Chapter 28 Soucy
Itake the paper out of my bag in the car before he has the key all the way turned.
"Seven across," I say.
He has the key turned. He doesn’t put the car in gear. "...what?"
"Seven across. It’s a Tuesday. They’re easy on Tuesdays. Seven across."
"Soucy."
"I’ve had this one since the morning of Game 1. I kept not reading it to you."
"Why are you reading it to me now."
This is the part where I’m supposed to look at him and I can’t.
So I look at the paper, because the paper has a grid and the grid has rules.
My pulse is in my throat. The last time I felt this exact thing I was asking him to call me Jules, and it cost more than going to bed with him had cost. I learned that day that the most expensive words I own are the short ones. These aren’t short.
"Because I’m going to lose you if I don’t, and I’d rather read you a crossword in a car than lose you. Those are the two options I’ve left. So. Seven across."
"Put the paper down."
"No. I need it in my hands. Let me keep it in my hands." The crease in the paper is under my thumb. I press it flat and it doesn’t stay flat and I press it again. The pressing is the only reason the words come out in order, because the brain will give me the words if the hands have a job. "I meant the thing I said. About not needing you to fix me. That part was true. I don’t need you to fix me. I’ve never needed anyone to fix me. "
"I know. You made that very clear."
"I said it like the not-needing was the whole sentence. It isn’t. I let you walk out of that room believing it was the whole sentence, and that’s the thing I did wrong. That’s the one I can’t stop counting."
"Soucy, we have a game."
"I don’t need you. Let me finish. Please." The hands flatten the crease. The crease comes back. "I don’t need you. I want you. Those are not the same thing. I made you believe they were the same thing, and you of all people cannot afford to believe they’re the same thing, and I did it anyway."
"You don’t get to do this to me right now."
"I want you. Je te veux. I don’t need you to fix one single thing and I want you anyway. That is the whole sentence. That's the part I left off in the room. I’m giving you the part I left off."
He’s looking through the windshield at the parking structure. His jaw is working. His hands are at ten and two like he’s still driving a car that’s in park.
"You’re asking me to sit here and be wanted and do nothing with it," he says. "You know that’s the one thing I’ve never once known how to do."
"I know. That’s why I picked it. I could have brought you fish food.
I could have fixed something of yours so we’d be even and you’d have a job again.
I didn’t. I brought you a crossword I can’t finish and a sentence I can’t take back, and I’m asking you to do nothing with either one. Just take them."
"That’s not fair."
"It’s not. It’s just true. I picked the true one, not the kind one. I’m out of kind ones."
"You picked the worst possible morning for this."
"I picked the only morning I’d left. If we lose tonight there’s no tomorrow morning.
So it’s this one. It had to be this one.
" I fold the paper back along its soft creases and set it on the console between us, seven across still empty. He can reach it or not. "You don’t have to do anything. I’m not asking you to do anything.
I did the thing. That’s all I came to do.
You can answer whenever. You can answer never.
I just couldn’t go play that game with it still folded in my bag. "
He looks at the paper on the console for a long time. Then he picks it up and his eyes go down it once. The corner of his mouth does the thing it does when the answer is already there and he’s going to make you wait for it anyway.
"Seven across is ‘anchor,’" he says.
"I know it’s anchor."
"You read it to me upside down and you still gave me the answer."
"I always give you the answer. You take forty-five seconds to get there anyway."
"There was one I couldn’t read you. In Boston. Twelve down."
"Lagoon."
"And fourteen across. Steady." I flatten the crease. "I’d them both. I just couldn’t say them to you."
He does not say anything else. He puts the car in gear. But he sets the paper on the dash instead of handing it back, face up, where we can both see it the whole drive in. That is not an answer. It is not nothing. I let it be the not-nothing it is.
The routine runs forty-six minutes that night.
One minute over. I notice it the way you notice a fever breaking, the catch that has been jamming the queue for three rounds easing off one click at a time, the tape going on top once, the skates after it.
The count flows through to the end without circling back.
Not the car. Not the man in it. What eased is the carrying.
I said the true thing out loud instead of folding it back into my bag, and not having said it was what had been inflating the count.
Gwen would call this exactly what it is.
A stressor resolving because the thing causing it got named.
The forty-five is still the floor. My hands are one minute lighter.
And then I am in the net for an elimination game and I am free.
That is the only word for it. Free. Every other night this round the crease has been the one place I was right and the rest of me was a problem being managed.
Tonight there is no rest of me. There is the puck.
The geometry. The read arriving before the play.
The count is not running because I emptied all of it into a car this morning and left it on a dashboard.
What is left is the cleanest version of myself I have ever brought to a net.
They come in waves the way they have come all series, three at the top of the blue.
Tonight the forest does not bother me. A forest is just geometry with legs, and geometry has never once lied to me.
The point shot that beat me in Game 4, I find early tonight, through hips and shins and sticks, and I have it before the building knows I have it.
The cross-seam that moved me, tonight I take the first one away and trust my D on the backside.
The puck dies in my pad. Their best player gets a breakaway and I am already where he is going before he decides to go there.
I take it off his stick and freeze it. I say nothing to him, because I am not Lundy.
I do not run my mouth in the crease. I close the door and let the silence carry the insult.
Forty-one shots. The building leans on me in the third and I lean back. Nothing goes in that I don’t see first. Nothing I see gets past me.
"That’s a series," Berger is yelling into the side of my mask before I have my blocker off. "That’s a series now!"
"It’s one game."
"It’s the first game. Of the rest of the games. We’re not dead. Say it. Say we’re not dead."
"We’re not dead."
"Louder."
"We’re not dead, Berger."
"You stood on your head. You know that? Forty-one shots. You stole it. The quiet guy stole an elimination game."
"It’s one game."
"Stop saying it’s one game. Let me have this. Let the building have this. We were dead this morning and now we’re not, and you did that."
The room after is the loudest it’s been all playoffs.
Marchetti is standing on a bench. Fontenot has lost a shoe and doesn’t know it.
Berger is writing a number on the whiteboard that I can’t read from here, and whatever the number is, it’s bigger than it was this morning.
I take my gear off slow. I let them have the noise.
And Lundy crosses the room to my stall on the crutches.
Slow. He stops in front of me, and I wait, because I’ve done all my reaching for one day and the rest is his.
"Soucy," he says.
"What?"
"Seven across was anchor."
"You said that already. In the car. Right before you told me to put the paper down."
"I know what I told you to do." He balances there on the two poles, the whole steady weight of him propped on aluminum, and he looks at me the way he used to look at the goalposts before he believed they had names. Like he’s deciding to enter a thing and stay in it.
"I’m telling you I got there. Forty-five seconds. Maybe a little more. But I got there."
He reaches into the track suit and takes out the paper, the Tuesday crossword, seven across filled in now in his handwriting. He sets it on the shelf of my stall, face up, and goes back down the room on the crutches without saying anything else. The paper stays.
The pen is still clipped to the fold. His pen, not mine. A cheap ballpoint from the trainers’ room, the kind that runs out in a week if you actually use it. He left it there like there are more clues to come back for.
?