Chapter 23 — TEO
The morning skate runs clean. Fontenot finds a lane through the left circle during the scrimmage that nobody picks up, and Berger’s line buries it.
“That lane was open all week.” Berger says it on the way off the ice, the same words he’d deliver at full broadcast volume on any other day, but the delivery is flat, like he’s reading off a box score instead of narrating a highlight. “Thursday. Today. It will be open Saturday.”
Thompson glances at him. “No record this time?”
“What?”
“You usually say you’re maintaining a record.”
Berger blinks. “I am maintaining a record.” He says it like he’s remembering the line rather than living it, and then he’s through the tunnel and gone before anyone can follow up.
I pull my helmet off and walk toward the locker room. Thompson falls in beside me. Neither of us says anything about Berger, which is its own kind of saying something.
The treatment room door is open as I pass. Zay is at his desk, charting, squared to the table, giving the room nothing. Pen moving, shoulders locked. He doesn’t look up.
My hand lifts toward the doorframe. The gesture starts before I’ve decided to make it, my body reaching the way it has reached for months, and I close my fingers and put my hand back on my bag strap.
I keep walking.
In the locker room I strip my gear and sit in my stall.
Mueller is arguing about the scrimmage’s offside call, which was correct, which Mueller will contest until approximately Thursday.
Hájek is across the room, working through his cool-down stretches with the deliberate focus of a man who treats every physical instruction like it carries exam weight.
Berger is at his stall. Third shirt of the day, collar straight.
He’s not talking. Not organizing his shoes.
Not pitching a restaurant for tonight or filing a complaint about the coffee or building a case about anything.
He’s changing his clothes and looking at his phone and the quiet from his stall is louder than anything Mueller is producing three spots down.
A month ago he would have leaned over by now and told me where we were eating, what he’d heard about the menu, why the previous rating needed revisiting.
The pitch isn’t coming. My mouth opens to say his name and ask what’s going on and then it closes again because I don’t have the words for anyone right now, not even the person I should be checking on.
Hájek comes over while I’m taping a new stick. He crouches beside my stall with the earnest posture of a student approaching a professor during office hours.
“The PK rotation from this morning. When Coach Bodie says pressure the strong side, does he mean commit fully or contain and angle?”
“Contain and angle. You don’t commit until the puck handler’s eyes go down.”
He nods, processing. “Thank you, Marchetti.” A pause. “You are quieter today.”
“Long week.”
He accepts this and goes back to his stall. Thompson, two spots down, looks from me to Berger’s quiet stall and back. His jaw sets. He doesn’t say anything. He starts unlacing his skates with the expression of a man making a decision.
I shower. Change. Sit with my phone. The text thread is open.
The last message is the Frank Ocean link I sent two nights ago.
Below it, white space. The read receipt and nothing after it.
I’ve been sending songs into this thread for months and the links said things we couldn’t say at the facility and didn’t need to say out loud.
The Frank Ocean sits there. Read. Quiet.
Walking back through the corridor after the optional skate, a lyric catches in my teeth.
The first three notes humming in my throat the way sound hums in my throat a hundred times a day in this building.
I close my mouth. The notes stop. Through the wall of the rehab room I hear Zay’s voice, easy and steady, walking someone through a hip flexor protocol.
The voice that used to stumble when I was the one on his table.
Gary Miller is outside his office. Coffee in hand, leaning against the frame.
“Marchetti. Got a minute?”
His office is small and organized. He sits on the edge of his desk, which is how Gary does conversations that aren’t quite meetings.
“How’s the shoulder feeling?”
“Good. Best it’s been.”
“That’s consistent with what Brooks reported.
” He takes a sip. “He’s also recommending we pull your ice time back by about four minutes per game for the rest of the regular season.
Posterior capsule is responding well, but pushing through a playoff stretch at full load risks regression in the joint. ”
Four minutes. A full shift rotation. Second and third periods during games that decide whether this team sees May.
“I feel fine, Gary.”
“I hear you. And I trust Brooks’ clinical judgment on this.
” Simple. Settled. The trust that isn’t a courtesy.
Zay earned that the long way, every call backed up, every recommendation right, until Gary stopped needing to double-check.
“He’s recommending load management so you’re available in the playoffs instead of on the reserve in April. ”
“So I watch from the bench during stretches of games that matter.”
“You play smart minutes. And you’re healthy when it counts.” He sets his coffee down. “Brooks has the data. If you want to discuss the specifics, his door is open.”
I sit in my car with the engine off and the radio off. The shoulder feels good. The best it’s felt. I’m producing. The team needs every minute during a push and being told to sit when the body says go and every point counts. You can’t argue with imaging. You can’t fight data.
And the data came from Zay.
Not as a gesture. Not as anything between us.
As the clinician who has spent seven months inside the mechanics of my shoulder and knows where the line sits between performance and damage.
He walked into Gary’s office with the numbers and Gary endorsed the call because Zay’s judgment has been right all year.
The man who won’t look at me in the corridor walked into his boss’s office and told him to protect my body.
