Page 16

Final horn.

4-2.

Em doesn’t scream. She stands up straight and she says, at a volume that is somehow completely audible to me through the noise of the rink, “I knew.”

The celebration on the ice is the usual kind. Teammates collide with each other in the way that hockey players celebrate, which involves a lot of stick-waving and helmet-removing and a significant amount of noise. Cas skates over and does something to Xaden that involves both his stick and his helmet. Xaden endures it.

I watch him do the things he does at the end of a win, the acknowledgement of the team, the tap of the stick, the nod to the bench and I watch him the way I always watch him in these moments, which is with the specific knowledge that this version of him, the post-win version, is different from any other version.

He’s not warm in these moments. He’s not soft, he’s not available. He’s still operating at the frequency of the game, still running on the thing he runs on when he's out there. But there is something in his face that only appears at the end of a game they've won, something that is not quite satisfaction, something that is larger and more private than satisfaction. I have been watching it for years and I still don't have a word for it.

The team begins to make their way toward the bench.

Xaden doesn't.

He turns toward the stands.

I know where he's looking before he finds us. I know it the way I know most things about him, the things I have accumulated over years of paying attention. He’s looking for us. He’s always looking for us first, exactly the way Em said.

He finds us.

Even from here, twenty feet away, the glass between us, the noise of the rink, I can see the shift. The thing that changes in his face when it lands on Em. Not softness, that's still the wrong word. Something that opens.

Something that has nothing to do with the game, the win or anything on that ice.

Em sees him at the same moment.

“Daddy!”

He doesn’t hear her. He absolutely cannot hear her over the ambient noise of four thousand people. And yet he moves toward us before she finishes the word, like he felt it rather than heard it.

He skates to the boards.

He stops in front of us, close to the glass, and he looks up at Em with the expression that she has always, since the day she arrived, produced on his face without effort. The one where everything he works very hard to keep managed comes undone quietly and completely. His helmet is off. He’s sweaty, breathing hard and there is a cut above his left eyebrow from the hit along the boards that I’m going to ask about later and that he is going to tell me is nothing.

“We won, Daddy,” Em announces, as if he may not have been present for that.

“I know,” he says, through the glass, the words more lip-read than heard.

“I knew you would,” she says.

Something in his face. The particular shift. “Yeah?”

“I always know,” she tells him.

He looks at her for a long moment. Then he looks at me, over the top of her head, the direct look that doesn't require the volume of the rink to navigate, the look that reaches me regardless of distance or noise because I have been on the receiving end of it for long enough to know it from every angle.

Dark. Still. The gray of his eyes doing what they do in the post-game moments when the performance of everything falls away.

He presses his hand flat against the glass.

Em puts her hand up to meet it, her small palm against the glass where his is, which she has done at every game since she was old enough to reach.

I watch his face when she does it.

I’ve watched his face do this for three years and I’m still not used to it.

I put my hand up too, next to Em's, and he looks at the two of them, our hands, hers and mine, side by side and something happens in the line of his jaw that he would never admit to and that I would never point out, but I will carry it with me long after this game is a memory.