Chapter 3
WALL
Hopefully not visibly. Externally, I'm sitting in the back row with my legs folded sideways because buses aren’t designed for people my size, staring out the window with the carefully neutral expression of a man who is definitely thinking about hockey and absolutely nothing else.
Internally, my brain’s playing video footage on a loop without my permission.
Patrick's hand, slow. Theo's head tipped back. The sound that got out of him right before Patrick covered his mouth. And then Patrick's eyes coming up over Moreau's shoulder, calm as a morning skate, like he wasn’t currently—
Hockey.
Fuck fuck’s sake, think about hockey.
I turn to the window. Milwaukee is sliding past, all highway lights and the vague outline of a city I have never really liked, and now have a reason to hate.
Three rows out, Becker puts my misery on hold.
"GENTLEMEN." Becker has never developed an indoor voice and has long stopped trying. "A reenactment. Petrov, you're the shooter. Ace, puck. Snooze, congrats, you're the net."
"How am I the net?"
"Arms out. Sag a little. You're G. after the third round."
Petrov rises and begins mock-skating up the aisle in slow motion while Becker narrates: "Petrov comes in with speed. The great G. is reading glove. He's reading blocker. He's reading everything except—"
Except, there’s no except, my brain chimes it. Patrick reads everything. That's the entire point of him. I have never once seen him look surprised. Which means… Which means when he looked up and found me in that doorway, he wasn't—
"—FIVE-HOLE! Somewhere in Gdańsk, a grandmother weeps!"
Ace takes a bow. Snooze, still being a net, receives a standing ovation for his portrayal of failure. Three seconds later, a robotic voice penetrates the fabric of Petrov’s pocket. I recognize the voice. The voice has already ruined two dinner parties this season.
“Word of the day. SULTRY.”
For a blissful moment everybody shuts the fuck up, all eyes on Petrov, as he pulls out his phone, face scrunched in concentration as he studies the screen, then nods. “I will use it in a sentence.” He ponders for a moment, and then, "Coach has sultry voice when angry."
The bus loses its shit.
"Coach does not have a—" Becker whirls on him. "Petrov, buddy. Do you know what sultry means?"
"Definition is 'hot and humid.' Also 'attractive in a way of—'" He squints at his phone. "'—causing sexual desire.'"
The bus loses another three decibels of sanity.
“You just called Coach Martin hot."
“I did not say hot.” Petrov grunts. “I said sultry. Different word.”
Becker’s not having it. “You’re twenty-two and you just called our sixty-year-old coach—"
"Fifty-eight," Coach Martin chimes in from the front, without turning around.
"—sexually attractive."
Petrov considers this. "He has... presence."
For the next ten minutes, it’s a full on riot. Somebody starts a slow chant of sul-try, sul-try. And I'm watching the whole thing through the window reflection with the engagement of a parking meter, because the footage in my skull just restarted and Patrick's thumb is doing that thing.
A head pops over my seat back. Becker, upside-down, eyes narrowed. "You didn't laugh."
Shit.
"I laughed internally."
"Don’t lie to me. I know when you lie."
I sigh. "Long game. I'm tired."
"Mhm." He holds the squint a second longer than I'd like. Becker's squint is a diagnostic tool, and right now it's running a full scan. Then he drops back into his seat, resumes yelling at Groover, and I'd feel relieved if I believed that he bought it.
He didn't buy it.
I turn back to the window. Wisconsin offers me an hour of darkness and zero distractions, and my brain, helpful as ever, cues the tape from the top.
Long ride.
***
BACK HOME, I run my routine, because the routine is what's going to save me. Chicken and rice into containers. Stretch. Hydrate. Twenty minutes in, I catch myself standing over the sink with a fork in my hand, food untouched, replaying the exact angle of Patrick's wrist.
This is hopeless.
I pull out my phone. Looks like no amount of distraction is going to save me. Not anytime soon, anyway, and I won’t risk the season just because I kept thinking about…stupid shit. Might as well get it over with.
I navigate to my browser and immediately enter incognito mode, like I’m not a grown man with a mortgage about to ask a completely normal question.
Then I ask it.
Is it normal to watch
I lock my phone before autocomplete can finish that sentence for me.
They should build phones that detect this and burst into flames as a courtesy.
Okay, regroup.
It's a reasonable question. People ask questions. Asking is healthy.
I unlock it back.
Watching people normal??
The results are a parenting blog about screen time and an article titled "Is People-Watching a Hobby?" Not helpful, Google.
Finally, I swallow my pride and refine my search.
Voyeurism but make it not weird.
First result: Voyeurism: When Watching Becomes a Problem.
Great.
Love that for me.
I don't open the link. Doing so means I have a problem, and I don't have a problem, I have a data point. One data point. One incident of standing in a doorway for two minutes while two men—
My fingers are tapping away again. I watch them do it.
Why did I like watching two m
I stop.
I look at the half-finished sentence.
I delete it. Letter by letter, which takes longer, which is the point.
Then I power off, carry it into my bedroom, set it on the nightstand, shut the bedroom door on it, and walk back to my kitchen, where I stand in the dark and take stock of my life.
"I am a goaltender," I tell the kitchen. "Observation is my craft. This is fine."
