"You checked their thermostat?"
"I check everything. It's why you keep me around."
"We keep you around because you block shots with your face."
"That also." Berger pulls his elbow pads on, a man at peace with his role on this earth.
"Welcome to the playoffs," Thompson says to nobody, lacing up. "Cold basement, bad coffee, twenty thousand people who learned our numbers just to boo them. Best time of the year."
"We could win the thing," Davis says, quiet, like he's testing whether the words hold weight.
"Don't." Berger doesn't look up. "Don't say it in the basement. The basement hears you."
"The basement's a freezer."
"The basement is six-two and listening, and I won't have you jinxing us in it. We focus on practice. That’s what we’re here for." He says it flat, and means about forty percent of it, which for Berger is sincere.
Somebody's slung a bag across the two clean stalls in the far corner, away from the vent. I move it one stall down so the end one opens up. I drop my own gear by the vent that rattles. I'm halfway into my pads before anyone clocks the trade. The door goes and my eyes are already on it before the rest of me decidesto look. Soucy comes through with his bag on his shoulder, already mapping the room. He finds the open stall in the clean corner. His shoulders come down half an inch. He sets the bag down and says nothing about it, because there's nothing to say. The stall is just right. Or at least right enough.
Across the room Avi says something low to Ash, and Ash does the face.
"Cap and Ash," I tell Soucy when he sits. "Watch Ash's face when Avi leans in. Not now. Give it a second so we don't look like we're watching."
Soucy tapes his stick and lets ten seconds go by before his eyes drift over, like he's checking the clock behind them. "Which face?"
"The one he thinks nobody can see. And Ash still thinks that when Avi says something only the two of them get to hear, his whole face doesn't reorganize itself around it. It does. The man couldn't bluff a child."
"He does it every time."
"Every time. And they think nobody caught it. Couples invent being unreadable and then forget to tell their faces. The loud ones you don't worry about. It's the ones who go quiet you watch."
"You watch everybody like this?" Soucy glances over at me.
"Only the interesting ones. You, for instance, I'd scouted by Thanksgiving. Tape, stretch, tape again, tape a third time for reasons unknown to science."
"The third one's structural."
"Structural." I run tape around my cuff. "None of them think they're being obvious, and all of them are."
He keeps working his stick. Then, because the game's already running behind his eyes, "They'll come harder tonight. Down a game at home, their defense pinches in the first ten. You'll see more action early than last night. Weather the first ten and theyget frustrated. Frustrated, they take the bait on the forecheck. Then it's our game. You just can't let one in early and hand them the building."
"So, no pressure, right?" I laugh, trying to loosen the nerves.
"Reasonable pressure."
"My favorite kind." And I mean it, which I don't always say out loud, but it comes out anyway, the way more things come out with him than with others. "You know what I didn't have in Seattle? A room nobody expected anything from. There you were supposed to win. The year you didn't they found somebody younger and faster and called it the future. Here the whole league wrote us off in September and forgot to check back. There's a freedom in that. Nobody's holding us up against a banner."
Soucy doesn't look up from the tape. "You're holding us up against one."
"A little. Old habit."
"You play better when nobody's watching the name."
I look at him. He's still taping, calm as anything, and for half a second my eyes catch on his hands instead of the stick. The quiet patience in his fingers. That isn't scouting and I know it. He's never once asked me about my father. He's the only person on this team who has sat with it and not asked. "Yeah," I say. "I do."
Tikh Volkov drops onto the bench beside me, already dressed, because Tikh is always already dressed. Always prepared.
"Their goalie," he says.
