Page 141 of Power Play

“I know.” He put his hand flat on the side of my neck, under my hair, where he always put it, warm and dry and enormous, and he didn’t pull me in and he didn’t say another word, and it was the most he had given me since August.

I didn’t pack the casita.

It was the decision, and it was the most reckless move I had made in my adult life, which, for a woman who’d just told her much younger employer she loved him over a mug of coffee, said a lot.

I lay in the casita bed that night with the lamp turned to the wall and my laptop open, and I didn’t sleep, so around four I started writing, which was the one habit I never gave up no matter how clean his kitchen got. The cursor went, and the page filled, and through the shared wall the house was dark and quiet, and I thought about a man standing two feet away from me refusing to lie, and I knew I had always believed bravery was asking once and letting it go.

It wasn’t. The brave thing was to stay in the room after asking.

So I decided I would. For the length of the series, however long it ran, four games or four weeks, I wasn’t going to spend one single day of it managing my own grief in advance, carrying the mug back, taking the cardigan down, pre-packing my own heart into newsprint. I’d wrapped another woman’s wedding glasses on a weekday in December while her little boy ran the empty rooms, and I’d done the math that afternoon, on my knees on her floor. I had no marriage, no lease, and a contract that ran with the season. I knew what I stood to lose. I’d known since the trade.

I decided to build it anyway, with both hands and my eyes open, until somebody said the word.

I saved the file. The lamp threw its half-circle on the plaster. On Thursday the series started, and after that there was a date nobody could see yet where all of it would be decided, and for once in my life I wasn’t going to be the one holding the clipboard, standing at the edge of the rug, asking in a reasonable voice.

I turned the lamp off and lay in the dark in a house I hadn’t packed, and let it be unfinished, which was new.

CHAPTER 35

Eli

I played the best hockey of my life for seven games and we lost it in overtime of the seventh, at home, on a play I was half a stride from killing.

The puck came off the rush, a drop at the blue line I’d read and stepped up on, and the pass went through the one lane I’d left because leaving it was the right read, and the right read was wrong, once. Their guy had the net open before I got my stick down. The horn went. The other bench came over the boards. A full building went silent at once. It wasn’t a sound so much as the lack of one, thousands of people deciding together not to breathe.

I stayed down on one knee a second longer than I needed to. Then I got up, because my daughter was up in the stands and would be watching to see what I did, and what I did was get up.

The handshake line was the most honest ritual in the sport. I skated down a row of men who had taken it from me and looked every one of them in the eye and meant it. Their captain held my hand an extra beat and said I was the hardest shifts he’d had all year, which only carried weight coming from a man who’d beaten me, and I said good luck and meant that too.

Then it was the room.

Calloway came down the line of stalls and didn’t give a speech, because there wasn’t one to give, and when he got to me he crouched to my level and put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “Nobody in this league plays the position the way you played it this series.” He let that sit. “It won’t be in the paper. I’m telling you because it won’t be in the paper.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know.” He tapped the top of my stall twice with two fingers and went down to Griffin, who had a towel over his head and his shoulders going.

Nobody filmed it. A defenseman’s year lived in the goals that didn’t happen, the odd-man rushes that turned into nothing, the forward who got to the net and found a body in the lane. A defenseman spent eighty-two games and a playoff series being the reason a goal didn’t happen, and when it ended there was no number to point at, no highlight, no line on the sheet that said here is what he was worth. There was a man on one knee in an emptying building who knew, and a coach who crouched down to tell him it wouldn’t be in the paper. It was the whole pension.

I showered. I put on the suit. I rolled nothing up under my arm this time, because the only jersey I’d ever wanted to keep was already hers, and I still hadn’t given her an answer.

They were at the pillar where the families waited.

Iris was asleep on Maren with Gerald’s tail wound through her fist and the paper crown crushed flat under her cheek. Ryan stood behind them with his tie gone and his eyes red, muttering så nära, så nära to no one. I didn’t speak Swedish, but I’d heard him say it after enough one-goal losses to know it meant so close. Cole had his sunglasses on indoors, which was what Cole did when Cole wasn’t okay.

Delaney had her coat on. Her eyes moved over me the same as they moved over the kitchen when she came in of a morning, one pass, reading all of it, and she didn’t flinch from what she found in my face.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You were the best player on the ice all series. I counted the things that didn’t happen. I know nobody counts them. I counted them.” Her chin was up. “Four hundred and something. I lost the thread in the third period when the man almost scored and you took his legs instead.”

“That’s not a real number.”

“It’s a real number. I’m a professional.” She said it with total seriousness, as if she were reporting that Gerald had a documented medical history, and I almost laughed, for the first time since the horn.

I lifted my daughter off Maren without waking her, and she grabbed a fistful of my collar in her sleep, same as always. Maren hugged Delaney with an extra beat in it and didn’t say a word, which from Maren was a paragraph.