Page 16 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

There are three numbers on it that a normal man would call. I don’t call the police because a man sat in a lobby chair, stood up, and then left. Explaining why that matters would end my career inside a week. Suze has represented me since I was eighteen; she would be in her car in four minutes. Beau lives twelve minutes away. He would come with his coat over his pajamas and ask no questions until morning.

I don’t call any of them.

Instead, I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet doors.

The floor is cold through my suit pants. The refrigerator cycles on and off. The stove clock goes from 12:31 to 1:00 to 2:14. Outside, the container cranes glow green along the far side of the water. One moves twice in four hours.

At some point after three, I start to shake. I let it happen, and it goes away. I stay where I am.

At four in the morning, alone, there’s no one to be calm for. I’ve been calm around people since I was fifteen. It’s the only real skill I have that has nothing to do with a puck.

I go through it. That’s what these hours are for.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t follow me in. He was in a vestibule, which isn’t a crime, on a night I was at the rink, which is public, in a building whose address is on a property record anybody can pull. He stood up so I would see him stand up. He left so I would see him leave. Everything he did was designed to be perfectly harmless and perfectly legible at the same time. The message is one sentence long. The sentence is: we know where you live.

Not pay us. Nobody has asked me for a dollar. That’s what I keep coming back around to, on a kitchen floor at ten past four with my back going numb against the cabinet doors.

I would rather be threatened. I understand a threat. A threat has a number, a date, a demand.

My brother’s hand comes back at four thirty. The black of it. The finger pointing the wrong way and the doctor saying somebody would have to twist it in a voice like a weather report. Fin sitting on the paper with his mouth shut for the first time in his life.

I get up once to be sick, but nothing happens. I sit back down.

At six, the sky over the harbor goes gray. I get up, but my hip has locked solid. I brace a hand on the counter until the joint gives, shower, then put the chair back where it belongs.

I get to the rink at seven forty, and I don’t go to my stall.

The trainers’ room is dark and empty. A rolled towel sits on the table by the wall. I lie down to stretch out my hip.

Beau’s hand on my shoulder is what wakes me up.

“Hey. Hey. Doyle.”

The lights are on. The whirlpool churns somewhere nearby. Voices carry from the hall. Beau stands over me in half his gear, helmet under one arm, wearing an expression I’ve never seen on him.

“Skate’s in twenty,” he says.

I sit up.

“You were out cold. I said your name three times.”

“I was stretching.”

“You were drooling on Marty’s table.” He doesn’t laugh. That’s the part I don’t like. Beau makes a joke, and then he laughs at it. This time he says it and stands there.

He pulls the stool over and sits down on it, which puts his face level with mine. He looks at me.

Beau Tremblay is thirty-four. His jaw has been rebuilt once. He has four kids, a truck full of car seats, and six seasons of standing in front of pucks for me. One night in Vancouver, he finished on a knee that turned out to be torn through because we were short a defenseman. He decided we weren’t losing another game.

“What’s going on at home?”

The whirlpool churns. Somewhere down the corridor, Emil is shouting at somebody about a phone charger.

“Fin’s business is having a slow winter,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“The regional stuff dried up. Three outfits he came up with have gone under since summer. He’s carrying six guys and there’s nothing to put them on until spring.”