12. Finn
Chapter twelve
Finn
The first shift tonight, eighteen thousand people decide what they think of me in about nine seconds.
I feel it in the noise when they announce the lines.
Not a boo, exactly. A held breath with an edge on it, the sound a building makes when it hasn’t decided whether you’re the rookie on the poster or the rookie in the clip.
I have spent half a season trying to earn a place in this barn, and then San Antonio watched me put a man in a hospital on their phones.
Now every time I step onto their ice, they want to know which one skated out of the tunnel.
So do I, honestly.
The suspension was three games, served weeks ago. Diaz’s line was that a man ought to keep working and keep playing, and the league gave me the number and the fine and the door back, and here I am, forty-four, another night, the whole building leaning in to read me.
I win the puck off the wall and move it clean and the noise tips, slightly, toward the poster.
For now.
And she’s here.
Not here. God, not here. But here, in the back of my skull where she’s set up permanent residence, surfacing mid-shift like she’s got a right to.
I’m on a line change and I catch myself thinking about the barn, about a hand flat on my chest and a woman who could stop when I couldn’t, and I nearly miss the bench door like a rookie.
Three weeks ago the only thing that lived in my head during a game was the game.
Now there’s a line I’m trying to hold out here and a line I already didn’t hold back there, and they’ve started to feel like the same line, and I don’t love what that’s teaching me about myself.
Focus. Play. The puck doesn’t care who you’re thinking about.
It happens in the second period, and it happens to me.
He’s been hunting me since the drop of the first puck, a big veteran on their back end with nothing left to lose and a game to turn, who read the same scouting report the whole league did.
He knows what I’m supposed to be. He’s spent forty minutes trying to find the guy from the clip: a word every whistle, a glove in the face, a slash across the wrists where the ref can’t see it.
Working me. Fishing for the rookie who put a man in a hospital, because he knows what that rookie does to my night if he surfaces: I take the instigator, I take the game misconduct, and I hand a judge an hour up the road the incident that ends me.
Then the whistle goes, and the puck’s dead in the corner, and he comes in late and cross-checks me across the back of the neck. After the whistle. On the numbers. The cheapest shot he’s got, saved for the moment it’ll cost me most.
And the reflex in me that has one job, one setting, one answer comes up so fast and so complete that I’m turned around and on him before I know I’ve moved.
This is the one I don’t even have to think about.
You hit me after the whistle, on the numbers, in my building: every cell I’ve got is already at him, gloves loosening, the crowd exploding up out of their seats because they smell it too, because this is the one they’ll all forgive: the small guy answering the cheap shot, the fight eighteen thousand people are on their feet telling me I’m owed.
I get a hand on his jersey.
I get a glove half off.
The whole building is on its feet screaming for it and my blood is screaming for it and it is right there, the fight the entire arena is begging me to have, the one that would feel, for about four glorious seconds, exactly like justice.
And a voice I don’t recognize as mine, way down under all the noise, asks a half-second early for the first time in my life.
Do you have to? Or do you want to?
I have to. He hit me after the whistle. I have to.
Except.
Except I don’t, actually. The ref’s already got his arm up; the guy’s going to the box; we get the power play.
The only thing my fists change is that I go to the box instead, and I hand the league the instigator that voids my whole deal, and I put a farm and a woman and my own rebuilt life on the ice to answer a cheap shot that already answered itself.
He wanted me to swing. That was the whole play.
The hit wasn’t the game he was trying to turn. I was.
I have to.
I want to.
They’re not the same, and for the first time I catch the difference while there’s still time to do something about it, and God, it costs.
It costs more than any hit I’ve ever taken.
I let go of his jersey. I pull the glove back on.
I skate backward toward my bench with my whole body howling that I’ve done something cowardly, that I’ve let a man cheap-shot me in my own building and skated away from it, that everything I am is built to answer this and I didn’t.
The building doesn’t cheer a man for the fight he doesn’t have. The noise curdles into something confused and disappointed, and I skate through it, and it feels like failing in front of the entire world.
I did the right thing. It feels exactly like being a coward. Nobody warns you they’re identical from the inside.
Ryan finds me on the bench.
He doesn’t say good job. Ryan would never insult me with good job. He sits down next to me close enough that our shoulders touch, and he watches the power play we got because I didn’t fight, and after a while he says, quiet, not looking at me:
“Nobody stopped you that time.”
“Yeah,” I say. My voice isn’t right. “Turns out it’s worse.”
“It is,” Ryan says. “For a while.” He taps my pad with his stick and goes over the boards for his shift, and that’s the most anyone’s going to say to me about the biggest thing I’ve ever not done.
We win. I don’t have my best game and we win anyway, and in the room after, Colt tells me I skate like a man who fell off a horse and Mack asks if the horse is okay, and I let them have it because it’s easier than the truth.