Chapter 15
Chip
The next time I visited Dane, his apartment was all wrong.
Not badly wrong. The chair by the window had been moved flush against the wall, and the TV stand was blocking half the corridor to the bedroom.
I know the things were moved for Dane so he’d have a clearer view of the TV, although my research said he maybe shouldn’t be watching TV, but that was another issue altogether.
I closed the front door behind me, stood just inside, and registered the changes.
Sable pressed into my left leg. She had been pressing since the parking lot, which meant she’d been reading something I hadn’t been tracking consciously. The fact that she was right about it made it worse.
“Hey.” Dane was on the couch, legs up, lamp on. “How was practice?”
Practice had been fine. But before practice there’d been a media availability that ran long.
Before that, a text from Matt with a number in it about Lena’s follow-up, which I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.
Before that, a road trip home from Hartford that took longer than projected because of weather conditions.
These were individually manageable things.
I had managed them but now I was overstimulated and antsy.
I put my bag down. The chair was wrong. The TV cabinet was wrong.
I sat down on the floor in the hallway.
Sable circled once and lay down against my side. I put my hand on her and felt her breathe. There was nothing forming, word-wise. Not blocked. Just absent. When I tried to locate them, they weren’t there.
I heard Dane get up off the couch. The slow, careful movements he was still making while his head healed. He came to the hallway, and I felt him look at me, but he didn’t say anything.
He sat down on the floor next to me, back against the wall, close but not touching.
He had his water glass from the coffee table, and he set it down between us.
He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle.
He didn’t ask what was wrong or say things were okay because, in my head, things were not okay at all.
He didn’t fill the silence. He just sat in it with me, breathed normally, and didn’t move.
After a while, Sable shifted and put her chin on Dane’s knee. He set his hand on her head and left it there.
I don’t know how long we sat on the floor. Long enough for the chair to be in the wrong position and the cabinet to be shifted too far over to stop registering as a threat.
“The chair and the cabinet,” I said.
“Courtney moved them. I’ll put them back tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I breathed out. “I don’t always know when it’s coming,” I said.
“I know.”
“Usually Sable gets there first.”
He smiled at me. “Actually, she was on it in the parking lot,” he said. “I saw it on the camera.”
“You have a camera?”
“Yeah.”
He’d looked at the security feed, seen her alerting, and said nothing and done nothing except sit down on the floor next to me. First he’d read the situation and second he hadn’t immediately asked me what was wrong.
“You didn’t come to the door,” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve done some reading on things,” he said, then nudged my arm with his. “Felt like me being at the door might be one more thing.”
It would have been. He was right. “Thank you,” I said.
“Anytime.” He picked up his water glass and set it down again. “Couch?”
I considered the couch. The chair was still wrong. But the couch was where it always was.
“Couch,” I said.
He got up slowly and offered me his hand. I took it. We went to the couch, and he put his arm around me, and I leaned into his side, and Sable rearranged herself across our feet.
The TV stand was still in the wrong place.
But I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt, and breathed, and the knots unraveled one by one.
Before I headed into the locker rooms, I went to check on my skates and found Kyle in the skate-sharpening bay, his back to me, ear defenders on, running a pair of skates over the wheel.
When he’d finished a skate, and the machine was momentarily silent, I knocked on the door frame, then moved where he’d be able to see me.
He turned, pulled his ear defender off. "Hey Chip! Your skates are next; I was actually just thinking about you. Your edges were off last week, not by much, but I could tell, so I adjusted the hollow a fraction, and I want to see how that feels for you after Thursday."
"I could feel it in the second period."
"Right? I knew it." He turned back to the wheel, pleased with himself. "I've got you on the chart now. I'll check them every game."
"You do a really good job with my skates."
He looked back at me over his shoulder. "Yeah?"
"Yes."
"Thanks." He set the skate on the rack and picked up the next one.
"I know I’m only part-time, but I really love it here, honestly.
My dad's been showing me stuff, and I've been watching videos online and it just—it clicks.
Like I actually get it. I didn't think I'd be good at anything like this, but apparently I have very steady hands. " He held one up as evidence.
"That's useful."
