Chapter 12 Lundy
Two hours before a game that tilts the whole Boston series, the room is too loud, which is how I know everyone's scared. Quiet rooms are confident rooms. This one's got Baz dealing cards to a game nobody agreed to play.
"It's Pres," Baz announces. "Everybody antes. Tikh, you're in."
"I'm not in."
"You're sitting at the table, that's in. Berger, ante."
"I'm watching tape," Berger says, not watching tape, watching the door. "That call in game four was a hook. I've decided. I've reviewed it in my heart and it was a hook and the league owes me a letter."
"The league isn't writing you a letter about your heart," Thompson says.
"They wrote Marchetti a letter."
"They wrote Marchetti a fine," Marchetti says, taping a stick he already taped. "Different letter. Worse letter."
"Ante or fold, both of you, this is the most boring crime I've ever run." Baz fans his cards at nobody.
"Nobody's playing your game, man." Ash, passing through, ruffling Baz's hair just to watch him hate it.
"Avi's playing. Avi believes in me."
"Avi believes in pregame naps," Avi says, eyes shut, chin on his chest, not opening them. "Wake me for warmups or for love, nothing else."
I do my twenty-two minutes in the back, where the equipment guys stack the spare sticks.
Eyes shut, breathing on a count. It's not calm.
It's manufactured calm, same as every game, the daily work of building what the room thinks I was born holding.
Tikh's the only one who's ever watched me come out of it and known what he was looking at.
"You good," he says now, dropping onto the bench beside me, not really a question, more a check of the gauges.
"I'm good."
"You're always good." He bumps my shoulder. "That's the problem with you. Nobody in here ever knows when you're not. They all think the calm comes free."
"It works for them. They need one guy it's free for."
"Sure." He lets a beat go by. "Just don't forget I can see the meter. One guy should get to."
Soucy comes through for his pads and the room rearranges around him without anybody deciding to.
The corner left open, the bag already off the bench so he doesn't have to ask.
A machine nobody built on purpose. He drops down on my other side to strap in.
Close, our shoulders touching. For a second he leans in, the whole warm line of him against my arm.
Then he straightens. Puts six inches between us like he caught himself. Goes very busy with a buckle that's already done.
"You sleep?" I watched him not answer two texts last night.
"Enough. Gaspard decided three a.m. was social hour. He stood on my face."
"You let a feral cat sleep on your face."
"I let a feral cat do whatever he wants. I'm aware of how that sounds, you don't have to do the eyebrow." The flicker at the corner of his mouth, there and gone, and then the retreat again, the lean-in and the pull-back. "Go do your thing. You've got the game face that isn't a face."
"Stick to your side tonight. Their five hole guy crashes the net late."
"I always stick to my side." He says it light, and it lands heavier than light, or exactly as heavy, and I can't tell which, and that's the whole trouble lately. I read shooters for a living. He's the one read I keep getting half of and never the back half.
Bodie sticks his head in. Finds me. Points two fingers at his own eyes and then at mine, which is the entire pregame speech I get and the only one I want. "You're the best player in this series," he says, flat, like a weather report. "Go be boring."
"That's the plan."
The puck drops and the rest of it goes quiet, finally, the way it only ever does in here.
The crease is the one place my brain stops manufacturing anything.
Eighteen feet of blue paint and a job with edges.
The gear I drop into out here is older and colder than the one the room gets.
It watches a winger's hips instead of his eyes, knows the pass before the passer's committed to it, finds the boredom in a two-on-one and uses it like a tool.
Scared goalies chase the puck. I let it come.
I make the shooter solve me, and most of them solve me wrong.
Boston's top line is fast and they want me moving, want me scrambling post to post so I'm a half beat late on the shot that matters.
So I don't move. I sit in the middle of my net and make the ice in front of me look smaller than it is, and the kid on the half wall waits for the lane and I give him one.
A real one. Top corner glove side, the shot he's been told his whole life to take.
He takes it because of course he does. I'm already there.
On the replay it'll look easy. It looks easy because I sold him that shot three seconds before he knew he wanted it.
"Attaboy." Berger, glove tap on the pads, gone. Nobody talks to me out here and they all know it. Tikh sets up in front and clears a rebound nobody else saw coming, because he's played enough nights behind my eyes to borrow them.
"You see him," Tikh says once, low, skating past in the second, the only sentence anyone hands me all night. The five hole crasher. Soucy's read.
"I see him." I always see him.
It's a war the whole way. One apiece into the third, the building loud enough to feel in the teeth.
They draw a power play with six minutes left and throw the whole roster at me.
I find the puck through traffic, through Baz's skates and a screen the size of a door, and I do the thing the room files under luck.
I'm already there. I was there before the shot left.
The horn that doesn't sound is the best noise in the sport.
Marchetti walks an empty-netter in with a minute left like he's mailing a letter.