The kitchen doesn't buy it either.
***
MORNING brINGS A mild headache from a night of aggressive not-sleeping, and an email from Wolves PR.
Subject: Border Battle for Paws — Campaign Brief & Assignments.
I skim it while I sip my much needed coffee.
Season-long joint charity campaign with Milwaukee.
Mama Paws' shelter has several sister locations now, and the Milwaukee one is apparently falling apart.
Renovation fund. Monthly joint events. Spring gala finale.
The PR people are calling it "a rivalry with a heart," and I almost puke in my mouth.
Bet they patted themselves on the backs for that one.
As far as inconveniences go, this isn’t the worst one. It’s for the cause. And for the animals. And for Mama Paws. And so I find myself nodding along as I read, until I stop on the line that makes me choke on my coffee.
Co-Chairs: T. Wallace (CHI) / P. Grezkowsiak (MIL)
Co-chairs. As in, the two of us? As in, me and him, monthly, for a season?
Yeah, I don’t fucking think so.
I'm already drafting the decline email in my head (schedule conflict, workload, ongoing goaltending commitments).
Except you can't decline a dog charity. There's no version of "I can't help the shelter" that doesn't make me a monster.
What am I supposed to tell Mama Paws, sorry, no puppies, I watched the co-chair give a handjob to a guy?
And then the typo catches me, and my panic trips over it.
Grezkowsiak.
The hardest name in professional hockey, and someone in our PR department looked at it and thought, needs more chaos.
They've moved the z, dropped a vowel from a word that desperately needs more of those, and ended up with something you'd get if you sat on a keyboard.
I stare at it. The wrong version sits there being wrong, and it bothers me.
I don’t know why. It’s not like I can pronounce it.
I’ve sneered vaguely Grze?kowiak-shaped sounds at him through a cage for years, grunted Gres-whatever at reporters when forced to reference him, and otherwise avoided it by calling him "the other guy" or "Patrick" or, most often, nothing at all.
I clear my throat.
"Grez— Gshesh—"
That was a sneeze committing to a bit.
"Greh-SHKOH-vee-ack."
Closer, but no.
"Gzheh-SHKIO-vyahk."
Huh. That might've been close, and there's nobody here to confirm, and this is when I catch up to what I'm doing: standing at my counter at 7 AM, coffee going cold, practicing the surname of someone I don’t like.
It's the typo. Totally because of the typo.
My phone buzzes in my hand and I nearly put it through the window.
Mama Paws. I smile instinctively and don’t even get to say hello when I answer.
"Wall, honey, before you say anything—" She's talking at the speed of a woman who has been rehearsing since dawn.
"I told them to ask you first. I made them promise.
And then, this morning Jimmy shows me the email and your name is just on it, already on it, and I am so sorry, sweetheart, a whole season is a big ask, so if you're too busy you say the word and I will march down to that PR office myself and—"
"Ma’am."
"—because the Milwaukee shelter, Wall, I won't lie to you, it's the plumbing, the plumbing is a tragedy—"
"Celeste. I'm in."
She pauses mid-word. In the background, faintly, a familiar voice screeches, "WHAT THE PUUUUCK."
"You… You don't want to think about it first?"
"No, ma'am."
"Stop calling me ma'am, I've told you a hundred times."
"Yes, ma'am."
She laughs, then gets audibly misty about it, while Papa Paws says something in the background about drywalls.
I’d walk into traffic for that woman. She called me her tall boy once, and I have not yet recovered.
We hang up. I look at the email one more time.
So the assignment comes with mandatory Patrick exposure, so what? It’s fine. It’s irrelevant. What happened in that video room is irrelevant to this campaign, irrelevant to the charity, and irrelevant to me personally.
Irrelevant.
I finish my cold coffee.
I am normal.
***
PRACTICE IS PRACTICE. I stop pucks. The puck-stopping goes incredibly well, actually, courtesy of sublimation. Coach Martin watches me for ten straight minutes and says nothing, which from him is high praise.
Today’s a good day. And it’s a good day all day, all the way until 9:47 PM when it stops being good and turns into a day you wish never happened, when my phone buzzes and I make the grave mistake of looking at the screen.
Unknown: You forgot your puck. — P.G.
No.
No, no, no.
This could be anybody.
Three dots appear under the message.
This is anybody. And they have the wrong number. Lots of people have pucks and lots of people forget them, and then other people text them about it, and they feel the need to sign their texts, and I bet there are millions of people with those initials that happen to know people who—
Unknown: We need to talk about what you saw.
—who need to be talked to about what they say and for fuck’s sake, how is this my life?
I sigh as several responses fight for dominance.
There's nothing to talk about. (Lie.)
I didn't see anything. (Bigger lie.)
I saw everything and I'm not sure how I feel about it. (Truth, therefore unusable.)
Fuck it. I don’t have to respond. He’s not my coach or my teacher or anyone with a shred of authority over me and I’m going to murder whoever gave him my number.
I put the phone face-down on the couch and resume my mobility routine. Twenty-two minutes, every joint, and I do all of it staring at the back of my phone, which sits there the whole time like a landmine
Minute twenty-three, I pick it up. I read both messages again and type back one word.
Me: Friday.
Then, three more:
Me: Bring the puck.