Chapter 24 Soucy
The car is quiet in a way the car isn't supposed to be quiet.
There's a paper folded in my bag because I folded it and put it there instead of reading him a clue.
That's the system. The system has run every morning for two hundred mornings and it isn't running now, and the not-running of it sits in the footwell the whole drive like a thing I should pick up and can't.
"Light's bad on Tenth," Lundy says.
"It's always bad on Tenth."
"Construction."
"I know about the construction."
The blinker ticks four times and stops. I count the ticks because the ticks are there to be counted, and counting them is better than the alternative, which is the size of the spaces between his sentences.
"Door code changed," he says. "Playoff security. Same as last round plus the year."
"I have it."
That's the carpool. Every line is a fact that needed to move from his head to mine, and not one of them is the thing. The blinker ticks four times coming off the ramp and I've lost count of a thing I wasn't counting.
The goalie room is mine for forty-five minutes, the one structure on this whole team nobody rearranged to be kind to me.
It's the one thing I built. On a morning like this morning I want the thing that's only mine.
I lay the pads out. Left, right. The tape goes on top of the left pad where the tape goes.
I check that it's on top. It's on top. I check again, because the check is the routine and the routine is mine.
Thompson comes in with two coffees and sets one by my left hand, far from the edge.
"Forty-five," he says. Not a question. He knows the number.
"Forty-five."
"You're at what."
"Nine."
He sits. He doesn't talk while I work. That's the entire reason Thompson is one of two people with access to the part of me that lives under the part everyone gets. He learned that the way to be in a room with me is to be in the room and require nothing of it. I'm at nine. I go to ten.
"Lundmark's running their forecheck heavy on the weak side," he says, after a while, which is how Thompson hands me film without asking if I want film. "Berger saw it on the bus."
I give him the read on their forecheck. The overload, the trap, the clean look that isn't clean. He lets me talk because that's what Thompson does.
"That's a lot of words for you."
"You asked."
"I didn't ask anything. I said a sentence."
"You said a sentence at me with your eyebrows doing the thing."
He laughs into the cup, both hands around it, shoulders going. Most people never get to the part where Thompson laughs like that. I'm at fifteen and the count is flowing and the hands are quiet, and the hands going quiet on a day like this isn't nothing.
"Their five-hole guy on the second unit telegraphs. Drops his shoulder before he goes low. You'll see it from the bench before anybody on the ice does, and it won't matter, because you're on the bench."
"I'm aware of where I am."
"I know you are." He turns the cup a quarter turn, sets it down, looks at the wall instead of at me, which is how Thompson asks a real question. "Car was okay this morning?"
"The car is a car. The car has a lot of mornings in it. Some of them are quiet."
"You good?"
"I'm at fifteen. The count's flowing. I'm fine."
"The five-hole guy. You're sure on the shoulder drop."
"I've watched him forty times. He drops it. Every low shot, the shoulder goes first. He can't help it."
"Forty times?"
"You asked if I was sure."
"I asked if you were good. You answered a different question, which is its own answer." He drinks. "Routine running long these days?"
"Forty-five is the floor now. It used to be the floor and the ceiling.
Now it's only the floor. It's the playoffs.
The routine runs longer in the playoffs.
It's not a thing." It's more than I meant to give, and I gave it because it's Thompson, because the brain keeps a short list of rooms where the pressure on the words comes off and his is on it.
"The bass help last night?"
"I didn't go last night."
"That's the part I'm circling, Soucy. You always go. You didn't go last night."
"I didn't feel like the drive."
"Okay. That's a sentence with a floor under it.
" He stands, claps me once on the shoulder, which I allow, because the list of allowed hands is short and he's on it.
"Show Thursday. After the game. The warehouse off Marietta.
You used to bring the after up before I did.
Twenty minutes, then Bodie wants both of you. "
He goes, and he leaves the door propped, because he knows to leave it propped, and the count picks back up at eighteen because a small correct thing lets the queue keep moving.
Lundy's gear comes in on the cart and the room is ours.
Ours has gone strange. He sets up across the six feet of rubber floor we've set up across from each other on for two hundred mornings.
The hand stays on his own gear now. He keeps it there.
The tape on my left pad is on top. Calisse. I press it again. It's on top.
Bodie comes in with the tablet and pulls a stool into the six feet, which is the first time today anyone has been in the six feet.
"Power play," he says, turning the screen so we both have it. "They run the one-three-one and they're patient. Lundy, the seam pass to the bumper is the one that kills us, not the one-timer. They want you cheating to the one-timer."
