Page 52 of Five Hole

The net passes to him when I go. It was always going to. The four-year clock does the exact thing I spent a whole season fighting with both hands, and the thing I was fighting turns out to have been the answer. He gets the crease. I get the door I built the order to keep shut, standing open now, on purpose. We get each other across the both of it.

Sowa finds me in the hall after, before I get to the room. He doesn’t say much. He never does. He puts a hand on the back of my neck. The way a man does with a thing he is proud of and will not embarrass by saying so. He says it in Polish, quiet. So the room cannot have it. You kept the order. I say it back to him. The way I said it the first morning he named the thing no one else here understood. I kept the order. Except this time we both know I mean something new by it. The order is not the wall anymore. He hears the difference. He nods, once, the way you nod at a job done right. He lets me go.

Later, in the equipment room, the season over and won. The barn draining and the seats going dark in banks. He comes and stands next to me at the shelf. While I set the last of the gear down. Glove. Blocker. Chest. Pads. Mask. The sentence I have spoken with my hands my whole life. He watches me do it. He is allowed to watch now. It is a door I open, not a window he broke.

He reaches out. Slow. Watching my face the whole way, the way he watches a shooter. Reading for what lands. He is giving me the room to stop him. All season he moved the glove to see if I would break. I broke, every time. I hated him for finding the seam. Now he moves toward it slow and open, asking, giving me the door. And he picks up my glove.

I put my hand over his before he can move it.

“Leave it on the right,” I say. “I like it there now.”

He goes still. Then he laughs. That laugh. The whole-body one, the one that uses everything he has got, the one I earned. He sets the glove down on the right side. The wrong side. The free side. I let it stay.

“I love you,” I say.

It comes out plain. Nothing in front of it. Nothing holding it up from behind. I have never said those words aloud to a living person. Not to my mother, who would not have known where to put them down. Not to Babcia, who said them to me a thousand times over a straightened plate and never once asked to hear them back.

He said it to me first. In his own bed, with the light on, with his ear over my heart. I did not say it back. I took his hand and pressed it flat against my chest and hoped the thing going under it would carry the whole freight. I have never known another way to answer anyone.

It was not enough. He deserves the words. He has deserved the words since the first day, when he moved a glove in this room to find out what I was made of.

So I hand them to him here. In the gray. Under the one bad fluorescent. Standing next to a glove on the wrong side of a shelf.

He goes very still. Then his face gives out entirely.

“Say it again,” he says. It is barely a voice. “Sorry. I’m going to need it about four hundred more times, me. It’s a documented condition.”

“I love you.”

“Câlisse.” He puts the back of his wrist against his eyes and does not apologize for it, and does not turn away, and does not make a joke. “Okay. Good. Okay.”

The order does not break. Because he is the order now. He is the thing that keeps me. And I am not afraid of the dark on the other side of any wall. As long as he is the one who gets to be in here with me.

Spokój. Peace. The word my grandmother gave me over the good plates. The folded cloth. The candle set safe from the curtain. I finally know where it lives.

It was never on the shelf. It was standing next to me at the shelf, laughing. With the glove in the wrong place, and no fear in his face at all.

Epilogue

Emile

Graduation is out there waiting somewhere and I’m not thinking about it, because Casimir is here now. And whatever comes after is a together problem. I’ve finally learned the whole trick of it. Eat at the party. Don’t just dress for it. You know how many nights I stood at the end of a bench with clean dry pads, watching somebody else get fed? Sit down at the table and eat.

I’m eating. It’s the best I’ve ever felt in my life.

Manon calls on a Sunday, like she has called on a Sunday since I was a kid ringing home from tournament hotels on somebody else’s phone card.

She asks did I eat.

“I ate,” I say. “Sat down for it and everything. There was a table, Maman. There were chairs. Two of them.”

There’s a pause on her end that runs a beat long, and I know exactly what she’s doing with it, because she did the same thing the night I told her I had a start. Nothing. She holds still so the moment can’t get away from her.

“Bon,” she says. “Good. That’s good, that.”

Then she asks about him. Not about the net. Not about where anybody’s name sits on a list. She has watched every game this season on a laptop propped against the sugar bowl and she has never opened with who was in the crease. She asks how he is. What he likes to eat. Whether he’s warm enough up here, because she has decided from her own kitchen table that a Polish boy raised in a cinderblock house might not be warm enough, and there is nothing on this earth that will move her off it.

“He’s coming home with me once they turn us loose here,” I say. “Both of us. I already told him about the tourtière. You want to know what he said? Word for word, he said, I will try it. That’s the review. In advance. Of a food he has never met.”