Chapter 61 First Season
CALEB
The first game of my professional career was on a Friday night in October, and I spent the forty minutes before puck drop sitting in a locker room that smelled like every locker room I had ever been in, rubber and cold air and the particular sharpness of fresh tape, trying to locate the version of myself that was ready for this.
He was there. I just had to stop looking for him and let him show up.
I had known this game was coming since June when my name came out of the television in Walter's living room and the room went loud around me and Mia crossed it and held on. I had known it through the summer training sessions and the preseason skates and the specific quality of the building above me as the crowd filled it, a noise that was different from junior arenas in the way that things are different when the stakes underneath them are real rather than practiced. Junior hockey was where you proved you could. This was where you proved you would. Every game a quiet referendum on whether you belonged here.
I belonged here.
I had earned the right to know that without apologizing for knowing it. That was something Mia had said to me in September when I told her about the first practice and she had listened and then said: you are allowed to be certain of things you have worked for. Say it like a fact, not like a confession.
I said it like a fact.
The game was three periods of the most serious hockey I had played, the kind where you understood in your body rather than your head that the margin for carelessness had disappeared. Every decision had weight. Every shift mattered not just for the score but for the record being written about you in every coaching notebook in the building. I had spent two years learning to play for the ice rather than for the audience and that learning paid out in the first period when a defenseman twice my age hit me hard into the boards and I got up and found the puck and was somewhere useful before the pain had finished registering.
Make the hit irrelevant by being somewhere useful immediately.
Mia. October of the year before. The corridor before the Westbrook game.
We won three to two.
I set up the game winner with a pass from behind the net that the coaching staff reviewed twice in the post game session, not because it was wrong but because they wanted to confirm it was intentional. It was intentional. I had been making that read in practice for six months and it had become the kind of thing that happened before the conscious mind caught up with it, a reflex rather than a decision, and that was the whole point of the work. You did it enough times in conditions that asked nothing of you so that when the conditions asked everything you did not have to think.
After the session I sat in the locker room alone for a few minutes.
I let the first professional game exist as a completed thing. Not a step toward something. Not a data point for Porter or a proof of something for my father or a performance for anyone watching. Just a thing that had happened and was real and was mine.
Then I called Mia from the parking lot and she picked up immediately, which she never did, which meant she had been holding the phone.
How was it, she said.
Real, I said. The way you said nursing school was real. Just floors and hallways and people who understood the stakes.
Did you score, she said.
Set up the game winner, I said.
She was quiet for a moment in the specific way she was quiet when something had landed properly and she was giving it the space it deserved rather than filling it immediately with words.
Good, she said finally. Really good.
I drove home through the new city with the game behind me and the rest of the season ahead and thought about what real felt like when it was finally the actual thing rather than the rehearsal for it. It felt like ground under your feet. It felt like arriving somewhere you had been walking toward for a long time and recognizing it when you got there.
By December I had played twelve games and registered two assists and one goal and a defensive record that Reeves described with the specific economy he used for things that mattered. The numbers are the proof of the work, he said. That is all they are. The work is the thing. The numbers just confirm the thing happened.
Harrington, the veteran defenseman with eleven seasons and two championship rings who did not offer evaluations unprompted, said good read after a defensive sequence in game eleven. Then in game twelve he added something to it. You are going to be useful on this team, he said.
I told Mia that night on the phone and she said he is right, and I said I know, and she said you are allowed to be proud of yourself, and I said I am proud of myself, and she said do not say it like a confession, just say it, and I said it again without the apology underneath it, and she said there, and I thought about how long it had taken me to learn to do that and how much of the learning had happened in rooms she was in.
The first weekend of December I drove to Hamilton without telling her I was coming.
Not because I had a reason. Because the distance had been a number I could calculate for two months and that particular weekend it had become something heavier than a number and the only solution I had was to stop calculating it and close it.
I showed up at nine in the morning and she opened the door and looked at me and said you did not tell me you were coming, and I said no, and she stepped aside and let me in, and we sat at her kitchen table and drank coffee that she had learned to make exactly right somewhere between October and now and worked in the same room for the rest of the morning and it settled something that had been unsettled for three weeks.
That evening I drove back.
She walked me to the car and we stood on the pavement in the December cold and she said two months until Christmas and I said seven weeks and she said you are counting and I said every day and she said does not change anything and I said no, and she kissed me on the pavement and I held on the way I always held on, like it was meant to last, because it was.
Same time tomorrow, I said.
Same time, she said.
I drove back through the December dark and thought about January and the thing I had been looking at in a browser window since February of the year before and the specific moment I was building toward that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with a girl who had told me to say things like facts rather than confessions.
January was coming.
I was ready for it.