30. Beau
Beau
Four days.
It’s been four days and I keep reaching for my phone to tell her things.
A dumb billboard on the highway. A thing O’Grady said in the meeting.
My thumb’s already moving before the rest of me catches up and remembers there’s nobody on the other end of it now.
Then I put it down. Then I do it again an hour later. The body’s slow to get the memo.
Here’s the part I keep skating back over.
She stood by the door with her coat already on and she laid it out for me, piece by piece, the way she argues, calm, no gaps. And I had the word. One word. It was right there behind my teeth, the whole short length of it, and all I had to do was open my mouth and set it down in the room.
Stay.
I know how to talk. I talk for a living, basically.
I can stand in a room of forty guys down two in the second and find the one thing that turns it.
I can talk a rookie back from the edge of a bad shift, talk my sisters down off whatever they’re spun up about that week, talk O’Grady into a line change he came in swearing he wouldn’t make.
The words show up when they belong to somebody else.
They line up clean and go where I send them.
That one would not go. I stood there reaching for it and it sat in me like a word on a page that won’t hold still, every letter in it and not one of them in the order that lets me say it out loud.
And while I was reaching, my hand went up instead and found the side of her face, because that I knew how to do without thinking about it.
She didn’t lean into it.
Then she was gone, and the sound was still sitting in my chest where I never got it out, and I have spent four days not understanding how a man can hold a word that small and just—not.
The locker room at Corbin smells the way it always smells. Tape and cold and the spray Wyatt uses on his pads that he swears isn’t scented and is. I’m taping my stick. I’ve taped this stick a thousand times. My hands do it without me, which is good, because the rest of me isn’t really here.
“You eat?” Wyatt’s next to me, already in his gear, voice low.
“Yeah.”
“What’d you eat.”
I try to remember. I can’t. “Stuff,” I say.
He doesn’t push. He just reaches into his bag and sets a banana on the bench next to me like it wandered there on its own, and goes back to his laces. That’s Wyatt. He won’t make you talk. He’ll just keep quietly putting food where you’ll have to look at it.
Across the room Cash is too loud. He’s been too loud for four days. He’s narrating his own warmup, doing a bit about Kingsbury’s goalie, working the room like it’s his job, and it is. Tonight, his job is me, and we both know it and neither of us is going to say it.
Theo says nothing. Theo’s been watching me since Tuesday, the way you watch a guy you think might be concussed. Quiet. Sideways. Counting something.
“You know what we should do,” Cash announces to the room, “is win. Wouldn’t that be something? A win. I’ve heard great things about them.”
“You’ve been saying that since October,” Wyatt says.
“And one day it lands.” Cash drops onto the bench next to Theo. “Kingsbury’s goalie’s got a glove hand like a screen door, by the way. Anybody shoots glove-side tonight, it’s a goal. Write it down.”
“You don’t watch tape,” Theo says.
“I watched some tape.” A second. “I watched a highlight. Counts.”
It’s all bit. He’s filling the air so I don’t have to, and every guy in here knows it, and we let him, because that’s the deal. That’s what a room does for somebody who’s coming apart quiet in the corner.
“Sorensen.” O’Grady, in the doorway, clipboard under his arm. “A word.”
I go. In the hall he looks at me a long second, and O’Grady’s not a soft man, O’Grady’s a man who once made us skate suicides until a freshman threw up because somebody was late, but he looks at me in the hall and something in his face gives.
“Heard you and your girl split,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“You good to play?”
“Always.”
He doesn’t believe me. I can see he doesn’t.
But there are two scouts in the building tonight, one of them flew in from Boston, and Coach isn’t going to bench his captain in a barn full of scouts on a feeling.
“Kingsbury’s chippy,” he says. “Briggs runs around back there, number six, he’ll take a head off if you give him the chance.
Keep your feet. Don’t do anything stupid. ”
“When do I do anything stupid?”
“Tonight,” he says. “I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Keep your feet, Beau.”
I tell him I will. It’s the second lie I tell him in under a minute, and I don’t even clock it as a lie until later, because by then I’ll know I went out there with no intention of keeping anything.
Corbin’s full. It’s always full, but tonight it’s the kind of full where you feel it in the glass, the crowd noise coming up through the boards into your skates.
We line up for the anthem and I look up, out of habit, to the section behind the bench where she used to sit with the girls when she came, which she pretended was for the concessions.
