9. Dani
DANI
Thursday came whether I wanted it to or not, which was the only reliable thing about Thursdays.
I'd spent the two days between sessions doing the careful boring work of becoming someone who could walk back into that arena without throwing up in the parking garage.
I transcribed the first interview. Flagged every dodge in red and every honest answer in green, and there was so much red and so little green that the document looked like a crime scene.
I wrote a list of fifteen new questions, threw it away, wrote a smarter one.
I took a long walk in the desert Wednesday morning and let the heat bake out whatever was left of Monday's adrenaline.
I called my old editor in New York about freelance options that would let me quit this assignment.
There were none. I looked at my severance balance. The math had not improved.
I pulled the boring public stuff for the by-the-numbers box every profile needs, too.
The cap hit. The career earnings. The agent of record.
The endorsement deals a man with his face and his game should have been drowning in and somehow wasn't. The number a hockey site will give you for what Jett Sturgill has earned in eight years is a large number and a knowable one, and it sat there on my screen being large and knowable and not, quite, explaining anything.
I starred it. A thing that doesn't reconcile is a thing a good reporter comes back to.
I came back to it, eventually. Not for a while.
I was doing the article. The article was doing me. We were in this together.
By the time I drove back to Caldwell on Thursday afternoon I had something that approached professional armor on, and I'd told myself the lie I needed.
That I was going in as a journalist with a job to do, and a man who had information I needed, and the personal dimension of the whole horror was a separate matter to be processed later.
On my own time. In a private room. With the door closed.
That lasted right up until Brynn texted me at the elevator. small change, video review room not media room, second floor, Jett wants to watch tape while you talk. Don't ask me why, he's being weird.
I stood in the elevator and read it twice.
He'd changed the venue. Moved us out of the formal media room where Brynn had been chaperoning and into one of the team's working spaces, the rooms where actual hockey happened. His territory. He was making a chess move. I didn't know what kind yet.
The video review room turned out to be a long narrow box halfway down the staff side of the second floor.
A wall-sized screen at one end, a long table running its length, the team logo cleaner and smaller on the side wall, like the room knew it was for people who didn't need reminding what they did for a living.
Jett was already there. Not sitting. Standing at the back, behind a chair he'd put out for me, a laptop open in front of him and a remote in his hand.
Long-sleeve practice shirt, sweats, and the kind of black ball cap pulled low that hockey players wear when they don't want their face read.
He glanced at me as I came in. Once. Up, down, away. The whole look took less than a second.
"Sit," he said. "Or stand. Whatever. I'm putting up the goal."
No hello. No small talk. No charm version of him.
I sat.
He clicked something and the wall lit up with a paused frame of a hockey game I knew without being told was the championship. The Vipers' colors. The arena logo behind the goal. A scoreboard showing the third period, two seconds left, tied. The man on the ice with his stick raised was him.
"Brynn said you wanted to walk through it," he said.
"Last time. So I figured we'd actually walk through it.
" He clicked the remote. The frame unfroze.
Two seconds of play unfolded, the puck flying off Rhett's stick, across the slot, onto Jett's, and Jett doing whatever the impossible thing was that he'd done with it, the wrist flick that ended the season and won a championship.
The recorded crowd went up. The screen froze on the moment the goalie's glove came down too late.
I watched it twice. Three times. He played it on a small loop without comment while my body decided whether or not to remember to breathe.
"You scored that," I said. The first thing I'd said in the room. It came out smaller than I meant.
He almost smiled. Caught himself. Killed it.
"Rhett scored that," he said. "I was the empty net at the right end of the ice."
"That wasn't an empty net."
"It was open enough."
"It was open for half a second."
"That's all you need."
He paused the remote. He didn't look at me.
He looked at the frozen frame on the wall, at the second of his own life he'd just made me watch four times in a row, and I realized, with a small painful click of recognition, that he hadn't come into this room to give me nothing today. He'd come to give me hockey.
