Page 89 of Breakaway
Chapter 31: Wes
The visitor's tunnel smells the same in every building. Cold concrete, rubber matting, the chemical bite of the ice surface rolling back through the Zamboni doors. I have walked a hundred of these tunnels across fifteen years and the body does not need to think about the walk anymore. The legs carry me. The skates are taped. The stick is right.
Atlanta's rink is newer than any other. The glass is clean, the lighting bright and even, the seats still carrying the new-arena smell that fades by year three. I step onto the ice and the surface is good, fresh cut, the edges biting the way they should. I take a lap along the boards, slow, letting the legs wake up. Paulson is behind me. Reeves to the right, already working the puck along the wall.
Except tonight I am looking across the center line.
He comes out of the home tunnel at a jog, stick in one hand, helmet already on. His shoulders are set the way they used to be set in Miami, when his body knew what it wanted and went to get it.
The warm-up drills run for eight minutes. I take shots on our goalie. I stretch my hip against the boards and watch the Atlanta end. He is in the shooting line, taking wristers on the glove side, and the release is close to right. Not perfect but close.
The lines meet at center for the final minute. Both teams skating easy laps, the ice shared, the convention of warm-up neutrality holding the way it holds in every building. I drift toward the center line. He drifts toward the center line. Two professionals in a professional setting and the convention says nothing about what is happening inside my chest when he skates past me at three feet and his eyes find mine for half a second.
"Hey," he says. Low. Under the building noise.
"Hey."
"Nice of you to visit." The grin that I used to get a year ago.
"Schedule helped."
"The schedule. Right." He’s wearing the private grin. "Good to see you."
"You too."
He skates on. I skate on. The half-second is over and the building is loud and neither of us has broken anything the cameras could catch.
A body comes alongside me at the line.
"Mercer."
"Asher."
"Good to see you." He says it simple and plain and the sentence is carrying the weight of a living room where he sat three weeks ago and watched me hold the man he came to check on. He doesn't say anything else. He taps my shin with his stick, the way players tap each other when the acknowledgment is enough, and skates back toward his end.
I take my position for the anthem. Across the ice, in the home lineup, he is standing with his helmet off and his hand on his chest and I can see his jaw from here, set, steady, ready to play.
The game runs the way games run. I take my shifts. The puck finds my tape and I put it where it belongs and the body does what fifteen years have taught it to do. Second period, I win a faceoff clean and drive the puck wide and the play develops and the pass finds Reeves in the slot. Shot goes wide but the play was clean.
Between shifts, I watch him.
He is on tonight. The edges are sharper than the last game I watched on the hotel television a few days ago, sharper than anything since the fall. He puts a pass on Marchetti's tape in the second period and the play converts and the building shakes and he skates back to the bench and taps his stick on the boards and I can see it from the visitor's bench, the thing I am watching for. He looks like the man I knew in Miami. Not identical. Leaner, the face sharper, the eyes carrying what they carry now. But the man on the ice tonight is playing hockey because his body wants to play hockey.
We lose four-two. I shower and dress and tell Paulson I'm meeting a friend. Paulson says "Tell Berger the grouper index says hi.” I smile and walk out of the visitor's tunnel into the Atlanta night.
The key still works. I turn the deadbolt and the apartment opens and the first thing I register is that it is different. The dishes are in the cabinet, not the sink. The mail is gone from the counter. A jacket on the hook by the door that was not there three weeks ago.
Mouse finds me before I find the kitchen. She comes around the corner at speed, her body low and purposeful, and stops at my feet.
"Hey, Mouse."
She yells at me once, sharp and specific, and walks to the kitchen and sits by her bowl and yells again.
"I fed her when I walked in," he says from the couch. He is in a T-shirt and sweats, his hair damp, his legs pulled up. "She's lying."
"She seems convincing."
"She's a professional liar. It's her best quality."
