12. Nolan
Chapter twelve
Nolan
Boston didn't change a thing for Game Four, and it was unsettling. The plan they'd found in Game Two had beaten us in our building and then lost them Game Three at home. Most teams would go back to the whiteboard. Boston didn't.
They came out and did it all over again, same forecheck, with a body on me a beat after every touch, and patience—endless patience. They'd decided Game Three was an outlier.
They finished everything. Every time I took the puck along the wall, I was checked a beat after the puck left my stick, clean and hard. One hit like that is nothing. After the thirty-fourth one, it felt like a tax I'd be paying all night.
I didn't back down.
For the first period, the hip held. I'd done my floor work in the hotel room that morning, thirty extra minutes of it because the barometric pressure was diving.
By puck drop I was as loose as I got anymore.
I killed a penalty, won a puck battle down low, and took a hit at the end of a shift that emptied my lungs. Typical night at the rink.
They scored when their fourth line hemmed our third in for a full minute. A puck bounced off a skate in the crease and landed in the net. Misha's vision had been blocked.
In the second period, the tax on my body came due.
Six minutes in, a rim came around hard in our zone, and I got there first, back to the pressure. The play was simple: hold, let the hit come, and then send the puck to the middle. I've made that play since I was fifteen. Most of the load runs through the left hip.
The hit arrived on time, and it moved me. The puck squirted off my blade into the slot instead of down the ice in the middle. Their center ended up alone with it eleven feet from Misha. The shot didn't miss.
None of the media would hang the failure on me. On the broadcast, it would look like a puck that took a hop, and then the battle went the other way. The guys on the bench tapped my shins when I stepped off the ice. Brick said something about the rim being a bad bounce.
I played the rest of the game. Wes got one back early in the third, a wrist shot through a screen that made the building go quiet. We pushed. Jamie hit a post. Misha kept it a one-goal game with a save on a two-on-one that he had no business stopping.
With ninety seconds left, Coach sent me over the boards for the six-on-five.
Wes got tossed from the dot for cheating in, and I stepped in to take the draw and won it clean.
I skated to the net front and stood in the paint, taking cross-checks while the pucks came at the net.
The last one kicked wide, and Boston chipped the puck the length of the ice into our empty net.
That was the game. Three–one. The series was even at two.
I looked for Elias on my way off the ice. It was now a habit. He stood with his back to a pillar, occasionally looking at me and then returning to scanning everything else.
The media took twenty minutes. On the road after a loss, they let the pack in all at once. Three dozen people filled the locker room.
Wes was first. The captain always answers for a loss. He stood at his stall with a towel around his neck and faced them down.
"They came in hard," he said. "We knew they would. We didn't manage the puck well and gave them too much off the rush. That's on us. We're back home for two now. I like where we're sitting."
"Are you planning anything different at home?"
"The plan didn't fail. It was a couple of missed reads and a couple of bad bounces. Now we're in a best-of-three. We've been in worse spots."
Wes was good at dealing with the media. I dressed slowly two stalls down and let him have the pack.
They didn't let me get away with that. When they spat Wes out, they came looking for the veteran.
"Nolan, what'd you see out there tonight?"
"I saw a good team playing a good road plan at home," I said. "They finished their checks and didn't give us breaks. That's Boston. They deserved the win."
I was quick and complete. Crediting the other team is the safest thing you can do with the media in a losing room. Nobody was ready to criticize a man who was gracious.
Then one of the national guys leaned in past a beat writer. "You've taken a beating this series, Nolan. Four games of heavy contact. At your age, how's your body holding up?"
I watched a beat writer glance up from his phone. Wes stopped toweling his hair. It was a real question.
"Fine," I said. "It's June hockey. Nobody feels good. You play the game in front of you."
I let it out smooth, as usual. Then I picked up my water bottle, and I left the room.
The charter plane's lights went dark twenty minutes after wheels-up. It was standard after lost games. Nobody sleeps after a win; after a loss, half the plane is out before the seatbelt light.
I couldn't sleep. My brain wouldn't stop.