He couldn't give me himself. Couldn't give me his childhood, his family, his hometown, any of the doors he'd locked. But he could give me this. The thing he'd actually earned. The thing he was actually proud of. The thing he could talk about without lying.
It was a peace offering and a wall at the same time, and he knew it and I knew it, and neither of us was going to name it out loud.
"Okay," I said. "Walk me through what was happening in your head."
He clicked back to the moment Rhett got the puck. Hit play. Started talking.
And the man who'd given me forty-five minutes of nothing on Monday talked for the next fifteen.
I couldn't even tell you, later, exactly how the shift happened.
He started where I'd asked, the moment Rhett got the puck off the boards.
He explained the geometry of the rink the way I'd never had a play explained to me.
The angles. The way two defenders had set up on the wrong side of the ice because their captain read a Vipers line change wrong.
The way Moose drew the goalie a half-step out of position by faking a screen.
The way Jett had been exactly where he was supposed to be because Coach had drilled them on this exact set since training camp.
"It looks like instinct on tape," he said, the remote moving in small precise motions, pausing, freezing on the frame that mattered. "It wasn't. Every part of that was a play we ran a hundred times. I just got to be the guy at the end of it that night."
"Why you, though."
"Because I was the guy at the end of it. Rhett was tired. Moose had played sixty minutes and his shoulder was wrecked. Tank was on the bench. I was rested because Coach had been benching me strategically in the second. Freshest leg they had, and the captain trusted me with the puck."
"That's a lot of structural answer for a goal everybody else calls magic."
"Everybody else doesn't live inside it."
He froze the frame on his own face the half-second before he scored. He looked at the man on the screen with a flatness I couldn't place at first. Then I placed it, and the placing of it did something to my chest I was not going to examine in his video room with him three feet away.
He looked at the man on the screen like a stranger who'd done a beautiful thing. Like he was watching somebody else's son.
I picked up my pen. Set it down. Picked it back up.
"You don't see yourself in him," I said. Not quite a question.
He glanced at me. The first real look since I'd walked in. Less than a second. Looked away.
"I see the goal," he said.
I let that sit.
He clicked the remote again and the play ran one more time, and this time he didn't talk.
He just watched it. Wrist flick. Glove down too late.
Roar from the crowd. Twenty grown men piling on him from every direction.
Brynn somewhere in the box above, screaming.
Victoria in slow motion bringing both her hands up to her own face and pressing.
And me, somewhere in that owner's box too. Sitting on my hands and not making a sound while a hockey team won a championship a few hundred feet below me and the man I'd ruined at seventeen hoisted a trophy nobody from our hometown had ever told him he was allowed to want.
I watched the play with him. I did not look at him while we watched it. I'd promised myself before I came in that I wouldn't, that I'd be a clean professional in this room until I was back in my car, and the looking was a thing I'd specifically promised myself I wouldn't do.
I broke the promise about thirty seconds in.
I let my eyes go sideways for the smallest possible second.
Just the bottom edge of his jaw under the cap.
The line of his throat. The way his hand sat on the remote, loose, his thumb on the pause button without him noticing he'd put it there.
He was three feet from me. He smelled clean.
Like the generic institutional soap from the showers here, and underneath it something warmer that was just him.
The warm specific smell of an actual living man.
And I felt that animal part of me, the part I'd been firmly explaining to myself I did not get to have, lift its head off its paws and look toward him.
I cut my eyes back to my notebook.
I wrote down absolutely nothing. The pen made a line on the paper that didn't connect to any word.
He paused the screen at the same second the goalie's glove came down.
Set the remote on the table. He didn't turn his head, but I knew the second he registered I'd looked, because his shoulders tightened the way shoulders do when somebody else's attention lands on them and the body doesn't quite know whether to brace or to lean.
He braced.
He shut down so visibly I felt the temperature drop in the room.