Chapter 15 Avi
“They traded me,” M?kinen says. No hello when I picked up the phone. His voice is staying level. But I can hear what it’s taking to do that. “To Montreal. My agent called. It’s already being posted online.”
I know what a phone call like that sounds like before it changes someone’s life.
I learned that on a running trail in Philadelphia.
Seven missed calls and a reporter’s number lighting up in my hand.
The phone does not sound different. That is the cruelty of it.
It rings the way it rings for dinner reservations.
I am standing in my kitchen. Ash’s coffee cup is in the sink. The cat is on the windowsill, supervising the street.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Driving. I don’t know where I’m going.”
“Yes, you do. Meet me at the arena,” I say, and hanging up, I send two quick texts, get my keys, and head out the door.
The facility in August is a building holding its breath.
No music, no tape, no skate blades on rubber.
The ice is out. They pull it after the season and pour it new in September.
The rink is bare concrete, a slab of gray below us.
A ghost of a hockey rink where a hockey rink will be again in another month.
M?ki is already in the seats when I come up the tunnel. Section 112. Third row. He didn’t pick it because it means anything. He picked it because it’s where you end up in this building when the noise in you needs somewhere quiet to sit. And where he knows I go, where we have talked before.
When I first started coming to this section, the walls of this place held framed drawings of what the building would look like when it had won something.
Now, it has.
I climb to his row. He moves his bag. I push the seat down beside him and the click of the plastic is the loudest thing in the building.
We sit. Below us, the concrete. Above us, bolted into the rafters over center ice, the rigging that went up last week. Cables and a winch and an empty space with a shape to it. The banner arrives in October. Right now it is a hole in the air. I find I like it better this way.
“My father called,” M?ki says. “Before my agent did. He has a friend on their staff.” He laughs, one breath of it, but not really a laugh. “He said, call Avi.”
Jari M?kinen played beside my father and knew him the way you know a man you have bled next to.
Eleven months ago his son skated up to me at camp carrying his father’s name and his own nerves, and turned out to be more than both.
There is a shape to how this family and mine keep handing each other back and forth. I have stopped calling it coincidence.
“Tell me the part you can’t say to your agent,” I say.
He is quiet. His thumb runs along the inside of his forearm, over the sleeve of his hoodie, where the tattoo of the Firebird is.
“I got the tattoo in February,” he says.
“The guys said wait. You wait, Davis said. Rookies always wait, in case. And I said no. This is my team. I’m not going to be one of the guys who waits to see if he’s allowed to stay.
The ink on my contract here isn’t even a year old.
” His jaw is tight. “Eleven months, Avi. I gave this team eleven months and a Cup and they traded me for whatever Montreal finally offered.”
There it is. Not the trade. The arithmetic under the trade. The idea that the building measured what he gave it and returned a number that was wanting.
“You know what my June was like, last summer,” I say.
“Everybody knows.”
“Everybody knows the transaction. I’m going to tell you the part I didn’t put in any interview.
” The concrete below us has a long crack near where the far blue line will be.
I looked at it all of last season. I look at it now.
“A reporter told me. Not the team. Not my agent. A reporter, on the phone, while I was standing beside a river as I finished up a run. I gave years to that team and the reporter’s call lasted ninety seconds.
When it ended I stood there and understood that I had just been thrown away.
And that everyone I had ever protected myself from was about to watch it happen. ”
M?ki doesn’t say anything. He is listening with his whole body. It is how he does everything. It is why the room has loved him since September.
“I was wrong,” I say. “Not about the feeling. The feeling was accurate. Being traded feels like being thrown away. It is supposed to feel like that and anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth. I was wrong about what it was. It was not an ending about me. It was a man in an office moving a name on a list. It had no authority over me. The things I actually had, it could not touch. And there is a difference this time, Eero, so hear it, because it took me a year to hear mine. Philadelphia left me unprotected because nobody fought to keep me. Montreal spent the summer fighting to get you. Grayson said no in June. He said no again in July. Then the offer got so big it stopped being a thing a GM can say no to. You are not being thrown away. You are being fought over. It will feel identical for a little while. Feelings do not read contracts.” I turn and look at him.
“They can trade you, Eero. They cannot take one minute of what you built. You own that, not them.”
He looks down at the concrete for a while.
