Chapter 23 Lundy
Ibuild the calm how I build the twenty-two minutes, one piece at a time, before anyone gets to the room.
I'm in my stall an hour early with the overheads still off and the light coming gray through the tunnel.
I do the breathing my mother taught me before she taught me anything else, and by the time the room fills I'm the man the room expects.
Settled. Easy. The big body at rest in the corner that the rest of them orient toward without deciding to.
Nobody has to know it's assembled. That's the whole point.
Davis drops onto the bench beside me first. "Head's better?"
"Better. Lights are still a lot. Couple more days."
"We need you, man. Soucy's standing on his head, but we need you."
"Soucy's better than anyone gives him credit for. You're in good hands." I say it and I mean it, every word, and meaning it does nothing to the thing underneath the words. "You watching the Finals tape tonight?"
"You're not?"
"Can't do screens yet. You'll have to run it without me."
"We don't run anything without you."
"You ran four games without me. You won them. You're going to be fine." It comes out warm and certain, how I say everything, and inside me it lands as the other thing. They ran four games without me and they won them.
Makinen comes by with a protein shake he sets on the shelf at my elbow without comment, the way I'd do it for him. "How's the head."
"Better. You didn't have to do that, you know. Drop the gloves on him."
"Yeah I did. He put my goalie into a post."
"I'm not even your goalie right now. Soucy is."
"You're both my goalies. He hit one of mine. That's the whole math." He cracks his own shake. "Don't make it a thing."
"Thank you, Makinen."
"I said don't make it a thing."
He goes, and the shake sits at my elbow where he left it, and I understand the team is going to keep doing this.
The small unbidden things. How I've done them all season.
Every one is going to land on me now like a receipt for a debt I can't pay back.
They hold me because I'm theirs. I used to think that was the same as being wanted.
Berger leans across two stalls. "Lundy. Settle it. Was the pregame pasta a seven-nine or an eight-two."
"It was pasta, Berger."
"That's what Soucy always says."
The name goes through the room how it goes through me. No different. To them it's just a name. Just the backup playing like a starter. Just a guy two stalls down. "It was an eight-two," I say. "Tell him I said eight-two." Berger grins and goes off to tell him. I don't watch where he goes.
Fontenot hangs over the back of my stall. "Book club Thursday. You're not getting out of it because you got your bell rung."
"I read the chapters."
"Did you? What happened in chapter nine?"
"The one where he finally says the thing. Out loud." I keep my eyes on my tape. "Before it's too late to say it."
Fontenot is quiet a second longer than Fontenot is ever quiet. "Yeah," he says. "That one." He goes, and I hold the look on his face, set it with everything else, and don't look at it again.
The crossword is on the bench between our two stalls, folded to today's grid, where it lives. It stays folded. I tape my stick and it stays folded and the room moves around it and nobody touches it. I don't touch it. That's all that happens with the crossword.
Tikh sits where Davis was. He doesn't say anything for a while, which is the most Tikh thing he does. "Marchetti and Zay made up, in case you're tracking. Zay brought him coffee this morning."
"I saw."
"You used to save those for someone."
I don't answer that. There's no answer to it that stays inside the calm. I used to narrate the room to one person, the small weather that only the two of us bothered to track. Nowhere to put it now.
"I'm not pushing," Tikh says. He puts his hand on my shoulder for exactly two seconds. Then he's gone. The two seconds sit on my shoulder after his hand is gone.
Thompson catches me by the water station. "You good?"
"Yeah."
He looks at me with the flat read he doesn't usually let me see. "You're not good."
"I'm handling it, Thompson."
"Yeah," he says. "You're real good at that.
" He lets it go, because Thompson knows when a thing won't move.
He built this. The fish food and the book-club nudges.
The step back at the show. He did all of it without a speech and it worked.
Now he gets to watch it stop working. He doesn't say he's sorry.
He just keeps me talking long enough to clock that I've filled the same cup three times and poured none of it out.
Soucy comes to the doorway when the room is half empty. He doesn't come in. He stays in the frame of it. Professional. The distance you'd keep from any teammate.
"Bodie wants the goalie meeting at four."
"I'll be there."
"He wants to talk about the Finals rotation. Whether you're cleared."
That's all of it. He nods and he's gone.
The doorway he stood in stays empty in a way doorways don't usually stay empty.
We had a language, not a figure of speech for one but an actual one, built out of a hundred small rooms and a season of mornings.
We point it at meeting times now. We leave the rest in the case.
Bodie finds me last. "Doc cleared you. You're good for game one. Soucy goes back to the bench."
"He carried us through Montreal. He should keep the net."
"He kept it because you were down. You're not down anymore. You're my one. That's the job."
"He earned the net, Bodie."
"And you own it. Both things are true. Game one's yours." He claps my shoulder where Tikh's hand was. "You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"I didn't ask if Soucy earned it. I asked if you're okay."
"I'm okay, Bodie." He looks at me a beat, the way they all look at me today, and then he goes.
The net I held all season comes back to me the same week he held it best, because I'm the one and that's the job.
The sport is going to walk the two of us back into the same small room.
Him two stalls down. Me in the blue paint.
Close enough to read each other. Far enough that neither of us has to.
One by one they all go. The room empties down to the hum of the lights and the smell of tape and the folded paper on the bench. Then it's only me.
I sit there a minute. I'd told Davis I'd. I take out my phone and hold the voice-note button down for my mother, because a screen for ten seconds won't kill me, and because she built the calm into me in the first place. She's the only person alive who won't make me explain past where I can go.
"Hey, Mom. Yeah, I'm good. Head's coming.
Lights are still a lot but it's coming. We're through.
We're in the Finals, can you believe it.
" I stop. I find the next part, and it costs more than the game cost me.
"Listen. There's been someone. On the team.
For a while now. I think I had it, the whole thing, and I read it wrong somewhere, which I don't do.
I don't read things wrong. But I think I did.
I don't really know how to say it yet. I'll tell you more when I can.
The knee's fine. Tell Dad good luck. I guess we'll see him out there. Love you."
I send it before I can take any of it back, and I sit with the phone in my two hands in the empty room. Her answer comes faster than I expect, her voice small in the quiet.
"Okay, sweetheart. I'm glad you told me even that much. I won't ask. When you're ready, and not before." A pause, the length of a held breath. "We're proud of you, both of us, all the way out here. Get some sleep, and stay out of the light. I love you."
She doesn't ask. She heard the whole of it in the hole between the words. She taught me the calm. She knows it's a thing you build to stand inside when the rest won't hold. I put the phone face-down on the bench beside the crossword nobody finished.
I sit in the dark a while longer with the one thing I'm best at in all the world. Being the steady one nobody has to worry about. The one who's fine. The one who provides. The one you can set down two stalls away and trust to stay exactly where you left him.
I've never in my life felt so much like the furniture.