Chapter 18
Casimir
Rehab is a room with no net in it.
Everything wrong with it is in that one fact, and it is enough.
A low room off the training corridor, mats and bands and a table.
The smell of liniment and rubber, and the particular sweat of men working a body back toward a thing it used to do easily.
Kilpatrick works the leg and I do what he says.
I am a good patient. Of course I am a good patient.
A man who keeps the order is a man who does the reps in the sequence he is given.
Three sets, then the next thing, then the next.
The leg comes back the way a leg comes back, on its own clock, indifferent to how much I need it to hurry.
The body does not care about a spring. The body does not know there is a man with a notebook waiting to see whether I can still be the wall.
The body just knits, in its own kolejno??.
I cannot make it faster by wanting it faster. And the wanting has nowhere to go.
Sowa comes to the sessions. He does not have to.
His job is on the ice with the goalies who are playing, and one of those is a loud boy in my crease.
Sowa still comes and sits on the edge of the training table while I fight a resistance band like it insulted my grandmother.
He does not talk. That is why I can stand him.
He sits and he watches me work and he lets the silence be the thing it is.
Until the day he talks.
“Your numbers went up,” he says. In English, which he uses when he wants a thing to be plain. He saves the Polish for when he wants it to be true. “That stretch he pushed you. Before the leg. You were better than you’ve ever been. You know that?”
I know it. I have known it and refused it and known it again in the dark, which is the worst way to know a thing. The way that gives you no peace and no argument.
The season I got closest to the goalie the men in the seats came to buy was the season a loud boy would not leave me alone.
He crowded my paint. He moved my glove. He broke my rituals for sport and studied the breaking.
I did not crumble. I sharpened. That is the sentence I cannot swallow.
Every law I have ever lived by says the disruption is the enemy, and the disruption made me sharper than the order ever did alone.
It is a debt to the one man I most need to owe nothing.
“He did not make me better,” I say. “I got better.”
Sowa looks at me a long moment. Longer than the sentence earned. He has a way of looking that does not push, that just waits. That lets you hear your own lie hang in the air of a small room until you cannot stand the sound of it.
“Keep the order,” he says finally. Quiet. In Polish now, so the room cannot have it, so it goes only to me. “But do not confuse the order with the wall.” A breath. “One keeps you alive. The other keeps you alone.”
Then he gets up off the table and leaves, because he has said the true thing, and Sowa does not repeat himself. He does not stay to watch it land. He gives you the sentence and he trusts you to sit with it, alone, in a room with no net. Which is exactly where a sentence like that does its work.
I sit with it. I do not want it. I keep it anyway, because he is right. I do not yet know how to take the one apart from the other without the whole thing coming down.
Kilpatrick clears me sooner than smart.
I push him for it. I will not hand the spring away on a leg that is close enough. That will hold if I ask it to. That only a cautious man rests longer. I am not a cautious man about my net. I am cautious about everything else on earth and reckless about exactly one thing, and it is the crease.
“How’s the leg?” he says, as he asks it every time, already knowing what he’s going to get.
“It is ready.”
It is not entirely ready and we both know it. I say it in the flat voice, which does not fail me. He writes it down. He looks at me the whole time like he knows what I am doing. Because he does.
Marquette has the paper by the afternoon. Marquette will not just give the net back. I did not let myself see that coming. I thought the leg healing was the whole obstacle. It is not.
“Fortin earned it,” Marquette says. He does not waste words, which is why he and I have never had trouble.
“You think I’m taking a thing off a kid who earned it?
Not without a fight. Not in the dark.” He taps the desk once, the way he does.
“You want it? You take it. On the ice. Same as he did. In the open. Everybody watching.”
So I have to win my own crease. From the boy in my bed.
In front of the room and the scout and the whole bad-fonted internet, which has already written the changing-of-the-guard and would rather not un-write it.
I have to stand across a sheet of ice from the one warm thing in my life.
And beat him for the thing I loved before I ever loved him.
One of us gets the net and one of us gets the bench.
There is no version where we both win, because the net is the one thing in this world that does not split.
I understand it, walking out of Marquette’s office on a leg that is close enough.
This is the exact machine the whole season was building toward.
Two goalies. One net. Zero-sum, no matter what happens in the dark between two rooms. Love does not add a goalie job.
I knew that in the equipment room the first day and I let myself forget it for a stretch of stolen nights.
Marquette just remembered it for me, out loud, across a desk, and now I cannot un-remember it either.
The worst part is the leg agrees with him.
I test it in the empty barn after, alone, before the lights come up.
