11. Dani #2
It wasn't that he played badly. A beat writer wouldn't have written that he played badly.
He back-checked. He won his battles on the boards.
The shape of him was all still there, the speed, the reads, the body in the right place.
But the joy was gone, and once I'd clocked its absence I couldn't stop seeing it.
At practice he'd skated like the ice was a thing he owned.
Tonight he skated like a man who'd borrowed it and knew the bill was coming.
There was a half-second in everything. A brace.
He'd get to the right spot and then hold, just slightly, the way you hold when some part of you is bracing for a hit that isn't in the play.
In the second period he got the chance. A turnover at the blue line, a two-on-one, the puck on his stick in the slot with the whole net opening up the way I'd watched it open for him on tape a hundred times.
The building came up out of its seats before he even shot, because the building knew what this man did with that chance.
I came up with it. I had a pen in my hand and no memory of standing.
He fanned on it.
Not a save, not a block. He just didn't get all of it, the puck rolling off the toe of his blade and dribbling wide, and the building sat back down in one long groaning exhale.
Jett skated to the bench with his head down and his jaw set, and the beat writer beside me said, to no one, "there's the slump," and wrote it down, and I did not write anything at all.
Because the beat writer was wrong, and I knew he was wrong the way I knew the weight of a right sentence.
A man at the top of this sport does not forget how to finish a two-on-one in November because his legs went.
He misses it because somewhere in the last little while something has gotten into the room he keeps locked, and the locked room is riding in his chest while his body tries to play a hockey game around it.
The slump wasn't the story. The slump was a symptom.
I had three weeks of notes on a man's career and I'd just watched the actual piece happen in the time it took a puck to roll off a stick.
Here was a man who was very good at carrying a thing nobody could see, and tonight, for the first time, the carrying was starting to cost him on the ice, where everyone could.
They lost it in the third. A soft goal with four minutes left, the kind a defending champion is not supposed to give up.
The horn went. The building emptied out quiet.
Down on the sheet the captain, Stone, the one who said about a third of what he was thinking, skated a slow loop and tapped a few guys on the shins with his stick, and Jett stood at the blue line longer than anyone, looking at the scoreboard like it had said something to him personally.
Then he went down the tunnel last. Not because he was the captain.
Because he was the one who couldn't stand to leave it.
I sat in the warm safe press box until the cleaners came.
I hadn't written a single word. I had the whole piece.
A week of interviews had taught me one thing. Jett Sturgill could weaponize courtesy.
We'd done three more sessions since the video review room.
He showed up to all of them on time. Wore the team polo.
Gave me hockey content the way a chef gives a critic a tasting menu, small precise plates, beautifully arranged, each one designed to fill me up without telling me anything about the kitchen.
He handed me the play breakdowns I needed.
He gave me the kind of quotes a magazine could run.
He had not looked at me again the way he'd looked at me at the end of that first video room session.
Not once.
He gave me the polite version of every session since.
The polished version. The cold-war truce we'd both apparently signed on Thursday afternoon in a room with a wall-sized screen.
And I'd spent the week working harder than I'd worked in years to act as though I hadn't noticed the truce was being held in place by a thin glass wall both of us were terrified to put a hand against.
I was failing. The work was good. I had ten thousand words of usable material and a clear path to the first draft. And I was failing.
The third session had been at his place.
He'd let me come up to the big glass house in the hills, which I hadn't been prepared for in any of the seven ways I should have been.
We did the interview at his kitchen island while the sun set on the valley behind him through a wall of windows the size of a movie screen.
I took notes. He answered questions about Coach's adjustments to the second-line forecheck.
He put a glass of water in front of me without asking and refilled it twice.
He did not stand within three feet of me at any point.
When I left, around eight, he walked me to Brynn's SUV in his driveway, past the Pontiac sitting under the floodlight on the far side of the gravel, which I recognized for what it was even in the dark, even from twenty paces.
