Chapter Four
Matvei was one of the last players to leave Atlantic Centre that afternoon.
That wasn't unusual. He had never understood teammates who could finish practice, shower and disappear within twenty minutes.
Even on days when his body felt good, there was always something to discuss with Pat McLean, another sequence to watch on the tablet or a stretch the training staff wanted him to hold longer than he thought necessary.
He preferred taking his time anyway. By the time he left, the reporters had usually retreated upstairs, the television cameras had been packed into black cases and the hallways had returned to the people who actually worked there.
The building was quieter when no one was asking questions.
Matvei pushed through the doors leading into the players’ parking garage and adjusted the strap of his backpack on his shoulder.
The September air was cool enough to cut through the heat still trapped beneath his skin, and he stopped for a moment beside his truck rather than climbing directly inside.
The first day had gone well.
That was what mattered.
His feet had felt quicker than they had the year before.
He had tracked pucks cleanly through traffic.
His knee had held up through every movement without the small hesitation he'd spent most of the previous season trying to ignore.
There had been no sharp pain, no instinctive refusal from his body when he pushed from one post to the other. Just hockey.
He should have been thinking about that.
Instead, he thought about the new reporter.
Tessa Brantley.
He remembered the name because she'd offered it as though it should mean something to him. She'd smiled when she introduced herself, recorder already in her hand, and looked at him with the nervous determination of someone who had rehearsed the conversation before walking across the room.
Then she'd asked the same questions they always asked.
What had he worked on? What had he changed? How confident was he that he could bounce back?
They changed a few words every September, but the story never did.
If he answered honestly, they would take whatever he said and shape it into proof that he was ashamed of the previous season.
If he kept his answers short, they would call him defensive.
If he said he felt good, they would write that he was making promises.
If he admitted there were things he still needed to fix, the headline would become another warning that the Convoy had a problem in net.
She had told him she wanted his perspective.
They all said that.
Matvei opened the back door of the truck and dropped his bag onto the seat.
He knew he had been rude to her. He wasn't pretending otherwise.
There had been a moment after he'd walked away when he'd nearly gone back, if only to give her one usable sentence and save himself from another conversation with the communications staff about cooperating with the media.
Then he'd seen her approach Pat.
A few minutes later, Viktor.
She hadn't needed him after all.
That was what he'd been trying to tell her.
Reporters always arrived with a story already formed in their heads. They spoke to enough people to fill the empty spaces, selected the quotes that fit and left the rest behind. By the time they approached him, they usually wanted confirmation, not an answer.
Matvei climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine. His phone connected automatically, filling the truck with a Russian rock song he'd listened to during summer workouts until even he was tired of hearing it. He turned the volume down and backed out of the space.
He had been nineteen when he first realized that what he said and what appeared in print did not have to be the same thing.
His English had been functional then, but only barely.
He could understand the coaches if they spoke slowly and demonstrated what they wanted.
He knew the words for every part of his equipment and enough profanity to understand when the defensemen were angry with themselves.
Interviews were different. Reporters asked long questions filled with words he'd never heard in a language that moved faster than he could follow.
After one of his first bad games in Halifax, someone had asked whether fatigue had contributed to a goal he'd allowed late in the third period.
Matvei hadn't known the word “fatigue.” He'd understood only the gesture toward the clock and the mention of the goal, so he'd tried to explain that he'd been late reading the pass.
“I am slow there,” he'd said. “Maybe lazy with eyes.”
The reporters around him had laughed.
At the time, he'd thought they were laughing because he'd made a joke.
The next morning, the newspaper described him as admitting he'd been “lazy,” with the word printed in quotation marks beneath a photograph of the puck behind him in the net.
The radio hosts repeated it for days. One columnist questioned whether a Russian goaltender understood the work required to succeed in the NHL.
It hadn't mattered that he had been trying to say his eyes were slow finding the puck through a screen. It hadn't mattered that the veteran reporter standing nearest to him had understood exactly what he meant.
The quote was better the other way.
That was only the beginning. Every mistake became a question about effort.
Every short answer became proof that he didn't care.
Every time he struggled to explain himself, they printed the sentence exactly as he'd said it, preserving every missing article and misplaced verb as though his English had anything to do with his intelligence.
Eventually, his English improved.
The stories did not.
By the time he pulled out of the garage, Matvei had stopped thinking about Tessa Brantley. At least, that was what he told himself.
She was new. She would learn what the others had learned. He would give her a few short answers when the team required it, she would write whatever she planned to write and eventually she would stop walking across the room with hope in her expression.
They all did.
The newspaper was waiting on his stall the next morning.
Matvei noticed it before he noticed the fresh practice gear folded on the chair or the bottle of electrolyte mix sitting beside his skates. The sports section of the Halifax Tribune had been opened to the first page and placed neatly across the bench beneath his nameplate.
A photograph of him filled most of the space above the fold.
It had been taken the previous morning. He was crouched in his crease, mask pushed on top of his head while he listened to Pat. The angle made him look more serious than he'd felt at the time, his eyes fixed on something outside the frame.
Above the photograph was the headline:
BACK TO BASICS
Beneath it, in smaller type:
Inside Belov's reset: Why the Convoy believe their star goalie is poised for a rebound
He stared at the byline.
Tessa Brantley
“Your favorite subject,” Viktor said from the next row of stalls.
Matvei looked up. The captain was already dressed in his base layer, a coffee in one hand and the other braced against the top of a teammate's stall.
“You put this here?”
“No.” Viktor nodded toward one of the equipment staff moving through the room. “They leave the papers sometimes when one of us is on the front.”
Matvei glanced back down.
“You read it?”
“I was quoted in it.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Viktor smiled. “Yes, Belly. I read it.”
“And?”
“And I sounded intelligent, which means she must be good.”
Matvei folded the paper once and set it beside him.
Viktor didn't leave.
“What?” Matvei asked.
“You're not going to read it?”
“No.”
“You've been staring at it for thirty seconds.”
“I was looking at picture.”
“Of yourself.”
“It is good picture.”
Viktor laughed and continued toward his stall. “Very humble.”
Matvei waited until the captain had turned away before reopening the paper.
He told himself he only wanted to know what had been written about him. That was reasonable. He had learned long ago that ignoring a story did not stop other people from reading it, and it was better to know which version of himself the city would be discussing that day.
The article began with his numbers from the previous season.
There was no avoiding those. His save percentage had fallen below .
900 for the first time. He had lost six consecutive starts in January, allowed several goals he should have stopped and spent nearly three weeks watching from the bench while the backup played.
He knew every number without reading it.
What surprised him was what came next.
Tessa wrote that the Convoy didn't believe the decline reflected a permanent change in his ability.
She quoted Pat explaining the technical problems that had entered his game after the knee injury, how Matvei had started chasing plays rather than trusting his positioning and how his summer work had focused on rebuilding those habits.
She quoted Viktor saying that everything had seemed heavy for Matvei the previous season, but that he had returned to camp looking more like himself.
There was no mention of the way he'd spoken to her.
No description of him refusing to elaborate. No clever line about pulling answers from an unwilling subject. She hadn't even used the little that he'd given her, though Matvei could already imagine how another reporter might have built the entire opening around it.
“Winning.”
It would have been easy to make him sound arrogant. It would have been easier still to make him sound simple.
She hadn't.
Matvei read the article a second time, slower than the first.