Chapter 37 Northwood again
CALEB
Shaw found me in warmup the way he had been finding me all season, through sheer deliberate positioning and a voice aimed at the specific frequency that cut through everything else and landed exactly where he intended, and I was on the far side of the ice with twenty two other players between us and the puck had not even been dropped yet and he managed it anyway, the comment arriving with the practiced accuracy of someone who had spent the week calculating the angle.
I heard it.
I skated a wide circle.
Breathed in through my nose.
Breathed out.
Walk away from every single one. Let the ice be your answer.
Mia. October. The corridor outside the locker room the night she had watched me carry something I did not know how to set down and had simply, without ceremony, helped me set it down.
I walked away.
The first period was clean and grinding and neither side gave the other anything that could be called a meaningful opportunity. Shaw played technically perfect hockey the entire period, precise and legal and exactly as irritating as he was designed to be, and I matched him shift for shift and gave him nothing and the score stayed zero zero after twenty minutes and Coach said two things between periods. Keep your discipline and trust your system. He did not need more than that.
Second period Shaw took a penalty at six minutes, a clear interference call that the referee did not have to think about, and we did not score on the power play itself but we held possession for ninety seconds and that possession settled something in the bench that had been slightly elevated.
When we came off the man advantage Eli found a seam through the middle that had been there for two shifts before he recognized it, and his shot went in cleanly and simply and the building went loud for us for the first time all night.
Shaw said something to me at the next whistle.
I skated to the bench.
Coach gave me one nod when I sat down.
Just one.
It meant he had seen everything and it meant something.
Third period was the hardest ten minutes of hockey I had played in this building all season because Northwood pressed with the desperation of a team that understood time was running out and at four minutes they scored on a scramble that nobody was proud of allowing, and the building went uncertain and the comfortable single goal lead we had almost had was gone.
I sat on the bench between shifts and thought about nothing except the next shift.
Ready lived in the next shift. Nervous lived in the final score. I had learned the difference this year in the specific way you learned things that happened to your body personally rather than things you were told.
At eleven minutes I drove hard to the front on a point shot from the right side and the puck was going to be somewhere specific and I knew where it was going to be before it got there because I had been watching that defenseman's release for two periods and had learned it, and I redirected it cleanly into the top corner and the building went loud in the way that belonged to us.
Two to one.
Nine minutes.
Shaw said nothing to me for the rest of the game.
He played the puck with the focused attention of someone who had recalculated and was spending the remaining time doing the only thing available to him, which was playing the game as well as he could and hoping it was enough.
It was not enough.
We held.
In the handshake line we shook hands and neither of us said anything and that was the right number of words.
In the tunnel Mia was at the cart with her clipboard and her log and she looked up when I came through.
He said something in warmup, she said.
Yes.
Every shift, she said.
Every single one, I said. Every single time.
And the goal.
That was the answer, I said.
That is exactly what I said it would be, she said.
She went back to her log.
Porter texted while Eli was still talking about quarterfinals.
Watched the stream. Composure in the third period was exceptional. The walk-away moments were all noted and will be noted elsewhere. See you March second regardless of Saturday.
Regardless of Saturday.
I showed it to Mia.
She read it and handed the phone back.
He already decided, she said.
He is deciding based on more than the score, I said.
She looked at the message one more time.
Walter is going to text me about this in approximately four minutes, she said.
I stared at her.
My grandfather texts you about my hockey career, I said.
He texts me about a lot of things, she said. We have an arrangement that works very well for everyone involved.
Eli was looking between us.
I want an arrangement with Walter, he said.
Get your own grandfather, Mia said, and walked away with the equipment cart.
The corridor noise faded behind us, but the win stayed with me in the quiet way real things do when they are no longer being performed, just carried.