Page 100 of Offside

Ryan: I may have called in a favor

Maren: You play hockey

Ryan: Hockey players know people

Maren: This is unhinged. All these gifts. You didn’t have to do all this.

Ryan: You love it

Maren: I don’t hate it.

Ryan: I take care of what’s mine.

I put my phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again. Went to refill my water bottle and stood at the sink thinking about those two words and the register he said them in and the fact that there was still another day of this. I was so giddy with the feelings I had for him I could’ve kicked my feet like a teenager.

Later that night, I watched the game at home alone.

Not because I’d planned to. I got home late from the facility, changed, stood in front of my refrigerator deciding between leftover carbonara and not bothering, and then sat on the couch with my phone and found the broadcast.

I knew hockey the way anyone raised by Tom Callahan knew hockey. Not passively, not just as background noise. I’d been watching game film with Griffin since I was old enough to sit still for it. I knew a shift from a zone entry, could read a breakout pattern, understood the difference between a team playing its system and a team playing scared. What I hadn’t ever done was watch with the involuntary attention I brought to it now, when number seventeen came over the boards for a shift and my whole body went slightly electric.

Ryan Lindqvist did not look like the same man who made me breakfast in the mornings.

He looked like the reason this franchise existed. He was energized. The center in every way.

I’d seen him skate before. I’d watched games all season, knew his habits and his timing from the treatment table, but there was something about watching him with nothing else to do that let me track what he was doing, and what he was doing was operating about two beats ahead of everyone else on the ice. The play hadn’t developed yet and he was already where it was going. The defenseman hadn’t committed yet and Ryan had already decided the answer. Three times in the first period I watched him do it. The subtle shift of his weight, the head fake that cost him nothing but the opposing center paid for it, and I sat there on my couch in the Scottsdale dark thinking oh.

He was extraordinary. I’d known this abstractly, at arm’s length so it didn’t have to land. Watching him play let it land.

Late in the second period he took a hit behind the net. Not dirty, just hard, the kind that rattled, and I watched him come up out of it and immediately locate the puck and make the pass, clean and controlled, like the hit hadn’t happened. I knew his right shoulder. I’d had my hands on it. I knew exactly how much hurt and I watched him not show it to a single person on that ice, and my heart ached with it for him.

The Sidewinders won 4–1. Ryan scored twice. The second off a faceoff win in the offensive zone he’d engineered himself, and by the third period the building had stopped being tense about it.

I sat with the TV off afterward and thought about the headline I’d named in Ryan’s kitchen months ago. She slept with Lindqvist. That’s how she keeps her job.

I’d meant it when I said it…at the time at least. I still meant the fear of it. Holding myself to a different standard because that’s what the position required, I knew people would look for the story before they looked for the work and it scared me. That was real and it wasn’t going away.

Yet I was sitting here in the dark having watched sixty minutes of hockey that left me breathless, and the idea that I was the story, that anyone watching him play would spare a thought for the woman who taped his shoulder, felt, for the first time, a little bit absurd. He was too good. The work was too visible. The fear had been of other people’s perception and I was starting to understand that other people weren’t watching what I was watching. They were watching number seventeen pick apart a penalty kill. They were watching the captain of an expansion franchise play like the whole city had already decided it was his.

I pulled my knees up on the couch and sat with that for a while.

I picked up my phone.

The bracelet on my wrist caught the glow of the screen. Alltid din.

I put the phone back down without texting him. I didn’t need to say anything. I needed to sit with the fact that the careful distance I’d been maintaining was starting to hurt more than it protected, and I was the one who’d built it, which meant I was the one who could take it down.

I went to bed thinking about overtime assists and rotator cuffs and two words engraved on the inside of a gold bracelet. We had texted briefly, but he was exhausted, in a different time zone, and I was too. He’d be home soon.

Two more days.

The jersey arrived on day eight.

This one came to my house, left on the front porch, a flat package I didn’t find until after work. I opened it on my kitchen counter and shook it out and stood there holding it.

Number seventeen. LINDQVIST across the shoulders in the Sidewinders’ burnt orange and black. A home jersey, the real one, not a fan replica. The actual thing, the weight and quality of it unmistakable in my hands.

I held it for a long time.