Chapter 8 Lundy
There's a version of this building that's been screaming for two hours, and inside the cage I can't hear a decibel of it.
That's the gear. Off the ice I hold the whole room at once on purpose, every face, every good thing.
In here I hold one thing. The puck and the half-second before it. Nothing else gets through the bars.
Wire to wire, this one. We scored, they answered.
We scored again, they answered again, and since the middle of the second it's been our one goal held against a building that can feel the round slipping and has decided not to let it go quietly.
A goalie at the end of a series is playing two games.
The puck and the shooter's belief about the puck.
They've thrown everything at me for two periods to find out if I'll blink.
The answer they keep getting back is the most boring answer in the sport.
No. Not tonight. Try the next one. The boredom is the weapon.
Late in the second their captain comes in alone off a bad change and the building stands up early to watch me lose.
I make him decide first, show him the whole net and take it away in the order I choose.
He shoots where I left the door open a quarter-second ago and I've already shut it.
That save is the game, except nobody knows it yet.
A save is only ever the game in hindsight.
We're up one with four minutes left. The mistake every goalie makes closing a series is guarding the lead instead of playing the puck, leaning back to protect what's behind you instead of stepping out to take what's in front.
The lead isn't my job. The next shot is my job.
I say it inside the mask where only I can hear it.
They pull the goalie with two minutes left and the ice tilts. Six skaters in our end, the puck moving low to high while they hunt the lane that finally cracks me.
"Net's clean," I tell Davis on a whistle. "Just bodies. Box them out and let me see the puck."
"Copy."
Cross-ice pass, I'm there before it arrives, post sealed.
Point shot through a screen, I track it through three bodies and smother it.
The whistle. Faceoff, fifty-eight seconds.
They win the draw back, one more look, a seam pass to the back door.
I push across and get the toe of the pad on it.
The puck sits in the blue paint for a half-second that lasts a season.
I cover it. They've used everything they had.
The last draw. The clock. The horn.
The building comes back all at once, two hours of held breath let go in a sound I feel in my teeth. The bench is already over the boards. Series in five. Round done.
Davis hits me first, helmet to helmet. "We got 'em. Lundy. We got 'em."
"We got 'em."
Marchetti's next, both gloves gone, taped wrist around my neck. "The toe save. Did you see the toe save? Of course you didn't, you made it, you made it with your foot."
"That's usually how the foot ones go."
"Don't be reasonable. Not tonight. Nobody is reasonable tonight, it's a rule."
"It's a good rule," Davis says, arriving again, because in a pile you arrive more than once. "Where's the goalie. Somebody find the goalie."
"Twenty-eight saves," somebody yells.
"It was twenty-six."
"It's a hundred now. It grows in the retelling, that's the deal, you don't get a say."
The pile builds the way piles build. By accretion.
Somewhere in the middle of it there's a body coming across the ice that I'd find in any crowd in any building, the one that maps every room before it'll enter.
He comes into me without the half-step. Without the redraw.
Without the careful eighteen inches that lived in front of his hands all season.
He just comes, helmet against my helmet, glove fisted in the front of my jersey, no recalibration anywhere in it.
That's the whole thing, inside a celebration nobody in this barn is reading but me.
"You played the save in front of you," he says into the cage, my own line, his now. "Every one of them."
"You were watching."
"I'm always watching. It's a depth chart." His mouth does the almost-thing, the full one this time, and the pile folds over us and takes it where no one can see.
Berger catches me on the way to the handshake line and grabs both my shoulders. "Seven to one. They had us seven to one to lose this round."
"You had us seven to one, Berger."
"It was the model. The model was wrong. Do you understand what I'm telling you. The model was wrong and it's the best day of my life."
The handshake line still gets me. Two teams that spent a week trying to end each other's seasons lined up to touch hands and mean it. Their goalie finds me at the end and taps my pads with his blocker.
"Good series. Go win the next one."
"You made me earn all of it."
"I know. That's the only part that helps." And we let go and skate to opposite ends of what comes next.
