Away Games - Prelude #3
Marcus nodded once against his shoulder. They lay in the quiet for a bit and he listened to the building settle around them: footsteps somewhere above, a door, the small sounds of other people’s ordinary lives happening on the other side of walls.
“You came in here tight,” Marcus said. “You’re not now. Couple of hours and you’re more yourself.” A pause. “I don’t know what you’re like the rest of the time. Just what I’ve got.”
He didn’t answer.
Marcus didn’t need him to. He reached over and turned off the lamp and the room went dark and quiet and he lay in it.
He didn’t sleep for a long time.
In the morning Marcus made coffee. Two cups, no discussion, handed one across the kitchen counter. He was in a grey t-shirt and track pants and looked like a man in his own kitchen at seven in the morning.
They didn’t talk much. The coffee was good. Outside the kitchen window the neighbourhood was starting up: a car, someone’s dog, the corner store’s gate rolling up with a sound that carried in the cold air.
He put on his jacket. Marcus walked him to the door.
“Long drive,” Marcus said.
“Five hours.”
“Drive safe.”
He didn’t ask for his number. Didn’t offer his own.
Just stood in the doorway of his apartment in his grey t-shirt in the February cold coming off the stairwell and looked at him with the directness that had been there from the beginning, and he understood that Marcus had known what this was before either of them said a word.
He nodded. Went down the stairs.
Outside, the neighbourhood looked different in the morning light. He walked the two blocks to the main road and got a cab back to his hotel and checked out and put his bag in his truck and sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel.
He thought about Marcus saying more yourself.
He started the truck and drove west out of the city, the skyline shrinking in the rearview mirror, the prairie opening up ahead. The drive was long and flat and he had the radio off and his own company, which had never been comfortable and was less comfortable now.
He thought about the fake name he’d given and the way Marcus had used it and whether Marcus had known it was fake. He thought he probably had.
The Shield came back gradually, the flat country giving way to rock and tree, the sky closing in to something more manageable.
He stopped for gas at a station outside of Dryden and stood in the cold filling the tank and felt the north settling back around him like a coat he hadn’t taken off, just forgotten he was wearing.
The sign for Veil Lake appeared at dusk. He almost missed it. He’d driven past it a thousand times, knew every kilometre of this road, but something about seeing it now made him pay attention. The name on the green sign. The arrow. The distance: 12 km.
He turned off the highway.
The lake appeared first, the way it always did: through the trees, through the early dark, the ice catching what light was left.
The town came next, the arena lights visible from the highway, the familiar grid of streets, the Sin Bin sign buzzing amber on Main.
He drove past it without stopping. Drove to the arena instead, used his code at the back door, laced up in the empty dressing room that smelled the same it always had and always would.
He stepped onto the ice.
The arena was dark except for the emergency lights, the ice a pale blue in the dimness, the boards casting long shadows.
He skated the perimeter slowly, getting his legs, and then faster, the sound of his edges the only sound, the cold air the only air.
He knew every inch of this ice. Had known it since he was seven years old.
He skated until his legs told him to stop.
Then he stood at center ice in the dark arena in the town where everyone knew his name and breathed in the cold and thought about a man in Winnipeg who didn’t know his real name and had told him a true thing anyway.
More yourself.
The radiator in Marcus’s apartment had knocked twice. The ice under his skates said nothing, the way ice never did. He stood in it and felt something he wasn’t going to name, in a town that wasn’t going to know.
He skated to the boards. Stepped off. Pulled off his skates in the dark dressing room and drove home through the Veil Lake streets and let himself into his house and stood in his kitchen for a moment before going to bed.
In the morning he went to practice. He joked with Kowalski. He ran the drill. He was who everyone needed him to be, which was what he’d always been, and he was good at it, and he had been good at it for a long time.
But something had shifted in the machinery of it, the way a gear wears down so slowly you don’t notice until the day it doesn’t catch.
He noticed.