Chapter 21 Soucy
“One-twelve again,” Soren says, sitting down beside my stall in the visitors’ room. “Your mother’s got the tourtière in a cooler under the seat. She told me. She texts me now. Did you know your mother texts me?”
“She got your number from Matty. She’s been texting you since Tampa.” The pattern runs under my hands, thumb to index, middle, ring, pinky, back. Steady. The crease is two hours out and the crease is where I go quiet. My body knows it’s coming and starts settling early.
“She asked if you’re eating. I said yes. Was that a lie?”
“Partially. Tell her I’m eating. She’ll know you’re lying and she’ll like you more for covering.”
“Your family runs on covering for each other.”
“My family runs on knowing exactly what’s wrong and never once saying it out loud.
We could win a Cup at it.” It comes out dry, the deadpan flat.
He laughs the way only three people laugh at the things I say, and I keep the sound of it how I keep all of them.
I don’t think about how the sentence is also a description of the last two weeks.
I’ve decided not to think about that until after the game.
“She sends me recipes,” he says. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Make them. It’s the highest honor she gives. She’s vetting you.”
“Am I passing?”
There’s a half-second where the honest answer and the easy answer are the same length in my mouth, and I let the easy one out because the honest one has a knife in it I’m not holding tonight. “You’re passing.”
He lets it go. He always lets it go, which is the whole problem and tonight is the whole mercy. He nods at Ash across the room, asleep against the wall with his headphones on. “Ash and Avi don’t sit together on the plane so nobody knows, and then they fall asleep on each other by hour two.”
“Everybody knows. They’ve known since October. Ash announced it by trying to hide it.”
“That’s how you announce things. You try to hide them and you do it loud.”
“Is that what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know. Are we hiding?”
“Half the room set a fish-food trap for us. Thompson stepped back at a show so you could step in. Tikh’s known since the kittens. We’re the worst-kept secret on a team full of badly-kept secrets.”
“I’m okay with being a badly-kept secret,” he says. “If it’s you.”
I look at the tape on my left pad and not at him, because if I look at him he’ll read the thing I’ve been holding under my tongue for two weeks. The room is no place for it. The crease is coming. The crease is the one place none of this can reach me. “Yeah.”
He pulls the folded paper out of his bag, creased to today’s grid. “Crossword. Pre-game. One clue, for luck. Nine across.”
“We don’t do it for luck. We do it because you can’t sit still in the twenty-two minutes without your hands moving first.”
“Same thing. Nine across. ‘Sentinel.’”
“Seven letters?”
“Seven.”
“Watchman.”
“You didn’t even look.”
“I don’t have to look. You picked it because of the net.
You’ve been picking goalie words all series.
You think I don’t see you doing it.” I see all of it.
I see him reaching for me sideways in the only language he has, the same as my mother with her clock, the same as Matty with his forearm.
Tonight, for once, I let it be only the warm thing and not the other thing too.
“Is it working?”
“It’s working.”
“Your brother’s going to come for you tonight,” he says, quieter now.
“My brother comes for me every night. He came for me when I was nine and took my cereal bowl because I needed it to be the blue one. This is just a bigger building.”
“I mean it. He’s been building to this all series. The crowd, his family in the seats. He’s going to make a statement.”
“Then he’ll make it. There’s a net between him and me. The net is the one place nobody has ever managed to make a statement I couldn’t answer.”
“What if he goes after me instead.”
“He won’t. You’re not the one he’s scared for.
” I say it like the settled fact it’s. Soren takes it.
Then it’s the twenty-two minutes and he goes still in his full gear with the low beat in his ears, and I sit and watch the biggest, calmest man I know build himself a quiet out of nothing.
That’s the last thing in this night that goes as I expect.
On the bench in the second I track him the way I track him. M?kinen drops onto the boards next to me, breathing hard from a shift.
“Your brother’s running him.”
“I see it.”
“He’s been running him all series. Somebody’s going to answer it.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying. Don’t.” Across the ice Matty parks himself at the top of Soren’s crease. Soren says something to him I can’t hear. Matty doesn’t move. “Marchetti and Zay aren’t talking on the bench. You see that?”
“They’re fighting,” M?kinen says.