And if anyone finds out about us. If someone sees, or if we get careless again the way we almost did with Bodie.
Every recommendation Zay has ever made about my shoulder becomes a question.
Every time he told Gary I needed different protocols or reduced load.
None of it gets taken at face value anymore.
People won’t ask whether he was right. They’ll ask whether the guy treating my shoulder was also in my bed when he made the call.
He knew that. He knew all of it when he walked into Gary’s office with the data and the recommendation. The shoulder needed what the shoulder needed and he went in anyway, and the only way that call stays clean is if nobody ever learns what we are.
I heard him in his kitchen. I heard the math.
But hearing it is different from sitting in a parking lot watching it happen in real time, in a building full of people who trust him because he earned every inch of that trust. Zay staked everything he’s built on my shoulder and nobody in that building knows the bet was personal.
His career is standing on ground I will never have to stand on, and the load management call is what that ground looks like when it’s bearing weight.
My phone buzzes. Thompson. You, me, Berger, Hájek. Tuza Taco, west side. 7. Don’t argue.
I don’t argue.
Tuza Taco is small, loud, bright. Orange walls and a chalkboard menu with specials written in two languages. The chips and salsa arrive before we’ve even sat down. Three weeks ago Berger would have had the first chip and guac rated before anyone sat down.
Thompson tries. “Columbus game. Fonty’s second goal, the redirect off the far post. You see the angle he took?”
“I saw it,” I say.
Berger nods.
Thompson waits. On any other night this table would already be four voices deep into whether the redirect was skill or luck, with Berger providing statistical context and me arguing that instinct doesn’t need a spreadsheet.
The silence sits where the conversation should be and Thompson lets it sit for exactly as long as his patience allows, which is about thirty seconds.
He orders for the table because nobody else is moving. “Al pastor, carne asada, two chicken, queso, and whatever salsa you recommend.” He handles it with the efficiency of a man who decided hours ago that this meal was happening whether anyone cooperated or not.
The food arrives. Hájek eats carefully, monitoring each taco with the focus he brings to everything.
I eat because the food is in front of me.
Berger picks up a taco, puts it back on his plate, picks it up again, takes a bite.
No rating. No commentary. No opinion about the char on the al pastor or the ratio of cilantro to onion or whether the tortilla is pressed or hand-patted.
The silence from his end of the table sits heavy in my chest because I’ve been so far inside my own quiet that I didn’t notice my best friend going silent next to me.
Four days in the same locker room. Four days of Berger not being Berger and I didn’t ask once.
Thompson sets down his taco. Wipes his hands. “All right. What’s going on with you two?”
Berger looks up. “Excuse me?”
“You.” Thompson points at Berger. “Haven’t rated a restaurant in two weeks.
Haven’t complained about the coffee since before break.
Haven’t given anybody an unsolicited opinion since Tuesday, which might be a first in recorded history.
” The finger swings to me. “And you haven’t said more than six words at a time since last week.
You didn’t sing in the hallway once today. I counted.”
“I don’t sing in the hallway,” I say.
“You absolutely sing in the hallway. Every day. Multiple times. You sang a stupid Barenaked Ladies song on the Columbus road trip so loud Coach Bodie heard it from the front row seat.”
Hájek nods. “Yes. I see this too. Both of you are different.”
Berger’s jaw tightens. His hand is on the table, flat, fingers pressed into the wood. “I’m fine, Thompson.”
“You’re not fine. And he’s not fine.” Thompson looks between us. “I don’t need to know what’s going on. I’m not asking for details. I’m telling you that the two loudest guys in that building have been walking around like someone died and the rest of us can see it.”
The table holds the words. The restaurant noise fills the space around us, a table of six near the window laughing, the kitchen calling orders in Spanish.
Berger’s taco is on his plate getting cold.
I’m looking at my hands and thinking about Parker at home on the couch right now, one paw on the empty half, purring into the quiet of an apartment that used to be full of music and bolognese and a man who lined his shoes by the door.
Berger stands up. His chair scrapes against the tile and the sound cuts through everything. He looks at Thompson. Then at me. His face is closed in a way I have never seen from him, sealed, every door shut, the man who narrates the world deciding the world can wait.
“This is bullshit.”
He picks up his jacket from the back of the chair. Walks to the door. Pushes through it. The glass swings shut and the orange walls hold the space where the loudest voice on the team should be.
Thompson watches the door. Hájek watches Thompson. I watch the empty chair.
“I’ll check on him,” I say.
“Not tonight.” Thompson shakes his head. “Give him tonight. Tomorrow.”
Hájek looks at me across the table with the careful attention of a man who is always reading the room in his second language. “You are also not fine, Marchetti.”
“I know.”
He nods. Accepts it honestly and without pushing.
He picks up his taco. Thompson picks up his.
I pick up mine. We eat in the space Berger left, three men at a table with four chairs, the chips getting cold and the restaurant still loud around us.
The taco is good, the char on the al pastor exactly right, and Berger would have known how good, and he would have told us, and we would have argued about his rating, and the table would have been full.
?