Chapter 3 Soucy
The home ice is built right, which is the first thing my body registers and the last thing it will thank me for. Because a room built right is a room you stop noticing, and not noticing is the whole luxury of it.
My stall is mine. The geometry holds.
Eighteen thousand people are above us tonight wanting the opposite of what Tampa's barn wanted.
The noise comes down through the ceiling as a pressure I can lean into instead of brace against. We split the two in their building.
We had no business stealing the one we did. Now we're home and the room knows it.
"You see the panel walked it back?" Thompson drops his bag. "Two games in, and now we're 'a problem.'"
Marchetti, from the trainer's table in the corner, holds his wrist up. "I'm a problem with a sore wrist."
"You're a problem with a wrist that's getting taped whether it needs it or not," Thompson says. Brooks, taping, doesn't look up. That's when Lundy says it from two stalls down, low, just for us.
"Brooks and Marchetti."
"Marchetti didn't ask," I tell him. "Brooks had the tape out and the table cleared before Marchetti walked over. He just had it ready."
"Three seconds," Lundy says.
"What?"
"His hand. After the tape was done. Brooks left it on the wrist three full seconds after the job was finished. Professional touch is one second. Friendly's two."
"Three's a data point."
"Three's a data point." He nods in agreement.
"And look at the table." I tip my chin at it.
"He pre-cuts the tape. Tears the strips before Marchetti's even sat down and lays them along the edge so he's not fumbling for them with a wrist in his hand.
He set the whole thing up before Marchetti walked in the room.
You don't do that for a guy you're just processing.
You do that for a guy you've already built a system around. "
"A system."
"That's most of what caring is on a team.
A system you build quiet enough that it reads as efficiency, so nobody has to say the other word for it.
" I tape my own cuff. "Brooks's been doing it so long he doesn't know he's doing it.
And Marchetti's been getting it so long he thinks it's just how the world treats him. "
"Huh," Lundy says.
"What."
The pen stops. Lundy is quiet a second. "Maybe he likes not knowing," he says. "Maybe it's easier to take if you get to call it a wrist."
"Maybe." I don't look up. "It's still a wrist that doesn't need taping."
"It's still a wrist that doesn't need taping," he agrees, and goes back to the puzzle. Across the room Brooks is already onto the next guy and Marchetti is flexing a wrist that was never the point. The whole thing closes over itself like water. We let it.
That's a thing I haven't done before. Let something close with someone already in it, already reading the same shape.
He saw Brooks's three seconds the same time I did.
Most people on this team need the thing pointed out.
He was already there. A man who handles the quiet the way I handle the count, by being inside it before anyone notices he arrived.
I don't look at what it costs me to notice.
***
The game is the kind we didn't used to be allowed to imagine. We score early, then again, and the building gets louder with each one. Lundy stands at the far end making the hard saves look easy.
By the middle of the second it's four to one and the Tampa bench looks like men doing math they don't enjoy.
Thompson drops next to me at a TV timeout, breathing hard. "You see Berger's face? He's drafting the parade route."
"There's no parade for round one."
"Try telling Berger. He's got us a six-eight problem and rising." He grabs the water bottle and drinks. "You nervous? Coach gives you the third if this holds, you know that."
"I'm not nervous."
"Sure." He bumps his glove against my pad. "Be a little nervous. It means it counts."
Then he's back over the boards, and I run the count and watch my goalie work and feel the score climb in my chest the way the crowd feels it. I'd never say that out loud.
Late in the second it's five to one, and Coach comes down the bench and stops in front of me.
"Third's yours," he says. "Get loose."
"Yeah?"
"Soucy." He waits until I look at him. "It's the playoffs. You earned it. Go have fun."
I stand and start the small private business of getting a body ready to go somewhere it's never been. During intermission, Lundy slides down next to me, eyes on the room and not on me.
"Play the save in front of you," he says.
"That's my line."
"It's a good line." His hand taps my pad once, same as it has a hundred times, and I don't recalibrate around it the way I'd recalibrate around anyone else's hand, because his hand has never once been a thing I needed to manage. "Borrowing it. Go enjoy your barn."
"It's not my barn."
"It is tonight."
The walk to the crease at the top of the third is twelve strides. I take all of them.
I hear the horn, feel the cage of my own mask, and then the blue paint under my skates and the net at my back. The noise drops away. There is only the geometry, and the geometry is the one language I have never had to translate.
Their first rush comes wide, and I'm already at the top of the paint, already square, because the winger drops his shoulder before he cuts, and the shoulder tells me where the puck is going before he knows.
He cuts. I'm there. It hits the pad, and I steer it to the corner.
Davis clears it. The building releases a collective breath I feel in my bones.
"Back door's mine," I tell Davis when he looks back. "You take the strong side, I've got the weak."
"Copy."
It’s not loud in here. That is the part nobody understands.
Out there my brain is a machine that won't stop running.
The room, every object, every angle, the tally that never closes.
In here, it runs the only thing worth running.
The bodies and the lanes and the half-second before the half-second.
Nothing underneath it. No count. No list. Just the puck and where it's going and the plain fact that I will be there when it arrives.
I tap Gertie, then Quessa. They hold the corners they always hold.
A two-on-one comes at me halfway through.
"Take the shooter," I call to my D. "I've got the pass.
" I read the pass before it's a pass, and I stay big and take the post away and dare the shooter to beat me with his hands.
He tries the seam instead. The seam was never open.
"There," I say, to nobody, to the post, to the part of me that already knew. The whistle goes.
Off the next faceoff they win it back to the point and a shot comes through a clean lane and I catch it in the glove and hold it. The building stands. Davis bumps my pads on his way past.
"That looked easy."
"Nothing's easy. It just gets to where it looks that way."
They get one late. Six on five, their goalie pulled in a game already lost, a point shot through a screen I never see clean and a tip off a stick at the edge of the blue paint that beats me low. The light goes on. In here, it doesn't touch me.
I dig the puck out, hand it to the ref, tap the posts, reset my depth, because the next shot is the only shot that exists and the last one is already gone. I told Lundy that and I believe it standing in the paint where believing it's easy.
The horn ends it. Six to two. Twenty minutes, my first in the playoffs, one goal I'd want back and a building on its feet that didn't pay to watch me fail.
The guys pour off the bench. Davis cracks me on the helmet and Marchetti is yelling with his taped wrist in the air.
I let them have it. It's good. I mean it.
I'm halfway up the tunnel, guards on, the roar still going behind me, when the goal starts to play.
The screen I never saw clean. I run it back without deciding to.
The point shot and the bodies in front of it, the tip, the angle I gave up, and the question underneath it that has no good answer because we won by four and it doesn't matter and my brain has never once cared whether a thing matters.
I could have had it if I'd seen the release but I didn't. I need to know whether that was the screen or whether I cheated my depth, and I'm not going to learn it in a tunnel, which means I'll learn it later, on a tablet, alone, for as long as it takes.
Lundy comes up beside me in his own guards. Says nothing. Bumps my shoulder with his. We go in together while the building keeps making its impossible noise.