Chapter 29
PATRICK
I'VE NEVER WATCHED playoff hockey from a seat.
From a crease, sure. From a couch with the sound low and my own failure for company. Never from a box in the United Center with a beer I'm not drinking and my heart lodged behind my teeth over Chicago's net, of all nets.
Game one of round one, Linda Wallace pats the chair beside her the moment Theo and I walk in.
It’s a demand, not a suggestion. Within one period she confiscates Theo's phone during play, informs Devon that his puppy-eyed screaming helps no one, and asks me, without turning her head, why my boyfriend keeps coming out that far to meet their zone entries, or is she seeing things, and if that’s legal.
My boyfriend, like it's nothing, one eyebrow daring me to make it strange.
She isn't seeing things. I lean in and explain what he's doing.
By game three we have a system. Theo supplies her coffee and I supply the tactics; the verdicts are all hers. When a guy in the elevator asks which one of us she's here with, she says we’re both her boys and leaves it at that.
The jersey debuts that same night. Theo peels off his hoodie in the family box and stands there in a Wolves home WALLACE jersey with GRZE?KOWIAK taped above the nameplate in hand-cut silver letters, each one a slightly different size.
"Both my guys," he says, arms out. "One garment. Efficiency."
"The letters are crooked," I tell him, ignoring whatever my heart is doing.
He shrugs. "Good. Kiss me anyway."
Chicago wins that night, which settles it: the jersey is protocol now, and it cannot be washed, adjusted, or questioned until the run ends.
The clincher in round one is Wall’s game.
Their opponents throw the whole first period at him and he fights the onslaught off each time, and I sit in that box discovering, in real time, what it costs to watch the man you love do the exact thing you do, with your whole body and no stick in your hands.
I feel every shot in my knees. I drop with him on every scramble, seal posts from the wrong side of the glass.
Twice Leila hands me back the drink I didn't know I'd abandoned.
There's no standings math for me tonight, no season of my own.
All of that grief has quietly turned into holding my breath for the man playing his heart out at the other end of the building.
When the horn goes, the sound I make embarrasses the whole box, and I could not have stopped it with both hands.
Watching him used to be my job. It has never once felt like this.
The second round sends them west, so we serve the road games from my couch in Milwaukee, and the couch develops customs. Theo in the double-jersey, cross-legged, out-talking the broadcast. I pause the feed to complain about coverage, he yells at me for pausing.
By the second period we're both on our feet shouting at the same doomed forward.
Between periods the thread lights up, and Wall gives us his intermissions.
Wall: Their winger tips everything.
Theo: …
Theo: stop admiring him and drink your water
He steals that one in overtime—a pure robbery that keeps it alive, and half a minute later, Groover ends it at the other end. Theo bites me on the shoulder, clean through the shirt.
Home games are worse for my composure and better for the spectacle.
Home games have The Boyfriend Cam.
It starts organically, if anything Theo does can be called that.
A scramble save late in a tied game, and he's out of the box and down the stairs before Leila can catch his sleeve, arriving at the glass behind Wall’s net just to hammer both fists on it, a Milwaukee Viper in a double-named Chicago jersey, pounding the plexi over a Chicago save.
It catches on fast. The broadcast finds him by his third trip.
By the conference final there's a camera operator whose entire evening assignment is waiting for Theo to make the run, the graphics package has a name for the cutaway, and league discipline has reviewed the matter and fined him zero dollars, presumably on entertainment grounds.
"You're on national television every night," I tell him after one of these trips, his fists still red.
"Good," he says, breathing hard. "Let them all see how it's done."
He means loving somebody out loud.
I kiss his knuckles in a luxury box in front of Wall's mother, and she watches the ice like the ice is the only thing happening, but pats my knee once without a word.
And under all of it, the whole spring long: the captain.
Washington is everywhere. He blocks shots with the parts of his body a man is supposed to be protecting, scores twice in the clinchers, and assists on everything else that matters.
After each round the handshake line takes longer to release him, opponents holding his glove, saying things into his helmet.
The Wolves have stopped talking about it in the thread, which is how I know that’s all they think about.
They play like men who have decided, without a meeting, that this particular person is not leaving hockey empty-handed.
Leila watches her husband's last spring from the seat beside mine with her chin high and her thumb moving over her wedding ring. Between periods she tells Linda stories from years I wasn't family for. I drink my beer and get to be family for this one.
Between rounds there's a single free night, and we spend it maintaining the asset.
That's Theo's term. The asset lets himself into his own apartment at nine and finds us already there, moving carefully, one bruise on his collarbone shaped like a puck.
We feed him. We put on a nature documentary he doesn't watch and lie on either side of him while whales migrate somewhere warm.
I knead the games out of his shoulders while Theo handles the feet, a service he provides under auditory protest and with visible devotion.
Wall submits to all of it in silence. Twenty minutes in, his head tips onto my shoulder and his breathing goes long. Theo turns the volume down one click at a time, and we sit there in the whale light, holding between us the most watched man in hockey, asleep.
I've kept a lot of things safe in my life. It was never this literal.
The conference final tries to kill us all.
Seven games, three overtimes, one puck off the crossbar that I will see behind my eyes every night until I die. We survive it in the box, barely, clutching each other through every overtime, and Wall survives it in the crease with numbers I would hate him for back in October.
Then, it's June, and there are two teams left, and one of them is his.
The Stanley Cup Final. My boyfriend's net, four wins from the whole thing.
They split the first two on the road. They drop game three at home, ugly, on a night when nothing bounces fair, then take game four on a Washington goal that half the bench cries about in high definition.
Game five belongs to Wall, a road performance so composed it's rude, and they fly home up three games to two, with the math suddenly very simple.
Game six. At home. The Cup is in the building.
Win tonight and it's over, the season ending with the Cup in Washington's hands in his last June. Lose, and it's a game seven with everything on it, on someone else’s turf.
The United Center tonight is a beast. Standing room packed to the rafters, the anthem swallowed whole.
Our box is at full strength. Mama Paws on Linda's far side with a paw-print flag, Devon and Mateo behind us in matching shirts, Leila at the rail with her eyes on one man in white, crying before warmups end.
Chicago scores first, and the building lifts off the ground. Some old Milwaukee reflex in me flinches at the roar. The rest of me is already on its feet with everyone else.
They give one back in the second, on a fluke even I couldn't have fought through, and the game tightens into hockey I recognize from the inside, where every pass has consequences and both goalies are past nerves and into something cleaner.
Wall is playing the game of his life. I've earned the right to that judgment. I've watched him closer and longer than anyone else alive, and it is the game of his life.
Third period. Wolves are up by one on a power-play goal that Theo celebrates so hard he pulls something and refuses to say what.
Ten minutes become eight. Eight become seven.
Chicago can't get the puck out of their end, and it lives one bad bounce from Wall's crease, where he keeps erasing chances with the calm I used to hate from the far end.
A shot disappears into bodies and doesn't come out.
The whistle screams, and the replay shows his glove closed around the puck, six inches off the ice.
The board says 6:00 even.
I reach for my drink and can't lift it. It takes me a moment to understand why.
My hands are shaking. Hands that took a Final-week shootout without a flutter, hands I've built a whole career and half a personality on, rattling a plastic cup against the rail of a box.
While I'm staring at them, Theo laces his fingers through my right without looking away from the ice, and Linda Wallace takes my left, her grip tight and absolute. Three people holding on in a row.
Eight years I tried to beat him. Tonight I'd give anything I have for him to win.
The building stands for the last six minutes, all of it, one beast on its feet.
The Wolves lose the draw.