Page 43 of Victory Lap

Jari Mäkinen played beside my father and knew him the way you know a man you have bled next to. Eleven months ago his son skated up to me at camp carrying his father’s name and his own nerves, and turned out to be more than both. There is a shape to how this family and mine keep handing each other back and forth. I have stopped calling it coincidence.

“Tell me the part you can’t say to your agent,” I say.

He is quiet. His thumb runs along the inside of his forearm, over the sleeve of his hoodie, where the tattoo of the Firebird is.

“I got the tattoo in February,” he says. “The guys said wait. You wait, Davis said. Rookies always wait, in case. And I said no. This is my team. I’m not going to be one of the guys who waits to see if he’s allowed to stay. The ink on my contract here isn’t even a year old.” His jaw is tight. “Eleven months, Avi. I gave this team eleven months and a Cup and they traded me for whatever Montreal finally offered.”

There it is. Not the trade. The arithmetic under the trade. The idea that the building measured what he gave it and returned a number that was wanting.

“You know what my June was like, last summer,” I say.

“Everybody knows.”

“Everybody knows the transaction. I’m going to tell you the part I didn’t put in any interview.” The concrete below us has a long crack near where the far blue line will be. I looked at it all of last season. I look at it now. “A reporter told me. Not the team. Not my agent. A reporter, on the phone, while I was standing beside a river as I finished up a run. I gave years to that team and the reporter’s call lasted ninety seconds. When it ended I stood there and understood that I had just been thrown away. And that everyone I had ever protected myself from was about to watch it happen.”

Mäki doesn’t say anything. He is listening with his whole body. It is how he does everything. It is why the room has loved him since September.

“I was wrong,” I say. “Not about the feeling. The feeling was accurate. Being traded feels like being thrown away. It is supposed to feel like that and anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth. I was wrong about what it was. It was not an ending about me. It was a man in an office moving a name on a list. It had no authority over me. The things I actually had, it could not touch. And there is a difference this time, Eero, so hear it, because it took me a year to hear mine. Philadelphia left me unprotected because nobody fought to keep me. Montreal spent the summer fighting to get you. Grayson said no in June. He said no again in July. Then the offer got so big it stopped being a thing a GM can say no to. You are not being thrown away. You are being fought over. It will feel identical for a little while. Feelings do not read contracts.” I turn and look at him. “They can trade you, Eero. They cannot take one minute of what you built. You own that, not them.”

He looks down at the concrete for a while.

“You built this,” he says. “This team. Everyone knows it’s yours.”

“I built it with twenty other men, and one of them scored the series winning goal in Game Seven of the Cup Final at twenty-four years old.” His head comes up. “Your name is on the Cup, Mäki. Do you understand what that means? A banner will hang in this building. The banner stays here and I am glad it stays here. But the Cup has your name cut into metal. The Cup will carry Mäkinen into every hallway it enters for the next hundred years. You are not leaving what you built. It is riding with you.”

His eyes are wet. He tips his head back, and I give him the courtesy of studying the rigging while he does it.

“You told me once,” he says, when his voice is level again. “In September. You said I belong here.”

“Sinä kuulut tänne.”

“So which is it? Do I belong here, or do I get traded?”

“Both. I never said you belong to this building.” The winch cables move a little in the air handling, a few inches, like the space is breathing. “Buildings don’t get to keep people, Mäki. I learned that the hard way and you are learning it the fast way. You belonged here because you decided to. Decide it again in Montreal. It works everywhere. That is the entire secret. Nobody tells rookies because the veterans like to seem wise.”

He laughs for real this time. It cracks in the middle. Both things are allowed.

“Soucy called his brother,” I say. “You have a place to land. He has a spare room and, I am told, opinions about how to stack a dishwasher. Consider it pre-training camp.”

“Soucy did that already?”

“This room does not wait to be asked. You know that.”

Below us, a door opens somewhere in the dark of the tunnel. Footsteps on concrete. I do not have to look. He is carrying food from the Ethiopian place with no sign. Three containers.

Ash pushes the seat down on my other side. He hands Mäki a container and a fork before he says one word, because feeding people is how he says most things.

“Montreal has great bagels,” is what he finally offers. “That’s not a consolation. It’s just true. We’ll come eat them in November when we play.”

“You checked the schedule already,” Mäki says.

“Of course. I checked it in the car while I waited for the food. Montreal comes here in October, and we go up there in November. Now eat.”

Mäki eats. Rookies always eat. It is the last rookie thing left in him. After tonight, it isn’t my job as his captain to notice anymore. I am not going to examine what that does in my chest until later, in the dark, where I keep such things filed.

We stay until the light through the high windows goes from white to gold. Nobody needs to be anywhere. That is the strange wealth of August. Mäki talks about Montreal, the coach, the tenth arrondissement of worry that is learning French. Ash builds him a restaurant list out loud, committee of one, with Marco as a consultant. I say little.

When Mäki stands to go, he looks down at the concrete one more time. Then up, at the shape of the space over center ice.