Chapter 2 Lundy
Hotel room, Tampa, the blackout curtain doing its job badly, so there's a blade of gray laid across the carpet.
I'm on the floor with my back against the bed and the playlist going low, the one with the soft beat under everything.
Twenty-two minutes that look like nothing from the outside and cost more than anyone watching would guess.
Nobody's watching. That's most of the point of doing it on a hotel floor at six in the morning.
People look at a big settled guy and figure the settled came free with the size.
It didn't. It's a job I clock into before the actual job, every morning, because the version of me that skips it's a stranger by noon.
Not a calm one. The version of me that comes apart is a version they replace.
Seattle taught me exactly how quiet that sounds.
After breakfast and the team meeting, we get to the rink for practice.
The visiting room two levels under the bowl is cold enough to hang meat in.
Half the team is being loud about the cold, because this team handles discomfort by narrating it until it's funny.
One of the Tampa staff props the door open on her way out, red hair, nice shoulders, and I register it the way I register the exit sign above her head: noted, held, already gone.
"It's a meat locker," Marchetti says. "They put us in a meat locker. This is a tactic even for practice."
"It's a thermostat," Berger says. "Six-two on the thermostat. I checked."
"You checked their thermostat?"
"I check everything. It's why you keep me around."
"We keep you around because you block shots with your face."
"That also." Berger pulls his elbow pads on, a man at peace with his role on this earth.
"Welcome to the playoffs," Thompson says to nobody, lacing up. "Cold basement, bad coffee, twenty thousand people who learned our numbers just to boo them. Best time of the year."
"We could win the thing," Davis says, quiet, like he's testing whether the words hold weight.
"Don't." Berger doesn't look up. "Don't say it in the basement. The basement hears you."
"The basement's a freezer."
"The basement is six-two and listening, and I won't have you jinxing us in it. We focus on practice. That’s what we’re here for." He says it flat, and means about forty percent of it, which for Berger is sincere.
Somebody's slung a bag across the two clean stalls in the far corner, away from the vent.
I move it one stall down so the end one opens up.
I drop my own gear by the vent that rattles.
I'm halfway into my pads before anyone clocks the trade.
The door goes and my eyes are already on it before the rest of me decides to look.
Soucy comes through with his bag on his shoulder, already mapping the room.
He finds the open stall in the clean corner.
His shoulders come down half an inch. He sets the bag down and says nothing about it, because there's nothing to say.
The stall is just right. Or at least right enough.
Across the room Avi says something low to Ash, and Ash does the face.
"Cap and Ash," I tell Soucy when he sits. "Watch Ash's face when Avi leans in. Not now. Give it a second so we don't look like we're watching."
Soucy tapes his stick and lets ten seconds go by before his eyes drift over, like he's checking the clock behind them. "Which face?"
"The one he thinks nobody can see. And Ash still thinks that when Avi says something only the two of them get to hear, his whole face doesn't reorganize itself around it. It does. The man couldn't bluff a child."
"He does it every time."
"Every time. And they think nobody caught it. Couples invent being unreadable and then forget to tell their faces. The loud ones you don't worry about. It's the ones who go quiet you watch."
"You watch everybody like this?" Soucy glances over at me.
"Only the interesting ones. You, for instance, I'd scouted by Thanksgiving. Tape, stretch, tape again, tape a third time for reasons unknown to science."
"The third one's structural."
"Structural." I run tape around my cuff. "None of them think they're being obvious, and all of them are."
He keeps working his stick. Then, because the game's already running behind his eyes, "They'll come harder tonight.
Down a game at home, their defense pinches in the first ten.
You'll see more action early than last night.
Weather the first ten and they get frustrated.
Frustrated, they take the bait on the forecheck.
Then it's our game. You just can't let one in early and hand them the building. "
"So, no pressure, right?" I laugh, trying to loosen the nerves.
"Reasonable pressure."
"My favorite kind." And I mean it, which I don't always say out loud, but it comes out anyway, the way more things come out with him than with others.
"You know what I didn't have in Seattle?
A room nobody expected anything from. There you were supposed to win.
The year you didn't they found somebody younger and faster and called it the future.
Here the whole league wrote us off in September and forgot to check back.
There's a freedom in that. Nobody's holding us up against a banner. "
Soucy doesn't look up from the tape. "You're holding us up against one."
"A little. Old habit."
"You play better when nobody's watching the name."
