Page 33 of Blind Spot
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything. I’m a public utility,” I said.
He didn’t smile. He had a roll of tape in his hands, turning it over end to end. His bad haircut had grown out enough to look intentional.
“How do you do it?” he asked. “The before-the-game stuff. Keeping your head clear. There’s all this—“ He paused. “Everybody in the building knows who you are, or they think they do. And you still go out and play loose. How do you not let any of it in?”
“Okay, this might be a new rule one, or sub-clause B to rule fifteen. You choose.” I turned on the bench to face him. “What they know about you out there is a costume. Nineteen thousand people think they know Lucas Varga, and not one of them has ever met me. They’ve met the guy on the bench mic. That guy is great. That guy is load-bearing. But that guy is not the one playing the game. Then it’s just you and the puck and a sheet of ice that doesn’t care who your dad is.”
“Right,” he said. He watched me like we were at hockey camp, and he’d have to repeat my words in front of the team.
“The trick isn’t keeping the crowd out. You can’t keep it out; the building’s too loud. The trick is you build a guy who stands in front of you, and the loud stuff hits him. Behind him is the quieter guy who actually plays the game. The kid on the mic absorbs the noise, so the player doesn’t have to.”
I shrugged. “You already do it, by the way. Out there at the table after Detroit, with the garage thing. You gave them one word, and it landed clean. That was you putting the costume on. You just did it by instinct that time. I’m telling you to do it on purpose.”
Rafe nodded slowly. He’d stopped turning the tape.
“So there’s a you that the room gets?” he asked. “And then there’s a different one?”
“There’s a you for the room and a you for you. Everybody’s got it. Mine’s just louder on the outside so the inside gets left alone.” I knocked his knee with the back of my hand. “That’s the whole job, Rafe. Be unmissable in the front so nobody goes looking in the back.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Yeah,” in the flat Saskatchewan voice. “Thanks, Varga.” He stood, tucked the tape into his bag, and went.
He didn’t call me sir. I watched him walk down the rubber matting toward the tunnel. He had that long, easy stride that ate the ice and looked wrong in sneakers.
Be unmissable in the front so nobody goes looking in the back.I’d meant it for any rookie in any October. For Rafe, it was personal.
I sat there with one skate on and one skate off and tried to piece it all together, but I couldn’t. The kid had asked me how to block out the outside noise, and I’d explained to him in detail, with examples, like a proper craftsman.
Had I revealed something about myself? I shook my head. Probably not. The kid was twenty, homesick, and tired. He was asking the loud veteran how to survive his first November. That’s all it was.
I caught Heath in the hallway outside the video room. He was down on one knee with his foot up on the bench against the wall, working his hip flexor.
He looked up, but he didn’t say anything. He tipped his head in the direction the kid had gone and raised an eyebrow.
It was a silent question.Mikkelsen?
I rolled one shoulder.I don’t know yet.
Heath nodded once and focused on his hip. The conversation was over without any words spoken. Whatever he’d seen in the kid, he wouldn’t be the one to name it, the same as he’d never name what he saw in Rook and me.
I continued toward the parking garage.
***
Rook was at the stove when I arrived home. The kitchen smelled like onions and something with paprika in it, which meant he’d dug out the recipe my mother sent, and he was trying to make me homesick for the country I left at ten.
“You’re cooking the Hungarian stuff,” I said. “You can’t read the whole recipe, and you’re guessing.”
“I’m not guessing. I looked it up.”
“You typed into Google and made the internet translate?”
“That’s what I call looking it up.” He didn’t turn around. “Sprouts or no sprouts? They aren’t in the recipe.”
“Always sprouts.” I dropped my bag, walked around the island, and put my hand on the back of his neck. I kissed the side of his jaw. “Hi.”
“Taste this,” he said, and held the spoon over his shoulder without turning around.
