Chapter 24
Emile
I find him in the equipment room. Where else would he be? And where else has anything that matters between us ever happened?
He’s at the shelf, but he isn’t setting it.
And that’s the thing that stops me cold with my heart already going.
In a year of watching this man I have never seen him stand in front of that shelf without touching it, because the touching is who he is.
He’s just standing there with his hands loose at his sides, not reaching for the corner, not squaring a single piece, still as a man in front of a grave he can’t make himself walk away from.
The one bad fluorescent buzzes its same dying note overhead, and the room is the same flat gray it’s always been, the gray that takes the blood out of a face and hands it back cheaper.
His gear is up on the wall above his stall in the order he keeps it, each piece square to the next, the sentence his hands have been saying since he was a kid, and he’s standing in front of it not saying it.
The room smells like foam and old sweat and cold rubber, the way it has smelled since before either of us got here.
He’s a shape with his back half to me, and I know the set of those shoulders better than I know my own, which is how I know they’re the shoulders of a man who has run out of order to hide behind.
He hears me. He doesn’t turn.
“You should not be here,” he says.
“Probably not.” I come in anyway, because I have never in my life done the smart thing where this man is concerned, not one single time. And it’s a documented condition, ostie. I open my mouth to put a grin on it. Nothing comes out. “I talked to Marquette.”
That gets a stillness out of him, a listening one.
He doesn’t turn around yet, but his hands, hanging at his sides doing nothing, go somehow stiller.
And is that a thing a body can do? I know I’ve got the whole of his attention now, like you know a goalie has locked onto the puck without ever seeing his eyes move.
“I told him to start you,” I say. “The rest of the way. The showcase, the spring, the playoff push, all of it. Your crease. I sat myself. It’s done, I already did it. And it isn’t a thing you can talk me out of, because it isn’t a thing that’s still open.”
Now he turns.
And his face is doing the thing, the not-blank blank, the processing, all that machinery I learned to read in the dark running behind his eyes and trying to fit this into an order with no slot for it.
He looks at me like I’m a variable that won’t resolve, like I’m a shot that came off a stick that wasn’t on the ice.
“Why,” he says.
One word. I’ve gotten a lot of one-word verdicts out of this man, but this one isn’t a verdict, it’s a real question, maybe the realest thing he’s ever asked me, and I can watch what it takes out of him to ask it.
I’ve collected a hundred of his silences and learned to read every one of them.
This isn’t a silence. This is him spending something to make a sound, and the sound is a question, and the question is pointed at me like he genuinely wants the answer instead of like a card he’s reading off my chest. It undoes me a little, that one word.
It’s the first time all season he’s asked me for a thing instead of bracing against me.
“Because you were right,” I say. “That’s the first thing. Before anything else, before the rest of it, you were right, and I have to say it out loud, standing here in this room where it started, or every other thing I say after it is a lie you’ll hear straight through.”
I make myself hold his eyes, and this is the hard part, the part I’ve never had the guts for in a whole life of talking to fill every silence I ever met.
Chirping is easy. Chirping is the nervous system I got issued instead of the standard one.
And saying the true ugly thing on purpose, with no chirp on it, no grin loaded, no exit left open behind me, that’s what I’ve spent my life building elaborate machinery to avoid.
“You want the funny version?” My mouth goes ahead without me.
It always does. “Guy walks into an equipment room, moves a glove, ruins his whole life. And he’d do it again tomorrow.
That’s the tragedy of the guy, calisse, he’s not even sorry about the glove.
He’s sorry about every single thing that came after it. ”
Nobody laughs. There’s nobody in here to laugh, and it lands on the concrete between us like something I dropped and can’t pick back up. So I stand in the wreck of my own bad timing and say the true thing anyway. The machinery is what nearly cost me him.
“At the start, breaking your rituals was scouting. It was. I’m not going to soften it.
I came into this building to take your net, you were the wall between me and it, and I decided I was going to find your gap if it killed me.
I moved your glove to see if you were a wall or a bluff.
That part’s true, Casimir. I won’t stand here and tell you it was never about the net, because you’d hear the lie in it, you’d hear it before I finished the sentence, and I’m done lying to you. I’m so done lying to you.”
He flinches. It’s small. It goes across him and it’s gone. I make myself watch the whole of it happen, because I put it there and the least I can do is not look away from it.
He’s spent his whole life not letting anyone see the flinch.
I know, because I studied him to find it, weeks in the corridor outside this door with a coffee going cold in my hands.
A man who was still all wall would’ve kept his face flat as fresh ice.
It’s the first give he’s shown me since he sealed himself back up in this room and left me on that bench.
