"You said you look at me when you skate. That I'm the signal in the noise. What if the signal doesn't depend on the size of the room? What if it only depends on the strength of the connection?"
I lifted my head from the steering wheel. He was close. His face was six inches from mine, angled through the open car door, and his eyes were dark and steady and reading me with the total, unsparing attention that I had come to understand was the way Mars Santos cared. Not through words. Through seeing. Through the commitment to look at something completely and understand it without flinching.
"I don't know if I can do it," I said.
"I know. But I'll be there. Row three. Center. Same as always."
"What if row three isn't enough?"
"Then I'll move to row two. Or row one. Or the boards. Or the ice. Whatever distance you need. I'll be the signal."
My hands had stopped shaking.
MARS
In the lobby. After the parking lot. The vending machine coffee, terrible as always. His hands were still trembling with the residual voltage of the panic, the shaking visible in the way the coffee cup vibrated against the plastic table.
I took his hands.
The action was not premeditated. The goalie's brain, which operated on prediction and control, had not authorized this movement. The hands moved independently, operating on an instruction set that came from beneath the analysis, from the place where the person lived underneath the goalie.
His hands were smaller than mine. Precise. The hands of a man who used his body as an instrument, who was conscious of every digit, every joint, every micro-movement. My hands were large, calloused, scarred from pucks and stick blades and the accumulated damage of eight years of catching objects moving at lethal speeds.
I wrapped my hands around his. The contrast was the point. His shaking, my stillness. His precision, my strength. His fear, my certainty.
"Your hands are shaking," I said.
"They do that. After."
"How often?"
"Any time someone mentions competing. Or performing. Or an audience of any size."
I held his hands tighter. The shaking was decreasing. My hands were absorbing the vibration the way a wall absorbs a shot, dampening the energy through mass and surface area.
"I catch pucks for a living," I said. "Objects moving at ninety miles per hour aimed at my face. Do you know what makes that possible?"
"What?"
"I don't see the crowd. I see the puck. One object. One trajectory. Everything else is noise. When a shooter winds up and releases, the arena could be on fire and I wouldn't know because my entire awareness is contracted to a single point: the puck. There is nothing else. There is only the thing I need to see."
"I can't tune out the noise."
"You can when it's me. You skate perfectly when I watch. Your body doesn't lock. Your edges don't soften. Your quad loop lands clean, every time, because when I'm the audience, I'm not noise. I'm signal."
"That's the problem, Mars. What if the signal only works when it's you? What if I need you in the stands for the rest of my life just to land a triple axel?"
"Then I'll be in the stands for the rest of your life."
The sentence arrived with a weight that exceeded its word count. I had not planned to say it. The goalie's brain would never have authorized a statement with that kind of permanence, that kind of commitment, that kind of implied future. The goalie's brain dealt in single saves, single shots, the immediate present.
The sentence came from the person behind the mask. And the person behind the mask was not a goalie. The person behind the mask was a man who had been alone for twenty-six yearsand who had found, in a suburban rink at 5 AM, the first reason he had ever encountered to be something other than alone.
Theo looked at me. His eyes were dark and wet and the wetness was not crying but the proximity to crying, the thin membrane between holding and releasing.
"You can't say things like that," he said.
"Why?"
