Chapter 32
CARTER
We lost in the second round, at home, in six.
Here’s what nobody tells you about an elimination game: you can feel it coming.
Not the result — the ending. Somewhere around the middle of the third period, when you’re down one and the clock has started moving faster than it has any right to, the building changes.
The crowd is still screaming, but the sound gets thinner, higher, like everyone in it is holding something up with their bare hands.
We were the better team for about forty minutes of that game. We just weren’t the better team for sixty.
They were faster than us. Deeper. Getting more out of their goaltender than a goaltender that age has any business giving, and after we split the first four they took Game 5 on the road and we came home needing to win or be done.
I played the best hockey of my season that night.
I want that on the record, not because it saved anything — it didn’t — but because there was a version of me that would have needed it to be the other way around.
There’s a certain comfort in playing badly on the night you lose. It gives you something to hold.
I didn’t get that. I got two assists and a goal in the second period on the Flip, tight quarters, right side of the net, the exact move Mark Ewing taught a scrawny fourteen-year-old in a cold rink in Ames, and when it went in the building came up off its feet in one motion and I skated back to the bench with my ears ringing.
And it wasn’t enough. That happens. That’s the whole brutal arithmetic of the sport — you can be good and lose anyway.
With just over a minute left they got a bounce off a skate in front and put it away, and the noise went out of that building all at once, the way air goes out of a room.
Ty put his head down on the boards. Liam stared straight ahead at nothing.
Cole leaned back and stared up at the rafters, jaw working, not saying a word.
The horn sounded. Their bench emptied onto our ice.
Here is the part I would not have been able to do a year ago.
I stood at our blue line while they piled on each other forty feet away, and I took my helmet off, and I made myself stay in it. Feel it. The whole ugly weight of a season ending, no shortcut, no cold place to go and stand where it couldn’t reach me.
Name it, don’t aim it. Sloane’s voice, in a hockey rink, in the worst minute of my professional year. I was going to have to tell her about that.
I tapped my stick on the ice for the fans still standing. Then I got in the handshake line, which is the strangest and best thing our sport does — you spend two weeks trying to end each other and then you skate through single file and shake every hand and mean every one of them.
I told their captain he’d earned it. I told their kid defenseman, who was maybe twenty and had made my life miserable for six games, that he was going to be a problem for a long time.
I tapped my goalie on the head twice, because he’d kept us in three of those games and would spend the summer thinking about the two he didn’t.
Then I was the last one on the ice, the way the old guys always are.
And I stopped just before the tunnel.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire distance between the man I’d been in October and the man standing on that ice in his own building with his season in pieces.
I looked up.
They were all still there. Every one of them, in that loud collected section — Jess, and Justin in his jersey standing on his seat, and Mark and Barbara, and Jess’s parents who had driven four hours from Kansas City to watch a team they didn’t follow lose a game they didn’t understand, all of them still on their feet in a building that was emptying out around them.
Nobody had gone anywhere.
I lifted my stick. Barely. Just for them.
Then I went up the tunnel, and I did not feel like a man who had lost something. I felt grateful — which is a strange thing to feel walking off the ice at the end of your season, and I felt it anyway, all the way to my chest.
I was quiet coming out to them afterward. That’s allowed. A guy is permitted to be quiet after an elimination game without anybody treating it as a symptom, and one of the mercies of Jess Calloway is that she knows the difference.
She didn’t ask if I was okay. Not there, not in a hallway full of other guys’ families with equipment bags everywhere and somebody’s toddler screaming about a pretzel. She just put her hand flat on my chest and looked up at me.
“Hey,” she said.
I covered her hand with mine. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“That was a hell of a goal.”
“Didn’t matter.”
“It mattered to me. And it mattered to Justin. He’s going to talk about it for a year.”
And here’s the thing — the old machinery didn’t fire. I kept waiting for it. The cold, the clean, the see, this is why you don’t want things. It just wasn’t there. What was there was a tired man in a hallway who’d wanted to win and hadn’t, with his girlfriend’s hand on his chest.
I put my hand over hers. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he will.”
