Chapter 5
Chapter five
Rook
Iset the phone face-up on the desk and waited.
I had the Do Not Disturb hanger on the door. My gear hung dripping over the bathroom door.
The back of my collar was still damp. I’d come straight from the morning skate without showering at the rink. I wanted the forty minutes of Kovac’s interview call to myself.
I timed it precisely. When it was over, I had the bus ride to the arena. It was a hard wall on the far side, so the talk couldn’t sprawl or drift. It couldn’t get comfortable enough to wander into unexpected territory.
I couldn’t hand a careful man space. I had to give him a clock and make him work against it. On the ice, I’d have called it gap control—get up in a guy’s face before he has room to move.
It was a lot of planning for a phone call about a defensive system, but I had my reasons.
Two doors down, Luki’s room would look like a crime scene: chargers loose on the carpet, a coffee cup he’d carried around until it was cold, and the book he wasn’t reading splayed open on the bed. He’d texted me at a quarter to twelve. You back? I’d written I’m back. Goodnight.
After that, I lay on my bed, unable to sleep. I’d never gotten used to separate rooms on road trips. I wanted to be across the hall with his head on my chest.
I hadn’t told him more about Kovac. Once I knew what he was, I’d know how to share. It would be a clean story with the proper context.
The call arrived two minutes early. I let it ring twice before answering.
“Daniel. This is Mattias Rook.”
“Mattias, thank you for taking the time.”
It was the same warm, unhurried voice that had asked me, six years ago, across two empty barstools on Queen Street, what it was like to play the way I played and go home to nobody.
“You’ve got me till noon,” I said. “Then they put me on a bus.”
“Then I’ll be quick. Tell me about the backend this year.”
I shared my view on the Ironhawks’ defense.
He asked good questions, and he’d done his research, asking how the third year of a system felt different from the first. He wanted to know whether the younger guys played looser now that the structure was in their legs and not just their heads.
I gave him genuine answers.
Then he moved on to the rest of the team. “Tell me about Cross,” he said. “I keep trying to write the guy, and I can’t get a handle on him. Help me. How does a room organize itself around a captain who never raises his voice?”
“The way he works isn’t obvious from the outside,” I said. “It’s the same as not noticing a floor that’s holding you up. He sets the pace, and everybody else falls in line.”
“That’s perfect,” Kovac said, pleased. “I can see it like I’m in the room with you.”
“Don’t tell Cross I gave you anything. He’ll think I talked.”
“You did.”
“Just barely.”
He laughed, and I eased back into my chair, putting my feet up on the bed. He asked about Mikkelsen, and I said the kid didn’t know yet how good he was.
I told him that Mikkelsen was twenty years old, with soft hands, and he answered every question as if he were talking to Markel’s mother. I told Kovac the scariest thing about him was the politeness. Kovac laughed.
I thought about Varga calling the rookie a specimen, a Saskatchewan biologist on skates, and I came close to smiling into the phone at a man I’d spent two days fearing.
“Last cluster,” Kovac said. “The veteran stuff.” A pause. “I’d flagged this for our second session, but you’re warmed up, and I’d rather not waste it.”
“Go ahead.”
“Fifteen years. Most guys are done. What keeps a man in it this long—for real? What keeps you going on nights the body says no?”
It was a softball question. He was probably waiting for a vague love of the game or the guys in the room, and on any other day I’d have served it back without a thought. Instead, my thoughts snagged on a house with a man waiting for me.
“The room,” I said in an even voice. “You play for the next guy. That doesn’t get old.”
“It doesn’t,” Kovac agreed, and moved on.
I exhaled slowly and let my shoulders drop.
“Okay,” he said. “Truly, the last thing, and then I’ll let you make your bus.”
“Sure.”
“You’ve said in a few places over the years that you’re waiting on the personal-life side of things until after you’re done playing. Has that changed?”
“Hockey takes a lot,” I said. “I’ve got time for the rest later.”
The line came out clean.
“Sure,” Kovac said. “Sure. Anyone you’ve got in mind for after?”
It was the same question, the exact one he’d asked six years ago in Toronto.
“No,” I said.
The word was out before I’d considered it, and it was wrong in a way the rehearsed lines never are. I’d denied Luki, our house, and the past five years as if they’d never happened. I’d handed a reporter the cleanest lie of my life.
Kovac didn’t follow up. He didn’t do the thing reporters do: leaning in and letting the quiet pull more out of me. He said, “Right. Of course,” quick, like a man pulling his hand back off a burner he already knew was hot.
He shifted back to the ice smoothly and professionally. He asked a clean question about communication with Pratt.
Still, his turn had a hitch in it.
It was the width of a breath, a stutter where a confident man wouldn’t stutter. I read flinches on the ice for a living. This was one.
A reporter chasing something doesn’t shy away from it when he gets close. He leans in and waits for you to fill the silence. Kovac had asked, but then he stepped back fast. Did he know more than he was letting on?
I could fight a man trying to trap me. I’m good at that, but there’s nothing to push against in a decent man who’s somewhere that he’s sorry to be.
I wasn’t ashamed of the man I was when I met Kovac in that bar six years ago. I’d been thirty, lonely, and three drinks down. Varga wasn’t in the picture, but I already knew what someone in my life would feel like. I knew it would be a he.
Two hard knocks sounded on my door. “Fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Lobby.”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Go,” Kovac said. “Thanks, Mattias, really.”
I said thanks back and ended the call.
At the arena, I played one of my best games of the season yet.
It all came easily. I had a reason to stay entirely focused on the ice. Kovac remembered six years ago, and I’d denied Varga. It was a protective instinct, but I didn’t want to think about the situation.
I closed gaps before they opened. In the first period, their big winger came down my side a stride up on me and threw a shoulder.I kept my feet under me and watched the play die on his blade.
In the second, I sent a clean pass out of the zone, tape to tape. It was the breakout Coach Markel draws on the board at six in the morning while the rest of us pretend to be awake. I tied sticks up in front of Pratt and made sure he could see everything coming.
He didn’t have to make a save worth talking about. That’s the best thing you can do for a goalie—make his game boring.
Markel sent me over the boards for the last two minutes with the lead, like he often does in tight games. I was tired, but I hadn’t lost my focus.
The ice was the one place in my life where the job was simple. Five other men joined me in the effort. I understood both the boundaries and the objectives.
Mikkelsen was tired, too. I saw it in his skating. It was his first three games in four nights since arriving in Chicago. His rookie legs were slowly giving out.
I watched him reach for a stride that wasn’t there anymore and come up short. He started strangling his stick the way players do when the tank reads empty.
He didn’t say a word. That wouldn’t be like him. He’d skate himself into the boards before he’d admit he was gassed. I sent a pass to Varga. I knew he’d corner the kid in the room and tell him that being twenty and dead-legged after three games in four nights wasn’t a character flaw.
It wasn’t pretty, but we won the game two to one.
I didn’t see Varga until he was next to me. He emerged from the tunnel crowd, in the stretch of the corridor past the cameras where the carpet starts.
He wasn’t talking. He’d dialed all the way down to the man only I get; the quiet one I bought a house for.
“Hey,” he said. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me. He knew something was off.
For most of the five years, I’d been the one who read him. In that hallway, he reversed the poles.
He read me.
He didn’t push. “Okay,” he said. “Bus,” he added, tipping his head toward the lobby. Then the quiet Varga was gone, swallowed up by comments about Mikkelsen’s dead legs.
I’d built the entire structure that kept us safe and kept everyone away from the truth so Varga could travel light. I’d been the one that protected him until now.