Page 40 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I tape my left wrist and then my right, mirrored, same order. The tape lies flat on the first try.

Then I go to my locker for my wallet, because that’s what I do before the trainer comes in.

The wallet is in the coat. The coat is on the hook. The bills are there. The cards are there. The fold where the stub goes is empty.

I check it twice. I take everything out onto the bench and put it back.

Then I go out to the lot, go through the truck. Under the seats. The gap beside the console where everything in my life ends up. The door pockets. The passenger floor has a socket set, a coffee cup, four months of parking receipts. Not the one I want.

Then the stall. Then the bag. Then the pockets of the suit jacket that spent the night on a chair in the port district.

It’s been in my wallet for thirteen weeks. Once it went through the wash, came out, dried on a radiator. I flattened it under a book.

I dropped it somewhere. That’s what happened. I took it out in the dark in a hotel, a kitchen, a parking structure. It hit the floor. Somebody swept it up. It’s a parking receipt with three numbers in blue pen, worth nothing to anybody on earth.

I know what the numbers are. I could write them again on anything.

I don’t write them again.

I sit on the bench in front of my stall with my hands on my knees. The building makes its early noises: a compressor kicking on under the stands, a hose running somewhere. I do what I do when a shot goes in that shouldn’t. I go back through it in order—truck, garage, elevator, kitchen. Truck, arena, tunnel, stall. Every pocket in every coat in the last four days.

The last time I had it was Saturday night, standing at my own counter with a pen. I folded it in half and put it away.

So it fell out of my pocket after Saturday, in one of four rooms, and one of those rooms isn’t mine.

That thought arrives and goes straight back out again without touching anything. It isn’t a suspicion. It doesn’t even get as far as being a question. He’s the man who sends four thousand dollars back the same afternoon, and I’m a man who leaves a socket set on the floor of his own truck.

Emil comes in at twenty past seven with his phone out. He asks if I saw what Vancouver’s guy did last night. I say no, and he shows me.

Nineteen shots.

Four goals on nineteen shots, in a building that’s been full and loud since December, against a team playing the second of a back-to-back.

The first one is a wrister from the top of the circle that I’ve stopped a thousand times, and it goes in over my shoulder because I’m a quarter-second late on the drop.

The second is a tip.

The third one comes off a two-on-one four minutes into the second. I read a pass. It isn’t a pass.

The fourth I don’t remember. I remember the noise the building makes, which is worse than booing. It’s eighteen thousand people going quiet in a way that has a shape to it, and Beau skating backward past my crease with his glove up saying hey, hey, that’s on me, which it isn’t.

Nils comes down the bench, speaks to the assistant. The assistant taps Emil.

Emil is over the boards before the horn. He doesn’t look at me on his way past. I know why: it’s the same reason I couldn’t look at the guy I replaced when I was twenty-two. I put my mask on the bench and go down the tunnel.

Three hours of sleep last night. I didn’t sleep on Monday. Tuesday, I got three hours on a strange bed.

Minnesota scores twice more on Emil and we lose six to two.

I sit on the bench for the last twenty minutes with a towel around my neck, mask on the shelf beside me. I watch a twenty-three-year-old kid work harder than I did. The building empties early. By the back half of the third, whole rows of red seats in the lower bowl are empty. I can hear skates cutting the ice from the bench, a sound you usually only get at practice.

Nils’s office is nine feet by nine. Desk. Whiteboard. A photograph of a boys’ team from 1994.

He doesn’t ask me to sit down. He doesn’t sit, either. He stands with his hands behind his back, looking at the whiteboard for a while. Then he says:

“Something wrong at home?”

“No.”