Page 16 of Victory Lap

We keep circling it, he and I. He said we’d talk when it stopped hurting. I know my father. It stopped hurting a while ago. Now it’s just waiting for a room quiet enough, and this week every room has a unicorn in it.

Later, brushing his teeth in my childhood bathroom, Jules says, “The girl.”

“Charlie.”

“She watches everything and pretends she saw nothing. She sat where she could see both doors.” He rinses his toothbrush. Sets it parallel to mine, adjusts it once. “Tomorrow I’m bringing the extra pads.”

He doesn’t explain. I don’t ask. Ten months of this man has taught me that his reads arrive before his reasons.

“Okay,” I say. “Bring the pads.”

Chapter 5: Soucy

There is a version of Chicago that has decided to be gracious about June by pretending it happened to somebody else.

The practice facility gives us the rink to ourselves. We spread out along the home bench with borrowed helmets and a bag of pucks. Cold air over summer air. The best smell in hockey.

I count the room without deciding to. Soren. Me. Murray. His wife with her coffee. Tyler, already down twice between the door and the boards. Emma establishes a broadcast desk at the bench with the unicorn propped against the glass, facing the ice, because apparently he gets nervous when he can’t see the action.

And Charlie, at the far end of the bench, exactly where I knew she would be. Coat zipped to the chin. The posture of a person who has decided in advance how this goes: sit there, be quiet, and get this over as quick as possible.

I know that seat. I sat in it for most of a childhood, at the end of benches in Montreal, watching a game everyone assumed I was too quiet to want. What I was doing was reading it. All the geometry of it, the angles nobody else seemed bothered by. I didn’t have the words to ask for the net, and nobody offered, until the winter I stopped waiting and started talking to the posts in the hallway because the posts didn’t need me to explain.

Tyler falls forty times. I count. Each one is announced as a trick, and to be fair to him, four of them almost are. Soren skates slow figure eights with him, huge and easy, keeping the kid’s confidence inflated with two fingers under it. His stride is careful on the pushes but it’s there. He’s coming back from the injury. Emma’s broadcast covers all of it. Brian is apparently very impressed.

“That one was a trick,” Tyler announces from the ice, face down.

“He’s down again,” Emma reports to the unicorn, in her anchor voice. “He’s okay. He’s doing it on purpose. This is the worst show I have ever seen.”

Murray takes shots on his son that miss on purpose. His wife films. It is a good morning in the middle of a good summer.

“You missed,” Laurie says, filming.

“I never miss,” Murray says, and misses again by a foot.

Charlie watches the ice the way I watched it.

Not the puck. The actual play. When Murray winds up, her eyes go to where the shot is going before it goes there. When Tyler loses an edge, she’s already looking at the spot where he lands. She thinks the coat hides it. The coat hides nothing. Her eyes are doing more work than anyone on the ice, and she would rather freeze than say one word about it.

I get the extra pads from the bag.

I don’t ask. Words hand a no to people looking for one, and this kid has a no loaded, has probably had it loaded the entire trip. So I stand in front of her and hold the pads out and say nothing.

“No thanks,” she says and looks away.

I keep holding them.

“I’m good.”

I keep holding them. Her eyes go from the pads to me. I watch her run the math every kid runs on an adult. What does he want? There is a specific flicker when she can’t find an answer, because I don’t want anything. I’m just holding what she needs until she realizes I am not going to walk away, and grabs them.

She puts the pads on wrong, then right, watching how the straps sit against her legs like the answer was already somewhere in her hands. I give her my helmet. It’s too big. It doesn’t matter.

In the net she stands the way we all stand the first time, arms out, too upright, a kid in borrowed armor. Murray sends one in soft, a grandfather of a shot.

She stops it. Fine. Anyone stops that one.

Soren sends one a little less soft. She’s there before it is. Doesn’t reach for it. She is simply standing where it wanted to go, like she’d read its mind, like the puck had told her on the way.