Chapter 15
Emile
It happens on a Tuesday, which is the stupid part, which is the part I can’t get past. Who loses everything on a Tuesday?
Not a big game. Not a game anybody will circle.
A nothing game, midweek, the kind you win and forget by the weekend.
Half the barn empty, the seats up top folded and dark, the sound gone thin and papery with nobody in the building to give it any weight.
You can pick out one voice at a time in a barn like this.
A dad three rows up telling his kid to watch the goalie, watch how he never chases.
The kid watching the wrong end. The concession guy calling last call on the pretzels.
Casimir’s back in his net where he belongs and I’m on the bench where I belong, the depth chart reading how it’s supposed to read, one and then two.
And I’m fine with it tonight, I am, because he handed me a start on the road and a word in a hall.
I’ve decided I can be patient. That’s new for me.
I’ve wanted the net so long and so loud that learning to sit and wait for it feels like learning to breathe underwater, but wanting him turned out to be a bigger engine than wanting the crease.
So that’s the decision. Patient. Starting tonight.
This one doesn’t come true.
I keep circling back to it because some part of me still thinks if I circle it enough times I’ll find the version.
The version where I was watching, really watching, where I saw the skate coming and yelled something, where it went different.
And there’s no such version. I was thinking about a diner. That’s the truth I have to live in.
I’m on the bench with a towel around my neck and a water bottle I’m not drinking, doing the backup thing, which is watching a game you’re dressed for and won’t play unless the worst happens.
You learn not to hope for the worst. It’s the first lesson and the ugliest one.
Every backup learns it. And every backup lies about having learned it.
Ask any of us. Same lie, every time. You sit and you track the play, you keep your legs warm enough to go if the phone rings and cold enough that you’re not the guy praying for it to ring.
I’ve gotten good at that particular temperature. Years of practice at it.
Down the bench a freshman leans over, like they always lean over, because the backup is the only man on this bench with the time to answer a question.
“Fortin. What’s he doing right now? Looks like he’s doing nothing.”
“He is doing nothing. That’s the trick, that. That’s the entire job.”
“Doesn’t look like a job.”
“Sit still for a whole period sometime. In all that gear. With a building full of people waiting to find out whether you’re a fraud.” I don’t take my eyes off the ice while I say it. “Then come tell me what it looks like.”
The kid laughs. I don’t. I watch the man in the paint do nothing, beautifully, and I let my head go where it’s been going all period, which is to a diner on the road home where Bev keeps the grill on late for a bus full of us.
Their winger comes down the wing in the back half of the third and cuts hard to the net, nothing unusual in it, a play you see forty times a night, a hundred, a play so ordinary your eye almost doesn’t follow it all the way in.
There’s a scramble in the blue paint the way there’s always a scramble, three bodies, a puck, everybody’s stick.
And I’m half watching, half thinking about the bus, about the diner on the way back.
Then it isn’t a normal scramble anymore.
Somebody’s skate. Somebody’s weight, coming down where weight is not supposed to come down. Casimir goes into the pile the way he goes into everything, sealed, low, giving the net nothing. And he goes down in the paint. And he doesn’t get up the way you get up.
Tabarnak. Get up. Get up the normal way. Get up mad. Get up and chew somebody out about the scramble in front, like you always do.
I know it before anybody, I know it in my body before my head has the words, because there’s a way a goalie goes down that’s part of the job, that’s a save, that’s him choosing the ice. Then there’s the other way. This is the other way. And I’m over the boards before I know I’m moving.
Backups don’t do that. You stay on the bench, you stay ready in case they call the next guy, in case the guy on the ice can’t go, and the guy who can’t go might be you next, so you stay ready.
That’s the job. The second guy’s whole job, to be dry, warm, ready.
And I’m not ready. I’m over the boards in full gear, blades on ice I’ve got no business putting them on, sliding the last of it on my knees into his crease before the trainer’s even off the bench.
He’s got both hands wrapped around his lower leg. And his face is doing a thing.
That’s what stops my heart. Not the leg.
The face. Casimir Wrobel’s face never does anything, it’s the flattest, most sealed thing I’ve ever stood near, a face that gave up a goal in a final without so much as blinking.
Now, on a Tuesday, in a half-empty barn, it’s doing this.
White. Open. A window with the blind torn all the way off.
“Do not move me,” he says through his teeth.
Not to the trainer. Kilpatrick’s coming, I can hear him, and Casimir doesn’t say it to Kilpatrick. His eyes find me and lock on. He says it to me. Just to me. Low, wrecked, only for the two feet between us.
“Do not.” His hand comes off the leg and grabs my wrist, hard, cold through the sweat. “Move me.”
And I understand he isn’t talking about the leg.
He’s talking about the net. The order. The season.
The one showcase he built his whole life toward, the scout, the door, the spring, the pro look, the whole cathedral of it coming down right now in a scramble on a nothing Tuesday.
He’s holding my wrist and asking me not to let it.
As if I could. As if there’s a single thing on this earth my two hands could do about it.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I got you, I’m right here. Where is it? The leg? Tell me where it is.”
Nobody answers me. I don’t know if he even hears it.
His grip on my wrist isn’t letting go, his eyes aren’t letting go, and I put my other hand over his fist on the leg, careful, not moving it.
Just covering it. The way you cover a thing to tell it you’re there without asking it to be different.
His knuckles are white. Mine go white on top of them.
For one second in the middle of the worst thing, before the trainers arrive, it’s just the two of us again, like it’s always just the two of us, the only two people in a building not watching the thing everyone is watching.