"Super useful." He grinned. "Okay, so Thursday, are you on the—"
Cap came through the door. He was looking at something on his clipboard, and he went to the rack on the back wall where they kept spare stick tape and equipment, unhooking a roll without breaking stride. He glanced up and registered Kyle.
"Kyle."
Kyle's hands didn't stop moving, but something in them changed. "Mr. Hannan."
“Please call me Walker, or Cap.”
“Sure. Sorry.”
Cap held his look for a moment, nodded once, and left.
Kyle turned back to the wheel. The easy set of his shoulders was gone.
He worked in silence, precise, careful, and very focused on the skate.
I knew what had happened between Kyle and Cap—that Cap had hit Kyle because Kyle had tried to steal from him, but Kyle was okay, and Cap was okay, so I’d filed the information away as not important.
Cap said the two of them had fixed things up, but Kyle clearly hadn’t gotten that message. I wish I knew what to say to Kyle or knew whether it was even my place to reassure him that Cap was a good man. It might help if I came out and just said it.
“Cap’s a good man,” I said.
Kyle threw me a smile. “I know.”
“You should call him Cap. He’d like that.”
Kyle frowned. “I will,” then he pulled his ear defenders back on. "They’ll be ready in fifteen minutes," he said, and I knew that meant we were done talking.
So, I left.
Social things were so damn complicated sometimes and anyway, tonight was all about our fourth game of the season against the Lehigh Valley Vortex.
I knew where Dane was sitting, because thirty-eight minutes before puck drop, he texted me a photo from his seat with Tim next to him.
I didn’t look up at the section during warm-ups.
I would look once at the start of the second period after I’d stretched at our bench in the first TV timeout, because I had told myself I was allowed exactly one look up at his face during a game, and that was the look.
Until then, he was a known quantity at a known coordinate, and I was at work.
The Vortex put Janne out against me, along with a left-handed defenseman named Pellegrino, who had a slow crossover.
Two shifts in, when he wasn’t busy chirping me, Janne had stepped up at our blue line with bad timing, and Cap had gone around him on the outside without breaking stride.
Three shifts in, Pellegrino was already breathing through his mouth.
Their goalie, Tucker, a rookie call-up—I’d watched two periods of his on tape that morning—kicked out a save off Taft’s shot, and the rebound came out flat to my stick.
Cap had half a second and an open net at the wrong angle.
He shoveled it, and it went in off the post. The horn sounded.
Their bench groaned. My bench knocked gloves on the boards.
Janne was super unhappy, but I didn’t care when he glowered at me.
The Vortex tied it at 14:04 of the first on a power-play one-timer from the left circle.
I watched it develop one full beat ahead of the puck and couldn’t get to it in time because their forward Bernier was already clearing the lane for it, and I was on the wrong side of the slot.
One-one. We took it back at 1:58 of the second with Taft on a wrap-around that shouldn’t have worked.
Tucker had just enough rookie in him not to seal off. Two-one.
I went to the bench, drank water, and this time let myself look up at Dane, who was wearing my jersey tonight and a black wool hat pulled low over the bandage.
He had his left ear turned slightly toward his right shoulder, the position the hospital had told him to favor while the auditory damage healed, so he could hear what Tim was saying.
Tim was wearing a Copperheads hat and holding a Coke.
My boyfriend mentioned that Tim was being friendly and talking at length about his family, so I was starting to like him a bit.
Dane had invited Tim to his mom’s house for Memorial Day if his family still hadn’t worked through their shit—Dane’s words, not mine—so that was in the plans, but that was something else I couldn’t think about when I was playing.
The third period was messy because the Vortex came at us with the desperation that comes when you are losing by one to a team twelve points up on you in the standings.
They pulled the goalie with five minutes left for an extra attacker but put him back in when the Vortex got the puck deep, then pulled him again at three minutes.
I was on the ice for the four-on-five with eighteen seconds left on the clock.
The Vortex cycled it once, and then Janne tried to thread the seam to their off-side winger, but I was already there.
I’d been there since their last cycle when Janne was looking off at the wrong shoulder. I’d read the seam pass on the bench during the previous power-play break and told Cap. He’d said, if you see it, take it.
I saw it. I took it.