“But it stopped being that,” I say. “Somewhere it stopped, and I can’t even give you the day, because it didn’t have a day.
It crept. It was the film room, mostly. I pulled your tape to scout you, sat in the dark, watched you reset after a goal with nobody behind you at all, and I couldn’t grade it.
There was no number for it. I turned the tape off. That’s where it stopped being scouting.
“And I didn’t tell you it stopped, because I couldn’t prove it.
Not to you. Not even to myself, and I’m the one who lived inside it.
And how do you walk up to a man built like you and hand him a thing you can’t prove?
You’ve had people hand you things your whole life, every one of them turned out to want something.
So I kept quiet. We’re so good at keeping quiet, the two of us, all-conference at it.
We made a whole second season out of the things we wouldn’t say.
It nearly killed both of us, and it burned down the first one, the real one, the one that mattered. ”
I take the thing out of my pocket. My phone. I hold it out between us in the gray light with the screen dark, the dumbest little rectangle to be carrying my whole heart in.
“Here’s the proof,” I say. “The only proof I’ve got, and it isn’t words, because you’ve stopped believing my words and I don’t blame you.
I gave your net back. I put my own shot in the trash for a year, my audition, the little book with my name in it, the thing I’ve wanted since before I had teeth, and I did it so you can have your season.
You can’t scout your way into that, Casimir.
Where’s the read? Where’s the angle anywhere on the ice where the guy who was using you gives away the exact thing he was using you for?
It doesn’t exist. I gave the net away because I don’t want the net.
I want you. I’ve wanted you since this room, since the first time you set the glove back and told me it matters because it matters, since before I had the sense to be scared of what that was. ”
I don’t know if he believes me. Hand a man like Casimir the truth and you learn something.
You can’t make him take it. You set it down where he can reach it and you step back, and the reaching or the not-reaching is his.
I’ve spent a whole season trying to make him do things.
Break. Flinch. Look at me. Want me. This is the first time I’ve ever just left a true thing in the open air, his to pick up or leave.
He isn’t moving. He’s holding so still it’s its own kind of speech, the loudest thing he owns, and I learned a long time ago to listen to it.
He isn’t saying no. A man who was going to say no would’ve said it already, flat, two words, then gone back to the shelf.
He’s standing in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides letting me talk, and for Casimir Wrobel that’s practically a parade.
So I do the last thing, the thing I actually came here to do, the thing the whole gesture with Marquette was only the setup for. I close the space between us. I put the phone in his hand and fold his fingers over it, cool and dry like his hands always are.
“That’s half the drawer,” I say. “That’s where I kept you.
Everything I ever gathered. Every tell. The two fingers on the corner.
The way the horn undoes you. The winter you stopped sleeping, the whole of it, in one folder, the ammunition I swore I’d never fire.
It’s yours now. Delete it. Keep it. Throw the phone in the river off the pass, I don’t care which.
The other half is in my head and I can’t hand you that one.
Nobody can. All I can do is tell you it’s in there and never open it again.
I’m done keeping a file on the man I love.
I don’t want to be a guy who has a folder on you.
I want to be the guy who just knows you, out loud, with nothing saved for later. ”
His fingers close around the phone, maybe not to take it, maybe just because I put it there and his hand did the human thing a hand does.
But he doesn’t push it back at me. He stands in the middle of the gray room holding the whole loaded weapon of himself in his palm.
He doesn’t fire it. He doesn’t drop it. And I understand that this is the most either of us has ever trusted the other, and neither of us threw a punch or made a save to earn it.
We’re just two guys in a cold room, holding still, letting a true thing be true between us for once.
I step in the last of the way. Close. Closer than I’m allowed, closer than the rule ever let me stand in the daylight. I can feel the cold coming off a man who has been standing in this cold room too long. I don’t touch him. I’ve taken enough without asking, and this one he has to reach for.
I’ve taken so much from this man already.
His order. His secret. His net, nearly. Even the two fingers on the corner of the shelf, the one truly private thing he had, I stole and turned into a way to knock in the dark.
So I let him be the one who closes the distance, or doesn’t.
The waiting is the only thing I’ve got left that costs me anything.
I’m the worst waiter God ever built, me.
And I’m going to do it for as long as it takes him.
“Move the glove, Wrobel.” My voice does the thing I have no control over.
It goes rough right in the middle. “Go on. Take it and put it on the wrong side, like I did, the very first time, in this exact room. You remember? And I’ll tell you why it matters.
Not because it does. A real reason. The true one.
I’ll tell you every single time you ask, for as long as you let me stand close enough to ask it, until you believe me.
And then a while longer after that, because I’m stubborn, because I’ve decided, and most of the things I decide come true. I’m too pig-headed to let them not.”