I look at him. He's still taping, calm as anything, and for half a second my eyes catch on his hands instead of the stick.
The quiet patience in his fingers. That isn't scouting and I know it.
He's never once asked me about my father.
He's the only person on this team who has sat with it and not asked. "Yeah," I say. "I do."
Tikh Volkov drops onto the bench beside me, already dressed, because Tikh is always already dressed. Always prepared.
"Their goalie," he says.
"Soucy says he cheats his glove."
"He does. Had him at the Worlds. Cheats glove, bites on the fake. Tell our guys to look him off and shoot late." He watches the ice a second. "You sleep?"
"Like a baby. Hotel bed, lights out early."
"Hmm." A beat then a nod. "You look good."
"I am good."
He doesn't answer that, which from Tikh is a full paragraph. He gets up to take his reps.
On the ice, the goalie coach runs the warm-up sequence. Shots from the dots. Lateral pushes. The work that wakes a body up. Somewhere in it, the cold stops mattering. Marchetti comes down my wing on the flow drill, and I have the words before I have the save.
"You're going far pad. You always go far pad on a clean entry. Show me something I haven't seen."
He goes far pad. I take it off the toe.
"That's not new."
"Next one's new,” he says skating around the net.
"It won't be." Next rep, he tries glove and I get a piece. "Closer."
I tap Gertie and Quessa going into the blue paint, glove then blocker, because they like it.
At some point this winter, I stopped doing it to humor a teammate and started doing it because the posts have names the same way the rookies have names, the same way anything does once you've stood beside it long enough.
Soucy named them in September. Wrote nothing down. Assumed I'd remember. I did.
At the bench between drills, I catch it.
Soucy's water bottle is squared on the boards with the label out, and I'm the one who squared it, and I don't remember deciding to.
I notice it the way you notice your own heartbeat once and then can't unhear it for a stretch.
I moved Berger's bag and gave the clean corner to a guy who'd never ask for it and felt like I won a hand.
I felt nothing handing myself the rattling vent.
Berger's own bottle is sweating onto the bench eight feet off and I have no plans for it at all.
I hold onto the notes. The way his hands go at two speeds, the pattern fast or slow, and everything it tells me. The way the room adjusts around him without being asked. I don't know what else to do with it, so I keep it.
The vent rattles. There's a Game 2 to steal tonight in a building that sold every seat to watch us leave quietly.
The team filters off the ice in twos and threes.
The goalie coach gives us the net ten more minutes and then goes too, because goalies are their own country and he learned in October to let us govern it.
Soucy stays at his end. I stay at mine. We trade soft shots back and forth, work done, not ready for the tunnel.
"You're staying late," Soucy says, gloving one of my floaters out of the air.
"So are you."
"I'm always late. You've got a room and a nap and a guy who texts you a meditation link."
"My mother sends me one good link a week and I'm not apologizing for it." I push another puck down the ice to him. "I like it out here when it's empty. Quietest a rink ever gets."
"That's the only time you stop talking."
"I don't talk that much."
"You said four full sentences to a goalpost an hour ago."
"She earned them. She's been taking nineteen's shot and not complaining once."
He sends the puck back. I let it come, and slide it down again, and we keep it going a while, the soft easy rhythm of two people with nowhere to be for ten minutes.
"Tonight," I say. "If they get one early, what do you want from me?"
"If they get one early, you play the next save and not the last goal.
That's the whole thing. You sit there chewing on the one that went in, you give up the next two.
The puck's already in the net. The net doesn't care how you feel about it.
" He gloves my shot, holds it a second, sends it back. "Play the save in front of you."
"You've thought about this for me."
"I've thought about it for every goalie I've ever watched. You happen to be the one in the net."
He says it flat, and it lands soft anyway, the way the true things he says always do. I take the last puck on my blocker and let it die in the corner because the ten minutes are up.
We come off last, the two of us, same as all year.
The calm I built on a hotel floor at six a.m. is still holding, through the cold and the rattle and the empty sheet, because I made it hold this morning, same as every morning.
It held easier today than most days. I don't go looking for why.
There's a Game 2 tonight in a building that wants us gone.
A quiet guy clomping up the tunnel beside me in his skate guards has scouted how I'm supposed to keep my own head on straight.
Somewhere in the next twelve hours the two of us have to go steal another one.
That's plenty to carry up the tunnel. I carry that.