She’s not there. Of course she’s not there.
Mormor is. Three rows back, in the good wool coat, her hands folded in her lap like she’s at church.
Margaret, to everyone in Haven who buys their books off her—Mormor only to the four of us who are hers.
She closed Margaret’s Books an hour early and walked over because she said she had a feeling she ought to see me play, and my mother’s Swedish mother does not explain her feelings, she acts on them and she’s usually right, which is its own kind of terrifying.
She catches my eye and she does not wave.
She just looks at me. She’s been looking at people like that for years and getting the truth out of them.
I look away first.
The puck drops.
The first shift I feel it right away. Not the shoulder — the shoulder’s been bad since October, a dull wrong thing I’ve been managing with ice and ibuprofen and not telling anybody, the same way I don’t tell anybody things.
I mean the other thing. The not-caring. I go into the first corner with Briggs and I don’t chip and chase the safe way, I put my head down and take the hit to make the play, and I make the play, and the bench likes it, and it costs me a shoulder into the boards that lights up all the way down my arm and I don’t care.
That’s the discovery of the night. I genuinely do not care what happens to my body.
It’s the lightest I’ve felt in four days.
“Easy,” Theo says, when I come off. Two syllables. From Theo that’s a speech.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not playing fine. You’re playing like you forgot you have to come back tomorrow.”
“We up or down?”
“Tied.” He looks at me. “Beau.”
“Tied’s not good enough.”
Behind us O’Grady leans over the glass. “Sorensen. Next shift you keep it simple. Chip, chase, change. I catch you putting your head down in that corner one more time, you finish the night in a suit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You hearing me, Captain?”
“Loud and clear, Coach.”
It’s the third lie I tell a man tonight, and it’s the cheapest one yet, because I’m over the boards on the next whistle and the very first thing I do is put my head down in the corner.
Second period we go down one. Kingsbury’s fast and they’re mean and Briggs has decided I’m his project tonight, he’s on me every shift, cross-checks in the numbers, a glove in the face after the whistle.
Normal stuff. The stuff you eat and smile about.
I used to be good at not giving him what he wanted.
Tonight I want it. Tonight I keep going back to the same corner like I’ve got something to prove to a guy named Briggs, and Cash skates by between whistles and grabs my jersey.
“Hey.” Quiet, for Cash. “Hey. Look at me. You’re running hot. He’s baiting you and you’re buying every shift. Take a breath.”
“I’m getting us a goal.”
“You’re gonna get yourself killed is what. Beau—”
The whistle goes. I leave him talking.
Here’s the thing about playing like you don’t care whether you come back tomorrow.
It works, for a while. I get us the goal.
I take a hit I shouldn’t take to spring Wyatt and Wyatt buries it and the barn comes apart and for about nine seconds, mobbed against the glass with my guys, I feel something that isn’t the gray.
Then it goes. It always goes. And I chase the feeling the only way I know how, which is harder, faster, more.
Third period. Two minutes left. Tied again. I’m gassed and I don’t care and there’s a loose puck in the corner, my corner, Briggs’s corner, and I should let it go. Any other night of my life I let it go. The smart play is to let it go.
I go for it.
I get there a half-step before him with my head down and my weight over the puck and I hear Cash yell my name from the bench, one syllable, stretched, the sound a guy makes when he sees the thing before it happens.
Briggs hits me from the side. Clean, almost. Late, a little. Shoulder to shoulder, all of his weight and all of my weight and the boards behind me with no give in them at all.
I’ve been hit ten thousand times. I know the whole catalog of how it feels. This isn’t in the catalog.
Something in the shoulder doesn’t absorb it.
Something lets go. There’s a sound I feel more than hear, deep, wrong, a wet structural give like a chair leg going, and the whole arm turns to a thing that belongs to somebody else, hot and loose and screaming, and I’m down on a knee on the ice with my glove off and I’m not totally sure when that happened.
The whistle. The crowd doing the thing crowds do, the big inhale, the hush.
“Stay down.” Wyatt’s there. He came off the bench, he’s not supposed to, he’s there anyway, on his knees in front of me blocking the cameras with his body. “Stay down, Beau, the trainer’s coming, stay down.”
“I’m good.” I’m already trying to get up. The arm won’t help. The arm just hangs there being its own separate disaster. “I’m good, give me a second, I’m good.”