Page 30 of Five Hole

The net is yours now.

I want to reach in and find that part of me and scrape it off the bone. I’ve hated a lot of things about myself, the loudness, the needing, how I fill a room because I can’t stand to find out what happens if I go quiet in it. Nothing in me has ever earned the hate I hand that voice in that second, standing in his warm empty paint while they carry him off.

Because it’s true. Horrible exactly for that. It isn’t a cruel thought. It’s just a true one. The depth chart rearranged itself in a scramble on a Tuesday and the net’s mine now, indefinitely, and nobody will put a number on that and I’m not going to ask. The thing I’ve wanted since I was small enough that the pads wore me instead of the other way around, since a dad said backup like it was a word you spit. Nobody handed it to me across a desk. A scramble named me the guy. It came to me riding on the back of the one thing I’d give it all back to undo.

And I would. Whatever ledger the universe keeps on the two of us, put it in there. I’d hand the whole net back this second, the net, the starts, the scout, the door, all of it, to see him get up the normal way. To see him plant that skate and stand. To see him skate off cursing under his breath about a lost stick. I’d give it back and not think twice.

But I can’t say that to him. That’s the trap inside the trap. He’s lying on a trainer’s table right now with his season maybe in pieces, his last shot at the door maybe gone for good, and if I walk in there and say I’d give it back, he doesn’t hear love. He hears pity. He hears the guy who just inherited his crease being gracious about the inheritance. He hears charity from the one person on earth he can’t stand to take charity from. That’s worse. That’s so much worse than saying nothing.

I stand outside the trainer’s room after. I get that far. I get my hand on the door, the smell of liniment coming under it, Kilpatrick’s voice going low and even in there, and I stand with everything I want to say backed up behind my teeth. I don’t go in. What do you say to a man who just watched the whole of it go? Somebody give me the sentence and I’ll say it, I’ll say it twice. I tell myself he needs space, I tell myself the trainers need room to work, I tell myself a dozen kind reasonable things, and all of them are true. None of them is the real one. The real one is that I don’t have a single sentence that would land as the thing I mean instead of the thing that would gut him, and I’m too much of a coward to say a sentence that might gut him. Moose comes down the corridor with the pieces of somebody’s stick under one arm and stops beside me, and looks at the door I am not opening, and does not look at me once.

“Bus hasn’t gone.”

“Yeah.”

He stands there a while longer than a man stands who came to tell you about a bus. Then he goes. He doesn’t tell me to go in and he doesn’t tell me not to. He made sure I knew I had the time, and left me to spend it however I was going to spend it.

I spend it standing there.

So I say nothing. Again.

We’re so good at saying nothing. The rivalry, the two feet of distance, the words held back like cards. We’ve said nothing about the biggest thing in either of our lives for a whole season and gotten away with it.

We’re going to say nothing right up until it kills us. I felt it standing in the warm empty paint and I feel it out here.

Chapter 16

Casimir

The system is gone.

Not the leg. The leg is a lower-body thing, a collision. A piece of bad luck with a skate in it.

“I’m not giving you a number,” Kilpatrick says.

“Give me the number.”

“You’d hold me to it. Then you’d hate me on the day.”

“Give me the number.”

“Weeks. Maybe the season.”

“That is not a number.”

“No,” he agrees, and does not produce one, and I understand somewhere behind my own anger that it is the kindest thing anyone is going to do for me this week. A number is a thing that can be taken from you. A number is a promise the body does not have to keep.

“Does Marquette know?”

“Marquette knows what I know.”

“Then he knows nothing.”

“Then he knows nothing.” He puts his hand on my shoulder as they all do, the calm voice, the weight of it. I nod. There is nothing to say back to a leg.

The leg is not the amputation. The leg will knit. The amputation is this. There is no net. There is no crease to keep. There is no shelf that means anything anymore, because the shelf was always only the front hall of a house. A house whose one room was the save. There is no save now. I set the gear I am not using in its order and touch the corner, two fingers, once. It settles nothing. It is a sentence with no object. Glove, blocker, chest, pads, mask, and then nothing. The sequence has always ended in the ice. It ends now in a stall in a locker room I dress in and do not play out of. A boy in my paint. A spring going gray like weather coming down the ridge, with nothing to hold it off.

I keep the order anyway. My hands know how to do nothing else. I set the day down. The room holds. I do not. And the gap between those two facts is the widest it has ever been.