I went back for water somewhere over Ohio. The galley light was on its dimmest setting, and Misha sat in the last row with his tray table down and a padlock in his hands. It was one of the old brass ones off the shelf in his apartment. He had a pick and a tension wrench working the keyway.
I grabbed a water bottle, but I didn't go back to my seat.
Misha moved his pick, and I heard a small, dry clicking sound.
"Tarn," I said. "At your card game, Elias said the name, and you watched me freeze. You knew something. What do you know?"
He stopped working on the lock and looked up at me.
"Tarn," he said. "Bad. We do not use them in Russia."
"Bad how?"
He turned the lock over in his hands.
"In Russia," he said, "everybody knows story about company that fixes everything.
Old story with different names." He set the lock back down on the tray.
"When I am young, coach from national program tells me: some people, when they fix you, you are not the one who is fixed.
You are the part." He picked up the pick again.
"Tarn came to my club in Yaroslavl one time.
Made presentation. Very nice slides. Old men in the room said no before slides finished.
I was nineteen. I ask why. Nobody answers me.
" The lock popped open in his hands. "Now is my answer for you.
Nobody answers you. That is the answer."
"Misha—"
"Okay," he said.
That was the period at the end of the sentence. He set the open lock on the tray table next to two others, took a fresh one from his bag, and started picking again.
I stood there for a few more seconds, in case. Then I carried my water bottle back up the dark aisle, past twenty sleeping teammates, and settled again by the window.
Elias was two rows up on the aisle with his laptop open. He was working.
I got into my seat and leaned the side of my head against the cold of the window. Somewhere thousands of feet above dark fields, a slice of memory came back.
Navy polos.
That was all it was. I saw navy polos in the Carolina training room, with a little stitched word over the pockets. There were three guys with clipboards and soft voices who showed up partway through my first full season there and never left.
They weren't team staff. Everyone knew they weren't team staff, and nobody said so. They had a corner of the room with a folding table and a laptop. On Tuesdays they measured things: grip, balance, and how long you could hold a wall sit. They always said "good" regardless of the numbers.
Tarn. The word was on the polos and paper cups, too. I'd read it a hundred times.
The cups. They were little pleated paper cups, the kind you get at an office water cooler, set out in rows on the folding table with a number Sharpied on the side. Mine said 17. They told us to take the cup and drink.
I knocked it back. For recovery, they said. I did it for two years. Thirteen years later, I still didn't know for sure what was in it.
It wasn't like they said it was a secret. I never asked. The team handed us so many things—uniforms, equipment, parking spaces. My teammates drank it, too. Asking would have been weird, and I was too young, at twenty-one, to afford being pegged as difficult. I just wanted to keep playing hockey.
Ty's cup said 9.
There he was in my head at the folding table with his cup, grinning at something one of the polo guys said. Then another thing came back. It was Ty across the aisle from me in a charter plane, asking whether what they gave me was the same as what they gave him.
I had a magazine on my chest. I was half-asleep. I said I assumed so. I asked him if it was working.
Yeah, he said. It's working great.
Then he looked out the window for the rest of the flight.
Tarn. Misha's old men in Yaroslavl walked out before the slides finished, and somebody let themselves into my home, picked up every bottle of pills and put them back wrong.
There were ordinary reasons for that. A rival team plays games in a Final; it's uglier than people think. Somebody could've been after pills to sell, or after a story—veteran star, cabinet full of prescriptions—it writes itself.
Any of those was likelier than what stuck in my chest. I didn't have a thread from that cabinet to a folding table in Raleigh. I just couldn't get the two of them to stop rolling around together in my head.
Four rows up, Elias's screen glowed against the dark.
He was the man the team sent. He was also the man who had a Tarn tour within the first two weeks of landing in St. Louis.
Elias asked better questions than any bodyguard I'd ever had, and he knew about the heating pad when he shouldn't have known.
A question began to take shape inside my head.
***
We had a two-day break before Game Five. The first day's practice was light and easy on purpose. The coaches called it optional, but most of the team was there. We needed to prove we were fine and nobody was panicking.
I showed up because the hip does better moving than sitting. I didn't want to be alone in the condo.
The rookies ran a shootout for coffee money, and Misha robbed every one of them.