Bodie sticks his head in. Finds me. Points two fingers at his own eyes and then at mine, which is the entire pregame speech I get and the only one I want. "You're the best player in this series," he says, flat, like a weather report. "Go be boring."
"That's the plan."
The puck drops and the rest of it goes quiet, finally, the way it only ever does in here.
The crease is the one place my brain stops manufacturing anything. Eighteen feet of blue paint and a job with edges. The gear I drop into out here is older and colder than the one the room gets. It watches a winger's hips instead of his eyes, knows the pass before the passer's committed to it, finds the boredom in a two-on-one and uses it like a tool. Scared goalies chase the puck. I let it come. I make the shooter solve me, and most of them solve me wrong.
Boston's top line is fast and they want me moving, want me scrambling post to post so I'm a half beat late on the shot that matters. So I don't move. I sit in the middle of my net and make the ice in front of me look smaller than it is, and the kid on the half wall waits for the lane and I give him one. A real one. Top corner glove side, the shot he's been told his whole life to take. He takes it because of course he does. I'm already there. On thereplay it'll look easy. It looks easy because I sold him that shot three seconds before he knew he wanted it.
"Attaboy." Berger, glove tap on the pads, gone. Nobody talks to me out here and they all know it. Tikh sets up in front and clears a rebound nobody else saw coming, because he's played enough nights behind my eyes to borrow them.
"You see him," Tikh says once, low, skating past in the second, the only sentence anyone hands me all night. The five hole crasher. Soucy's read.
"I see him." I always see him.
It's a war the whole way. One apiece into the third, the building loud enough to feel in the teeth. They draw a power play with six minutes left and throw the whole roster at me. I find the puck through traffic, through Baz's skates and a screen the size of a door, and I do the thing the room files under luck. I'm already there. I was there before the shot left. The horn that doesn't sound is the best noise in the sport.
Marchetti walks an empty-netter in with a minute left like he's mailing a letter. Then it's over. The bench comes over the boards and buries me, all that weight and noise, and somewhere in the pile a bare hand finds the back of my neck. Brief. Fingers only. I know exactly whose it is, because nobody else on this team touches me like they mean only that and nothing they have to.
The room after is the loud I like. The survivor's loud. Bodie banging the door frame with the flat of his hand.
"We go again," he's saying, to all of us, to none of us. "Hear me? We don't get comfortable. We've still got work in front of us. Lundy stole you that one, so the least you owe him is you go win the next without making him do it twice."
"He likes doing it," Thompson calls. "Look at his face. That's his happy."
"That's the same face as his everything," Baz says. "That's the problem with him."
"Funny, Tikh said that exact thing an hour ago," I say, and Tikh, across the room, lifts two fingers without looking up.
"We close this out soon," Berger informs the room, "and the television and I take a break from each other, and everyone wins."
"The television's been carrying you all spring," Thompson says.
"The television has range. You wouldn't understand, you watch with the sound off like a person hiding a body."
Thompson finds me at the towels and doesn't say anything dumb, which from him is a form of respect. He just looks at me, then looks, on purpose, across the room to where Soucy is half out of his gear telling Marchetti a story with both hands. Loose and lit, more himself in a room than I've seen him let himself be all year. Then Thompson looks back at me and raises his eyebrows the exact amount of a man declining to say a sentence.
"Don't," I tell him.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said a paragraph with your face."
"My face is a private matter." He cracks a sunflower seed. "Nice when a guy finds his feet, though. Whole different player than the one who showed up at camp flinching at the coffee machine. Real shame nobody knows what got into him." He lets it hang, the Thompson method, the question set out to ripen, and drifts off before I can decide whether to take it.
Here's the thing. The whole room sees it. Tikh sees it and says nothing useful. Thompson sees it and says everything except the actual word. Berger, who misses most of what isn't a television, has started leaving the seat next to Soucy open for me on the plane. They've all done the arithmetic the two of us keep refusing to do out loud, and they're letting us get there at our own speed. That's the kindest thing this loud stupid family does.
He comes back to my place, because that's a thing that's true now. I make eggs because it's late and there's nothing else. He eats them standing at my counter in my shirt with his hair wet. It's the best part of any day I own. This. The after. The ordinary.
I'd already set his water on the counter before he got out of the shower. The tall glass, not a mug, because he doesn't like drinking from mugs after games. I'd moved his phone to the charger by the toaster and put his keys on the hook instead of leaving them in the pile on the table where he always drops them. None of it a decision, really. Just the way the room should look when he walks into it.
He picks up the glass. Drinks half of it. His eyes go to the charger, his phone already plugged in, the cord arranged so it doesn't cross the counter. Then to the hook where his keys are hanging. He puts the glass down and stands there for a second with his hands flat on the counter. Very still. The way he gets when he's doing math I'm not part of.
"Thanks," he says, and the word is a beat late.
"For what?"
"The water." He almost says something else. Doesn't.
