4. Nick
Nick
The kid wins the first faceoff of camp clean, and the second one dirty, and by the third I stop being polite about it.
“Again,” I say.
Rory Locke grins at me across the dot like it’s Christmas morning and I’m the bike.
Twenty years old, giant hands from another planet, the C they’ve all but fitted for him hanging in the air over his head like a storm cloud.
He’s been calling this the best day of his life since the skate this morning, out loud, to anyone, because the kid says everything out loud, and what he means is that I came back.
I un-retired on to his team. His bedroom-poster guy is taking draws against him at ten a.m. on a Tuesday and losing two of three.
Fourth draw I tie him up, kick it back to where the winger should be and isn’t, and skate through the lane he left open until the point is made.
No speeches. The kid watches the whole route with his mouth open, then closes it and nods, and the lane is his now, permanently, because that’s the other thing about Rory Locke. You show him something once.
“Calisse,” I mutter, gliding off, and it means: my hips did not enjoy the demonstration.
Two years away, and my body kept the ledger.
First week of camp reads like this: neck, a low static hum that lives between C4 and the base of my skull, worse in the mornings, worse after contact, ignorable by the second coffee.
Hips, both, the right one honest, the left one a liar that saves its opinions for the night.
Hands, fine. Lungs, embarrassing but improving.
Everything hurts at a volume I know how to live at, which is different from a volume I should live at, and there’s exactly one person in this building who knows the difference.
The game came back faster than the body did.
That’s the strange mercy of it. Two years away and the reads are all still there: the geometry, the knowing where the puck goes before it goes there.
What’s gone is the half-step, and a two-way center my age lives and dies in half-steps, so camp is me relearning the oldest lesson I own: arrive early because you can’t arrive fast. Play the angle because you can’t play the race.
The coaches watch me solve it and call it veteran savvy in media availability, and I let them, because compensating doesn’t sell gold squares.
Afternoons are film. I sit in the dark with the video coach and twenty years of habits, and we grade which ones survived the layoff, and the honest answer is most of them, and the honest footnote is that the ones that didn’t were all below the waist.
He’s standing in his crease right now, mask shoved up, watching me like a man doing an appraisal.
Micah Beaulieu has seen every important thing that ever happened to me.
We go back nineteen years. Three teams, two continents’ worth of hotel rooms, one facility in the desert whose visiting hours he never missed, four states away, in season.
He never told a soul, including me, what that cost him.
He’s the only man alive with the entire story.
When the trainers ask how I’m feeling, I say good.
Micah doesn’t bother asking. He watches how I move and draws his own conclusions.
“You’re favoring the left,” he says, when I stop at the top of the crease.
“I’m managing the left.”
“Managing.” He says the word the way you hold up something you found at the back of the fridge. We both know its history. In this building, between us, managing is a loaded word. “Opener’s in three weeks. Manage slower.”
“Noted.”
“And you’re going to meetings.”
Not a question, so I don’t answer it. That’s our shorthand: he states, I don’t correct, and the not-correcting is the yes.
Thursdays, a church basement in a neighborhood where nobody looks at anybody, terrible coffee, folding chairs, first name only, which is the one place on earth where being Nico, no last name is the entire point.
It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason.
My sponsor thinks the comeback is a risk.
My sponsor is right. We went over it for a month before I signed anything, and what we landed on is a sentence I keep taped inside my helmet where a family photo would go, metaphorically, because the actual tape is for the actual secret: the season is a thing I’m doing, not a thing I am.
I believe it most days until about the third coffee.
The announcement went out two weeks ago.
I’ve done maybe a thousand press conferences and this one was the strangest, because I sat between the owner and a franchise-record projection screen and watched my own face sell out a building.
Eighteen thousand seats. A wall in the concourse, floor to ceiling, every season ticket rendered as a little gold square, and the wall filled in nine days.
They call it the Wall of Gold. Marketing does, anyway, in meetings I now have to attend.
What it is, is a balance sheet with my face on it.
The contract is one year. Incentives stacked like cordwood, a team option that vests if we make a run, and on page eleven, a paragraph my agent read to me twice, slowly, the way you read a man his rights.
Personal conduct. Public image. Detrimental to the reputation of the club.
Standard language, he said. It doesn’t feel standard when eighteen thousand season tickets are riding on my image and my real history includes sixty days in rehab.
They didn’t buy a center. Centers my age go for a third of this.
They bought the myth: the grinder’s son who never missed a bus and walked away upright.
And I signed on page fourteen, because I made my father a promise, and he’s buried in Chicago under a stone with no Cup on it.
One year. Finish it.
So that’s the season clock, and it was already loud before the book.
The book. Christ, the book. I hear about it constantly and against my will, secondhand, from every direction.
It starts in the room after Thursday’s skate, Sullivan holding his phone up like evidence, half the guys already grinning, which with this group means somebody’s about to have a bad afternoon and it’s me.
“Cap. Big fella. You got something you want to tell the group?”
“No.”
“Because my wife’s book club has some questions.”
“Tell your wife’s book club I said hello and no.”
“There’s this novel,” he announces, to the room, over me, “number-four bestseller in America, romance deal, and the whole internet is saying, and I want to be delicate here, that the man in it is—”
“Sully.”
“—a large, emotionally unavailable, silver-type fox who—”
“Sully.”
“—okay, but the author’s anonymous and the ladies have theories, and you’re theory number one, Cap, you’re beating out a Navy SEAL.”
