Chapter 18 Lundy
Marchetti's knee has been going since the bus, and Zay keeps dropping a hand on it to stop it, and every time the hand comes back the knee starts again. The two of them have been holding an entire conversation for forty minutes and neither one has opened his mouth. I lean toward Jules's stall.
"Zay's got a hand on Marchetti's knee."
"He's had it there since we got off the bus.
" He doesn't look up from the pattern. Thumb to index, middle, ring, pinky, back.
Steady today, not fast, which is the first read I take before a game and the only one I need.
"He's reset it nine times. Marchetti thinks he's being subtle about the knee.
Zay thinks he's being subtle about the hand. Neither of them's said a word."
"Did they really think they could hide it."
"They're not hiding it. They don't know it's a thing yet. There's a difference."
"Yeah," I say. "There's."
The room is loud the way our room gets loud before a game in a barn that hates us, everybody a degree too awake. Berger's the exception, folded into his stall with his headphones on since we walked in.
"Berger's quiet," I say.
"Berger's been quiet since Tampa. Not his voice. The volume's the same. It's what's under the volume that changed."
"He moved a thing from one place and set it down somewhere else."
"That's the read. I don't have the data yet. Give it a week."
"Look at us. Running the whole room."
"You run the room. I run you."
His skate guards are a half-inch off the line he keeps them on.
I nudge them square with the side of my foot on the way past, and he doesn't see me do it.
That's the whole point. The noise through the wall is its own animal in this place.
Montreal arrives loud and gets louder, and you feel it in the floor before you hear it in the air.
"Your mother's in one-twelve," I say.
"Section one-twelve, row four. Same seats since Matty got traded here. My father's on the aisle because he can't sit a full period without getting up. Etienne flew in this morning and went somewhere he didn't tell anybody so a camera couldn't find him." The hands keep moving while he talks.
"She cooking?"
"Tourtière. There's a container in the fridge at the house with my name on it for whichever night I get a free hour. She started Tuesday. The series wasn't even set."
"You could see them after. I'd cover for you."
"I know you would. That's not the hard part."
"What's the hard part."
"Being in that house and having everyone watch me be fine." He caps it there, the way he caps things that mean more than the words. "I'm better at fine when nobody's grading it."
"You're allowed to not be fine in front of me."
"I know. You're the room where I don't have to be."
My phone buzzes in my stall. I flip it over expecting the group thread, but it's my father. Unusual enough that I read it twice.
Watch your five-hole on the cycle entries. They run it off the far dot. Don't cheat the post.
No sign-off. No good luck. Just the note, clean and specific, as he's sent them since I was fourteen and he was coaching peewee in St. Louis and couldn't stop himself from fixing my game from across the rink.
Karl Lundmark. He broke down three NHL goaltenders in the '90s and built the systems that did it.
Then retired and coached the next wave of guys who'd do the same thing.
He's never once in my life watched me play without sending a note after.
Always after the whistle. Because before would be coaching against his own kid, and that crossed a line he drew the day I was drafted.
Except tonight it came before.
I look at the text again. He knows their cycle entries because his team runs the same scheme.
He isn't coaching Montreal. But if we get through this series, he's standing behind the bench on the other side of the Final, and he sent me a scouting note on the team I'm about to play.
In two weeks he will be the one I'm playing against. He won't send the note then.
I know that the way I know every line he's ever drawn.
The steadiness of his hand while he drew them is the first thing I learned about what it costs to love someone and compete against them at the same time.
His phone has been lighting the edge of the bench since warmups. Face-down. A steady pulse against the wood.
"Matty texted you?"
"Eleven times. He wants to put me through the glass on my own home ice and have my mother watch. He says it'll be character-building."
"That's a brother."
"That's Matty. He'll mean it for sixty minutes, and then he'll find me at center ice and ask if I'm sleeping enough."
Then it's the twenty-two minutes. The low beat in my ears and everything else falling off the edges.
I don't know why twenty-two. I stopped asking a long time ago.
The building shakes through the wall and inside the count it doesn't reach me.
