Marked by the Puck: Icebound Hearts

The hit replays in my head the way it always does after a game, frame by frame, the way Coach Morrow taught us to watch film. Not with regret. I don't do regret. I do calculation, and the calculation on Webb is simple: he had his head down crossing the blue line, I had a clean angle, and I took it. Clean hit. Legal hit. The kind of hit that wins playoff series in April even when nobody wants to say that part out loud in March.

I've made harder calls than that one. I've made calls that cost me more.

What I didn't calculate was her.

I'm sitting in front of my locker with my elbows on my knees, half undressed, while Remy Bouchard recreates the entire third period at a volume that suggests he thinks the rest of us were not, in fact, present for it. Somebody laughs. Somebody throws a towel. The noise is the noise of a locker room after a win, easy and loud and completely uninteresting to me right now, because I'm replaying a different fifteen seconds.

She stood up.

I've watched a hundred people react to me on the ice over the years. Trainers who flinch when I skate toward the bench too fast. Officials who give me an extra half second before they drop the gloves on a penalty call, like they're hoping I'll talk myself out of whatever I'm about to do. Reporters who ask their questions a little too carefully, like they're handling something that might go off.

She didn't flinch. She stood up from her knees on NHL ice with a concussed player at her feet and looked at me like I was an obstacle between her and a job she intended to finish. No fear in it. Just irritation, precise and clean, the kind that doesn't need volume to land.

I'm used to people stepping back.

She stepped forward.

I peel my pads off slower than I need to, working through the motion without thinking about it, which leaves my head free to keep doing the thing it's doing, which is replaying her voice. Low, even, completely unbothered by the fact that I'm six inches taller and probably forty pounds heavier and have a reputation that makes most people choose their words like they're disarming something.

Do you want to go ahead and suture your own stitches too, or shall I handle that later as well.

Nobody talks to me like that. Not because I demand silence, I don't demand anything, I just exist in a way that tends to make people careful. She wasn't careful. She was exact.

"Kane." Cole Rutherford drops onto the bench beside me, already showered, towel around his neck. He doesn't say anything else for a second, which is Cole's particular skill, the silence that isn't empty, the silence that's waiting for you to fill it if you want to.

I don't want to.

"Good hit," he says eventually.

"Clean hit," I correct.

"That's what I said."

"You said good. There's a difference."

He looks at me for a beat too long, the way he does when he's deciding whether something's worth pushing on. He decides it isn't, tonight, and goes back to his own locker. I appreciate that about Cole. He knows which doors not to knock on.

I finish dressing in the kind of quiet that the rest of the room has stopped expecting me to break. They've learned this about me over four seasons: I'm not antisocial, I just don't perform. If I have something to say, I say it. If I don't, I don't fill the air with noise just to prove I'm part of the room. Danny used to fill rooms. Danny used to walk into a locker room and have every guy in it laughing inside ninety seconds, including the ones who'd never met him, including the ones who didn't even like hockey that much. I do the opposite. I take up space by being still in it.

It works for me. It worked for me tonight, with her, too, except that for the first time in longer than I want to think about, the stillness didn't feel like strategy. It felt like something I needed in order to not say something I didn't have language for yet.

I drive home with the radio off. I do this most nights, not because I dislike music but because the quiet after a game is the only quiet I get, and I've learned not to waste it filling it with something else. Seattle at eleven at night is wet and orange under the streetlights, and I take the long way past the water because the long way gives me four extra minutes of nothing, and tonight I need the four minutes.

I keep coming back to her wrist.

It wasn't anything. I caught it on instinct, the way I catch a falling glass before it hits the floor, no thought behind it, just reflex. Except reflexes don't usually come with a follow up thought, and mine did. Her pulse under my thumb. Fast. Controlled. The two things sitting on top of each other in a way that told me more about her than anything she'd said all night, because a pulse doesn't lie the way a voice can. She'd been steady through the whole suture, steady through the whole argument on the ice, steady enough that I'd half believed steady was just what she was.

