Chapter 250 250

Chapter 250 250
Alejandro's POV:

We lost to Chicago on a Saturday, four to one at home, and it was not close for one second of the sixty minutes.

Davis pulled Reiner after the second period. Not benched officially, nothing anybody would print, he just stopped calling his name, and Reiner sat at the end of the boards for the whole third with his helmet on and his hands on his knees while Chen and I got double-shifted because there was nothing left to lose.

Reiner played six minutes that night. We played fourteen.

Fourteen minutes in a four-to-one loss was not a promotion. Chen knew that, because Chen knew the difference between minutes you earned and minutes that fell on you when a coach had stopped caring, and he did not say a word about it. But I felt like something good had happened.

The room after a loss like that had a specific sound, which was almost none. Guys got out of gear fast. Nobody put music on, and that included me, because I was loud but I was not stupid. Holloway threw a glove and picked it back up. Marsh was talking quietly to the goalie in the corner and whatever he was putting out was filling that end of the room, thick and hot, and half the guys on that side were sitting with their shoulders up around their ears because of it.

Chen and I got nothing, same as always. Two guys undressing in a hurricane we could not feel.

Reiner came through with a towel around his neck, going nowhere in particular, and he stopped about eight feet from us and said it to the room.

"You know what I can't figure out?"

Nobody answered him. That was not how it worked with a guy like that. He waited, and the room gave him the space, and he took it.

"Six years I've been in this room." He was drying his hair. Casual, unhurried, a man making conversation on a bad night. "Six years, and I can tell you what every guy in here had for lunch. I can tell you which of you is scared before you know it." He nodded down our way without really looking. "Not those two. Nothing over there. Months with them already, and I got a whole lot of nothing."

Somebody laughed. One of the young forwards, I think. It was not a mean laugh, it was the laugh you did when a veteran said something and the room needed a noise.

I knew that laugh from the inside, because I had done it myself some weeks earlier, first and loudest, in that same room, when the same man walked past us on his way to the showers and said that one of us had to have the hands. It had been funny. It had been funny because I had thought it first.

Chen had not laughed that night either.

"Although that's not fair to the loud one." Reiner moved the towel around the back of his neck. "The loud one's easy. Loud ones always are. You know what Martinez wants about ten seconds before he does."

More of them laughed at that. That one was fair. That one I would have laughed at myself.

"It's the other one I can't get." He said it toward the wall, not toward us. "That one's not quiet. Quiet is an accident. That one's careful. And I've been in rooms a long time, and a man who's that careful is being careful about something."

Nobody laughed at that one.

"Four years at the same school," he said. "Same apartment now, I hear. Same everything." He put the towel over his shoulder and started for the shower. "Must be nice. Having somebody who never asks you a question."

I was on my feet before I knew I had stood up.

I got about four steps before Connor got me around the chest with both arms from the side, which for a guy built like Connor was not a hug, it was a piece of construction equipment. He walked me backward into my own stall and sat me down on the bench with one hand flat on my sternum.

"No," he said.

"Did you HEAR—"

"Everybody heard. Sit down."

"He was—" And I stopped, because Connor was not looking at me.

He was looking over my shoulder at Chen, and he held it about a second and a half. Then he came back to me like nothing had happened.

"He was WHAT?" I said, to nobody, because the end of that sentence did not exist.

He had said we were hard to read, which was true. He had said Chen was careful, which was the most accurate thing anybody in that building had ever said about him. He had said it must be nice, which on paper was a compliment. Laid out flat there was nothing in it at all, and if you had taken it to Davis he would have looked at you like you had brought him a drawing.

I sat through the first part. That one had been about me too, and I sat through it with my hands on my laces. It was the second part that put me on my feet, and I did not ask myself why.

My hands were shaking. Not a lot, but enough that I put them under my thighs.

Parsons said, "Guy's got six minutes and eleven hundred games, let him talk bullshit."

A couple of people laughed, and the room started making noise again. That was the end of it as far as anybody in that building was concerned.

Davis found me in the hallway on the way out. He did not make a thing of it. He put two fingers on my shoulder and said, "Martinez," and when I looked at him he said, "You're on a two-way," and kept walking.

That was the whole sentence. He did not have to say the rest. Everybody on a two-way knew what a two-way was. I was on this roster on a Tuesday and I was in the American League on a Wednesday if somebody upstairs decided I was a problem. There was no hearing and there was no appeal and there was nothing to argue about. If Holloway put a veteran into a wall it was character. If I did it I was an AHL defenseman with a lease in the wrong city.

Chen drove us home. He did that about five times a year, when he decided I should not be driving, and he did not ask. He got to the car first and stood at the driver's door with his hand out until I put the keys in it.

He did not put music on. He knew I hated that, which was exactly why he did it.

Twenty minutes of wet highway with the wipers going on the second setting for a rain that only needed the first, because Chen ran everything one notch over what it needed. I looked out the window and argued with a man who was not in the car, and I got in about nine really good hits on Reiner in my head. Every single one of them ended in the same place, which was that I still could not have told anybody what he had actually done.

And underneath all of it, the whole way home, one word kept turning over and would not lie flat.

Nothing.

He said we were nothing. He said there was nothing over there, and the whole room heard him say it and half of them agreed with him, because it was TRUE. I had known it since I was a teenager and it had stopped being a wound about a week after that. I was a beta. I did not put anything into a room. That was not an insult, that was a fact, it was like calling me right-handed.

So why the hell was I sitting in my own passenger seat with my jaw locked and my hands under my legs?

We came up the stairs and Chen unlocked the door and I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my bag still on my shoulder while he put the keys in the bowl and got a glass of water. He did not turn the light on over the table, only the one over the stove, which was the light we used when neither of us wanted to be looked at.

He had not said one word since the rink. Not one. Not in the room, not in the hallway, not in the car. And he had been fine. That was what I could not get past. Reiner had said it in front of twenty men, and I had come out of my skin, and Chen had taken his skates off and folded his towel.

"What did he mean?" I said.

Chen put the glass down on the counter.

"Chen. What did he mean?" I asked again.

"Which part?"

"Don't do that. Don't do the thing." I dropped my bag. "The last part. 'Must be nice, having somebody who never asks you a question.' What the fuck is that? Who's the somebody? Is that me?"

He stood there with one hand still on the glass and he looked at me across a kitchen with the stove light on. He did the thing he had done maybe six times in four years, which was to stop giving you anything at all and start deciding.

I knew that face. I had watched it come down over him before a shootout, and in a hallway outside a coach's office, and once at our graduation when I had met his family. It meant Chen was about to hand you a thing and had already worked out exactly how much of it you were getting.

"Sit down," he said. "There's something I need to tell you."