Chapter 30 Soucy
"Seven across," I say.
"We did a crossword in the car already. You finished it before we hit the connector."
"That was the leftover Tuesday. This is the Wednesday. We're catching up."
"You kept a backlog."
"I have nine days of backlog. Seven across."
He doesn't look at the paper. He never looks at the paper first. "Nautical?"
"It's always nautical on Wednesdays."
"That's not actually true."
"It's true enough. Seven across is 'starboard.'"
"You can't just tell me the answer."
"I can if you're going to take forty-five seconds to get there anyway."
"It could have been something else."
"It was starboard." I set the pen down on the bench between us, the way I've set it down a hundred times. How I didn't set it down for nine days because the paper stayed folded in my bag. Across the room Marchetti pulls a shirt over his head that isn't his shirt. "Marchetti's wearing Zay's shirt."
"He isn't."
"Inside out. But it's Zay's. The collar's stretched how Zay stretches collars."
"How do you know how Zay stretches collars."
"Same way you know everything in this room. I watch. You taught me to watch and now I can't stop. They think nobody sees it."
"Nobody does see it. Except us."
"Except us."
The routine runs forty-five minutes that night.
Not forty-six. Not sixty-one. Forty-five, the number I built in Gwen's office learning where the walls actually are.
The stressor that inflated the count was the carrying, and the carrying is done now.
What brought the number back down isn't the man on the stool.
It's the work I did in that office, week after week, until the floor I stand on became mine and not the disorder's.
The floor and the ceiling met back up at the same wall after a month of the floor sitting alone in the basement, and the meeting happened because I did the work to find it again.
Thompson clocks it from across the room because Thompson clocks everything.
"Forty-five," he says.
"Forty-five."
"On the nose?"
"On the nose."
"That's the first time in a month."
"First time in a month."
"You want me to make it weird and say a whole thing about it?"
"No."
"Cool. I won't. I'm thinking it very loud, though."
Lundy is on the stool at the end of the bench in the goalie room, the braced leg out straight, where he's parked himself every game since the leg went.
Tonight he isn't handing me a scouting report across a cold six feet of floor.
Tonight he's just talking, how he talks.
Easy. The warmth back on top of the economy where it lives.
"Their goalie cheats on the first shot of the power play," he says. "Comes out too far on the first look. You saw it in Game 5."
"I saw it."
"I know you saw it. I'm saying it out loud so it's said. You don't need it."
"I'll take it anyway."
He looks up from the leg. "...yeah?"
"I don't need it. I want it. Give me the rest of what you've got."
Something settles in his face that hasn't been settled in nine days. "Their D changes late when they're tired. Both pairs. Around the twelve-minute mark of every period."
"You told me that nine days ago in a hallway with a brace on your leg."
"I'm telling you again. It lands different today."
"It does."
"One more. Their bottom-six tries to draw you out on the wraparound. They want you cheating to the post. Don't bite. Let the post do its job."
"Quessa can handle a wraparound."
"Quessa's been handling wraparounds all series. I just like saying her name in a sentence where it sounds like a compliment."
Bodie sticks his head in on his way past, looks at me a second too long.
"You good?"
"I'm good."
"You look different tonight. Looser."
"I'm good, Bodie."
"Then go force me a Game 7."
In the tunnel Davis falls in beside me, gloves tucked under one arm, and doesn't say anything for the length of the concrete walkway.
This isn't unusual. Davis doesn't waste words before a game.
What's unusual is that he adjusts his stride to mine instead of the other way around.
The whole team has been adjusting around me for a month.
The careful choreography of twenty-two men pretending they aren't working around the goalie's schedule.
"We're going to get you clean looks tonight," he says, just before the light hits. "Box them out early. Keep the garbage out of your paint."
It is not accommodation. It is a captain telling his goalie he has a defense. I have spent a month noticing the difference between people managing me and people relying on me. This is the second one.
"Appreciate it."
"Don't appreciate it. Just stop the puck." He taps my pad with his stick on the way out. How he taps every goalie. Nothing special. Nothing careful. The nothing-special is the whole point.
I go out for Game 6 and for the first time in my life I take up all the room there is.
That is the thing nobody warned me about freedom.
It would feel like getting bigger. Every other game I have played, the crease was the one place my brain was allowed to be the size it actually is, and the rest of me spent the night trying to cost the team nothing.
To need no accommodation. To take up the least space a goalie can take up and still be standing in the blue paint.
