Chapter 12
She drove home at five-thirty in the dark with the heater ticking and her body not her own.
That was the only way Dani could think of it, that her body had been handed back to her at the rental door an hour ago and she hadn't yet figured out how to wear it.
Everything was too loud against her skin, the seat belt, the cold steering wheel, the seam of her own sleeve.
She'd had sex before. Occasionally. She'd had careful, controlled, detached sex with careful, controlled women in other cities, the kind you could get up from and drive away from with your locks all still in place, and she had told herself for seven years that this was a thing she did fine, that she'd kept the one drawer she needed and given away the rest. She understood now, at five-thirty in the morning on an empty road, that she had never once done what she'd done last night, which was let somebody all the way in and then lie there afterward and let them hold her while she shook.
There was no drawer for that. It had gone into all of her at once.
She showered. The water was too loud too, and too warm, and it found every place Roxy's mouth had been and reminded her, and she stood under it longer than she ever did and came out no steadier.
She kept catching herself in small stupid ways, her own reflection in the dark bathroom mirror, the shape of her own mouth, a soreness low in her she'd put there on purpose for once in her life.
She ate three boiled eggs standing at the counter without tasting them, because the body needed fuel and she fueled it, like gassing a car you had to drive whether you felt like it or not.
She got to the rink fifteen minutes early, because she was always fifteen minutes early, and the one rule she had left this morning was that nothing on the outside was going to show.
The outside had always been the easy part.
She'd built the outside specifically so it would never show anything.
It was the inside that had come off its hinges in the night, and there was no drill for putting that back, and some quiet part of her, under the wreckage, didn't want to.
Lex was already in the gear room. She looked up when Dani came in, and her eyes went over Dani once, slow, as Lex read everything, and one corner of her mouth moved, and she didn't say a single word.
She just looked back down at her skate laces with that knowing tilt to her head, and Dani sat down at her own stall and started taping and said nothing back, and the not-saying held all the way through, which from Lex Landry was practically a kindness, and they both knew it.
The practice was a disaster.
Dani had been a professional goaltender for eleven years and the one thing she could always do, the floor under everything, the thing that didn't move when the rest of her life did, was stop a puck in a drill she'd run ten thousand times.
She couldn't do it this morning. Camille beat her clean three times, two of them on moves Dani had read off her stick since for years, and she got a glove on the third and dropped it, and Lex walked in twice and roofed both because Dani was a half-count slow dropping into the butterfly, a half-count that may as well have been an hour.
Her edges felt borrowed. Her hands felt like somebody else's hands.
She'd spent seven years playing behind a wall and this morning the wall was just gone, taken down brick by brick on a couch in a rented apartment, and it turned out she had been using it for more than she knew. It had been holding the net up too.
Mara blew the whistle halfway through and waved the backup in.
She didn't yell. That was the part that nearly undid Dani worse than the goals.
Mara Ellison had a voice that could strip paint and Dani had been on the wrong end of it maybe twice in five years and deserved it both times, and this morning Mara skated over with Goldie's gray muzzle watching from the bench door and just stopped beside the crease and looked at Dani for a second.
"You hurt?" Mara said. Low. Just for her.
"No." Dani kept her eyes on the crease.
"You sick?"
"No."
Mara looked at her a moment longer, and Dani watched her decide not to ask the third question, the real one, the one a fifty-something year-old coach who'd seen everything already half knew.
"Hit the bike," Mara said. "Get your legs back.
You're no good to me leaking five before 9am.” She tapped Dani's pad with her stick, the same as Frankie did, the team's whole dialect of I'm not going to say the soft thing but here is the soft thing, and skated off, and Dani went and sat on the bike in the hallway and pedaled and stared at the wall and tried to find the wall inside herself and couldn't.
Frankie found her in the locker room after, when it had cleared, when Dani was sitting at her stall in her base layer with her elbows on her knees and her head down, looking at the rubber floor and the puddle of melt under her skates and trying to understand how a person could be the happiest she'd been in years and the worst she'd played in years at the same identical time.
Frankie sat down beside her. She didn't say anything for a second. She held out a Gatorade, blue, the one Dani liked, and Dani took it because Frankie would hold it there until she did.
"So that was the worst practice you've had since the Obama administration," Frankie said.
"Yeah." Dani didn't lift her head from her hands.
"You want to know what I think?"
"Not especially."
"I'm gonna tell you anyway, it's why I'm here.
" Frankie leaned back against the stall, easy, no warning in her now, none of the parking-garage gravity.
That had been a different conversation for a different day, the eyes-open one, and Frankie wasn't a woman who gave the same speech twice.
This was something else. "I think you've spent years being the most locked-down person I've ever skated with, and I think last night some of that came off, and I think your body doesn't know what to do with itself yet.
That's not a hockey problem. That's a person finally being a person, and the hockey'll catch up soon once your nervous system stops acting like it got hit by a truck.
" She cracked her own bottle. "I'd know.
I played the worst game of my life when I was first getting with Alessia. Lou still brings it up."
Dani looked at her.
"I'm not gonna make you say anything," Frankie said.
"I told you that in the garage and I meant it.
I just want you to know that I know, and it's safe with me, all the way, forever, no matter what happens with any of it.
You don't have to carry the part where you're worried I'll say something.
Set that one down. I've got it." She bumped her shoulder against Dani's.
"You can keep the rest. But put that one down, you look like you haven't exhaled since yesterday. "
And Dani, who hadn't in fact exhaled since yesterday, who had been holding her breath since a door clicked shut in a rented kitchen, let it out.
All of it. A long shaking breath into the empty locker room with her oldest friend's shoulder against hers, and her eyes stung and she pressed the cold Gatorade bottle to her forehead and breathed, and Frankie sat there and let her, and didn't make it a thing, and that was the whole reason it could be one.
"Thanks," Dani said, into the bottle.
"Drink your blue garbage," Frankie said. "We've got Tampa tomorrow night. Go be unreasonable."
She suited up that following night as she'd suited up four hundred times, and it wasn't the same.
The order never changed. It hadn't changed since she was nineteen, the same order every game of her life, right pad before left, the superstition so old it had stopped being a superstition and become just the shape of her hands, chest protector, the braid, the jersey last. She did all of it in the quiet corner of the room she'd staked out a decade ago, headphones in, eyes down, the pre-game cocoon she built around herself so completely that rookies had been on the team a month before they'd heard her speak.
Tonight she did every step of it exactly the same and felt every step of it different, because last night a woman had taken these same shoulders in both hands in the lamplight and put her mouth to the scar on this same forearm and not asked what it was, and the body Dani was strapping armor onto was a body somebody else had touched now, and the armor went on over the knowing instead of over a locked empty room.
She pulled the jersey down. She picked up the mask.
Somewhere above her, by now, Roxy was finding her seat behind the glass, and Dani breathed out slow through the cage and skated into the tunnel light more nervous and more sure than she had been in years, both at once, as everything was now.
She was unreasonable.
It was the strangest thing, and she'd think about it for a long time after, that the same nervous system that had leaked five soft goals the previous morning gave her, at seven that night under the lights with eighteen thousand people screaming, the best game she'd played all season.
The wall didn't come back. That was the part she didn't have words for.
The wall stayed down, brick for brick, and instead of the disaster she'd braced for, what filled the space where the wall had been was something with no name, something that played like the wall but warmer, looser, more awake, a goaltending that wasn't about keeping the world out anymore because the worst had already gotten in and it had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her.