Except this time the thing everyone is watching is him.
Then Kilpatrick gets there, and the world fills up with people who know what they’re doing.
I get moved back where the useless go. They cut his leg pad, the good scissors going through the strapping he sets in the same order every single day, and I watch the pad come off him in pieces until I have to look at the ceiling of the barn instead, the dark folded seats up top, the banners, anything.
They talk to him low and steady in the language of trainers, the calm-voice language.
He answers in clipped one-word pieces, back inside himself already, gone flat and sealed over again, because there are people watching.
He’d rather bleed out quiet than be seen bleeding.
“How bad?” I ask Kilpatrick’s back.
“Fortin.”
“Just tell me if it’s the season.”
“Fortin.” He doesn’t turn around, not once, not for any of it. “Go stand somewhere else.”
Nobody in a barn ever tells the backup anything. I could catch fire out here and read about it in the game notes.
They get him to his feet with an arm over two guys’ shoulders, his skate not touching the ice, not even brushing it, and they take him down the tunnel slow.
The barn does the terrible quiet thing a barn does when it’s bad.
Even the other bench is quiet. Even their winger, the one who cut to the net, taps his stick on the ice, the old salute, because hockey knows what it’s looking at even when it’s nobody’s fault.
Nobody did anything wrong. That’s the part that makes it worse, somehow.
There’s no one to be angry at. A skate and some weight and a Tuesday.
Rocco comes past me on his way to the bench and doesn’t slow down for it.
“Fortin. In.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey.” Then he does slow, one stride’s worth, which from Rocco is a full stop with the engine off. “He’s fine. Say it back to me.”
“He’s fine.”
“Good.”
And he goes, and neither of us believes one word of it, and that was never what the words were for.
I stand in the crease he left. Full gear, clean dry pads, my mask still shoved up on my head, planted in the warm hollow of the paint where a body was.
The refs are waving play back on. The clock will start again.
I’ll finish this one in his net, because there’s nobody else dressed who can.
The nothing game will finish itself the way nothing games do.
We’ll win it or we won’t, and I won’t remember which, because the only thing in this barn that mattered got carried down a tunnel with his skate not touching the ice.
Here’s the part I hate myself for. Here’s the part I’m never going to say out loud. Not to him, not to anybody. Not on the last day of my life. You want the worst of me?
Somewhere in the back of me, in the drawer, in the ugly folder I keep swearing I threw out, there’s a voice that sounds exactly like the animal that’s lived in my chest since I got here, and it says it plain and quiet, without any shame at all.
The net is yours now.
I want to reach in and find that part of me and scrape it off the bone.
I’ve hated a lot of things about myself, the loudness, the needing, how I fill a room because I can’t stand to find out what happens if I go quiet in it.
Nothing in me has ever earned the hate I hand that voice in that second, standing in his warm empty paint while they carry him off.
Because it’s true. Horrible exactly for that.
It isn’t a cruel thought. It’s just a true one.
The depth chart rearranged itself in a scramble on a Tuesday and the net’s mine now, indefinitely, and nobody will put a number on that and I’m not going to ask.
The thing I’ve wanted since I was small enough that the pads wore me instead of the other way around, since a dad said backup like it was a word you spit.
Nobody handed it to me across a desk. A scramble named me the guy.
It came to me riding on the back of the one thing I’d give it all back to undo.
And I would. Whatever ledger the universe keeps on the two of us, put it in there.
I’d hand the whole net back this second, the net, the starts, the scout, the door, all of it, to see him get up the normal way.
To see him plant that skate and stand. To see him skate off cursing under his breath about a lost stick. I’d give it back and not think twice.
But I can’t say that to him. That’s the trap inside the trap.
He’s lying on a trainer’s table right now with his season maybe in pieces, his last shot at the door maybe gone for good, and if I walk in there and say I’d give it back, he doesn’t hear love.
He hears pity. He hears the guy who just inherited his crease being gracious about the inheritance.
He hears charity from the one person on earth he can’t stand to take charity from.
That’s worse. That’s so much worse than saying nothing.
I stand outside the trainer’s room after.
I get that far. I get my hand on the door, the smell of liniment coming under it, Kilpatrick’s voice going low and even in there, and I stand with everything I want to say backed up behind my teeth.
I don’t go in. What do you say to a man who just watched the whole of it go?
Somebody give me the sentence and I’ll say it, I’ll say it twice.
I tell myself he needs space, I tell myself the trainers need room to work, I tell myself a dozen kind reasonable things, and all of them are true.
None of them is the real one. The real one is that I don’t have a single sentence that would land as the thing I mean instead of the thing that would gut him, and I’m too much of a coward to say a sentence that might gut him.
Moose comes down the corridor with the pieces of somebody’s stick under one arm and stops beside me, and looks at the door I am not opening, and does not look at me once.
“Bus hasn’t gone.”
“Yeah.”
He stands there a while longer than a man stands who came to tell you about a bus. Then he goes. He doesn’t tell me to go in and he doesn’t tell me not to. He made sure I knew I had the time, and left me to spend it however I was going to spend it.
I spend it standing there.
So I say nothing. Again.
We’re so good at saying nothing. The rivalry, the two feet of distance, the words held back like cards. We’ve said nothing about the biggest thing in either of our lives for a whole season and gotten away with it.
We’re going to say nothing right up until it kills us. I felt it standing in the warm empty paint and I feel it out here.