Page 23

Twenty-nine shots against Detroit. The last four all come inside ninety seconds with the net empty and their goalie on the bench. I’m on my stomach across the crease for the third one, with my stick out flat and no idea where the puck is until it hits the shaft.

Two to one. Fourth straight.

The room afterward is loud in the way it gets in January when a team has decided it might be good. Somebody has the speaker going. Beau is standing on a chair for no reason. Emil is filming.

Nils comes in, and everyone goes quiet.

He’s fifty-eight, gaunt, wearing the same quarter-zip he’s worn for a decade. He never raises his voice or gives speeches. He stands in the middle of the room, holding a folded piece of paper he never opens.

“Ninth in the conference,” he says. “Two points out of seventh.”

Nobody says anything.

“We’re not a good hockey team.” He lets that sit. “We’re a hockey team with a good goaltender. That’s the entire reason we’re in this. Everybody in here knows it, so I’m saying it once out loud. We’re going to become something better before March.” He looks at me for about a second. “Good game, Doyle.”

Then he goes.

The room doesn’t start up again for a few seconds. Then Beau lets out a noise like a whistle, and the speaker comes back. Emil drops onto the bench beside me with his phone still in his hand and his mouth open.

“He’s never said that. Four years, he’s never said anything like that to us.”

I pull the tape off my left wrist and roll it into a ball. “He’s said it about the penalty kill.”

“That’s not the same, and you know it.” Emil is bouncing. He can’t sit down properly; he’s on the edge of the bench with one leg going. “That was about you.”

I get up, go take my shower, and stand under the water until the noise outside is gone.

We’re a hockey team with a good goaltender.

Forty minutes later, I’m dressed. The room is empty. I’m still hearing it. Nils Haugen has said maybe nine hundred words to me in four years, and eleven of them were tonight. I go back through the second period looking for the shift where I wasn’t the reason we won.

There isn’t one. That’s not modesty or false humility. I played well tonight. I know exactly how well, to the shot. It does nothing for me.

What I want is to get out of the building before anybody buys me a drink for it.

The plane to Nashville leaves at nine forty the next morning.

The travel party is thirty-one people, and there are six seats in the last two rows that nobody takes. Marek Brandt is in one of them, with a laptop bag under the seat in front of him.

I sit down beside him, which I don’t have to do.

There are eleven empty seats on this aircraft. I’ve flown with this club for six years. I’ve sat in 12A since my second season; Beau has had 12C for four. This morning, I walk the length of the plane and sit in the second-to-last row.

Nobody says anything about it. Emil looks up from his phone and looks back down.

Marek doesn’t ask me why I’m here.

The plane climbs through clouds into white, blinding light. The cabin dims. Half the room is asleep within eleven minutes.

“How long did you sleep?” he says.

“Four hours.”

He takes a notebook from the seat pocket, black, the size of a hand, with an elastic around it. He opens it flat and writes on a page that already has other lines on it in small, square handwriting. Six seconds, then the elastic goes back on and the notebook slides into his coat.

The engines change pitch. Somewhere up the cabin, somebody laughs.

I know what that notebook is. I’ve known since the first week. Nobody has explained it because nobody has to. A man doesn’t get installed in your accounts, calendar, and travel by a woman who owns your brother’s debt because he cares about your wellbeing. Whatever I tell him goes somewhere. Whoever receives it uses it. That use is what he’s paid for.