"I'm not cheating to the one-timer."
"I know. I'm saying it out loud so it's said. Soucy, what do you see."
"The bumper drops to the dot a half-second early when the entry's clean. Same half-second every time. Time it off the strong-side winger. He curls instead of driving, the bumper's already moving, and the pass is coming whether the lane's open or not."
"Say that again to Lundy. Slower."
"He heard it."
"He heard it," Lundy says, not looking up from his blocker. "Winger curls, bumper's already gone. I've got it."
It's the most either of us has said in front of the other since the morning, and it's about a seam pass. Bodie notices nothing because there's nothing to notice except two goalies agreeing. He claps the tablet shut and tells us we look ready and goes.
We lose Game 1 four to one. I watch all of it from the bench, which is the job.
Lundy is good. He isn't the problem. Their second goal goes in off the seam exactly the way I called it, and Lundy is square and ready and the puck finds the only six inches that beat him, because that's what a power play designed by Karl Lundmark does.
"They're not better than us," Berger says next to me, low, in the third, down three. "Lundy's a nine and we lost. We were a two tonight."
"We were a two."
"So tomorrow we're not a two. One game is a bad night with good seats."
"You should write that down."
"Bodie loves me," he says. The horn goes. The building makes the sound a building makes when it gets what it wants.
He drives me home, because his is the car we came in, and there's no version of tonight where I take a different car without it being a sentence one of us would have to say out loud. The blinker ticks four times coming off the ramp.
He puts the car in park outside my building. He doesn't say anything dry. I don't give him anything to catch. I take my bag, the paper still folded in it. I go up.
?
The apartment is quiet and the tank holds its steady seventy-eight degrees and Gaspard lifts his head off the back of the couch and decides I'm worth getting up for. He crosses the room. That's the only thing all day that came toward me without a reason.
The paper is still in my bag. I take it out and unfold it on the counter and look at the grid I never read to him, and the clue for seven across is there. I don't need the answer because the answer was never the point.
I sit on the floor with my back against the cabinet and Gaspard settles across my knees and I replay it.
I said I don't need you to fix me.
I meant stop. Stop arranging every room before I walk into it.
The fear was real. His care carries a shape I know, the same shape my mother's house carries, the shape that says I love you by saying let me do it for you so you never have to find out if you could.
I wasn't wrong to feel it. The pattern was there.
The brain that catalogs forty shoulder-drops is the same brain that catalogs every time someone rearranges a room on my behalf, and that brain was reading a real pattern, not inventing one.
But fear makes the read louder than the room. I heard managing when some of it was just love that hadn't learned my shape yet. And instead of saying this is the part that scares me, I said the cruelest possible version. The one that fit in the smallest sentence and landed in the largest wound.
I don't need you.
He heard it in a dark room where his whole wound lives.
The question of whether anyone has ever wanted him past the usefulness.
I handed him the answer he was most afraid of, and he believed me, because I said it in the voice he trusts.
He left because I told him the kindest thing he could do was disappear.
Giving people what they need is the only language he speaks.
I was the one who told him what I needed was his absence.
The fear was mine. The cruelty was mine.
Gaspard shifts his weight against my knee and the grid sits on the counter above me with its empty squares.
I think about every room Lundy walked into early.
Every meal that appeared without my asking.
Every morning he drove because driving was a thing he could give.
I cataloged every one of them, and what the catalog said, underneath, was this costs too much.
I cost too much. The boy who needed the extra time and the adjusted room and the careful quiet grew up, and his mother loved him by making him smaller, and the bill kept growing.
The first person who loved him without making him smaller was still paying.
So I stopped the bill. That's what I did. I looked at a man who was spending himself on me and I said stop, because the old math says the kindest thing the expensive thing can do is take itself off the shelf.
The math is wrong. I know the math is wrong the way I know the tape is on top of the pad after I've checked it twice, which is to say I know it and the knowing doesn't stop the checking.
But this isn't the checking. The checking is the count, forty-five minutes, the routine climbing under stress because that's what the disorder does with a real stressor.
This is older. This is the belief under the belief.
I'll always cost more than I'm worth. Love is a ledger.
The balance was always going to come due.
He didn't leave because I was too expensive. He left because I told him to.
The fear was mine. The cruelty was mine. The wound I gave him is the one I was trying to protect him from, which is the kind of arithmetic that doesn't fit in a crossword grid.
Gaspard pushes his head into my hand. The count is at forty-seven and climbing and I let it climb.