The routine runs forty-six minutes that night. One minute over. I notice it the way you notice a fever breaking, the catch that has been jamming the queue for three rounds easing off one click at a time, the tape going on top once, the skates after it. The count flows through to the end without circling back. Not the car. Not the man in it. What eased is the carrying. I said the true thing out loud instead of folding it back into my bag, and not having said it was what had been inflating the count. Gwen would call this exactly what it is. A stressor resolving because the thing causing it got named. The forty-five is still the floor. My hands are one minute lighter.
And then I am in the net for an elimination game and I am free.
That is the only word for it. Free. Every other night this round the crease has been the one place I was right and the rest of me was a problem being managed. Tonight there is no rest of me. There is the puck. The geometry. The read arriving before the play. The count is not running because I emptied all of it into a car this morning and left it on a dashboard. What is left is the cleanest version of myself I have ever brought to a net.
They come in waves the way they have come all series, three at the top of the blue. Tonight the forest does not bother me. A forest is just geometry with legs, and geometry has never once lied to me. The point shot that beat me in Game 4, I find early tonight, through hips and shins and sticks, and I have it beforethe building knows I have it. The cross-seam that moved me, tonight I take the first one away and trust my D on the backside. The puck dies in my pad. Their best player gets a breakaway and I am already where he is going before he decides to go there. I take it off his stick and freeze it. I say nothing to him, because I am not Lundy. I do not run my mouth in the crease. I close the door and let the silence carry the insult.
Forty-one shots. The building leans on me in the third and I lean back. Nothing goes in that I don’t see first. Nothing I see gets past me.
"That’s a series," Berger is yelling into the side of my mask before I have my blocker off. "That’s a series now!"
"It’s one game."
"It’s the first game. Of the rest of the games. We’re not dead. Say it. Say we’re not dead."
"We’re not dead."
"Louder."
"We’re not dead, Berger."
"You stood on your head. You know that? Forty-one shots. You stole it. The quiet guy stole an elimination game."
"It’s one game."
"Stop saying it’s one game. Let me have this. Let the building have this. We were dead this morning and now we’re not, and you did that."
The room after is the loudest it’s been all playoffs. Marchetti is standing on a bench. Fontenot has lost a shoe and doesn’t know it. Berger is writing a number on the whiteboard that I can’t read from here, and whatever the number is, it’s bigger than it was this morning. I take my gear off slow. I let them have the noise. And Lundy crosses the room to my stall on the crutches. Slow. He stops in front of me, and I wait, because I’ve done all my reaching for one day and the rest is his.
"Soucy," he says.
"What?"
"Seven across was anchor."
"You said that already. In the car. Right before you told me to put the paper down."
"I know what I told you to do." He balances there on the two poles, the whole steady weight of him propped on aluminum, and he looks at me the way he used to look at the goalposts before he believed they had names. Like he’s deciding to enter a thing and stay in it. "I’m telling you I got there. Forty-five seconds. Maybe a little more. But I got there."
He reaches into the track suit and takes out the paper, the Tuesday crossword, seven across filled in now in his handwriting. He sets it on the shelf of my stall, face up, and goes back down the room on the crutches without saying anything else. The paper stays.
The pen is still clipped to the fold. His pen, not mine. A cheap ballpoint from the trainers’ room, the kind that runs out in a week if you actually use it. He left it there like there are more clues to come back for.
?
Chapter 29: Lundy
He stands in my doorway with his bag still on his shoulder. Like he isn't sure he's staying long enough to put it down.
"You came," I say.
"You texted 'come over' and nothing else. That's the most words you've sent me in nine days. I came."
"I had more words. I deleted them. They were all wrong."
"What were they?"
I get the crutches turned so I can let him past. The leg takes its share of nothing. That's the whole problem in one motion, the body that used to open doors and carry bags balanced on two poles in its own front hall. "Versions of an answer. I kept writing it and it kept coming out as a list of things I could do for you. I could carry your bag now that you're the starter. I could cook the thing you like. I could fix the strap on your right pad that's been loose since Game 1."
