Chapter 32 Lundy
"Forty seconds, Soren. Forty seconds." Davis is gripping the boards next to me on the bench. Not looking at the ice. Looking at me, like I'm the one who can do something about it.
"I know."
"He's got it. Look at him. He's got it."
"I know he does."
I have the best seat in the building. I can't use a single thing it shows me.
Their six skaters cycle the puck low and Soucy tracks it through the bodies, square and set, exactly where the geometry says.
There's a part of me that wants to be out there.
A strap to fix. A word to say. There's nothing.
There has been nothing for days. Tonight, for the first time, the nothing doesn't feel like failing.
It feels like front-row seats. The puck comes to the slot off a scramble and their best player one-times it.
The shot that ends seasons, the shot Karl drew up for exactly this moment.
Soucy is already there. He's been already there his whole life.
The puck dies in his glove. The horn goes.
The horn goes.
It is not supposed to happen, is the thing.
An expansion team in its first year. A roster stitched together out of the players nobody else thought worth protecting.
A backup who came here to spend a career behind a starter.
And a Cup. None of it was ever supposed to add up.
A season that was dead on a stool at the end of the bench nine days ago is the last team left standing on the ice, and the horn does not care what was supposed to happen.
The horn just goes and goes and will not stop.
For half a second nobody moves, the way nobody moves at the top of a fall. Then the bench empties over the boards in one body, gloves and sticks in the air. The building comes down. I do not go.
I stay where I am with my hands on the boards. I watch.
I have spent a full season watching this man make himself small.
Watching him angle a chair toward the exits and apologize with his shoulders for the room he was using.
Watching him file himself under the least space a person can take and still be in the world.
Watching the team learn his routine and protect it without being asked.
Every act of that care landing on him as a debt instead of a gift.
And now I watch the whole team bury him.
Twenty bodies folding down onto one goalie at the bottom of a pile at center ice.
He is not bracing. He is not apologizing.
He is somewhere underneath all of them. Taking up every inch of space twenty grown men can pile on top of.
Chosen and wanted and swarmed. I have never in my life seen anything I wanted to keep this badly.
For a full season the most useful thing I knew how to do was make his small-ness survivable.
Move the jacket off his hook. Sit two stalls down and not say anything.
Fix the thing before he noticed it needed fixing.
And there is nothing to fix down there at the bottom of that pile.
There is no small-ness to make survivable.
There is just a man being loved out loud by twenty people at once.
Not one of them needs me to manage it. I get to stand here on a leg that does not work and watch it happen.
I feel only the one clean thing. I am glad.
I get the crutches under me. I go over the boards last, slow, the leg taking what it can, because tonight I do not need to be first. Tonight I get to be the one who watches.
By the time I reach the pile they're peeling off him, hauling him up. His mask is off and his face is doing the thing I've only seen it do twice, and I get a hand on the back of his neck.
"Hey. Hey. I've got you. Come here."
"We won," he says, like he is reading it off a card he does not believe.
"You won. You. Say it the right way. You won it."
"We won it."
"Close enough. I'll take it."
Then the room finds us. The room has always known where to find us. It closes in loud.
Across the ice, Avi has both hands in Ash's hair, pulling him close. Ash's face is buried in Avi's neck. Neither of them is pretending it's about hockey.
Baz has Tikh by the front of his jersey. Holding him steady with both hands. Tikh is the one crying, which I've never seen. The quiet one finally making noise. Baz is just holding him there like an anchor that's been waiting for this current his whole career.
Berger is over at the boards, listening to something Mercer from Miami is saying. For once in his life, Berger is not talking. Not rating anything. Just leaning into him.
Marchetti lifts Zay off his feet with the shoulder that's supposed to be icing, and Zay doesn't tell him to put him down, which is how I know even Zay has run out of rules tonight.
Somewhere in the noise Soucy's hand finds the back of my jersey and holds. Not pulling. Just holding. I let it stay there because his hand on my back in a room this loud is as private as a locked door.
"About time," Thompson says, both arms around the both of us. "Both of you. The whole room had money on it. I held the book."
"I had you two at minus four hundred in October," Berger yells, skating back over to hang off Soucy's shoulder pads. "Nobody took the bet. Nobody bets against a lock."
"Wait, were we not supposed to know?" Fontenot asks, a confused look on his face. "Did we know? I feel like I knew."
"Everybody knew, Fonty."
"Everybody knew."
"Seven games. Seven. I aged a lot tonight, I'm forty now." Berger again, somewhere behind me.
"I scored." M?kinen, holding his own face in both hands. "Did everyone see I scored? In a Game 7. Me, M?kinen."
"We saw it, Maki."
"I'm going to talk about that goal until the day I die."
Tikh gets to me sideways through the noise. Puts his forehead against my shoulder for one second. The most Tikh has ever touched anyone on purpose.
"You good?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah. I know. I'm glad." He pulls back.
