I've stood in this net and heard that building clap for a save, and I didn't know until right now that the same sound can mean the opposite thing.
Soucy is off the bench, at the door, very still, the stillness that on him means the queue has jammed and every read is firing with nowhere to go. His hands have stopped.
The reflex fires. The oldest one. Fix the thing in front of you. Fix his face. I can't reach him and I couldn't fix it if I could, because the thing that needs fixing is that I'm being carried off the one sheet of ice where I've ever been entirely myself. There's no version of being carried that I get to make all right for anybody.
The last thing I see before the tunnel takes it is the far bench. My father's bench. Karl nodding once with his eyes already on the door the backup will come from, the whole machine he builtturning toward the man two stalls down from me. He isn't cruel. He's the best there is. I go down the tunnel on two other men's shoulders with nothing left to hand the people I love but the sound of a door swinging shut behind me.
?
Chapter 26: Soucy
The routine is at sixty-one minutes and it isn’t done.
It’s supposed to be forty-five. I built forty-five eight years ago with my first therapist one disgusting rep at a time, and forty-five was the floor and the ceiling both. Now forty-five is a country I left an hour ago and I’m still pressing tape onto the left pad. The tape is on top. I know it’s on top. The knowing doesn’t reach the hands that need it pressed again.
I am starting a Stanley Cup Final. That is the sentence under the tape. The man who chose Atlanta to back up a goalie is starting Game 4 because that goalie's leg came apart in Game 3, and the building tonight is ours. None of that’s the thing my hands are doing with the tape. Tabarnak. On top. Press it. On top.
“Sixty-one,” Thompson says from the doorway. He doesn’t come in. He read the room from the hall.
“I know the number.”
“I’m not telling you the number. I’m telling you I’m here and I’m going to keep being here and you can take ninety if you needninety. They can’t drop the puck without you. You’re the whole show tonight. They’ll wait.”
“They won’t wait.”
“They will literally wait. That’s how hockey works. The goalie has to be in the net. You’re the goalie.”
“The tape’s on top.”
“Okay.”
“It’s been on top for six years. I know it’s on top.” My voice is the high tight one I don’t like, and I press the tape again. “I can’t get to the next thing. I do the tape and then I’m supposed to go to the skates and I can’t get to the skates because the tape isn’t... it’s. It’s done. I can’t make my hands believe it’s done.”
“So don’t make them believe it. Just put your hand on the skate. You don’t have to believe anything. Hand on the skate.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know it’s not how it works. I’m asking you to put your hand on the skate anyway, because the tape is going to be on top whether your hands believe it or not, and the puck drops at seven-oh-five whether you’re at forty-five or ninety. Hand on the skate. That’s the only ask.”
I put my hand on the skate. The tape is behind me. It’s two feet away and it’s screaming, but my hand is on the skate and the queue lurches forward one place. It’s the not-reaching, tape instead of a tablet. My hands don’t believe it. My hands don’t have to.
“I’ve never started one of these.”
“I know. And I watched you read their whole power play off the bench in Game 1 before Bodie’s staff had it on a whiteboard. Cold.”
“Watching isn’t the net.”
“No. It isn’t. The net’s worse, and the net is also the one place on this earth you’ve never once been wrong. So go be in the worse place you’re best at.” He pushes off the frame. “I’m goingto go stand somewhere else and be extremely calm at you from a distance.”
He goes. Two people can stand in a doorway and do that, and the other one is at the end of the bench tonight with a brace on his leg. I’m going to think about the skate, which is under my hand, which is the next thing.
Bodie comes in and crouches at the edge of the six feet instead of pulling the stool into it. Someone told him. Or he learned.
“One thing.” He waits until I look up. “They’re going to live in your kitchen tonight. Three of them at the top of your crease every shift, sticks in your eyes. When it gets loud in there and you can’t see, you find the puck. One puck. Let the rest be noise. Say it back.”
“Find the puck. Let the rest be noise.”
“They’ll get one early. Maybe two. That’s the design, not the verdict.” He stands and knocks the frame twice on the way out. “Go be the reason we’re still alive Thursday.”