Chapter 27 Lundy
Davis sets a stool down at the end of the bench and shoves it toward my braced leg with his skate.
"Brought you a stool for the leg. Bodie’s orders. He says if you tip over the bench he’s not picking you up."
"Tell Bodie I’ve never tipped over a bench in my life."
"You’re on crutches."
"Different muscle group entirely."
Zay crouches in front of me before the warmup is even over, both thumbs already finding the wrap. "Leg. Let me see it. Don’t argue with me."
"It’s fine, Zay."
"It’s not fine, you can’t walk. Two minutes, I’ll wrap it tighter so you quit standing on it to look taller on the bench."
"I don’t do that."
"You did it twice in the first period. Sit."
I sit. He wraps. It’s the strangest thing in the building, stranger than the score will be.
A man kneeling in front of me with his whole attention on a part of my body I can’t use, fixing a thing I can’t fix myself.
I’ve spent a career on the other side of that crouch.
I don’t have anywhere to put my hands while he works, so I push my hair back.
I push it back again. I find the tape on Davis’s stick where it’s started to fray at the knob and I pick at it until it’s smooth.
Zay finishes and slaps my shin guard twice. "You just fixed his stick while I was fixing your leg."
"It was fraying."
"Everything is always fraying with you. Sit."
The puck drops and they come at Soucy in waves.
It’s exactly what Karl drew up, which I know because I told Soucy the shape of it on the crutches.
Three of them at the top of his crease every shift.
The first one goes in off a screen, the third man at the back post the way I said he would.
Soucy gets a piece. The piece isn’t enough.
I’m on my feet before I clock that I’m on my feet, hand reaching for a strap that’s forty feet away. There’s no strap. I sit back down.
The second one moves him cross-seam and beats him to the room he just left.
The building goes quiet. Our building. The quiet that’s worse than noise.
My hands find the water bottles and line them up by the boards, caps all facing the same way.
Nobody asked for it. Nobody will notice.
That’s the whole point. Down two. I push my hair back. I push it back again.
The horn for the intermission goes with us down three. The room I follow them into on the crutches is a morgue. Heads down. Nobody talking. So I talk. The room has always turned toward me when I talk. Right now it needs somewhere to turn.
"Three’s a number," I tell them. "It’s not the horn."
"It’s three goals, Lundy," Berger says, not looking up.
"It’s three goals now. Boston, we were down on the road and we came home and took the series. Numbers move. Ask Soucy, he’ll give you the exact percentage and ruin your night, but they move."
"I’d us at eleven percent after their second one," Berger says, and now he’s looking up, because numbers are the rope I threw and he grabbed it. "We’re back to twenty-six now. That’s not nothing."
"Twenty-six. Berger’s got us at twenty-six. I’ll take twenty-six. Everybody hear that? Twenty-six."
"It goes to thirty-eight if we score in the first five minutes of the third," Berger says. "The model is very clear about the first five minutes."
"Then score in the first five minutes. You heard the model." Davis lifts his head, and I go to him, because Davis has the read I need. "Their left pair."
"Gassed," he says. "They’ve been out for everything."
"Then go at the left pair. Make them chase. Tikh, you and Baz, next shift, dump it to their tired corner and forecheck like it’s overtime."
"Okay," Tikh says, and that’s all Tikh needs to say.
"Marchetti. You scored once. Do it again. Be annoying. You’re good at it."
"I’m great at it."
"I know you’re." Across the room Avi has his head in his hands and Ash is pretending not to watch him, and they think nobody sees it, and they’ve always thought nobody sees it. "Avi’s rattled. He hasn’t moved a puck clean since their second one."
"He’s fine," Ash says, too fast.
"He’s not fine and you know he’s not. Settle him. That’s you. You’re the one he listens to. Tell him to make the first easy pass and the rest comes back."
"How’d you know he listens to me."
"Everybody knows he listens to you, Ash. It was never a secret."