Her pulse said otherwise.

I don't let myself finish that thought. I've gotten good, over the years, at cutting threads off before they unspool into something I don't have room for. No distractions. That's not a rule somebody gave me. It's one I built myself, brick by brick, back when I was twenty two and learned the hard way what happens when your attention isn't where it's supposed to be.

I don't go home.

I tell myself I'm going to the facility to run drills, which is true in the sense that I do, in fact, lace up and run drills, alone, under the half lit emergency lighting that the rink uses after hours. Nobody else is there. The Zamboni's parked at the far end. The ice is clean and cold and exactly as forgiving as it's always been, which is to say not very, which is exactly why I like it.

I skate the same sequence I've skated probably ten thousand times since I was nineteen. Crossovers into the corner, tight turn, drive to the net, finish on the backhand. My body knows it well enough that my mind gets to go somewhere else while I do it, and tonight my mind goes to a small office that smells like antiseptic and a woman who didn't ask me a single question that wasn't necessary and somehow extracted more from me in twenty minutes than most people manage in a season.

I went there for the stitches. That's the version I'd give anyone who asked, and it's not even a lie, exactly. The night trainer did send me. The cut did need closing.

But I'd known, walking down that corridor, that I could have waited until morning. Cuts like that don't need same night attention. I'd known it and gone anyway, and somewhere under the part of my brain that runs calculations about ice angles and penalty minutes, a quieter part of me had already understood why, even if I wasn't ready to say it out loud to the only person in the building who would have heard it, which was me.

I run the drill again. And again. Crossovers, corner, drive, finish. The rhythm of it is supposed to empty me out. Tonight it's not working the way it usually does, because every third lap or so I catch myself thinking about gray eyes that didn't blink and a voice that cut cleaner than any scalpel I've ever had near my skin, and I have to physically shake my head to get back to the ice in front of me instead of the version of tonight still playing behind my eyes.

Danny would have had something to say about this. Danny had something to say about everything, that was half his charm, the easy running commentary he kept up on my life like he was narrating a documentary nobody asked for. He'd have clocked the thing with the wrist in about four seconds flat. He'd have grinned that grin, the one that used to make our father, even our father, soften for half a second before catching himself, and he'd have said something like, careful, Jax, that one's got a spine, and you've never known what to do with a woman who's got a spine.

He'd have been right. He usually was.

I don't let myself sit with Danny long. I never do, not on purpose, not when I'm tired and the ice is quiet and there's nobody around to perform steadiness for. Some doors I keep shut because opening them costs more than I have to spend most nights, and tonight has already cost enough.

I skate until my legs are heavy in the specific way that means I'll sleep without needing to think myself into it, and then I head for the bench, peel my gloves off, and pull my phone from my bag where I left it three hours ago.

One notification.

A text. Unknown contact, except it isn't unknown, I've just never bothered to save the number under anything other than what it is.

Dad.

Saw the highlight. Good hit.

That's it. Four words, the same four words he's sent after roughly a third of my games for the last two years, ever since he decided, unilaterally and without explanation, that this was an acceptable way to maintain contact with a son he otherwise doesn't speak to. No mention of anything that matters. No mention of the only thing that's ever actually sat between us. Just good hit, like I'm still nine years old and he's still the kind of father who shows up to watch instead of the kind who shows up seven years too late to a hospital room and then disappears into blame for the rest of forever.

I look at it for longer than it deserves.

I don't answer. I never answer. Answering would mean acknowledging there's a conversation happening, and there isn't, there's just him throwing four words into a silence every so often to remind himself, or maybe me, that the silence exists by choice and not by accident.

I lock the phone. I put it back in the bag.

Then I go back to the ice, because the ice doesn't ask anything of me that I'm not equipped to give it, and right now that's the only kind of conversation I trust myself to have.