“You built this,” he says. “This team. Everyone knows it’s yours.”
“I built it with twenty other men, and one of them scored the series winning goal in Game Seven of the Cup Final at twenty-four years old.” His head comes up.
“Your name is on the Cup, M?ki. Do you understand what that means? A banner will hang in this building. The banner stays here and I am glad it stays here. But the Cup has your name cut into metal. The Cup will carry M?kinen into every hallway it enters for the next hundred years. You are not leaving what you built. It is riding with you.”
His eyes are wet. He tips his head back, and I give him the courtesy of studying the rigging while he does it.
“You told me once,” he says, when his voice is level again. “In September. You said I belong here.”
“Sin? kuulut t?nne.”
“So which is it? Do I belong here, or do I get traded?”
“Both. I never said you belong to this building.” The winch cables move a little in the air handling, a few inches, like the space is breathing.
“Buildings don’t get to keep people, M?ki.
I learned that the hard way and you are learning it the fast way.
You belonged here because you decided to.
Decide it again in Montreal. It works everywhere.
That is the entire secret. Nobody tells rookies because the veterans like to seem wise. ”
He laughs for real this time. It cracks in the middle. Both things are allowed.
“Soucy called his brother,” I say. “You have a place to land. He has a spare room and, I am told, opinions about how to stack a dishwasher. Consider it pre-training camp.”
“Soucy did that already?”
“This room does not wait to be asked. You know that.”
Below us, a door opens somewhere in the dark of the tunnel. Footsteps on concrete. I do not have to look. He is carrying food from the Ethiopian place with no sign. Three containers.
Ash pushes the seat down on my other side. He hands M?ki a container and a fork before he says one word, because feeding people is how he says most things.
“Montreal has great bagels,” is what he finally offers. “That’s not a consolation. It’s just true. We’ll come eat them in November when we play.”
“You checked the schedule already,” M?ki says.
“Of course. I checked it in the car while I waited for the food. Montreal comes here in October, and we go up there in November. Now eat.”
M?ki eats. Rookies always eat. It is the last rookie thing left in him. After tonight, it isn’t my job as his captain to notice anymore. I am not going to examine what that does in my chest until later, in the dark, where I keep such things filed.
We stay until the light through the high windows goes from white to gold.
Nobody needs to be anywhere. That is the strange wealth of August. M?ki talks about Montreal, the coach, the tenth arrondissement of worry that is learning French.
Ash builds him a restaurant list out loud, committee of one, with Marco as a consultant. I say little.
When M?ki stands to go, he looks down at the concrete one more time. Then up, at the shape of the space over center ice.
“I wanted to see the banner,” he says. “That’s the only thing. I’ll never see it go up.”
“You’ll see it,” I say. “In October. Visiting bench. You will stand on the blue line and hate every second of it and we will buy you drinks after.”
“That’s the away team’s side.”
“The banner doesn’t know that.”
“How do I get the cat up there? The cat hates the carrier,” he says, like a man negotiating with the last problem small enough to solve today.
“The cat carries your father’s name and your father’s opinion of travel. He will survive getting to Montreal.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “So will you.”
He hugs me. There is no protocol for it and he doesn’t wait for one.
Arms around me, exactly as the room taught him.
Over his shoulder, Ash grins at me. Then M?ki is down the stairs, bag on his shoulder, and at the bottom he turns around and lifts his forearm, sleeve pushed back.
The firebird, mid-flight. Going with him.
The tunnel takes him and the building goes back to holding its breath.
Ash’s knee settles against mine. He looks up at the rigging for a while. I can hear him deciding whether to say it.
“You know what should go on the banner,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“Ikonen describes the ice,” he says, savoring every word of it, “as adequate.”
“I am revoking your keys to my place.”
“You’d have to stop living with me.” He takes my hand. “Some things go up in October,” he says, quieter. “Some things are already here.”
Last September, I sat in this exact seat and told myself I didn’t know what this team was yet but told myself I wanted to find out. It was the truest sentence I had, and it was still three sizes too small.
I found out.
It’s not a roster. It is the people inside the building, inside the team. The food showing up before you ask. People sitting next to you in the quiet. A bird inked on a forearm, going to Montreal, still in flight.
They can hang the banner wherever they want. But what it stands for stays with each of us.