8. Rhett
Rhett
Caden puts her on the road trip, and I know I’m in trouble, but the first thing I feel isn’t dread.
Four cities, two weeks. The team’s two and seven and the narrative’s a brushfire, so the GM decides the comms lead travels with the coach to keep the city from setting itself on fire while we’re gone.
It’s the right call. It’s a smart, professional, organizationally sound call.
My son makes a lot of those. He has no idea he just booked me onto a plane for fourteen days with the one thing I’ve been keeping a building’s worth of distance from.
I should tell him no. I’m the coach; I could find a reason. I don’t find a reason. That’s the trouble, right there, in the not-finding.
The road is its own country. You forget that when you’re off it.
Charter flights at two a.m. Hotel hallways that all smell the same.
Long empty afternoons in cities you don’t see past the rink and the room.
When I played, the road was where the team became a team, where the thing happened that couldn’t happen at home.
I’m too old to have forgotten that the road is where things happen. I forgot it anyway, or I let myself.
She’s good on the road. Of course she’s good on the road; she’s good everywhere, it’s the most irritating thing about her.
She handles a hostile market in Toronto, a tabloid in Montreal, a radio host in Boston who wants my head on a stake.
She sits across the aisle on the charter with her laptop and her headphones and she does not look at me, and I do not look at her, and we are both extremely good at not looking, all the way across four time zones.
You learn a person on the road anyway. Not from talking, we barely talk, that’s the whole architecture of this trip, but from proximity, the way you learn a teammate over eighty-two games.
I learn that she works the entire flight and then lets herself watch exactly twenty minutes of some baking show before she sleeps, earbuds in, blue light on her face.
That she’s first to the rink and last out of it.
That she tips the bus driver and learns every hotel bartender’s name and has it ready in the next city.
That she calls her sister from stairwells when she thinks nobody’s near, her voice going younger and softer, all the comms armor off.
I’m not supposed to be taking any of this in.
I take it in anyway, the way I used to read a winger’s tells before a shift.
We lose in Toronto. We win in Montreal, ugly, but a win, the third of the year, and the room breathes for the first time in weeks. We lose in Boston in a way that makes me want to put my fist through the bench.
The Boston loss teaches me something about my team, and what it teaches me is that they still don’t believe.
We’re tied into the third and I can feel them waiting for it to go wrong, the whole bench leaning back instead of forward, and when Boston scores the goal that wins it, a soft one, a goal we hand them, nobody on my bench is surprised.
That’s the thing that gets my fist halfway to the boards before I catch it.
Surprise would mean they expected to win.
They didn’t. You can coach a team that loses.
You cannot coach a team that’s quietly decided losing is what it is, not until you break the deciding, and I stand behind the bench in a loud building three hundred miles from home and watch twenty young men confirm to each other that they’re exactly as bad as the standings say.
This is the actual job. Not the systems. The believing.
And I don’t know how to give it to them.
And every night there’s the hallway.
***
It’s the Boston night, after the loss, almost one in the morning, and I can’t sleep because I never can after a loss, the knee aches and the game runs on a loop, and I go down to the ice machine at the end of the hall because it’s something to do with my hands.
She’s already there.
Leggings, an oversized Crowns shirt, hair down, no armor, a bucket of ice in her hands like we planned it, which we didn’t.
She stops when she sees me. We both stand there in the long empty hotel hallway at one in the morning, two people who’ve been not-looking for eight days, and there’s nowhere to put the not-looking now. It’s just a hall. It’s just us.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she says.
“No.”
“The Boston guy was brutal. I’m sorry. I should’ve —”
“You did everything right. We lost because we were worse. That’s not a comms problem.” I fill my bucket. The machine is very loud. When it stops the quiet is louder. “Go to bed, Maren.”
“I’m going.”
