Chapter 5 Soucy
There is a version of Chicago that has decided to be gracious about June by pretending it happened to somebody else.
The practice facility gives us the rink to ourselves. We spread out along the home bench with borrowed helmets and a bag of pucks. Cold air over summer air. The best smell in hockey.
I count the room without deciding to. Soren.
Me. Murray. His wife with her coffee. Tyler, already down twice between the door and the boards.
Emma establishes a broadcast desk at the bench with the unicorn propped against the glass, facing the ice, because apparently he gets nervous when he can’t see the action.
And Charlie, at the far end of the bench, exactly where I knew she would be. Coat zipped to the chin. The posture of a person who has decided in advance how this goes: sit there, be quiet, and get this over as quick as possible.
I know that seat. I sat in it for most of a childhood, at the end of benches in Montreal, watching a game everyone assumed I was too quiet to want.
What I was doing was reading it. All the geometry of it, the angles nobody else seemed bothered by.
I didn’t have the words to ask for the net, and nobody offered, until the winter I stopped waiting and started talking to the posts in the hallway because the posts didn’t need me to explain.
Tyler falls forty times. I count. Each one is announced as a trick, and to be fair to him, four of them almost are.
Soren skates slow figure eights with him, huge and easy, keeping the kid’s confidence inflated with two fingers under it.
His stride is careful on the pushes but it’s there.
He’s coming back from the injury. Emma’s broadcast covers all of it. Brian is apparently very impressed.
“That one was a trick,” Tyler announces from the ice, face down.
“He’s down again,” Emma reports to the unicorn, in her anchor voice. “He’s okay. He’s doing it on purpose. This is the worst show I have ever seen.”
Murray takes shots on his son that miss on purpose. His wife films. It is a good morning in the middle of a good summer.
“You missed,” Laurie says, filming.
“I never miss,” Murray says, and misses again by a foot.
Charlie watches the ice the way I watched it.
Not the puck. The actual play. When Murray winds up, her eyes go to where the shot is going before it goes there.
When Tyler loses an edge, she’s already looking at the spot where he lands.
She thinks the coat hides it. The coat hides nothing.
Her eyes are doing more work than anyone on the ice, and she would rather freeze than say one word about it.
I get the extra pads from the bag.
I don’t ask. Words hand a no to people looking for one, and this kid has a no loaded, has probably had it loaded the entire trip. So I stand in front of her and hold the pads out and say nothing.
“No thanks,” she says and looks away.
I keep holding them.
“I’m good.”
I keep holding them. Her eyes go from the pads to me.
I watch her run the math every kid runs on an adult.
What does he want? There is a specific flicker when she can’t find an answer, because I don’t want anything.
I’m just holding what she needs until she realizes I am not going to walk away, and grabs them.
She puts the pads on wrong, then right, watching how the straps sit against her legs like the answer was already somewhere in her hands. I give her my helmet. It’s too big. It doesn’t matter.
In the net she stands the way we all stand the first time, arms out, too upright, a kid in borrowed armor. Murray sends one in soft, a grandfather of a shot.
She stops it. Fine. Anyone stops that one.
Soren sends one a little less soft. She’s there before it is. Doesn’t reach for it. She is simply standing where it wanted to go, like she’d read its mind, like the puck had told her on the way.
I take three shots myself. I don’t baby the third one.
She stops it clean. Her body does the small settling, weight already flowing toward where the next play would start. I feel the specific vertigo of watching something I have never once seen from the outside.
She knows where it’s going to be. Then she’s there.
That’s the gift. Nobody teaches it. You can build everything else on top of it.
The angles, the patience, the routine of putting your gear on in the same order.
But the bottom layer is just that. A kid standing in a net, feeling the game arrive early.
Every goalie I have ever respected describes it the same helpless way.
Around us, the rink gets quiet.
I know this quiet. Murray has stopped skating.
His wife has lowered the phone. Soren is looking at me across the ice with both eyebrows raised, which for him is shouting.
The quiet is well-meaning and it is heavy.
It is about to land on a twelve-year-old who came here planning to be invisible.
I remember exactly what that weight feels like from below.
So I end it.
“Tyler,” I say. “Show me the trick again. The good one.”
Tyler is thrilled to. The noise comes back. The adults remember to be adults. The moment closes over itself, and Charlie stands in the crease with her too-big helmet, breathing hard, holding my glove like she’s not planning to give it back.
She stops almost everything else we send her. I keep the shots honest. She would know a gift the way I would have known.
After we finish, she sits on the bench to get the pads off and I crouch down to help with the strap she can’t reach.
“You’re really good at this,” I tell her. The way you report a fact, because that’s what it is, and kids can hear the difference between a fact and a fuss.
She looks at me. There’s a second where the whole of it is on her face, the trip and the family and being twelve, and then she says, “Don’t tell my dad.”
Behind that sentence is a door I am not going to open.
Maybe the game feels like his and she wants one thing that’s hers.
Maybe she’s not ready to want it out loud, because wanting things out loud means people watching you want them.
Maybe it’s simpler and maybe it’s worse.
The reason doesn’t matter. Some things are yours until you decide they aren’t, and deciding has to be yours too, or it doesn’t count.
Nobody let me keep anything quietly. They asked and asked, kind, all of them so kind, why don’t you skate, why don’t you talk, what’s going on in there. Every question took a little of it away.
So I nod and I don’t ask her why.
She hands me the gloves, and then, before she goes to join the broadcast desk with Emma and Brian, she stops.
She tips her head at the net. “You said something to the posts. Before you took shots. What did you say?”
Observant. Of course she is. “Their names. Gertie and Quessa,” I say. “Left and right.”
She considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “That’s weird.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says, in the tone of a person filing something for later, and walks away.
Across the rink, Soren is helping Tyler drag the net, and he’s watching me over the top of it. He saw all of it. He was always going to see all of it.
He doesn’t say anything on the drive home as we sit in the far back of Kyle’s minivan. His hand sits on my knee. At the last turn before the house he leans in and says, “The posts already like her,” and I look out the window at his father’s neighborhood going past, and I let him see me smile.
“Everyone starts somewhere,” I say and glance over at him, smiling.