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“Tied.” He looks at me. “Beau.”
“Tied’s not good enough.”
Behind us O’Grady leans over the glass. “Sorensen. Next shift you keep it simple. Chip, chase, change. I catch you putting your head down in that corner one more time, you finish the night in a suit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You hearing me, Captain?”
“Loud and clear, Coach.”
It’s the third lie I tell a man tonight, and it’s the cheapest one yet, because I’m over the boards on the next whistle and the very first thing I do is put my head down in the corner.
Second period we go down one. Kingsbury’s fast and they’re mean and Briggs has decided I’m his project tonight, he’s on me every shift, cross-checks in the numbers, a glove in the face after the whistle. Normal stuff. The stuff you eat and smile about. I used to be good at not giving him what he wanted. Tonight I want it. Tonight I keep going back to the same corner like I’ve got something to prove to a guy named Briggs, and Cash skates by between whistles and grabs my jersey.
“Hey.” Quiet, for Cash. “Hey. Look at me. You’re running hot. He’s baiting you and you’re buying every shift. Take a breath.”
“I’m getting us a goal.”
“You’re gonna get yourself killed is what. Beau—”
The whistle goes. I leave him talking.
Here’s the thing about playing like you don’t care whether you come back tomorrow. It works, for a while. I get us the goal. I take a hit I shouldn’t take to spring Wyatt and Wyatt buries it and the barn comes apart and for about nine seconds, mobbed against the glass with my guys, I feel something that isn’t the gray. Then it goes. It always goes. And I chase the feeling the only way I know how, which is harder, faster, more.
Third period. Two minutes left. Tied again. I’m gassed and I don’t care and there’s a loose puck in the corner, my corner, Briggs’s corner, and I should let it go. Any other night of my life I let it go. The smart play is to let it go.
I go for it.
I get there a half-step before him with my head down and my weight over the puck and I hear Cash yell my name from the bench, one syllable, stretched, the sound a guy makes when he sees the thing before it happens.
Briggs hits me from the side. Clean, almost. Late, a little. Shoulder to shoulder, all of his weight and all of my weight and the boards behind me with no give in them at all.
I’ve been hit ten thousand times. I know the whole catalog of how it feels. This isn’t in the catalog.
Something in the shoulder doesn’t absorb it. Something lets go. There’s a sound I feel more than hear, deep, wrong, a wet structural give like a chair leg going, and the whole arm turns to a thing that belongs to somebody else, hot and loose and screaming, and I’m down on a knee on the ice with my glove off and I’m not totally sure when that happened.
The whistle. The crowd doing the thing crowds do, the big inhale, the hush.
“Stay down.” Wyatt’s there. He came off the bench, he’s not supposed to, he’s there anyway, on his knees in front of me blocking the cameras with his body. “Stay down, Beau, the trainer’s coming, stay down.”
“I’m good.” I’m already trying to get up. The arm won’t help. The arm just hangs there being its own separate disaster. “I’m good, give me a second, I’m good.”
“You’re not good.” Cash, the other side, his face white under the visor. “Bud. Your arm’s not—it’s not sitting right. Stay down.”
The trainer gets to me. Hands on the shoulder, gentle, asking me to move it, and I try, and it doesn’t, and his face changes, and I watch it change and I still don’t feel anything I’m supposed to feel about it.
They get me up, Wyatt and the trainer, and the barn does the thing where they clap for the hurt captain leaving the ice, that long building respectful clap. I keep my chin up because that’s the job, the captain keeps his chin up, even now, even with his arm hanging and his season probably in the corner where he left it.
Mormor’s on her feet. Three rows back. Not clapping. Just watching me go, with that look, the one that gets the truth out of you.
I look away first. Again.
The room off the tunnel is too bright. They’ve got me on the table and my jersey cut off, not pulled off, cut, scissors up the side, because the arm won’t go through the sleeve, and the team doctor’s doing the thing where he moves it two inches and watches my face.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Stop. I’ve seen enough to not make you do more.”
“What is it?”
