"You don't stop all at once. You stop with one person. The first person is the hardest. After the first person, it gets easier. Not easy. Easier."
"Who was your first person?"
Wes looks at the door to the equipment room. The door where Luca will eventually reappear, carrying someone's skates, talking about something, filling the room with warmth and noise and the specific, relentless, solar-powered kindness that broke through Wes Chen's walls when nothing else could.
"I think you know," Wes says.
He stands. He puts his hand on my shoulder. The hand is heavy and warm and scarred and the weight of it on my shoulder is the weight of a man who carried his thing alone for years and who is telling me, through the hand and the bread and the six minutes of conversation that just rearranged my internal architecture, that I don't have to carry mine for as long as he carried his.
He leaves.
I sit in the equipment room. The metal chair. The leather and tape smell. The racks of skates arranged by number, each pair the specific tool of a specific man, each one maintained by Luca with the attention to detail that is Luca's love language.
I cry.
Not a controlled cry. Not the silent, internal, nobody-can-see-this crying that I've done in hotel rooms and cars and showers. This is a full, body-shaking, hands-over-face cry that comes from a place I didn't know was pressurized until the pressure released. The tears are not about one thing. The tears are about all of it: the name, the walls, the alone, the search bar, the half-second, the goal, the parents who love me and don't know, the sister who knows and is waiting, the journalist who sees the thing underneath the thing, the Russian who said the walls are optional, the security guard who said the hearing comes first, and the enforcer who just told me, in six minutes and one loaf of bread, that the carrying is the killing and the stopping is the living.
The equipment room door opens. Luca.
He sees me. He stops. He does not ask what happened. He does not ask if I'm okay. He does not say "talk to me" or "what's wrong" or any of the things that a person might reasonably say upon finding a teammate crying in the equipment room at ten in the morning.
Luca Moretti sits down on the floor next to my chair. He stretches his legs out in front of him. He leans his back against the skate rack. And he talks about nothing.
"My nonna makes these things called pizzelle. They're waffle cookies. Italian. She uses an iron that's been in the family since, I swear, the Medici era. The thing weighs eight pounds and it has a crack in the handle that she refuses to fix because she says the crack is 'character.' I've been trying to replicate her recipe for three years and I can't get the anise right. She says I use too much. I say she uses too little. We've been having this argument since I was fourteen."
He talks about a penguin documentary he watched last night. He talks about whether Wes's sourdough starter deserves a name ("I vote Dough-anne. Wes says starters don't get names. I say everything alive deserves a name."). He talks about the time he tried to make croissants and the butter leaked during the lamination and his apartment smelled like a French bakery that had been set on fire.
He talks and talks and talks. The words are warm and funny and meaningless and essential. The meaninglessness is the point. Luca is not trying to fix me. Luca is not trying to understand the crying. Luca is sitting on the floor of his equipment room and filling the space with warmth because warmth is what Luca does, and the warmth is not a strategy or a technique. The warmth is who he is. The warmth is the biscotti in the stall on Day 1 and the sticky notes and the tea he's somehow producing now (from where? I didn't see him make tea) and the fact that he's sitting on a concrete floor in his work clothes talking about penguins because a teammate is crying and the crying does not require diagnosis. The crying requires company.
The crying slows. The breathing normalizes. The pressure in my chest recedes to a level that is manageable, if notcomfortable. I wipe my face with the hem of my shirt and look at Luca, who is still on the floor, who has not moved, who is holding out a cup of tea that is warm and present and offered without conditions.
"Thanks," I say. My voice is rough.
"For the tea or the penguin lecture?"
"Both."
"The documentary is on Netflix. Episode three will make you cry harder than whatever just happened in here. Fair warning."
I laugh. The laugh is small and wet and real, and Luca smiles at it, the full Luca smile, the one that makes rooms warmer, and the equipment room is warm, and the bread is on the shelf in my stall, and the alone part is, for the first time in my life, slightly less alone.
DECLAN
The hallway is becoming a problem.
Not the hallway itself, which is a corridor with fluorescent lights and floor wax and zero architectural distinction. The hallway is a hallway. The problem is what the hallway has become, which is the only space in this building where Jamie Kowalski and I exist outside our roles. In the press box, I'm a journalist. In the media scrum, he's a source. In the hallway, at 10:30 PM after the building has emptied, we are something that neither of us has named and that both of us keep returning to.
Tonight is the fourth time. The first was the eye contact that started everything. The second was the proprioception conversation. The third was a thirty-second exchange about a power play entry that turned into a forty-five-second exchange about music, because Jamie mentioned that he listens to Frank Ocean before games and I said something about Frank Ocean being the only artist who makes loneliness sound architectural and Jamie looked at me for three seconds without speaking.
Three seconds is a long time to look at someone in a hallway.
Tonight, the game is over (Reapers 3, Rangers 1, Jamie with an assist), the media scrum is done, the building is emptying.I'm walking toward the parking lot, bag over my shoulder, phone in my hand, reviewing my game recap draft. The corridor is empty except for the distant sound of equipment being loaded and the eternal hum of the fluorescent lights.
"Hey."
I turn. Jamie is twenty feet behind me. He's in jeans and a hoodie and his hair is damp and he looks exactly like what he is, which is a nineteen-year-old who just played an NHL hockey game and is walking to his car and has chosen to stop in a hallway and speak to a journalist who is walking to his car.
"Hey," I say. The word contains nothing. The word is a container for the things I'm not saying.