"Wait, is that a thing now?" Ash, eyes enormous. "Lundy and Soucy? Are we allowed to say it out loud?"
"It's been a thing since October, baby." Avi, towing him away. "Try to keep up."
"You knew the whole time, didn't you, Thompson. You knew before they did."
"I drove the car. That's all I'll say. Ask me no questions."
"The book club questions make so much sense now." Fontenot, having an entire revelation at once. "Oh my god. The romance novel. That was about a PERSON."
"Read the room faster next time, Fonty."
"Somebody get a camera. Where is the team photographer? This is going on my wall, full wall, floor to ceiling."
"Berger, why is your shirt off? Put your shirt back on."
"It's the Cup. The Cup means shirts off. It's in the bylaws."
"There are no bylaws, you lunatic, it's twelve degrees of air conditioning in here."
"Baz. Baz. We did it. We actually did it." Tikh, louder than I've ever heard him, both hands on Fontenot's face.
"I know. I know. I saw the whole thing." Baz, letting him.
"Everybody in. Group. Goalies in the middle, both goalies, get Lundy in here." Marchetti, herding the room with both arms. "He's on crutches, somebody carry him, I don't care, carry him."
"I'm not getting carried."
"You're getting carried. Maki, grab him. Other side."
"I'm getting carried," I say, because there is no version of this where I'm not.
M?kinen and Davis lock arms under me and lift, the braced leg swinging free.
For the first time in my life I let the room hold me up instead of the other way around, and it turns out the room has been ready to do this whole time. I just never once asked.
The handshake line forms the way it always forms. Both teams filing through the wreckage of their own season and ours. Near the end of it's my father. The building is still shaking and he takes my hand and pulls me in by it the way he has since I was small enough to disappear in his coat.
"Hell of a goalie you've got there, Soren."
"I know."
"I threw everything I had at him. I couldn't crack him."
"Nobody can." I hold his eye here, in the loudest place in the world. The only privacy is that no one can hear us over the noise. "I'm in love with him, Dad."
He looks at me. Thirty years of reading rooms, the same way I read them.
I watch him file it. I know what drawer it goes in.
His son is with a man. He'll hear that and think the simple thing, because the simple thing is the closest shape and the simple thing isn't wrong, it just isn't all of it. There are women he’s known about over the years.
And right now there's Jules. I don't owe this handshake line more taxonomy than that.
I can give him the rest of it over dinner, when there are more than thirty seconds between the worst night of his career and the best of mine.
Tonight the headline is the truth. The truth is enough.
"...yeah?"
"Yeah, Dad."
"Your mother's going to be unbearable about this. She called it in October."
"She calls everything."
"She called this." He pulls me into a hug, a second past where the line keeps moving. "Go. Go get your Cup. We'll talk when it stops hurting, which is going to be a while. I’m proud of you. Love you, kid."
"I love you, Dad."
"Go, Soren. It's yours. Take it."
He lets go of me and turns back to his own bench. The hardest night of his professional life. I watch him go. The two biggest moments of my life just happened in the same handshake.
I told my father I'm in love with a man and he was not surprised. The not-surprised was not performance. It was Karl, who is never surprised. For once that is not the whole problem. For once, it is enough.
They wheel it out under the lights, the oldest thing in the sport. The noise changes shape. Somebody is already arguing about who lifts it first.
"Captain gets it first, that's the rule, somebody tell Davis the rule."
"Forget the rule." Bodie, hoarse, both hands up. "Give it to the goalie. I don't care what the league says. Give it to the kid who stood on his head for this."
"You heard Bodie. Soucy. It's yours. Lift it."
I get it into his hands myself. I want my hands to be the ones. Both of his under it and both of mine under his for the half-second before I let go.
"Both hands. Over your head. Let the whole building see who did this."
"Is he crying? Is Soucy crying? The quiet guy is crying."
"Leave him alone, he earned every tear, let the man cry on the Cup."
He lifts it. The backup who came to this team to cost nothing.
The goalie who spent a season being something the room worked around.
He raises the first Cup this franchise has ever won over his head.
Forty thousand pounds of building can see him.
The building gives him his name back in one voice, over and over, the way you give something to someone who finally has somewhere to put it.
And then he looks for me. The whole place screaming his name.
The oldest trophy in the sport over his head.
His whole team's hands on his back. He does the thing he's done all season without knowing he does it, the scan that ends in one place, except tonight there's no bracing in front of it.
No shoulders going up. No room he has to survive first. He just finds me in the crowd.
The way I've spent a season being the thing his eyes land on.
He holds the Cup an inch higher, at me, for me.
A man who can't read his own story finally getting read his favorite line out of someone else's.
I don't need to go to him. He knows where I am.
He's always known where I am. I stand a step back on a leg that can't carry me another inch.
I let myself not be the one holding anything up.
For once. For one chant. The man I love takes up all the room there is.