He pushed off from the boards. Took two gliding steps. The figure skating blade caught a toe pick, which was a feature that hockey skates did not have and which Mars's muscle memory was not prepared for, and the NHL's starting goaltender went down in a controlled but undignified pile at center ice.
I laughed so hard I could barely stand. The laughter echoed in the empty rink and Mars lay on the ice looking up at the ceiling with the flat, evaluative expression of a man who was processing a data set that did not match any existing model.
"The ice is attacking me," he said.
"The ice is being ice. You're being a hockey player on figure skating blades, which is the ice sport equivalent of wearing ski boots to a salsa class."
"I have never salsa danced."
"This surprises no one."
He got up. Fell again. Got up. Fell again. Each fall was controlled, the goalie's instinct kicking in to protect the body even as the body refused to cooperate with the blade. Each time he got up, he adjusted something: his weight distribution, his knee bend, the angle of his ankle. The analytical brain, which could not be shut off, was processing each failure as data and feeding it back into the system.
On the seventh attempt, he completed a full lap of the rink. Slow. Unsteady. The most inelegant skating I had ever seen from a professional athlete. But a lap. A complete circuit.
"I did it," he said.
"You looked like a giraffe learning to ice skate."
"A giraffe on ice is still on ice."
"That is technically accurate."
I skated to him. Took his hands. The hands that stopped pucks and held mine in the dark and that were now gripping my fingers with the specific, death-grip intensity of a man who did not trust the surface beneath him.
"I'm going to teach you a spin," I said.
"No."
"A basic spin. Two-foot. Not even a real spin. A rotation."
"I am a goalie. I rotate constantly. I butterfly, I slide, I push. I do not spin like a figure skater."
"You're going to spin like a figure skater. Once. For me."
He looked at me. The goalie's eyes. Dark. Steady. Reading me the way he always read me, with the total attention that was not analysis but love, and the love was visible because the mask was off and the mask was not coming back on, not here, not at 5 AM, not in our rink.
"Fine," he said. "One spin."
I showed him the position. Two feet, shoulder-width apart. Arms out for balance. The rotation initiated by a slight twist of the hips and shoulders, the body following the head, the head following the intention.
He attempted the spin. The rotation was approximately 270 degrees, which was three-quarters of a revolution and which, by figure skating standards, was not a spin but was, by hockey goalie standards, an act of considerable bravery.
He came out of the three-quarter spin with his arms windmilling and his balance compromised and his face wearing an expression that combined triumph with the specific, existential confusion of a man whose body had just done something his brain did not authorize.
Axel, who was in his carrier on the bench, watched through the mesh with an expression of supreme feline contempt.
"I spun," Mars said.
"You rotated."
"A rotation is a spin."
"A rotation is 360 degrees. You did 270."
"I did 270 more degrees than any other NHL goalie has ever done in figure skating blades at 5 AM in a suburban rink."
"That is a very specific record."