Tonight there is no least space. There is just the puck and me.
All of it pointed in one direction. I do not flinch when three of them crash my crease.
I do not shrink when their best player winds up from the top.
I am not trying to be small enough to survive the night.
I am trying to win it. The cataloguing brain and the still hands and the body that knows where the puck is going before the shooter does.
All of it aimed at the only thing in the world that has ever been simple.
The first period they come hard. How Karl's teams come hard.
I let them, because letting them come is different from bracing for them.
There's a save in the first that I'd not have made in October.
A cross-ice one-timer, their winger teeing it up off a seam.
The old me would have committed early, would have lunged at the threat as you lunge when you're trying to prove you belong, when every save has to be big enough to justify the space you're using.
I don't lunge. I sit in the middle of my net and let the geometry come to me.
The puck hits me square in the chest because I was already there.
No drama. No dive. Just a man standing exactly where he was entitled to stand.
The crowd doesn't even gasp. It's the best save I've made all playoffs and it looks like nothing.
Looking like nothing used to be the whole point.
Tonight it isn't the point at all. It's just true.
In the second they get a power play and their goalie-cheat doesn't save them because we kill it clean.
Davis and Marchetti box out the shooting lanes before the puck can get through.
The kind of defense that doesn't show up on a stat sheet but shows up in the shooter's eyes when he realizes the lane he wanted closed thirty seconds ago.
At the twelve-minute mark both their D-pairs are gassed exactly the way Lundy said on a stool with his leg out straight.
Marchetti reads the tired backcheck before anyone else in the building does.
He cuts across the blue line with his head up and finds the seam their exhausted defenseman left open.
He buries it. Not a beautiful goal. A smart one.
The kind Lundy would have scored if Lundy still had two working legs, and the building comes up out of its seats as a building does when it remembers it's allowed to want something.
I feel them lean on me after that. The whole team putting its weight on the one position it spent a month afraid of.
The weight does not crush me. It holds me up.
I did not know it could do that. I did not know that being leaned on and being managed were two completely different things until the difference was the only thing holding me upright in the crease.
The third is them throwing everything and me giving nothing.
They try the wraparound and I let Quessa do her job.
The puck dies against her. They pull their goalie and put six skaters in my end and the puck is a rumor in a forest of sticks.
I don't need to see it. I feel where it has to be the way I've always felt it.
Tonight there's no part of me arguing that I don't deserve to be the one who feels it.
I cover it. The whistle goes. We're ahead.
There's a minute left. Then there isn't. The horn goes. The building doesn't sit down.
"Three-three," Berger is yelling, hanging off my cage. "You hear me? Three-three. We get a Game 7."
"It means we have to win one more game."
"It means we're alive. Say it. Say we're alive."
"We're alive, Berger."
"Louder."
"We're alive."
"You shut the door. You know that? You shut the door on a Game 6, at home, with the season on it. The quiet guy. Two weeks ago we were burying this team and now we're going to a Game 7."
"It's one more game."
"It's the last game. The whole thing, one game, and we earned the right to play it. Nobody handed us that. You earned it. Let the building say thank you."
Davis finds me in the handshake line and puts his forehead against my cage, the way he does with Lundy, the way I've watched him do with Lundy for two seasons and never expected to be on the receiving end of. "One more," he says. "One more and we get to keep playing."
Marchetti taps my pads on his way past. Thompson gives me the nod, the one that means he clocked the number and the win and is holding both under the same heading. Bodie catches my eye from across the ice and just points at me. Says nothing. It's the loudest thing Bodie has ever said.
The room after isn't the dread lifting as it lifted in Game 5, the desperate gasp of a team that was dead and got one more breath.
It's something else. Something I haven't heard this team make all year.
The sound of a group of people who have stopped asking whether they're allowed to want the whole thing.
They want it. Out loud now. And Lundy crosses to my stall on the crutches.
Slow. The braced leg held off the floor.
He doesn't say anything about the game. The game isn't the thing. The game was never the thing.
"Seven across was starboard," he says.
"I told you it was starboard. In the car. Before you told me it wasn't nautical."
"I know what I told you. I'm telling you now you were right.
It was nautical." He lowers himself onto the bench beside me, careful, the leg straight, his shoulder coming to rest against mine in a room full of people who could all turn around and see it and none of whom would be surprised. "It's always nautical on Wednesdays."
"It's not, actually."
"It's true enough."
?