Chapter 25 Lundy
"You're going far side," I tell the kid on the half-wall, because it's in his hips. He's telegraphed it since the second period and nobody has made him pay. "You've gone far side every time you've cut in off that wing. Six times. Change it up. You're getting boring."
The play comes back the other way and I find my defenseman through the traffic.
"Davis. Strong side. He's looking for the bumper, not the shot.
Take the bumper. I've got the shooter." Davis takes the bumper.
The puck squirts to the corner and the clock keeps moving, which is the only thing I'm asking the clock to do.
Soucy is two stalls down, gear half off, hands moving through the pattern that brings him down off a game watched from the bench. My body knows the path between the stalls. I keep it in the stall.
The path stays empty.
My phone has a missed call when I check it, and I know who it's before I look. Exactly one person calls during the playoffs instead of texting.
"Hey Dad."
"There he's. Good game. Your glove was quick tonight."
"Your kid on the half-wall telegraphs. Tell your video guys. They're letting him get away with it."
"You think I'm going to take coaching from the other team's goalie."
"I think you already noticed and you're testing whether I noticed."
He laughs, the big one, the one that filled the rink in Chicago when I was small enough to think the noise was for me. "Mom says hi. She's got your jersey and my jersey both. She switches at the second intermission. Says it keeps her neutral."
"Mom can have both jerseys. You get nothing until this is over."
"I'm not asking for your power play."
"You're absolutely asking for my power play. You called the night before a game, which you only do when you want me relaxed."
"Maybe I want my son relaxed."
"Maybe you want my five-hole reads soft. How's the room over there."
"Loud. Confident. That worries me more than scared would. You remember the bantam final, you let in the soft one in the first and then stood on your head."
"I remember you didn't say a word the whole drive home."
"I didn't have a word. I was too proud to talk. I'm telling you now. That's the word, eighteen years late." He lets it sit, the way he taught me to let things sit. "Your backup. He played the third in that Round 1 blowout. Quiet glove. Calm. Where'd you find him."
"Don't scout my backup, Dad."
"I scout everybody. It's the job. I'm asking as your father, not as the bench."
"You can't turn it off that fast and we both know it."
"No. No, I probably can't." A pause, and in the pause is the both-of-it, the man who taught me to answer a hostile press scrum and the man whose forecheck gets drawn up tonight to break the breakout keeping us alive. "You okay, Soren."
He asks it the way he asked the night Seattle left me unprotected. Two words, the weight all underneath.
And I want to tell him. That's the strange part.
I want to tell my father, who's coaching the team trying to end my season, that there's a person two stalls down whose hands I know the pattern of.
That we aren't talking. That I built something this year I can no longer find the edges of, and I think I broke it by trying to hold it too well.
"I'm good, Dad. Knee's fine. Just maintenance."
"I didn't ask about the knee."
"I know you didn't. I'm good. Go design your forecheck. I'll see you Thursday."
"Love you, kid. Play well. Not too well."
He hangs up and I sit with the phone a beat longer than I need to. Nothing surprises him. He likely knew there was a someone before I had a word for it, and that's either a gift or the whole problem. I've never once been able to decide which.
Tikh drops onto the bench beside me without asking and starts unlacing skates he changed out of twenty minutes ago.
"Good win."
"Good win."
He works the lace. He isn't here for the win. Tikh sits down next to you when there's a thing and waits, and the waiting is the question. I taught him the economy. He uses it on me now, which is its own justice.
"Crossword," he says.
"What about it?"
"You're not doing it."
"It's the Finals. There's a lot going on."
"You did it on the worst road trips all year.
You never skipped it. Now you're skipping it.
" He sets the skate down. "I'm not asking.
I'm telling you I see it. His shoulders are still up when he finds you now.
They used to drop. You used to be the thing that dropped them. You taught me to read it. I read it."
"You read it."
"Two observations. No interpretation. Just data. When you see the thing, you don't have to fix it. You just say it once so the other guy knows it's seen. You did that for me. Pizza for two or three. You never made me explain. I'm doing it back. That's the whole sentence. You know where I am."
He goes. He's right about the shoulders. I've watched it three nights running, Soucy coming into a room, finding me, the shoulders staying up where they used to drop. I don't know if I'm not allowed to fix it or if I'm only afraid to try.
Soucy comes past my stall with his bag on his shoulder.
"Glove was quick tonight," he says.
"Their kid telegraphs."
"Six times far side. I had it on the bench in the first."
"You could've told me."
"You had it by the third on your own."
"I had it by the second."
"You had it by the third." He shifts the bag. "Their D-pair gets tired around the twelve-minute mark of the third. Both pairs. They change late. There's a window if you push the pace there."
"I'll tell Bodie."
"I already told Bodie. I'm telling you so you have it in the net."
"I have it."
"Carpool's at eight forty for the morning skate. I'll be downstairs."
"Eight forty."
"Eight forty," he says again. The number twice. He's gone down the tunnel.
That's the most we've said off the ice in nine days, and most of it was a scouting report. It was almost enough to make me believe the path between the stalls is still there if either of us would walk it.
Game 3 is forty-one minutes old and I own it. I've owned it since the warmup, every read early, every angle true, the puck slow and big and arriving where I already am. We're up two. Their half-wall kid finally changed it up, went glove side, and I had that too.
Karl is behind their bench with his arms folded and his face doing nothing, the face that means he's three plays ahead. The puck goes hard around the boards to the far side, their winger driving the back door, and I push.
It's a push I've made ten thousand times. Post to post. The lateral drive my mother's studio built into my hips before I knew what it was for, the thing that gets a goalie across the crease faster than a puck can cross it. I've made this push in my sleep.
I make it now, and somewhere in the middle the inside of my right leg comes apart.
There's no sound.
That's the part nobody tells you. You expect a sound and there isn't one.
The push doesn't finish. The leg goes out from under me the way a leg is never supposed to go.
I am down. Not in a save. Just down. The puck is in the net behind me and I don't turn to look at it.
The net is the smallest thing in the building right now.
The biggest thing is that I can't make my right leg do the next part.
The whistle goes. Zay is there along with the other trainer. The building drops into the hush a building drops into when it understands before the people in it do.
"Don't get up, Lundy. Don't get up. Talk to me. Where."
"Groin. Right. It's the groin. I felt it go. It went." My own voice is calm, which is wrong. The steady hand reporting on its own failure like it belongs to someone else.
"Okay. Okay, stay down."
They get me up between them because I can't do the part where I get myself up. That is the part. My arms over two sets of shoulders and my right leg taking none of me. The building begins to clap, the clap that means we see you and we're sorry and please be okay.
I've stood in this net and heard that building clap for a save, and I didn't know until right now that the same sound can mean the opposite thing.
Soucy is off the bench, at the door, very still, the stillness that on him means the queue has jammed and every read is firing with nowhere to go. His hands have stopped.
The reflex fires. The oldest one. Fix the thing in front of you.
Fix his face. I can't reach him and I couldn't fix it if I could, because the thing that needs fixing is that I'm being carried off the one sheet of ice where I've ever been entirely myself.
There's no version of being carried that I get to make all right for anybody.
The last thing I see before the tunnel takes it is the far bench.
My father's bench. Karl nodding once with his eyes already on the door the backup will come from, the whole machine he built turning toward the man two stalls down from me.
He isn't cruel. He's the best there is. I go down the tunnel on two other men's shoulders with nothing left to hand the people I love but the sound of a door swinging shut behind me.
?