“They’re not fighting. Zay’s mad Marchetti blocked a shot with his face in the second. He gets scared and it comes out as mad. It’ll be fixed by the bus.”
“How do you know that.”
“I watch. It’s the only thing I’m good at that isn’t this.” Berger leans in from my other side, eyes on the net.
“Lundy’s standing on his head. Twenty-eight saves.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“The one in the first that hit his blocker and dropped didn’t get counted. Twenty-nine.”
“I’m checking.”
“Check. It’s twenty-nine.”
The puck goes into the corner to Soren’s right.
Matty goes after it and so does the kid on our third pair.
The puck squirts loose toward the net. Matty turns.
There’s a half-second where I can see the whole geometry of it how I see every geometry.
The angle and the speed of him. I think, he’s going for the puck. He isn’t going for the puck.
He hits Soren square. Soren’s head goes into the post. His body goes down wrong, folded. The way a body goes down when nothing in it caught the fall.
Matty is standing where the hit happened.
For one second he’s looking down at Soren and his whole body is still in a way that isn’t hockey-still, not ready-still.
It’s the stillness of a man who can see what he just did.
Then his shoulders square and his chin comes up and the stillness is gone, sealed over. I note that too.
M?kinen is over the boards before the whistle.
He has Matty by the jersey and the gloves are off and they’re throwing and the linesmen are late.
The bench stands up. The bench is noise.
Davis is on the boards screaming something at the ice.
Berger’s hand is fisted in the back of my sweater. Soren isn’t getting up.
Reste là. The two words come up in French from somewhere I don’t keep them.
I don’t say them. I don’t say anything. My hands are flat on my thighs and they aren’t running the pattern and they aren’t moving at all.
The bench empties toward the glass and I’m the one piece of it that stays in its seat.
I watch the trainer skate out, I watch them get to him.
A leg moves, an arm moves. They turn him over on the ice my father taught me to skate on forty minutes from here.
“He’s up. They’ve got him up.” Someone’s voice, far off.
“He’s walking. He’s walking off.”
M?kinen comes off through the gate with blood on his face and his knuckles split, and he drops down hard beside me. He doesn’t apologize. M?kinen never apologizes for the right things.
“Somebody had to,” he says. “I’m not sorry.”
Davis has my mask. Davis is putting my mask in my hands.
“Soucy. Gear’s on. You’re in. Look at me, man.”
Bodie is in front of me, both hands on my cage, turning my face to his. “Soucy. Soucy. You’re in. Look at me. You’re in.”
“He’s in protocol,” the trainer says somewhere behind him. “He’s done for the night.”
“Julien. Net. Now. You’ve got this.”
I get up. I put the mask on. I skate out onto the ice in the building that raised me with my brother on the other bench and my mother in section one-twelve with a cooler of tourtière under her seat.
I find the crease. I scrape it square how I scrape it.
The noise of the building drops away the way it always drops away, because this is the one room in the world where my brain isn’t a problem to be managed.
It’s the asset. It’s the only asset I’ve ever fully trusted.
So I hold. They come and I read them and I get where the puck is going before it gets there, because I’ve watched this team on film for two weeks and they don’t know I’ve watched them.
The shots come and I’m already there. My hands are still.
The crease still. I hold the post he hit Soren into.
I hold for the rest of the period and into the next, and every save is clean and every save is the asset doing what the asset does.
Underneath it, where the crease can’t reach, the rest of me is filling up.
Everything I didn’t feel when he went down.
Everything I didn’t say for two weeks. The crease holds the water out for as long as I’m in the crease.
The bill is going to come due the second I leave it.
The horn goes. We win it, 2-1. The series is 3-2 and we’re still alive.
The building boos. My teammates hit me and I don’t feel the gloves on my back.
M?kinen’s blood is on my white sweater. Somewhere down a tunnel Soren is sitting in a dark room with a light in his eyes answering questions about what day it’s.
I skate to the bench and the crease lets go of me, the way it always lets go of me when the ice runs out, and everything it was holding pours forward at once into a body that doesn’t have room for it.
That has never had room for it. I’ve held everyone all night by holding the net.
There’s nothing left to hold it with. There’s no room in me for one more unspoken thing.
I’m full to the teeth with the worst-kept secret on a team full of secrets.
I haven’t said it yet. I can feel that I’m about to.
?