Coach Mercer appeared in the doorway, and the room found its laces again. Danny Mercer was in his fifties, built like a man who’d spent four hundred NHL games getting run through the boards and had enjoyed none of them, and he had a way of standing in a doorway that made it clear the doorway was his, and you were a guest in it.
“Lindgren. Novak. My office. Five minutes.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He never did.
Shane shot Theo a look across the room, the look that meant this is your fault, and Theo gave him back the specific nothing that meant everything is your fault, always, forever, and theyfinished undressing in a silence that the rest of the room gave them a wide berth around, the way you’d give a downed wire.
* * *
Mercer’s office smelled like coffee that had been hot during the Clinton administration. There were two chairs in front of his desk, and Theo and Shane sat in them like boys outside a principal’s door. Theo supposed that was exactly what this was.
“I’m not breaking you up,” Mercer said, before either of them had fully sat.
Shane opened his mouth.
“I’m not breaking you up,” Mercer said again, “so close your mouth, Novak. You want to know why I’m not breaking you up. Here’s why. When you’re not screaming at each other, you’re the best pairing I’ve got. Forty-six games left, and I need a top pair that can play forty minutes between them and not get caved in. That’s you. When you’re right, that’s you. So you’re going to get it right.” He folded his hands on the desk. “Lindgren. You stepped up on the third goal.”
“Yes,” Theo said.
“Why?”
“Bad read.”
“You don’t make bad reads. That’s the whole—” Mercer exhaled. “Whatever. Don’t make it again. Novak. You pinched in your own zone on a one-goal game in the third.”
“I was trying to make something happen.”
“In your own zone. In the third. Down one,” Mercer said each phrase like he was setting bricks down. “Make something happen in their zone. That’s why God made blue lines. You’re a power-play quarterback who can’t be trusted to defend a lead, and the day you learn to defend a lead is the day I can put yourname on a piece of paper and send it ninety miles down the road, and not one day before. You hearing me?”
Theo watched the words land on Shane. He’d seen Shane take a slapshot off the collarbone and barely blink. This was worse. Shane’s jaw worked, and his eyes went bright and hard as he said, “Yes, Coach,” in a voice scraped down to nothing.
It was the defend a lead that did it; Theo had filed that, too. There was a whole man inside that sentence, a man Theo had spent twenty-six games next to and decided he understood and had, it was becoming clear, not understood at all. Everyone in the league knew Shane Novak as a highlight reel: the hands, the vision, the absurd outlet passes, the power-play goals that made the building stand up. Nobody talked about the other column, the goals-against, the gambles that didn’t come off, the nights the flash cost more than it scored. Mercer had just named it out loud in a small office, and Theo had watched Shane take it like a cross-check to a part of him that didn’t have padding, and Theo had thought, against his own will, he’s heard this before from someone who mattered more than a coach. Theo did not want to know things like that about Shane Novak. They were not useful. He filed it anyway.
“Good. Get out. Drink water.” Mercer was already looking at his computer. As they reached the door he said, not looking up, “Lindgren. Your visa thing. You sort that out?”
The question landed in the center of Theo’s chest. “Working on it,” he said.
“Work faster. I can’t recommend a guy I can’t roster next year. You’re a good soldier, Lindgren, but the math has to math.” He waved a hand. The audience was over.
* * *
The players’ lot behind the barn was half-empty and lit by twosodium lamps that turned everything the color of weak tea. Theo’s car was an eight-year-old Volvo he’d bought used and paid for in full, because Theo Lindgren did not finance things, and he sat in it for a while in the cold before he turned the key, letting his body settle into the grade of pain that meant it was over.
His phone had a voicemail. He almost didn’t listen to it. Then he saw the number, the 312 area code, the immigration firm in Chicago that ate four hundred of his dollars an hour to tell him things he already knew, and his stomach dropped before he’d even pressed play.
“Mr. Lindgren, hi, it’s Dana from Cardoso Immigration, returning your call. So — I’ll be straight with you, because I know that’s how you like it. The P-1 is tied to your employment, and your employment agreement runs through the end of this season, and after that there’s nothing to extend. The visa doesn’t renew on its own. To stay on the athlete track past the summer, we’d need a new contributing contract — ideally NHL, because the P-1 wants you at the top of your field, and a returning AHL deal is a hard sell to the officer. Without that, you’d be looking at leaving the country when the current authorization lapses. There are other paths, but they’re — well. We should talk about all of it. The one that’s fastest and cleanest, honestly, if it applies to your situation, is marriage to a citizen. I know that’s not — I’m just laying out the options. Call me back. We’ll figure it out. Okay. Bye.”
Theo sat with the phone warm against his ear after the message ended.
A new contributing contract. Ideally NHL.
He was twenty-seven. He had come over at twenty as the best young defenseman in the Swedish league, a kid who scored, a kid scouts wrote poems about, and he had landed in North America and the scoring had not made the trip. The ice was narrower.The men were meaner. The version of Theo Lindgren who’d put up forty points in the SHL had stayed in Sweden, apparently, and the version who’d come over had spent seven years becoming a different player, necessary, the one that blocked the shot and killed the penalty and made the flashy kid next to him look brilliant. He was good at it. He was, by now, one of the best in the league at a job that had never once made anyone write a poem.
A coach could recommend him. Mercer had as good as said he would, if the math mathed. But the call-up wasn’t Mercer’s to give, not really; it lived ninety miles down the highway in an office in Chicago, in the hands of people who ran a different math, and there was exactly one open spot on the Fury blue line and more than one Blaze defenseman who wanted it.
He did the arithmetic he’d been doing for a month. Contract: not in his control. Call-up: not in his control. The summer was coming whether he controlled it or not, and at the end of the summer was a flight to Gothenburg and his mother’s house and the rest of his life spent being the man hockey had been finished with, in a country he’d left at twenty because he’d wanted, more than anything, to be somewhere that didn’t already know exactly what he was worth.
Marriage to a citizen.
Theo almost laughed. He didn’t know any citizens. He knew twenty-three hockey players, a coach who scared him, a captain who’d seen too much, and a trainer named Pete. He had no one. This was not self-pity; it was a roster, and he kept clean rosters. The list of people in North America who would marry Theo Lindgren to keep him in the country was a sheet of ice with nothing on it.