The room enjoys this at a volume that used to mean somebody’s car got filled with packing peanuts. Rory’s laughing so hard he’s got a skate half off and can’t finish. Somebody asks if there are scenes. Somebody else confirms, with feeling, that there are scenes.
“It’s about this older guy who meets—” a kid starts, phone out, actually reading the flap copy, and I feel something in me put a glove up before I know why.
“Spare me,” I say, and it comes out with more edge than the bit deserves, enough that the kid puts the phone away and the room recalibrates around the tone.
I soften it half a click, because when a captain snaps, the whole room feels it.
“The internet has decided things about me my whole career. It once decided I was dead. Skate’s at ten tomorrow. ”
That’s the whole speech. Gossip is like snow, you just wait for the plows.
Twenty years of headlines taught me the only move that works, which is starve it, and I am a man with one season, a hip and a half of issues, and a wall of gold squares on my back.
I don’t have bandwidth for a paperback rumor.
That’s the story I tell myself, anyway, and it holds right up until Gwen Marsh finds me in the hallway.
VP of Brand and Communications. She wears the title well and smiles like she’s already won the meeting. She falls into step beside me with a tablet she doesn’t look at, because the tablet is a prop and Gwen Marsh has never once needed notes.
“We love the chatter,” she says, no hello. “To be clear, we’re not engaging. But awareness-wise, the overlap between that book’s audience and our growth demo is, frankly, beautiful, and if the moment gets bigger, we may want to get playful with it. Fun, right?”
“No.”
“Love it. We’ll circle back.” She peels off toward the offices, already three conversations ahead, and I watch her go, feeling measured for something I never agreed to wear.
Rory catches me at my stall after, when the room’s mostly cleared.
He’s got his cap on backward, and my rookie card taped up in his stall, which I’ve pretended not to see since day one of camp, because there’s no version of acknowledging it that doesn’t kill us both.
Twenty-year-old me stares out of that card with two working hips and no idea what is to come.
“Hey, Cap. Serious question.”
“Go.”
“The two-a-days.” He’s doing the thing where he asks casual and vibrates.
“Your neck, the hips, whatever, I see you on the bike after everybody’s gone.
Does it stop? The hurting. Like when you made it back, did it—” He rolls a hand, twenty years old, no vocabulary for it yet. “How do you play through?”
And there it is. The question, from the kid, in the empty room.
Here’s what I could say. I could say: carefully, Rory, and some years not at all.
I could say: there was a stretch where playing through came in a bottle with my name on it, and the name was the problem, because that man could get anything he wanted, and the wanting nearly buried him before he was forty.
I could say: the reason I ride the bike after everybody’s gone is that a man in a church basement taught me the difference between pain you respect and pain you obey.
What I say is: “Sleep. Ice. And you tell somebody the truth about the pain before it starts making your decisions for you. Every time. That’s the whole trick.”
“Tell someone?” He nods slowly, writing it on the inside of his skull, where he keeps everything I’ve ever said. “That what you did?”
“That’s what I do now.”
Which is true, and a lie, in the exact proportions I’ve gotten used to living at, and the kid takes it like communion and bounces out of the room on twenty-year-old ankles, and I sit there in the empty stall row for a minute with the thing I actually am: a wall a kid lives behind.
Micah’s right that the secret is a weight.
He’s wrong about whose. If it ever comes out, I don’t just take the fall.
I take the wall of gold, the vesting option, the front office that cleared me, and one kid’s entire operating system down with me.
Micah drives me home because my truck’s in the shop and because he doesn’t trust me on I-70 after two-a-days, which he doesn’t say. Goalie silence the whole way, which is a real thing and I’ve missed it. At my gate he puts the car in park and looks at the mountains instead of me.
“Good camp,” he says. “Best you’ve moved in three years.”
“But.”
“No but. That was the whole review.” A beat. “Thursday’s Thursday?”
“Thursday’s Thursday.”
“Bien.” He unlocks the doors, which is goalie for I love you, get out.
Inside, the house is quiet the way I built it to be quiet.
Big windows, foothills going blue-black, one lamp.
There’s a room down the hall I built for him and visit on a schedule, because it’s not a room you should live in: his skates from Chicoutimi, a bench from the old rink in Trois-Rivières, the last jersey he ever wore in a league nobody films. Twenty-two seasons of a man who drove through the night to watch me play in buildings colder than the ones he played in, and he never saw a Cup, mine or his.
I made him a promise at a kitchen table when I was fourteen and I made it again at a graveside eighteen months ago, and the difference between those two promises is that the second one knew the price.
Not tonight. Tonight the door stays shut, and I stand at the kitchen island eating leftovers I don’t taste, and my phone sits there on the granite. Sully’s group text won’t stop buzzing. Somebody’s posted the cover: a plane window, gold light, a title I’m not going to think about.
I pull up the search bar. Type mile high sincl — and stop, thumb hanging over the keyboard, feeling like a man about to read his own scouting report from a stranger.
Delete. Pocket. I’ve got a season. I don’t read fiction.
Here’s the truth about retired ghosts, since the internet’s asking.
There’s a woman I let myself think about on Sundays, one day a week, rationed, because a man in recovery knows exactly what he can and cannot keep in the house.
No last name, her rule, smartest rule anybody ever made for me.
Eighteen months, and I can still feel a thumbnail against my lips and hear a voice in the dark going okay, Just Nick, and I still don’t know the last name of the only person who ever met me unarmored.
It’s Tuesday.
I think about her anyway, and call it camp legs, and go to bed.