M?kinen rolls his shoulders the way he does when he’s deciding to hit someone for the good of the group. "You want me to send a message early? Loosen them up?"
"No. No messages. We can’t give them a power play, not tonight. Just play. Hard, clean, fast. Mak, I mean it, gloves stay on."
"Fine."
Marchetti, halfway into his gloves, says it without any heat in it, just true. "You should be telling us this from the net, Lundy."
"Yeah. Well. I’m telling you from here. Same information, worse seat." Bodie hits the door and holds up two fingers, and I get the rest out before they go. "Two minutes. Left pair. Bodies at their goalie. Go."
They go, and I crutch back to my stool at the end of the bench.
Soucy comes through the tunnel ahead of me without slowing.
There’s a version of this intermission where I catch his eye and say one dry thing about the screen and he hands me the number and we set the three goals down together.
I don’t catch his eye. He goes to his net. I go to my stool.
The third period is Soucy holding the line.
They throw everything at him and he does not give.
He is square. He is set. He is exactly where the geometry says, and the pucks that beat anyone else die in his glove or his chest. We claw one back.
Then closer. Within one. It is his game now, the kind he is keeping alive at one end while we try to solve their goalie at the other.
"He’s holding," Davis says next to me on a TV timeout.
"He’s holding."
"They’ve thrown everything at him since the second and we’re within one. That’s him, that’s not us. We handed him a three-goal hole and he climbed out of it so we’d have a game to play."
"So climb the rest of the way. Get him even. He can’t score them too."
"We’re trying."
"I know you’re. Keep going at the left pair. They’re done, they just don’t know it yet."
And somewhere in there my hands go still.
I do not decide it. I am watching him take a slap shot off the chest and freeze it.
The whistle goes. I notice that my hands are folded on my good knee.
They have not stopped all night. They have lined up bottles and picked at tape and pushed my hair back a hundred times.
They have been folded for a while. He does not need me out there.
He has never needed me less than he needs me right now.
He is under more than I have ever had on me.
He is not falling apart. He is the best player on the ice.
The part of me that has spent its whole life believing that the day I stop being useful is the day I stop being wanted is sitting on a stool with its hands quiet, watching him hold a one-goal game together with nothing from me at all.
I do not have a word for what that is. I just stop reaching for the strap.
Marchetti gets robbed on a chance that was in. All the way in. The glove came out of nowhere.
"That was in," Davis says. "That was in and their guy robbed us."
"It was in. Next one doesn’t get robbed. Get another."
We don’t get another. They score into our empty net with the goalie pulled.
The horn goes. We’re down three games to one with the whole season standing on the next one.
Across the glass, in the seats behind their bench, I find my mother.
She’s wearing my jersey tonight. Or his.
I can’t tell from here which number it is, and she isn’t watching the scoreboard.
She’s watching my father. He’s shaking hands with his assistants, the staff that built the machine that just took us apart.
Her face is doing the thing it’s done for thirty years.
Holding two men at once without letting either of them see the cost.
M?kinen taps my shoulder on his way down the tunnel and the hand stays a beat longer than a tap.
Davis, behind him, slows at the door. I wait for myself to say the thing I always say.
I’m fine. Go get some rest. The thing doesn’t come.
The hand lifts. Davis nods once and goes.
The room empties past me. I stay on the stool with my quiet hands.
None of them needed a thing from me tonight. They walked past slowly anyway.
"Lundy." Tikh, last one off, waiting on me the way I’ve waited on him a hundred times. "You good down here? You don’t have to sit the bench. They’d put you up in the room, get the leg up."
"I’m good. I want to see it."
"See what, a loss?"
"I want to see him. Whatever happens out there, I want to see it from here." I get the crutches under me. The leg holds enough. I go down the tunnel after my team with the score against us and the series against us and one small impossible thing loose in my chest that I’m not going to look at directly yet, the way you don’t look directly at a light that’s finally, after a long dark, coming on.
?