Page 1 of Puck My Pain Away

1

ROMAN

The puck’s on my tape and the whole barn knows what’s coming before the two guys in front of me do.

Eighteen thousand people on their feet. Third period, tie game. I’ve got Hartley flat-footed at the line because he always cheats to his glove side and he’s done it again, the idiot, leaned a half-step the wrong way to open the door. I take it. I always take it. That’s the thing nobody understands about me until they’ve tried to stop me and couldn’t: there’s no decision in it. The lane opens and my body’s already gone.

I split them. Hartley and the kid they paired him with, both reaching, both a step late. One stick rakes my pants and gets nothing. Then it’s just me and Vesely in the crease, the slot wide open like the ice cracked down the middle just for me.

He drops. They all drop for me eventually. I wait the extra half-second that separates the guys who score forty from the guys who score eighteen, wait until his pad’s committed, and then I roof it backhand into the wedge of net over his shoulder where the puck has no business going.

The horn goes.

The sound that comes after isn’t sound. It’s pressure. It’s the whole building inhaling and then coming down on me at once. Somewhere under it the chant starts, same as it has in this rink since I was twenty-two. Three syllables. My name, broken into a thing they can pound their feet to. Ro-man-Vane. Ro-man-Vane.

My boys hit me at the boards and I’m laughing, yelling something that isn’t words. Theo’s glove cracks the back of my helmet hard enough to ring it. This. This right here is the only church I’ve ever needed. You score one like that and for about nine seconds you are not a person with a body, a father, a problem. You are just the thing the crowd is screaming, clean and enormous and loved. You would do anything, give anything, burn anything you owned to keep standing inside that noise.

I tap Theo’s cage. I point my stick at the kids behind the glass losing their minds in my sweater.

I never see Kovac.

—

They rule it clean. I’ll hear that word for months. Clean, because the refs had their eyes on the puck crossing the line, same as everyone else in the building, and not one of them was watching the guy coming across my blind side.

What it is, is this: I’ve already let the puck go, I’m gliding out of the play with my weight floating high on my edges, light, careless, a man taking a bow. And Kovac comes across the grain from my blind side at a speed that doesn’t fit the moment, finishes a check the play doesn’t need anymore. His hip catches me low and turning.

My skate holds when the rest of me doesn’t.

There’s a sound. I want to be clear that I hear it before I feel anything, this wet structural pop from somewhere inside my own knee, loud as a branch going, loud enough that I think for one stupid spinning second it came from the boards. Then the ice comes up and takes me. The pain arrives all at once like the building fell on the joint, white and total, a pain with no top to it. I’m down grabbing my leg with both hands and I cannot make it let go.

I try to get up. That’s reflex, that’s twenty-five years of getting up. I plant the good skate and push. The bad leg won’t answer. It just hangs there sending up that white roar, and I go back down.

And the barn goes quiet.

You don’t know what eighteen thousand people sound like until they stop. The chant dies in the middle of my name. There’s a ring of held breath, and then this low traveling moan rolling section to section as the replay hits the board above me. I don’t look up at it. I will never once look up at it. But I feel it pass over me like cold water. Somebody behind the glass is crying. A kid, maybe. In my sweater.

Theo’s on his knees beside me with his glove off, his bare hand on my chest, and he’s saying my name in a voice I’ve never heard him use, low and scared, the captain voice gone, just Theo. “Stay down. Hey. Hey, look at me, stay down.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him, and my voice cracks in half on two words. “It’s fine, it’s fine⁠—”

It is not fine. I knew it the second I heard it pop. Some animal part of me that has never once been wrong about my own body already knows it, is already screaming it while the rest of me bargains. The season’s gone—maybe more than the season. The thing I just felt give was not a ligament so much as the floor of my entire life.

They bring the stretcher.

I tell them I can skate off. I beg, actually, with the trainers crouched over me and the ref holding the crowd back with his arms out. I say let me skate off, I can skate off, do not put me on that thing. And the senior trainer, Marv, who’s taped my ankles for six years, looks at me with something terrible and gentle in his face. “Not this time, bud.”

So they strap me down. They strap my arms, they brace the leg, and the whole barn watches the boards do it, watches the cameras do it. Eighteen thousand people, a national broadcast, my father somewhere in a recliner two time zones away, all of them watching them carry Roman Vane off on his back. There’s a towel over my eyes I didn’t ask for. I shove it off, because crying on the jumbotron is the one thing left tonight I get to refuse.

They roll me toward the tunnel.

And here’s the part that lives in me after. As they wheel me into the dark of the tunnel mouth, behind me, the horn goes for the faceoff. They’re restarting the game. Of course they are. There’s six minutes left, a lead to protect, a building full of people who paid. The trainers haven’t even got me to the room yet. Out there the puck has already dropped, Theo’s already taken the draw, and the world I was the center of nine minutes ago has closed back over the hole where I was standing like water over a dropped stone.

I listen to the crowd come back up. Not for me. For the next thing. For whoever’s got the puck now.

That’s the sound I take with me down the tunnel. The crowd learning how fast it can love someone else.

—