borrowed a stranger's thermos.
At two in the morning I was awake. There was no version of that night where I was asleep. So at two I got up and put on a t-shirt and sweats and went to find ice for my shoulder.
I pushed the button and stood there in an empty hallway. The car came up from the lobby and the doors opened on four, and Riley Kowalski was in it.
He was in a Duluth hoodie with the strings pulled uneven and gray shorts and slides, and he had a plastic bag of hotel ice pressed against his collarbone, up high, where our number six had cross-checked him in the third and I had watched it happen from the bench.
We looked at each other. I got in and the doors closed.
Two floors of absolutely nothing. Just the sound of the elevator, and the ice shifting in the bag when he changed hands.
Then he said, "Your number six is a menace."
"He's not a menace, he's just slow."
"That's so much worse." He shifted the bag. "A menace has intent. A slow guy's just weather."
"You okay?"
"It's a bruise." He looked at the numbers over the door.
Neither of us said anything for a second.
The first rush of the celebration had worn off him. That's what was different. In the handshake line he'd been all lit up and now he was just a guy in a hoodie at two in the morning who had won the thing and couldn't sleep either. His voice had dropped about a third.
"Hey," he said. "Can I say something and you don't get weird?"
"That depends entirely on the something."
"That pick." He was looking at the little brass panel with the buttons on it. "That's the best read I'm ever going to make. Whole career. I'm not going to top it."
"Congratulations."
"I'm not done." He turned his head. "It's the best read I'll ever make because you're the best player I'll ever beat. Those are the same sentence. You get that, right? It doesn't work without you."
I did not say anything.
"And I know which half of that I'd rather keep," he said.
The elevator kept going up.
I have been handled by professionals my entire life.
Coaches, media trainers, my uncle, my father.
Every single person who has ever talked to me has been managing me toward something.
I could not work out what he was managing me toward, and after about four seconds I understood he wasn't. He just said it because it was true and he had it in his mouth.
So I did the insane thing.
"Congratulations," I said again, and this time I turned and looked at him when I said it. "Not the media one. You were the best player on the ice tonight and you deserved it. I'm not going to say that again, so enjoy it."
He laughed, quiet, mostly out his nose.
We went up three floors like that. Whatever the two of us were supposed to be to each other, the thing that had been printed on tickets and sold to a television network and shouted by eleven thousand people six hours earlier, was just not in that elevator. It had gotten off somewhere.
What was in there instead had a temperature. The elevator slowed on the ninth floor.
The doors opened and neither of us moved, for one entire second.
Then he stepped backward out into the hall. The ice bag was leaving a wet mark on his hoodie, and he was grinning.
"Enjoy the show, Sinclair," he said, and the doors closed on him.
I got to my room and I did not turn the light on.
My dick was hard. I had been hard since somewhere around floor six. I stood in the dark, having lost a national championship four hours earlier, with the worst night of my hockey life still going on all around me, and my body had made an announcement.
So I got in the shower and I ran the protocol.
The protocol is: you make it about something else. You pick anything. You pick a body without a face. You pick nothing at all and just get it done like a chore, like brushing your teeth, because it's a mechanical problem.
I’ve run that protocol before. It has a very good success rate.
But now, it failed completely.
I stood with my forehead on the tile and one hand on the wall and my other hand stroking my cock.
My brain served up, in order and without asking me: a grin coming apart across a face in a cinder-block room.
A throat coming up out of a collar. Ice shifting in a bag at two in the morning.
A knuckle going past silk into my breast pocket.
It took about three minutes and it was the best orgasm I’ve ever had in my life. I hated every part of it.
Then I sat on the edge of the tub with a towel around me and my hands shaking.
Systems failure, I wrote, in my head, in the file. Secondary to grief and exhaustion. Not indicative.
I turned the light off and went to bed.