Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Max Stevens
I’m in the arena at six forty-seven a.m. because I couldn’t sleep.
That’s the straightforward version. If Trey Dillingham, who’s incredibly observant and meticulous, asked me, I’d tell him that I’m here early to work on my edges.
Which is also true. My left skate has been a half-degree off since Tuesday’s game, and the sensation of it has been living in the back of my skull the way small wrong things do, patient and persistent.
Both versions are true. I couldn’t sleep and I need the ice.
The facility at this hour belongs to the maintenance crew, the overnight security guy who waves at me from the lobby desk without looking up from his phone, and the particular quality of silence that exists in large buildings before they decide to be loud.
I like it. And when the overhead lights click on they take two full minutes to reach their operating brightness, which means I lace my skates in a room that’s gradually waking up the same way I am.
The ice is perfect. Zamboni finished at six and nobody has touched it since.
The rink has its own smell at this hour.
Not the game-night smell. The other one.
Industrial cleaner over cold rubber matting, the mineral bite of the ice itself, and under all of it, cedar from the sauna two corridors over.
I’ve been breathing this specific combination since I was nine years old, and it does the same thing it’s always done — drops my heart rate by ten beats a minute, whether I want it to or not.
The arena has its own nervous system. I've learned to read it like I read defensemen.
Weight, temperature, which way it leans.
There’s a water stain on the far boards, Section C side, that looks like the state of Michigan. Equipment guys have been painting over it for two seasons. It keeps coming back. Nobody talks about it anymore. It’s just Michigan.
I do edges for forty minutes. Not glamorous work.
Not the kind of thing that makes highlight reels.
Left outside edge, left inside edge, right outside, right inside, crossovers, transitions, the specific footwork sequence Toni showed me on video three weeks ago that I’ve been running in my head ever since.
She was right about the heel load point.
She’s right about most things. Right about the things that matter.
I've stopped pretending I don't know that.
At seven thirty-two, I step off the ice.
The ice arena starts its morning in increments with equipment managers first, then the training staff, then the early arrivals from the roster who are either diligent or insomniacs or, in my case, both.
I shower. Pull on sweats. Head toward the kitchen for coffee because the team kitchen has the good machine that Fuze broke twice and replaced twice out of pocket because apparently that specific coffee machine is the one non-negotiable of Scott Fusak’s professional career.
I’m in the hallway between the locker room and the training corridor when I hear it.
Two voices, the facility director and another person, are heard from the administrative wing.
The director, whose name I always forget and whose face I know from the framed photos near the main entrance, and someone else.
I register the second voice before I register the words.
The cadence of it catches before I can identify why.
Measured. Unhurried. The calmest thing in a loud room.
I round the corner. Frank Amato is twelve feet away. He’s in a charcoal coat, dark slacks, a collared shirt that doesn’t need to try as hard as it does. He holds a leather portfolio and converses with the director, who nods occasionally, showing respect and ensuring his admiration is evident.
I know him. Number forty-one resolves into Frank Amato.
The man I've been on the wrong side of four times.
The man I researched because Toni said her father officiated.
Frank Amato. Top official. The name that comes up in officiating conversations the way elite players come up in scouting reports as the benchmark, the standard, the thing everyone else is measured against.
He hates players like you. Toni’s voice. The weight room. Her voice flat and precise, delivering information the way she delivers everything. Without apology. Like a diagnosis. He officiates NHL games. Including yours.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s mid-sentence, the facility director’s attention fully on him, and for two full seconds I have the option to turn around and take the other hallway and pretend this morning went differently. Two seconds is a long time. I have made decisions on the ice in under one.
I don’t turn around.
I keep walking.
The facility director clocks me first. There’s a flicker of recognition, a neutral nod, the professional acknowledgment of a man who has been the intermediary between players and administration for fifteen years, and possesses the unique ability to make that buffer invisible.
He doesn’t break the conversation. He doesn’t signal anything.
Frank Amato finishes his sentence. He turns, finding me as efficiently as he finds everything on the ice. He doesn’t scan or search; he simply orients and arrives at the correct conclusion. His gaze locks onto mine.
Three seconds. I count them, the same way I count everything in situations where counting is the only thing keeping me from acting out things I can’t undo.
One. His eyes are green. The same green.
I’ve never stood this close to him off the ice, and the resemblance is evident.
Her height lives in him. Her features. The specific quality of his attention, arriving complete and assessing before you can track when it started.
Two. He doesn’t change his expression. Doesn’t lift his chin or set his jaw or do any of the things that signal a man preparing to make a point.
He simply looks at me with the opinions of professional assessment and lets me feel every one of them.
I think about the penalty box. I recall every time I’ve sat in it: the forty-five-second cross-checking call in Vancouver, the fighting major in Pittsburgh where I believed I was justified, and the boarding call last month that I knew was coming before the arm went up because I’d made the wrong decision.
I think about what Frank Amato's file on me looks like. Not the official one, but the one in his head, the one built from every game he’s officiated where my name came up.
Two seasons of data. The pattern of a player who leads with force because force is what he knows, who protects the people he cares about by the method most immediately available, who has never once in his professional career made the smart play when the instinctive one was right there.
Three. He looks away. He returns his attention to the other man and picks up the conversation exactly where he left it, without a pause, without a shift in register, with no signal that the three seconds happened at all.
The facility director responds. They move toward the administrative corridor.
The charcoal coat disappears around the corner.
The hallway is empty. I stand in it. My feet haven't received any instructions.
He said nothing. I prepared for the version of this encounter that has edges.
Something to push against. He gave me the three-second look.
The same one he gives players on the ice when the call has already been made and he’s informing them of it.
The one that means the verdict is already in.
He walked away. That was worse than anything he could have said.
I drag a hand through my damp hair. He hates players like you.
Reckless. That was her word for it. Said flat and without drama, the way she says the things that cost something.
Reckless. Years of proving his point have defined Frank Amato.
I have, with no request, spent two seasons showcasing his validity.
The hallway is still empty. Fuze arrives somewhere past the locker rooms. I hear him before I hear Scott Fusak announce his presence to the building.
I make myself move. Coffee. Edges. Session at nine with Toni, who does not know I just spent three minutes in a hallway with her father.
Ignorance is preferable, because knowing would make it another thing she has to manage, and she manages enough.
I pour the coffee, hold the mug, feel the heat, and think about the three-second look. I make a decision unrelated to the coffee, the edges, or the nine o’clock session.
Frank Amato is going to receive different data from me.
Because the file he has on me is accurate and incomplete.
I am the only person who can fix the incomplete part.
And because Toni has built something in me that her father hasn't seen yet. It exists whether he sees it or not, but I’d like him to see it.
I have work to do.