Page 72 of Filthy Goalie
Mira said, “Already done. Go.”
The rink was dark.
Not dark like it was closed. Dark like it was in that particular state of being between things—after practice, before the evening games, in that window when the Fury players were mostly gone and the ice was waiting for the next thing to happen. The parking lot was almost empty. Knox’s truck was in the lot, parked in the corner like he was trying to make himself small.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot for seven minutes, trying to decide whether I was actually going to go inside or whether I was going to sit here like a coward until the reasonable thing to do was to go home and text Knox and say something sensible and mature.
I got out of the truck.
I walked to the rink door. The cold was significant. My hands were shaking as I pulled the door open.
I opened it.
The Frostbite Arena was quiet in a way that rinks are quiet when the stands are empty and the air is still and the only sound is the particular hum of the refrigeration system working to keep the ice solid. I walked down the hallway that led to the ice, following the sound of skates moving across frozen water.
Knox was alone on the ice.
I could see him from the tunnel that led down to the boards. He was in a white Frostbite practice jersey, no pads, just him and the ice and the stick in his hands. He was moving slowly, deliberately, the way a man moves when he is practicing something that needs to be practiced—not the violent quick movements of a goalie working with a team, but the slow, careful movements of a man who is remembering how to do something he had almost forgotten. His movements were precise. His positioning was perfect. He was a man trying to stay sane by doing the work that defined him.
He moved to the left post.
He moved to the right post.
He moved to the crease and then back to the goal line.
He was not stopping pucks. He was not practicing in any real sense. He was skating the position, muscle-memory work, the kind of thing you do when you are trying to keep your body from disappearing entirely. He moved with the particular grace of a man who had spent his whole life on ice, who understood the geometry of a hockey rink better than he understood the geometry of his own life.
I watched him for ten minutes.
Ten minutes of me standing in the tunnel in my boots and my diner apron and my everyday clothes, watching the man who had lied to me skate alone on an ice rink like he was paying penance for something. He had lost weight. He had dark circles under his eyes. He looked like a man who had not been sleeping, who had been spending his nights alone in an apartment thinking about his mistakes.
He did not see me.
I walked onto the ice.
I was wearing boots. Canvas-and-rubber hiking boots with a terrible grip on frozen water. I walked onto the ice the way a woman walks toward something she is afraid of—slowly, carefully, one boot in front of the other. The ice was slick under my soles. The arena was cold. I was very aware of the particular fragility of my own balance.
Knox stopped.
He was standing at the far end of the ice, by the goal line. He was watching me walk toward him. His hands were loose around the stick. His expression was something I could not read. He looked like a man who was not sure whether he was seeing something real or whether his grief was manifesting itself as hallucination.
I kept walking.
When I was three feet away from him, I stopped.
I said, “I cannot have a man who keeps secrets to spare me.”
He said nothing.
I said, “I am not a thing to be spared. I am not something fragile that you get to protect by lying. I am a woman who is trying to keep her diner alive and trying to figure out whether the man in my apartment is the man I thought he was. And you made that harder by deciding that I needed protecting.”
He said, “I know. I know now.”
I said, “Do you. Because it seems to me like you’re still trying to fix this without me. You’re still trying to control the outcome. You’re still not trusting me with your own life. You’re trusting me with your body and your apartment and your presence, but you’re not trusting me with the things that matter.”
He said, “What are you asking me to do.”
I said, “I’m asking you to let me in. All the way in. The good parts and the hard parts. I’m asking you to tell me when the team is struggling, when you’re struggling, when you don’t know what to do. I’m asking you to trust me with the thing you’re most afraid of.”