The room is a flood, the speaker going before half of us are through the door.
"Two more rounds like that and I'm dead," Davis announces, a goalie stick raised over his head like a sword. "I'm dead and I love it."
"Tell me you saw the toe save," Marchetti says, to the ceiling. "I need somebody to tell it back to me."
"Everyone saw it, Marchetti," Thompson says, dropping onto the bench beside me, soaked.
"I want it as a story. With a beginning."
"Once upon a time Lundy made a toe save and we made the second round," Davis says. "The end. Berger, where's the parade route."
"There's no parade for the second round."
"You said that about every round."
"In October I was a coward with a spreadsheet. I've grown."
Coach Bodie comes in and stands in the middle of it with no speech in him at all, just stands there grinning like a man who got away with something clean. The room quiets for the one guy who almost never raises his voice.
"Boys," he says.
We wait.
"That's it. That's the whole thing. Rest tomorrow, round two Thursday. Boys." He walks back out and the room comes apart at the seams, Davis swearing it's the best speech he's ever heard and meaning it.
"Speech, Lundy," Davis starts, and a few of them pick it up. "Speech. Speech."
"No speech."
"You're the calm one. Calm us down. Say one calm thing."
"Drink water. We play Thursday."
"That's the worst calm thing I've ever heard and I'm going to live by it."
"Who do we even get," somebody asks the room. "Round two, who."
"Whoever survives the other series," Berger says. "And no, the model has no read, the model is on a beach. I told you."
"Good," Thompson says, quiet enough that only I catch it. "Now they have to take it from us."
"Frame the spreadsheet," Marchetti calls. "Frame the wrong one. We hang it over the door."
Tikh is leaning against his stall while the room roars around him, watching, and when his eyes cross mine they stop for exactly one beat.
A question that isn't really a question.
I don't answer it and I don't have to. He tips his chin, once, at nothing, and goes back to the noise.
He saw it before I did. He won't make me say it.
Soucy's three stalls down, present in a loud room without being the noise in it.
The distance I used to read in those three stalls is just three stalls now.
He looks up and finds me already looking, and neither of us does anything about it, because there's nothing to do about it in a room this full and because we both already know we take the same car home.
I moved the bag in Tampa. Squared the bottle without deciding to.
Took the rattling stall and felt like I'd won a hand.
I've been building a room around a man who never asked me to build one, and the question Tikh left sitting on the table isn't whether I see it.
It's whether the building is for him or for me.
We do, eventually, when the room has burned down to the diehards and the trainers and the smell of old champagne. The long way, his place sliding past mine. Same as every night.
"You stood on your head," he says, quiet now, the building gone behind us.
"Marchetti covered that. With a beginning, middle, and end."
"Marchetti doesn't know what he watched. I do." A block goes by. "It was the best game I've seen you play."
"You watch all of them."
"That's how I know. We win round two too."
"You don't say things like that."
"I said it last week and we won. I'm saying it twice now. Write both down."
"What's the cat situation," I ask. "Looking, or looking-looking."
"There's a shelter near Gwen's. I drove past it twice this week."
"That's looking-looking."
"Bug's going to be furious he’s competition."
"Bug bit a vet. Bug can handle competition." He says it to the windshield, and his name for what he's deciding is already a reason that does the talking. I let it. A man keeping his reasons while the want sits plain underneath them.
"Jules," I say, just to say it, just because I get to now.
His name fits in my mouth like it's been there a while, like I'd been saving the spot.
He doesn't answer, but something in his face gives.
The smallest thing. Then his hand crosses the console and finds the back of my neck, brief and certain, gone before the next light.
Nothing careful in it. Nothing managed. Just a hand that knows where it's going.
I drive the four blocks to nowhere in particular, in no hurry to get either of us home.
Somewhere behind us the building is still letting people out into a spring night, eighteen thousand of them carrying what they watched, the round we were never supposed to take.
They got the half that happened on the ice.
The other half rode home in a quiet car with the windows down.
That one stays ours, the way the names do, the way everything does once he's handed it across and I've decided to keep it.
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