A frame-off restoration of one of those, done right, is a six-figure car wearing a weekend hobby like a disguise.
He didn't say anything about it and I didn't ask, and I filed the not-saying next to all his other not-sayings.
He opened my door with the same controlled distance he'd been operating with for a week, and he said drive safe, Hartley, and he shut the door. That was Wednesday.
It was Friday now.
I was sitting at Brynn's kitchen island while she diced an onion the size of a softball and tried to figure out how to ask me the thing she'd clearly been working herself up to for two days.
"You're avoiding the team events," she said, finally, to the cutting board.
"I'm working."
"You're working from the guest room. Twelve hours a day. You haven't come to The Hideout with me on a Friday night in three weeks and I've stopped pretending I think that's a coincidence."
"Bry."
"Don't Bry me. I'm cooking you dinner. I get to ask one question."
She set the knife down and turned to face me.
Hair up in the messy bun she did when she was actually working in the kitchen and not performing the idea of it, a smear of something on the side of her wrist that was probably olive oil.
She looked at me with the steady direct eyes she'd been deploying on me at random intervals since we were eighteen.
The eyes that said, I have you, and I am not letting you slip out of this one with a joke.
"Are you okay," she said.
"I'm fine."
"That wasn't the question."
"It was the question. Just phrased softer."
"Dan." She came around the island. Stood next to my stool.
Put one hand on my back, not heavy, just there.
"You've been here three weeks. You came out broken.
You said you'd take Mom's job and breathe for a minute, and I've watched you take the job and not breathe.
You go to interviews. You come home. You go to the guest room.
You work. You eat what I put in front of you.
You laugh at the right places. And you do all of it with the back of your shoulders held the way you used to hold them sophomore year when your dad called your dorm phone and I picked up on the third ring. "
I went still.
"I'm not asking what's happening," she said, very gently. "I'm asking are you okay. Right now. In your body. You can lie. I'll know. I just want you on record."
I closed my eyes.
If I'd been a different woman, with a different set of trained reflexes, I'd have laid my head on her shoulder and told her the whole thing.
The dance. Tennessee. The envelopes in a shoebox three thousand miles away.
The man whose kitchen island I'd sat at on Wednesday night drinking water he'd poured for me while we talked about a sport I'd never bothered to learn until he was the reason to learn it.
What he'd looked like a week ago in the video room, and what I was very carefully not looking at him like every session since.
If I'd been a different woman I'd have done it then, with the onion sweating in the pan behind her and Vegas going pink through the glass and my best friend's hand on my back.
I wasn't a different woman.
"I'm okay," I said. "I'm tired."
She let her hand stay there a moment longer. Then she lifted it.
"Okay," she said. The careful Brynn okay, the one she used when she'd decided not to push past a wall I was holding.
She went back around the island. Picked the knife up.
Diced the rest of the onion. Dropped it in the pan.
The smell of it hit, sharp and clean, and the sizzle came up.
"But you're coming with me Sunday. The team's doing a thing at The Hideout for Tank's birthday and we're going.
I'm not asking. You can sit at the bar with me, I won't make you mingle. But you're going."
"Bry."
"Sunday, Dan. You can avoid him in person. It's not that hard. The man is six-three and easy to spot."
I almost laughed. A sound came out of me that was on the way to one and didn't make it.
She didn't look at me when she said the next thing, because she knew better than to look at me when she said it. She said it to the pan.
"I'm not asking what's between you. Just so we're clear.
I had a conversation with Jett at the bar last week.
I asked him one question and got the answer I wanted, and I'm going to take that as the deal both of you and I have.
I will not poke at this until one of you brings it to me.
And when one of you brings it to me, I'm here.
I love you. I love him. That's the whole entire scope of my involvement until either of you gives me more, and I'm telling you now so you know exactly what the room looks like. "
The onion sizzled. She added garlic. The smell went up into the air.