Up in one-twelve there's a woman who taught her son to set the table right before anyone had a name for why he needed it, and tonight her two boys are on opposite benches in the wrong sweaters.
I hold that. Then I let it go. The count doesn't have room for it.
On the ice it's a different gear and I find it the second my skates hit the sheet. The barn comes down on us in the first shift and stays. Their top line cycles low and I read the half-wall how I read a room. Their winger cuts from the left circle. I have his hands before he uses them.
"Glove side," I tell him through the cage. "You go glove side every time you cut from there. Show me different."
He goes glove side. Quessa takes the rest off the post and I smother the rebound and he skates away telling the linesman something that isn't true.
The crowd wants Matty every shift and he gives them their money.
He's bigger than the tape says, and he plays the front of my net like he's looking for an address, bumps me after the whistle, a question more than a hit.
I hold my ground. Say nothing. The answer he wants isn't one I'm giving him in front of nineteen thousand people.
"Gertie. Thank you," I tell the left post after she eats a one-timer that had eyes.
I mean it. Somewhere along the way, I stopped saying it because he asked me to and started saying it because I believe it.
"I've got the back door, you're good, you're good," I tell Davis, and he trusts it and steps up and we kill the look.
"See it. See it. There." Between shifts I find Jules on the bench.
Helmet off. Gone still in a register I've only seen twice, the stillness that isn't calm, where everything in him points at one place and nothing moves.
He's watching his brother. His hands are flat on his thighs and not running the pattern. That's worse than fast.
"Quessa, this one's low," I say, and she's, and it isn't, and we move on.
We score on a broken play late and the air goes out of the place through everyone's teeth at once.
We hold the lead the way you hold a lead in a barn that wants you dead, with your back teeth and your blocker.
The horn is the sweetest sound a road team owns.
Down the line Matty finds Jules at center ice and says a few words, fast and low, mouthguard out.
Jules answers. It doesn't land soft on either of them.
Then we're into the cinderblock quiet and the door closes on Montreal.
?
The room empties by degrees until it's the two of us and the hum of the lights. Jules drops onto the bench beside me. Gear half off. Color back in his face now that the building's behind a door.
"We stole that one," he says.
"We held that one. There's a difference."
"You held that one. I sat on a bench and watched my brother try to relocate your spleen."
"He was being polite. For Matty."
"For Matty, that was a love letter."
I'm peeling tape off my wrist and my hands won't quite settle.
That's when I see my stall. The heat pad is already plugged in, warming on the shelf where I keep my neck guard.
The ice pack is in a towel, rolled tight, sitting next to my water bottle at the angle I drink from.
My shower kit is unzipped and turned to face me so I can reach the soap without bending. All of it done while I was on the ice.
All of it right.
Jules doesn't look at the stall when I look at it. He's already up and moving for the trainer's room.
"I'll grab the wrap for that wrist. And the heat's on for the shoulder. You've been rolling the right one since the second."
He would, too. He'd have it wrapped right and the pad adjusted before I finished arguing, and I'd let him, as the whole season has been him learning the shape of taking care of me and me handing him the next thing to fix.
He set up my stall the way I'd set it up myself.
Every piece exactly placed. I notice it how I notice everything, from a small distance.
Like it's somebody else's data. The thing I can't stop calculating is he did it without asking.
The same way I straightened his skate guards without him seeing.
The same instinct. Quiet management dressed up as love, or love dressed up as management.
I've been on both sides of that math. I can't tell you from here which one this is.
"Don't," I say instead.
He stops. "Don't what."
"Don't get the wrap." My voice does a thing I don't recognize on the back half of it. I push my hair off my face and make my hand go still after, flat on my knee, how his go flat when the pattern stops. "Sit down. Come here."
He comes. He sits. The whole of him turned to me, that attention he gives three people in the world. I have it, and I'm about to ask for a thing I've never once asked anyone for. It won't come up clean.
"I want you to." It dies there. I find the next piece and hold it to the light before I let it out. "All night I had the net. All season I've had it handled. Yours, the team's, mine. I'm good at it."
