Page 53 of Power Play

I’d never in my life seen forty men on one sheet of ice. Forty pairs of skates on fresh ice sounded like paper tearing, amplified through the building, and under it pucks cracked off the boards so fast and so close that I flinched at every one until I got used to it.

Then I found him. He swung around the far turn in full gear with his stick held across his thighs. He was the largest object on the sheet by a visible margin, and every man he passed adjusted for him without raising his head.

The gear didn’t make him bigger. It organized him. Every line of him ran one direction, forward, and he skated low and economical, with nothing wasted. Every move I’d seen him make in his kitchen was a smaller version of this. I’d taken his never hurrying for temperament. It was arithmetic. He took the corner at a speed that lifted my stomach, and the man didn’t hurry because he’d never in his life needed to.

“Breathe,” Paige said, with her eyes still on the ice.

“I am breathing.”

“You aren’t, but that’s fine.”

He swept down our end on the next circuit and his head came up toward our section.

I had both hands on the rail and his name across my back and a few feet of air and one pane of glass between us, and there was no possible way on earth he was going to miss it.

His eyes landed three feet below my face. They went to the seat on my left, at the height Iris stood at when she was up on the cushion with both hands on the rail. They stayed there the length of one stride. His shoulders came down and set again, and he tapped the glass low with his stick on the way past, at nobody, and kept skating.

He never brought his eyes up off that seat, not by one inch. I was watching him, and I’d swear to it in front of a judge.

I sat down and drank a quarter of a beer I didn’t want. My throat ached, and all it had taken was a stick tapping a pane of glass.

“He does it every game,” Paige said. “Every home warmup since he got here, and he’d never admit it.” She turned her head and looked at the letters on my shoulders for the first time all night. “Tonight’s the first night there’s been a grown woman in this row with his last name on her back.”

“Paige.”

“I said I’d give you a period and a half. I’m early. It happens.”

They played San Jose, and it stayed a one-goal game most of the night while both teams tried to kill each other. Eli almost never had the puck, and this was the point. He played the blue line, took away the middle, arrived at the second a man with the puck was choosing between three things and removed two of them.

“That’s the job,” Paige said. “There is no noise in this building for a man standing in the correct place. Griffin told me his save percentage is a lie and Kovac is the reason, and none of them will ever say it to his face. That’s hockey.”

I’d started calling him Iris’s father in my head when I needed a fence up. It had stopped working.

The hit landed deep in the third period.

He had the puck for once, behind his own net, and he carried it up the boards with his head down for half a second. He hadn’t done that all night. A San Jose forward peeled off the wall at him at a speed and an angle that even I read as wrong. He caught Eli high, shoulder into the jaw, and drove him into the boards, and the sound the glass made ran up through my feet and into the seat.

He dropped. The boards were still moving after he was down.

I was on my feet with the seat rocking behind me. Everyone was. The building went up in a flat furious roar with nothing happy anywhere inside it. There were gloves on the ice. Ryan Lindqvist had a fistful of somebody’s sweater. Eli was face down at the boards and he wasn’t getting up.

“Paige.”

“I see it.”

Her phone was already out. She typed fast and held it up between us, and the screen stayed exactly as it was.

“She won’t answer,” Paige said. “She’s down there. Maren doesn’t answer from the tunnel. Not for anybody.”

“You have a badge in that bag.”

“It opens forty doors in this building and it does not open that one,” she said, still watching the ice, “and if it did, the person it ought to take down there isn’t me.”

A trainer was out on the ice, down on one knee at Eli’s head. His hand settled on the back of Eli’s neck and stayed there, and I couldn’t get a full breath. The fear was enormous and plain. He was face down and not moving, and I didn’t know how badly he was hurt. Under the fear sat the part I hated more. I had no standing. I couldn’t call anybody. Row two was as close as I was allowed to get, and not one person in that organization had the job of telling me anything, because I was the nanny, and the nanny didn’t get an update. I stood there in his name in a packed October building full of strangers and waited, and down there, as far as anybody knew, I was one of them.

He got up on his own, and he took his time about it. His face when it cleared the boards was furious. There was a red smear left behind on the white where his mouth had been. He shook off the trainer’s hand before he let the man take his elbow, and the roar broke open into one enormous relieved sound. He skated off under his own power with blood at his mouth, and he stared at the San Jose bench from the boards to the tunnel.

My knees quit and I sat down hard.