Justin had been vibrating with the need to be acknowledged for approximately ninety seconds, which for him is a geological era.
“CARTER. Your goal. YOUR GOAL. You went — and then you FLIPPED it —”
“You saw that, huh.”
“It was the BEST ONE.”
“Best one of the night,” I said, and hauled him up into my arms, too big for it and not caring, and felt the last of it let go, because it is genuinely difficult to stay inside the darkness of an elimination when a first-grader is performing your goal back at you with his entire body.
Over his head, Mark caught my eye and nodded once.
He’d seen me raise my stick to the stands.
Of course he had. Mark had been coming to my games since I was fourteen, and in all that time he’d only ever seen me point that salute at one section — his.
Him and Barbara, the two seats they drove down for.
Everywhere else I looked up into a building full of strangers and found nobody who was there for me, because I’d never given anybody a reason to be.
Tonight the section was full. And he’d watched me raise my stick to all of it. That was the whole conversation, and neither of us said a word of it out loud.
The night took a while to end.
The parents said their goodnights. Barbara hugged me hard enough to bruise something. Mark held onto me an extra second in the parking garage and said, quietly, you looked up, son, and then didn’t say anything else, because he didn’t have to.
We got Justin home — wired, exhausted, narrating the goal to the ceiling long after the lights were out.
And then, much later, Jess and I sat on her back steps in the spring dark.
I had a beer I wasn’t really drinking. She had her head on my shoulder.
“You okay?” she asked. Now. When we were alone and it was allowed.
I turned the bottle around in my hands.
“You know what’s strange?” I said. “I’ve lost before.
A lot. I lost in the second round three years ago and I remember exactly what I did after.
I went back to my apartment. Alone. I sat in the dark with the TV off and I told myself it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, because that was easier than —”
I stopped. The next part was harder to say than I expected, and I made myself say it anyway.
“— than admitting I’d wanted it and didn’t get it. Wanting things and not getting them was the whole thing I’d built my life around never having to do.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight I lost,” I said, “and I skated off, and I looked up, and you were all still there.”
And saying it out loud was what did it. The whole thing came together for me right there on those steps, all at once.
“Winning was always the whole point. That’s the thing nobody tells you about being wired the way I’m wired — a loss like tonight should’ve leveled me, and every other year of my life it would have, because I had nothing to set against it. You lose, and there’s nothing there to catch you.
“And tonight I lost, and it stung, and then I climbed up that tunnel and there you all were, and it just — didn’t break me.”
“It didn’t,” she agreed.
“No. And I want to know why.” I took a breath. “I’ve got Sloane on Thursday. Not because I’m wrecked — I’m not. Because I finally figured out there’s a whole lot more to my life than a hockey game, and I want to make sure I never forget it again.”
Jess turned her face into my shoulder.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I’m proud of you. And not for the goal.”
I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and didn’t answer, because there wasn’t anything to say that would have been better than sitting there. I just breathed out, long and slow, and let the last of the day go with it.
The season was over.
Everything that actually mattered was exactly where I’d left it.
Three weeks later, I put on a tux and stood up as Liam’s best man.
Here is a thing nobody tells you about the job: you spend the whole ceremony standing three feet from the happiest moment of somebody else’s life, with nothing to do but watch it. It works on you. It gets in.
We stood up at the front of the Jewel Box in Forest Park on a warm Saturday evening in June — Liam and me in matching black suits under fifty feet of glass, the last of the day’s sun pouring through the conservatory walls and turning all that greenery gold around us.
There was a third spot up there, too, at Liam’s other side. Finn’s.
He’d asked for it himself. That was the part that got Liam. Anne had offered him a seat in the front row next to his grandmother, somewhere he could fidget in peace once his ring-bearer duties were done — and Finn had said no. He wanted to stand up front with his dad. For the whole thing.
Liam told me about it in the locker room the next morning and then had to stop and look at the ceiling for a second before he could finish the sentence.
So that was the arrangement: two grown men in black suits, and a spot held open beside them for a boy in a little suit and a white shirt and a real tie his father had knotted for him that morning in the mirror.