Then it's over. The bench comes over the boards and buries me, all that weight and noise, and somewhere in the pile a bare hand finds the back of my neck.
Brief. Fingers only. I know exactly whose it is, because nobody else on this team touches me like they mean only that and nothing they have to.
The room after is the loud I like. The survivor's loud. Bodie banging the door frame with the flat of his hand.
"We go again," he's saying, to all of us, to none of us. "Hear me? We don't get comfortable. We've still got work in front of us. Lundy stole you that one, so the least you owe him is you go win the next without making him do it twice."
"He likes doing it," Thompson calls. "Look at his face. That's his happy."
"That's the same face as his everything," Baz says. "That's the problem with him."
"Funny, Tikh said that exact thing an hour ago," I say, and Tikh, across the room, lifts two fingers without looking up.
"We close this out soon," Berger informs the room, "and the television and I take a break from each other, and everyone wins."
"The television's been carrying you all spring," Thompson says.
"The television has range. You wouldn't understand, you watch with the sound off like a person hiding a body."
Thompson finds me at the towels and doesn't say anything dumb, which from him is a form of respect.
He just looks at me, then looks, on purpose, across the room to where Soucy is half out of his gear telling Marchetti a story with both hands.
Loose and lit, more himself in a room than I've seen him let himself be all year.
Then Thompson looks back at me and raises his eyebrows the exact amount of a man declining to say a sentence.
"Don't," I tell him.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said a paragraph with your face."
"My face is a private matter." He cracks a sunflower seed.
"Nice when a guy finds his feet, though.
Whole different player than the one who showed up at camp flinching at the coffee machine.
Real shame nobody knows what got into him.
" He lets it hang, the Thompson method, the question set out to ripen, and drifts off before I can decide whether to take it.
Here's the thing. The whole room sees it.
Tikh sees it and says nothing useful. Thompson sees it and says everything except the actual word.
Berger, who misses most of what isn't a television, has started leaving the seat next to Soucy open for me on the plane.
They've all done the arithmetic the two of us keep refusing to do out loud, and they're letting us get there at our own speed.
That's the kindest thing this loud stupid family does.
He comes back to my place, because that's a thing that's true now. I make eggs because it's late and there's nothing else. He eats them standing at my counter in my shirt with his hair wet. It's the best part of any day I own. This. The after. The ordinary.
I'd already set his water on the counter before he got out of the shower.
The tall glass, not a mug, because he doesn't like drinking from mugs after games.
I'd moved his phone to the charger by the toaster and put his keys on the hook instead of leaving them in the pile on the table where he always drops them.
None of it a decision, really. Just the way the room should look when he walks into it.
He picks up the glass. Drinks half of it.
His eyes go to the charger, his phone already plugged in, the cord arranged so it doesn't cross the counter.
Then to the hook where his keys are hanging.
He puts the glass down and stands there for a second with his hands flat on the counter.
Very still. The way he gets when he's doing math I'm not part of.
"Thanks," he says, and the word is a beat late.
"For what?"
"The water." He almost says something else. Doesn't.
I shelve it with the half of the read I haven't finished yet and let it go.
"Good game," he says.
"You always say it like a scout filing a report."
"I'm always filing a report on you. It's a documented condition.
" He sets the fork down. Comes around the counter.
Fits himself against me, arms around, face in my neck, the whole weight of him handed over for one long breath, and I get both arms around all of it and hold on.
Here, I think. This. Whatever this is, it's here.
Then he goes still in the wrong way. Steps back. Picks the fork up again like it called his name.
"You do that," I say, before I've decided to say it.
"Do what."
"Come all the way in, and then leave. Lately.
You'll be right here, and then you're checking a buckle that's already buckled.
" I keep it easy, because I'm not asking him to defend it, I'm naming the read I've only got half of.
"If there's a door you're standing in front of, you can open it whenever.
Whatever's behind it. I'm not going anywhere while you figure out the handle. "
"You're not going to push." It's almost a question.
"No."
"People push. They want the thing named so they know where they stand."
"I know where I stand. I'm in my kitchen at midnight making eggs you're not eating. I don't need it named to know that." That gets the smallest sound out of him, almost a laugh and almost not.
"It's nothing bad," he says, after. Which isn't a no and isn't an answer.
"Didn't say it was."
"It's just new. Having a thing I'd hate to do wrong.
" He pushes the eggs around the plate. "Most of what I've got, I already know how to keep from breaking, because I built it small enough that I could.
This one isn't small. I don't have a system for a thing this size yet. Give me a minute with it."
"Take the whole minute. Take a year of minutes.
" And I mean it, and I hook a finger in the hem of my own shirt and pull him back in, and he comes this time, and stays, and I stand in my kitchen at midnight holding the one read I can't finish, deciding to trust that the door swings toward me, because I've built my entire life on being the man who waits where he's needed, and I've never once stopped to ask what's left of me if the waiting turns out to be the only part that was ever really mine.
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