Page 34 of Full Contact

Mark: I’ve stopped explaining. People think I got a cat.

At the airport, Leah ran the morning smoothly. She confirmed interview availability while we checked bags, answered a question from a local outlet on her phone, and told us she’d need Rook and me for five minutes after landing, no more, cameras in the hotel lobby.

“Five minutes,” Rook said.

“I’ve done it in four.”

Mark’s absence created no professional difficulty whatsoever.

He texted while I was boarding.

Mark: Birthday episode. Does she open gifts on camera or is that private?

Trier: She doesn’t open gifts. She sits in the tissue paper and lets the gifts come to her.

I found my seat and put my bag up. The doors closed, and I switched the phone to airplane mode.

***

We had four games in six days. Between them there would be treatment, meals, video, and Peaches’s updates from Anna at seven each evening. Somewhere in the last few weeks, I’d started timing my texts to Mark where his day had openings: after his morning meetings and before the evening posts went up.

The schedule had developed a Mark-shaped dependency. I made a note to stretch my hip flexors and reclined my seat the allowable inch.

The first road game made us work for it. Their forecheck was better than the video had suggested, and midway through the second period, Rook and I spent a full shift pinned in our own end. Every time we got a stick on the puck, another body arrived. By the time Rook worked it up the wall and we could change, my thighs were burning.

I dropped onto the bench beside him and reached for my water. “That was unpleasant.”

“You stayed for all of it,” he said.

“I didn’t want to leave you with strangers.”

He took a long drink. We watched the next pair get through a shift in considerably less time. That sent us back to the ice faster than we expected.

Late in the third, protecting a one-goal lead, Rook went back to collect the puck behind the net. He delivered a perfect pass without looking. I sent it up to Cross, followed the play out, and heard the change called from our bench.

Our third-period power-play goal held up for the win. We’d earned it.

Afterward, most of the roster ended up in the hotel’s players’ meal room, showered and hungry, talking over one another across round tables crowded with plates and phones. The buffet smelled of roasted chicken and garlic. I took two pieces, a heap of potatoes, and enough green beans to discourage questions from the training staff.

The television was showing highlights, though hearing the commentary was difficult amid the celebrating. Varga had the remote beside his plate and kept nudging the volume up.

“Some of us are trying to have a conversation,” I told him, taking the chair across from Rook.

“You’ve been having it since the bus. I want to see if we were good.”

“We won.”

“Yes, but did we look good doing it? There are several camera angles to consider.”

Rook reached past him for the salt. “Turn it down.”

Varga lowered it two clicks. At the next table, Heath said something I missed, and four guys burst out laughing.

“There,” Varga said. “Now I can’t hear the man telling me how well I played.”

“He hasn’t mentioned you,” Rook said.

Kelsey’s report landed while I was on my second plate. St. Louis had played Dallas that night, and she’d documented it carefully.