Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Rook
He opened at the first knock. He was down to shorts and the road-trip T-shirt with the collar he’d stretched out by pulling it up over his chin on planes. Stepping back, he let me in without a word.
I threw the deadbolt and put the chain on. He flopped onto the bed as he watched me do it.
We had forty-nine minutes. We spent them with the television on low and me sitting behind him, back against the headboard. I wrapped my right arm around him, and he held my forearm in both hands, like gripping a railing on a boat.
“These pillows,” Varga said.
“Here we go.”
“No, Rook, listen to me. Feel it.” He tugged the pillow out from between his head and my shoulder and pressed it back against my face without turning around. “Feel that. What is that?”
“It’s a pillow.”
“It’s a former pillow. It died, and they kept it. There’s no loft. You put your head down and it just—“ He made a small sound, like air leaving a balloon. “It surrenders. The souls of dead pillows haunt every room in this hotel.”
“You say that every time we’re here.”
“Because it’s true every time we’re here.
They have not bought a pillow in this city since the Flyers were good.
” He wedged the pillow back under his head and resettled against me, pulling my arm across him like a man adjusting a seatbelt.
“Detroit, fine, the water pressure is a crime, but at least Detroit lets you sleep. Columbus has the curtain gap. You remember the curtain gap.”
“You said you slept with a shirt over your face.”
“Like a kidnapped man. Like cargo, Rook. And tomorrow we get Pittsburgh, where the elevator was built by a union that hated its own members. Rafe is going to get in it at four o’clock, get trapped, and he’ll miss the team dinner.”
“I’ll tell him to take the stairs.”
“He’ll listen to you. He’s from Saskatchewan, and he’ll take the stairs politely.“ His voice slowly dropped as he continued to talk. He punctuated one sentence with a yawn.
I relaxed and let him run. He had a complaint for every building in the Eastern Conference, and I’d been collecting them for five years. His commentary never bored me.
“You’re not listening,” he said.
“Dead pillow souls. Union elevator. Saskatchewan.”
“You’re listening.” He pulled my arm tighter.
On the television, a documentary about caribou played at a volume neither of us could hear.
He’d chosen it on purpose. He’d told me once that wildlife migration documentaries were the best thing to not-watch in a hotel, and he was right.
Many of my best hours happened in front of things we weren’t watching.
As we neared midnight, Varga’s commentary thinned to single words with long gaps between them. At home, this would be the part where I turned off the lamp, and he rolled into me. I’d nudge him off the couch and follow him upstairs to bed.
Two minutes before midnight, I moved my arm.
He let go of my forearm, one finger at a time. In five years he’d never asked me to stay past curfew. I used to think that was discipline. Now I understood it was a gift.
I dressed in the dark.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Tell the hallway I said hi.”
“I’ll do that.”
I leaned down and kissed him. He held the back of my neck a second longer than usual and then dropped his hand to the mattress. I looked at him sprawled across the bed and thought what I did every night on the road: he’s mine, and I’m leaving the room.
I unhooked the chain, cracked the door, and checked the hallway through the gap. It was empty except for a room-service tray outside 913. I stepped out, and the lock clicked shut behind me.
I let myself into my dark room. Before I turned on a light, I sent the text, standing with my back against my door.
Rook: I’m back.
I undressed for the second time in twenty minutes and lay down. I was almost under when the phone lit up the ceiling.
It wasn’t Varga or the team chat. It was Mark.
Mark: Good news—Kovac’s editor greenlit the career piece. He’s hoping to lock your second session before Thanksgiving, I’ll send dates. FYI he’s also doing his due-diligence calls around the room this week. Standard stuff for a profile. Night.
I read it twice. Around the room.
I lay with the phone facedown on my chest and listened to the heating unit cycle on.
***
The bus to morning skate left at 9:30, and Trier was complaining before it cleared the parking garage.
“Nobody answers,” he said, dropping into the seat across the aisle from me with his phone in his hand. “I have called twice. I am paying this woman to live in my apartment, and she cannot send one photo of the cat.”
“It’s 8:30.”
“The cat is awake. It has been awake since five. The cat wakes her up; that’s half of what I’m paying for.
” Philadelphia went by gray and wet. It was garbage day on Broad Street.
“She’ll send one photo at noon. It will be a picture of the cat asleep.