She doesn’t go. I don’t go. We stand there with our ridiculous buckets of ice, and she’s looking at me the way she looked at me in the film room, like I’m the only thing in the hall worth reading, and eight days of being professional comes apart at the seams all at once, the way a team does, the way ice does, slow and then not.
“This is stupid,” she says quietly.
“Yes.”
“We’re standing in a hallway with ice buckets like a sitcom.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me to go to bed again. Mean it this time.”
I don’t tell her to go to bed. That’s the answer. I set the bucket down on the little table by the machine, slow, deliberate, and she watches me do it, and she sets hers down too, and now neither of us is holding anything, which is the most dangerous either of us has been all season.
I close the distance this time. Me. I want that on the record, since she carried the last one.
Two steps in a hotel hallway, and she doesn’t back up, she tips her chin, and I get a hand to the side of her face, my thumb at the corner of her jaw, and she leans into it like she’s been waiting eight days to be touched on purpose, and God help me she probably has, and so have I, and her mouth is right there and her breath catches and I lower my head and —
“Coach.”
Tobin’s voice, from the far end of the hall.
We come apart so fast it’s almost comedy.
My hand drops. She steps back into her own doorway like the floor moved.
Tobin’s at the other end in his own road sweats, and he’s too far to have seen the start and close enough to have seen the end, and his face, when I make myself look at it, has decided to see nothing. That’s a mercy I’ll owe him for later.
“What,” I say. It comes out rough.
“It’s the kid. Voss.” Tobin’s already moving toward me.
“He’s in a bad way. Sitting in the stairwell, won’t talk to the young guys.
Dad’s been calling him an embarrassment in the group chat, and he’s nineteen and three hundred miles from anybody who loves him.
He needs his coach, not his captain. I tried. He needs you.”
And that’s the thing about the road, the thing I forgot.
It’s where the team becomes the team. It’s also where a nineteen-year-old kid falls apart in a stairwell at one in the morning, and the man who’s supposed to catch him is standing in a hallway about to do the single most selfish thing of his second life.
I look at Maren. She’s already nodding, already stepping back, already putting her professional face on over whatever was underneath it ten seconds ago, because she understands before I say it that the kid wins. The kid always wins. That’s the job I took.
“Go,” she says. “Go get him.”
I go. I don’t look back at her, because if I look back I’ll see all of it at once, the doorway, the bucket, the inch, and I need to be a coach in about forty feet, not a man who almost. I find Voss in the stairwell with his knees up and his phone face-down and his eyes wrecked, and I sit down on the cold concrete next to a kid young enough to be my own, and I do the thing I was never any good at being home for, and I’m good at it now, which is a joke at my own expense, that I learned to father other people’s sons after I missed my own.
It takes an hour. He’s okay. He’ll be okay.
I get him back to his room and I tell him the thing my own coach told me, that the game owes you nothing and your father’s wrong and there are men in this room who’d run through a wall for you, and I mean it, and he believes me, because nineteen-year-olds believe the legend.
It’s almost three when I get back to my floor. Her door is closed. The light’s off under it.
I stand in the hall a long time, where it happened, where it didn’t.
Here’s what I know, standing there with the ice machine humming and a kid asleep two floors down because I chose him, the way I’m supposed to choose them. I chose right tonight. I keep choosing right. Voss tonight, the people last week, the deal I made with myself in the film room.
And it doesn’t matter. That’s the new thing I know, the thing that wasn’t true a week ago.
I can keep choosing right every single night, and it will not make the wanting smaller.
It’s not a fire you put out. It’s the weather now.
It’s just the weather, and you don’t out-choose the weather, you only decide whether you’ve got a coat.
Eight days of distance, and I’m standing outside her dark door at three in the morning understanding that the distance was never going to be the thing that saved us.
We’re going to break. Not tonight. But we’re going to break, and the only question left is how much it costs when we do, and who I take down with me.
I go to bed. I don’t sleep. Three and nine, and the longest road of my life, and it isn’t the hockey keeping me up.