"You're the best I've seen at it," he says. Quiet. Not a deflection. He's giving me room.
"It's the one thing I know how to be." The last piece costs the most. "I don't want to be it tonight. I want to be the one you take care of. I'm asking you to."
He doesn't make it a moment. That's the mercy in him nobody else gets to know about. He reaches over and takes my hand off my knee and turns it palm-up in both of his, those long careful fingers that catalog everything.
"Okay," he says. "Lie back."
I do. I let the biggest, most useful body in the room go heavy on a training table in a building that wants us gone, and I let him have it. He starts at the wrist, the heel of his thumb pressing slow and exact into the joint, reading me for a weakness to protect instead of one to exploit.
"You caught the one in the first with your elbow tucked," he says. "That's new. You've dropped that elbow all series. Tonight you tucked it."
"You watched my elbow."
"I watch all of you. The elbow's part of you." He moves to the shoulder I've been favoring and finds the knot on the first try. "The winger telegraphs with his top hand. You had him before he crossed the blue line."
"I told him so."
"I heard you. The whole building heard you. He's going to lie awake wondering how you knew." His thumb works the knot and I make a sound I don't mean to. He doesn't tease me for it. "Your glove dropped twice in the third. You were tired. Nobody scored on it because nobody else saw it."
"You saw it."
"I always see it." He says it into my shoulder, hands not stopping. "You square to the shooter a half-beat before anyone in the league. It's why you look bored out there. You're already where the puck's going."
"Bored is the goal."
"I know it's. I've watched you do it four hundred times. Breathe. I've got it."
He gets the ice without me telling him which drawer, because of course he knew which drawer, and works it down over the wrist. His hands move to the straps of my gear and start in on those too, loosening what's still on me.
"Your left pad strap's been loose two games. You keep cinching it in the second. I'll fix it before Thursday."
"It can wait."
"It's not going to wait. Tais-toi and let me." He says it without any heat, the French slipping out as it does when he stops minding the gate. He goes back to my shoulder.
"Tell me where it's bad."
"Everywhere. Nowhere. I don't have a word for it."
"Then don't use one. I'll find it."
And he does, how he finds everything, moving over me with that total attention turned all the way down to warm, no part of him rushing, until I'm loose under his hands in a road room and I've forgotten I have a wrist.
"You don't have to fix me," I tell him. "That's my line."
"I'm not fixing you. There's nothing wrong with you. I'm just here."
"Say that again."
"There's nothing wrong with you. I'm just here."
His phone lights on the bench. His mother and his brothers stacking up in a language I don't read.
The seating chart and the tourtiere and the house forty minutes away that built itself around him before anyone had the word.
His mother keeps an invisible list. Etienne translates love into spreadsheets.
Numbers are the only dialect the two of them have ever shared.
A thousand miles south a feral gray cat is sitting in a window because Thompson has a diagram, waiting for the man who wrote out which corner the litter box has to face.
He had all of this before me. The family and the order and the cat and the tank glowing in the dark of an apartment I'm not in.
A whole world that runs without my hands in it, that ran fine for twenty-four years before I ever nudged a skate guard square with my foot.
His thumb finds the last knot under my shoulder blade. I go loose under it. He stays and works it and takes care of me as I asked him to. He told me there's nothing wrong with me and that he's just here. I believe him. It lands clean.
And then I look past his shoulder at the stall he set up while I was on the ice, every piece in its place, and I think about my father's text sitting deleted in my phone, the scouting note he sent before the whistle for the first time in my life because the math is changing.
The next series is the one where love and competition stop being two different rooms and become the same ice.
Jules did the same math tonight. He saw what I'd need and built it before I asked.
I'm lying here held exactly the way I wanted to be held.
The question I can't put down isn't whether he loves me.
The question is whether I'll ever learn the difference between someone building a place for me to land and someone deciding where I go.
The heat pad clicks off on its timer. The room hums. I stay where he put me, and I let it be enough for tonight, because tomorrow the series comes back and the doubt will still be there. I'll carry it the way I carry everything. Quietly, with both hands, where nobody has to see.