What does that prove? Anyone can photograph a sleeping cat. I want proof of life.”
Six rows up, Varga was holding court over the back of his seat. He kept Rafe and one of the young defensemen pinned in place.
“Oh—hey, this writer called me yesterday,” Trier said. “Kovac. The one doing the thing on you.”
“Yeah,” I said without facing him.
“Twenty minutes. He was very professional and asked good questions, wanting to know what you were like in the room and how you related to young guys.” He waved the phone. “I told him about Columbus, when you played the whole third period on a broken skate blade. He liked that.”
“Probably.”
“And he asked who knows you best in the room. I said that’s easy; it’s Varga. I said those two are like an old married couple.“ Trier laughed, delighted with his line. “You fight about the thermostat. I told him if he wanted to understand you, Varga’s the guy to call.”
Two seats ahead, somebody snorted. Varga’s head popped up over his seatback.
“He’s right, you know,” he announced to the bus at large. “I know everything about this man. I know his blood type, and he shared his mother’s chowder recipe. If Kovac calls me, the piece will write itself.”
“I hope they don’t give him your number,” I said.
“Mark already gave him my number, old man. This is America. Information is free.”
“Tragic,” I said, and turned back to the window. The team laughed and moved on to whatever was next. Trier showed Rafe a photo of his cat sleeping.
We pulled in under the visiting rink. I exited the bus with everyone else, down into the concrete cold of the loading tunnel.
Inside, the visiting locker room smelled like all of them: rubber, bleach, and forty years of other teams. I found my stall and started my morning in the usual order. I was lacing my right skate when I felt it. Varga was across the room, looking at me. He had Rafe half-listening to him.
When I looked up, he tilted his head slightly. You good?
I gave him the slight nod that meant yes.
I finished my laces. Around me, players dressed and chirped. Somewhere out there, Kovac had a contact list and was quietly working through their phone numbers.
By the time I stepped onto the ice, I’d decided. I was going to get Varga off Kovac’s list before the trip was over.
***
Coach Markel ran a video session late afternoon in one of the hotel’s conference rooms. He was efficient.
He’d sanded his presentation down to eleven minutes.
Their top line was first. He highlighted the center who hunted the middle of the ice and the big winger who’d plowed me into the glass twice last March.
Markel froze a zone entry and stood with the clicker loose at his side.
“They want this lane all night,” he said.
“Rook’s pair doesn’t give it to them. Everything to the wall.
Let them live on the wall.” He clicked once more.
It was a face-off alignment. “We don’t get the last change.
So we change smart, and when the matchup’s wrong for a shift, it’s not wrong, it’s just hockey. Play it.”
That was it. His sentences got shorter every season because the structure was living in our legs, and he knew it.
Philadelphia came out hard. In their first shift, the big winger checked me behind our net to introduce himself. He didn’t get the puck. I sent it off the glass away from our goal. The crowd cheered the check and booed my play. Nineteen thousand people booed a textbook zone exit. Philadelphia.
Markel sent me over the boards every time their top line stood. Twice in the first ten minutes a forty-second shift turned into ninety because the puck refused to leave our zone. Trier was solid at my side. We did our unglamorous work: making nothing happen over and over again.
Pratt did the rest. When shots reached him, his glove was there, casual as a man catching a tossed pair of keys. After each, he tapped the posts and reset.
We scored in the second. Varga’s line caught tired legs in their defense.
Rafe won the race to a dead puck in the corner.
He passed it to Varga on the half-wall, and my man took care of it from there.
He slowed down and let the defense over-commit, leaving a lane open. The puck landed on Rafe’s tape.
Rafe didn’t miss. The net came off its moorings, and so did he. Varga hit him so hard in the celebration that they both bounced off the glass. I stood at the blue line watching nineteen thousand people boo the man I loved while he laughed into a twenty-year-old’s cage.
Philadelphia tied it before the second period ended. It was a miracle shot past six bodies that nobody could stop. The third period was long. Markel shortened the bench to four defensemen instead of six with twelve to go, doubling my shifts.
Varga scored the winner with just over four minutes left. He won a net-front scramble with three whacks at the puck, and it bounced off somebody’s skate. They reviewed it for two minutes while the crowd held its breath. The goal counted.