Post to post, down and sealed and up. It holds.
Not all the way back but back enough, and back enough means the last excuse is gone.
A hurt leg makes the choice for you. A healed one hands it back.
Some part of me had been glad of the injury, glad of the one clean reason I did not have to stand across the ice from him and fight.
Finding that gladness in myself is a worse thing than the leg ever was.
He comes to my door that night. In the rhythm. Two fingers, once. And I want to open it more than I have ever wanted anything. Which is exactly the reason I cannot.
I open it. Of course I open it. I have yet to do the smart thing where he is concerned, and I am not going to start on the night it matters most.
He’s there in the hall, and he steps in, and he puts his hand flat on my chest the way he does.
The way he has done since the night at the Hitch.
The hand that lands and stays and does not wait for the bill.
My whole body leans toward it. Toward him.
Toward the one thing that has ever quieted the noise the shelf was built to quiet.
The only spokój I ever found that did not come off a folded cloth.
My hands go to him without my permission.
His mouth finds mine and it is not a soft thing, it is a season of wanting with the lid off.
He backs me into the door and comes flush against me and I feel all of him at once, the heat coming through two shirts, how hard he already is against my hip, how hard I am against his.
His hands fist in my shirt. Mine drop to the small of his back and drag him harder into me.
The kiss goes deep and open. He makes the low sound into my mouth that I have taken apart my whole ordered life trying not to need, and I’m already dragging at the hem of his shirt, and for a breath there is no leg and no net and no Marquette and no scout.
And then I feel it. The net. Right there in the two feet of dark.
The way it has been between us since the first day.
Except now it is not a thing we joke about at the top of a faceoff circle.
Now it is a thing we are going to stand across from each other and fight for in daylight, in front of everyone, for keeps.
My net. His net. The one thing that does not split.
One of us takes it, and the taking is the whole rest of the season.
I step back.
I make my hands let go of him. It is the hardest physical thing I have done since the leg. Harder than the bands, harder than the reps. To open my two hands and take them off the warm thing and step into the cold air of my own room.
“I cannot,” I say. “Not while we are doing this. Not while you are in my crease.”
His face. I put that face there. I make myself watch it arrive, because I am a coward about needing him, and I refuse to be a coward about the cost of pushing him away too.
“Casimir.” My name in his mouth. He only started saying it a little while ago.
Wrobel, all season, the rivalry name. The name for a wall you mean to beat.
Then one day the first one, careful. Like a word in a language he is still learning.
He says it now like it might change my mind. “You’re serious?”
“Off the ice was the rule,” I say. “The contained thing. Off-ice stays off-ice, and it doesn’t touch the net.
” My voice is doing the flat thing, the order voice.
The one that does not shake because I built it not to shake.
For exactly this. For the moments I need to say a thing that will cost me everything and not let my body show the price.
“There is no off the ice anymore. He hurt his leg, and I hurt mine, and now it’s all ice.
There is no room left that the net is not in.
” I make myself say the last of it. “Go back to your room.”
He goes.
That is the part I cannot bear, later, alone, in the ordered dark.
He does not fight it. He does not chirp, does not push.
Does not do the loud thing he does when he is scared.
Does not stand in my doorway and needle me until I have to laugh or throw something.
He just looks at me for a moment with that face I put there, and then he goes, quiet, down the hall.
I hear his own door. Then nothing. No music.
He does not even put the music on. The thin place goes dead on both sides for the first time all year.
I shut my door on the one warm thing in my life.
I stand in the middle of my ordered room and I tell myself it is focus.
The net is the showcase, the showcase is the spring.
The spring is the door, the door is the whole reason the order ever existed.
I cannot chase all of that with a boy in my bed.
A boy who is also the man I have to beat for it.
It is focus. It is discipline. It is the correct sequence.
It is not focus.
It is the wall. It is me choosing the wall over him, on purpose, in the one season I finally learned the difference. Knowing a true thing and being able to live inside it are two different countries. I have a passport to only one of them.
I keep my order. Books upright. Lamp squared. The day set down piece by piece. The room holds.
I do not.
I lie awake inside a complete and finished sequence.
There is no music coming through the wall, because I sent the music away.
The dark is on both sides of the drywall now, mine and his.
I taught myself a long time ago that this is the safe way to live.
Alone and sealed and sure. Tonight, for the first time in my life, the safe way does not feel like safety.
It feels like exactly what Sowa said. It feels like the wall.
It feels like being alone on purpose. In a room I built so no one could get in. On the night the one person who got in walked out. Because I held the door for him and pointed at the hall.