Chapter 19
Emile
The competition is the cruelest thing either of us has ever done to the other, and we do it with a whole team watching.
Marquette splits the reps down the middle, even, fair, says it out loud in the room with his clipboard flat against his chest and his voice as dry as a taped stick.
My starts and his starts. Head to head in the same drills, save for save, one net each, the same shooters feeding us both.
He doesn’t call it a competition. He doesn’t have to.
You can hear it in the little quiet that falls when I make a good one, and in the other little quiet when he does.
Sowa runs the goalies while Marquette watches from the blue line with his arms folded.
Rocco fires the heavy one from the top, Girard walks the line and finds the seam without looking like he’s looking, the freshmen throw everything they own, because that’s what you throw at a goalie war.
It’s the best practice ice of your whole year.
I take my reps and feel the barn hold its breath a little each time, like it does when a thing is genuinely not decided yet.
The scoreboard dark above us while every guy in the building keeps a private version of it lit behind his teeth.
I said I wanted this. Nobody in this building gets to tell me I didn’t say it.
Since the first day I hauled a box up the Stable stairs, since I stood at the end of the bench in clean dry pads watching him steal a season one save at a time, I’ve said the words to myself the way you say a prayer you only half believe.
Beat the best. Take the net. Make the list spell my name for once.
And here it is. Handed to me on a plate. Here he is.
Rusty off the leg, a step behind coming back, the brace gone but the caution still living in him.
That’s how a guy skates when his own body told him a lie once.
He doesn’t trust the push off the bad side.
I hate that I can see it. Rattled too, off whatever I did to him at his own door.
He shut the door on me and called it focus and neither of us believed the word for a second.
Now he carries it out onto the ice, a brick short.
He taught me that himself, without ever meaning to.
And here I am. Hot. Wanted. The changing of the guard, tabarnak.
You seen the graphics? Two heads, an arrow between them, a font they’d use for a monster truck rally, and the bad-font internet will not shut up about it.
Somebody in the comments has already picked a winner, which must be nice for him, having the whole thing settled that early with a phone and no skates on.
We line up for the first drill and I feel the whole thing sitting in my chest like a live thing, a puck war with a body count.
Rocco runs the breakout, the pucks come, I take mine and he takes his.
I’m flying. I feel it in my edges before I feel it anywhere else, every read arriving early, every rebound going exactly where I put it.
The young D-men make the sound they make for me now, that little bark of a thing they didn’t forecast. And I hear where it lands on the other side of the room.
A senior is quietly not being barked for.
Here’s the truth of it. I could take this.
That’s not a brag, it’s a diagnosis, and I can feel it in my hands the way you feel weather in a bad knee.
He’s off. I’m on. If I really lean into it, the net is mine for good, and the scout writes my name in his little book, and the door I’ve thrown my whole body against since I got here swings all the way open.
It’s that close. It’s one hard week of really trying, and when have I ever been afraid of trying hard?
There’s a version of me who wants to take it, and he’s not a small guy.
The kid on the milk crate, the first idiot in, the one who earns the corner seat on the bus because nobody was ever going to hand it to him.
That kid is standing at the top of the crease with the puck flat on my blade going shoot it, shoot it.
Isn’t this the whole reason you came here?
He’s loud. He’s always been loud. And he’s the reason I’m any good at all.
So of course I hold up.
Not on purpose. It isn’t a decision I make, it’s a decision that gets made in me, somewhere south of the part that talks.
There’s a rep late in the week where a forward comes down the far wing and cuts hard into the slot on him.
Casimir is a half-step slow into his angle and the whole net past him sits open.
The shooter buries it, and I know the exact seam before it goes, because I’ve watched a whole season of him in the dark of the film room.
I know where the gap sits when his leg is a beat behind.
Dead center. The one place the crouch exists to hide.
I don’t go anywhere near that seam.
I take my own reps the honest way. I play mine and I let him play his.
Then it comes my turn to shoot on him. Top of his crease, the whole thing open, his angle wrong, his weight on the leg he doesn’t trust. I have him. I have the game. I have the season. I have the door.
I pull up.
I can’t make myself do it. I stand there at the top of his crouch with the puck on my blade and the gap right in front of me, mine, findable, the softest spot on the best goalie I’ve ever stood near.
My hands won’t fire into it, because I’m the only person alive who knows precisely where it is.
I learned it lying next to him in the dark.
I learned it in all the nights he never told me why the order matters.
Using it now would be the one thing you don’t come back from.
There’s a word for a guy who studies a man that close and then shoots the gap on purpose.
You want to say it out loud, or should I?
I’m not going to be that word. Not to him.
Here’s what nobody on that ice will ever understand, and I’ve never once let them see it.
I didn’t pull up to be kind. Kind never entered the room.
I pulled up because I’ve watched what this man holds up with two hands every night, and I’ve seen what waits on the other side of it going slack.
I’d put my own body through the end boards before I’d be the one to cut it.
That isn’t mercy. Mercy is a thing you hand down from above.
This came from underneath, from the same place the other want comes from, and I’m starting to understand they were never two wants at all.
The room reads it wrong. Of course they do.
How would they read it right? They see the hot kid pull up on the hurt senior and they file it under mercy, under toying, the guy who already won the argument being gracious about it.
You tap a downed skater’s pads on your way past. That.
A couple of the young ones grin at me like I did him a favor, like I was showing off my restraint.
And it makes me want to skate into the boards.
Casimir reads it worst of all.
I catch his face after, the drill where I had him dead to rights and didn’t shoot.
He comes up out of his crouch and finds me across the ice, and for one second the not-blank blank of him is gone and there’s a whole man in there instead.
He doesn’t look grateful. He looks like I slapped him.
The deciding is the cruelest cut I could have chosen, because the deciding means I could have.
It means every night he stands in that net now, he stands in it knowing the kid who owns his soft spot is choosing, shift by shift, whether to be kind.
A wall you can be spared from isn’t a wall.
It’s a thing you keep by permission. I made his net a thing he holds because I let him.
I want to skate over there and grab him by the front of the jersey, right in the middle of practice.
I want to say I’m not toying with you, you beautiful stubborn idiot.
I want to say I’m in love with you, that I’ve been in love with you since the film room, since the tape rolled and I watched you reset after a goal like there was nobody on this earth standing behind you.
That’s the night I stopped being able to grade it.
I want to say I’d sooner cut my own hand off at the wrist than shoot the gap I know is there.
I want to say pulling up wasn’t mercy, it was the only love I know how to show, in a language that doesn’t have any words in it.
I don’t say a single one of those things. Crisse, we could not-say it in our sleep, and most nights that’s exactly what we do, one wall apart. We have a whole language of chirp and needle and the flat two-word verdict, and not one word of it can carry the only thing I need to say.
* * *
He knocks that night.
Two fingers. Once. My own knock, the thing I lifted off his shelf and handed back to him, coming through my door in the dark like a word in a language exactly two people on this earth speak.
I’m off the bed before I decide to be off the bed. You want the tell? That’s the tell. Write it down, use it against me later, get in line behind everybody else who’s tried.
He’s out in the hall in a gray T-shirt with his hands loose at his sides. He doesn’t say anything, because opening with a word is a thing this man has never learned how to do.
“One door,” I say. “You walked one entire door. You want a water? A towel? Should I get the boys in here for a little ovation?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t be funny at me. Not tonight.”
And my mouth quits on me. Ask the whole roster. That has happened in my life exactly never.