Page 9 of Five Hole

“There should be. Who do I see about that?” He does not wait. “Chapter one, know your role. Chapter two, get more reps than the guy in chapter one.”

“Chapter three,” I say, because he has pulled it out of me before I can stop it. “Leave.”

He grins wider, delighted, like I have handed him something. That’s the trouble with giving him a word. He hoards them. He counts the ones I spend on him the way I count the pieces on the shelf. “He speaks. Write it down. Wrobel told a joke.”

“It was not a joke.”

“It had a shape like one.” He coasts to a stop at the top of my crease. Right at the paint. Skate blades kissing the blue. Close enough that I feel the border of the thing get stepped on. He looks down into my net like it is a room he is measuring for furniture.

Sowa says something in Polish, dry, about God giving a man patience and children to spend it on. He leaves us to it. He gathers his pucks into the bucket, slow, and goes up the tunnel. I will remember that he left us to it.

“You are in my crease.”

“I’m near your crease.”

“You are in it.”

“Semantics.” He rocks a blade against the paint, testing it, a boy toeing a line his mother drew on the floor. “Big fancy word for a guy who can’t bear a glove on the wrong shelf.”

He looks down at his own skates, at the blue paint underneath them, and then back up at me. He does not move them off it.

“Huh,” he says. “Would you look at that?”

There is the thing I will not name. He is standing where a man cannot stand, doing the one thing you do not do to a goalie. A crease is not a suggestion. It is the one square yard a goalie owns outright. The one place on a sheet of shared ice that is sovereign. Every man in this game learns it before he learns to skate backward. You do not enter another goalie’s crease. You do not touch his water bottle. You do not move his gear. He knows all three. He does them anyway, one at a time, like a boy testing which fence has the current in it. Treating the net like ground we share. The right answer is fury, and the fury comes. It does. But it comes with something riding it. The look from the equipment room. The high shut window and the light that moved.

I hold still. I am good at holding still. It is most of what I am.

“Move.”

“There it is,” he says, soft, like I have proven a point he was making to himself. “Was starting to think you didn’t have a pulse.”

“Move.”

He holds my eyes. Past the point where anyone holds mine. Past the point where I let anyone. I feel the hold land in my chest like a flat palm pressed there. He knows I feel it, because the grin goes quiet on his face. Something comes up under it that is not a joke at all. For one moment neither of us is playing the part. He is not the noise and I am not the wall. We are only two goalies alone in a cold barn, standing too close, and the quiet between us is doing the loud thing his music usually does.

Then he steps back off the paint. Easy. Like leaving was his idea in the first place.

“See you tomorrow, Wrobel.” He skates off backward so he can keep the grin on me the whole way. He nearly clips the far post and does not look to check. He knows where it is. He knows where everything is. It’s the one thing we have in common, and I hate that we have it in common. A man who knows where everything is should know better than to stand where he stood.

The music goes with him up the tunnel, thinning as he goes, until the barn is only the barn again. I wait for the quiet to put itself back the way it was. It does not, quite. He has left a shape in it.

I stand in my crease. My own. The one square yard of this building I am entirely sure of. I do not lay the last course of the day.

I go home with it a brick short.

A brick short does not sound like much. It is much. The order is only as whole as its last piece. Tonight the last piece is missing. Where it should be there is a boy on his skates at the top of my crease, saying would you look at that. I carry the gap home with me. I set the room down piece by piece and the room holds. The day does not. A name is a door. I have spent my whole life keeping the doors shut. I do not say his, even in the dark, even to myself.

I lie in the dark and run the order and it does not close. I get up. I check the shelf. Books upright, lamp squared, everything where everything goes. I lie back down. It still does not close. This is the oldest fear I have, dressed in new clothes. The fear that one night the order will be perfect and it will not be enough, and there will be nothing left to straighten, and the thing will come in anyway.

I do not sleep. Not how a man sleeps who finished the sentence. The shelf is fine. I checked it. I checked it again. It is fine, and it was never going to be the shelf.

It is that somewhere down the hall there’s a boy who has decided I am a thing with a window in it. He is not wrong. I have given my whole life to making sure no one ever got to be right about that.

Chapter 5

Emile

By the end of the first week I’ve figured out I’ve been playing it wrong.