Chapter 5: Weak Backhand
The first stride told him.
Shane stepped onto the ice at the morning skate, pushed off with his right foot, came down on his left, and the ice took him. That was the only way he could have put it, if anyone had asked. For eight months he had been skating on it. Now he was skating in it again. The edge went down and held and let go exactly when he asked it to, and he went the length of the rink without thinking about his feet once, and came round behind the net, up on his heels the way he always went when he was nervous, and didn't catch.
He did another lap to be sure. Then another.
It was the building, he decided. It had to be. He had skated on this ice more than any ice in the world, more than the Nepean Sportsplex, more than the outdoor rink his father flooded in the backyard every January. Twelve years of mornings. The ice here knew him. It didn't matter which bench he'd come off.
Mick was at the bench door with a towel over his shoulder, watching the drills with no expression at all.
"They're good today," Shane told him, coasting over.
"Hm," said Mick. "Must be the building, hey."
The Metros came on as Ottawa came off. That was how it went at a morning skate: the visitors went first, and the home team waited in the tunnel in their practice jerseys, banging their sticks on the floor, and for a minute at the bench door the two teams got tangled up.
Hayden was the first one through.
He had the same haircut he'd had at nineteen and a new scar through one eyebrow, from a puck in October, that Shane had only seen in photos. He stopped dead in front of Shane in the doorway and looked him up and down, slowly, at the Ottawa practice jersey, the Ottawa gloves, the Ottawa helmet under his arm.
"Wow," said Hayden. "Look who's lost."
"Hi, Hayden."
"Can I help you find your bench, sir? It's that one. The bad one." He grinned, and grabbed Shane by the back of the neck, helmet and all, and pulled him in and banged their foreheads together, hard enough to hurt. "You coming to dinner or are you too big-time for us now?"
"We're coming. Both of us."
"Good. Jackie made the kids make a sign. I'm warning you now about the sign. I had no editorial control." Hayden let go of him and looked past him, at Ilya, who was coming off the ice behind with his helmet in his hand. "Rozanov."
"Pike."
"Don't kiss anybody in the background of anything tonight. I can't do it again. My phone's only just recovered."
"No promises," said Ilya, and Hayden laughed, a big honking laugh that went all the way up the tunnel, and smacked him on the shoulder going past.
Behind Hayden, JJ said something rude in French and kissed Shane on both cheeks, through the cage. Behind JJ came Sorren Miitka, enormous in his pads, with his mask pushed up, who didn't stop. As he went by, he lifted his blocker and tapped it twice against the side of his own mask: a little salute, goalie to shooter. Miitka had faced Shane every practice for seven years. He knew Shane's forehand better than Shane's own mother did. He knew where Shane went when he came in alone, and had stopped him there more times than anyone alive.
Shane raised his stick to him. Miitka grinned around his mouthguard and went on down the tunnel.
He did everything he always did on a game day, and it helped about as much as it ever had.
Chicken, rice, the same broccoli. A nap in the hotel at one o'clock with the blackout curtains closed and his phone in the bathroom. Ilya didn't nap on game days; he lay on the other bed and watched videos of people restoring old furniture with the sound off, and when Shane woke up at three Ilya was watching a man in Wales strip the varnish from a church pew, and said, without looking round, "I think we should get a pew."
"Where would we put it?"
"The Glebe," said Ilya. "In the duplex. Next to the coal."
In the warm-up, he read the signs.
He didn't mean to. He had trained himself for twelve years not to read the signs, and it lasted about thirty seconds. They were everywhere, along the glass, in the first rows, held up over the heads of people who'd paid a lot of money to stand that close. MERCI 24, on a bedsheet, in red and white. A teenager with a piece of cardboard that said ON T'A VU TOMBER: we saw you fall. A man of about sixty in a Hollander jersey from 2015 with the name taped over in silver duct tape, and over the tape, in marker, TRAÎTRE. A little girl on her father's shoulders, in a Metros toque with a pompom, holding up a pink sign with glitter on it that said SHANE + ILYA, and a heart.
He looked at that one for too long. He nearly skated into Dougie.
"Galloway," Dougie said, steadying him, "says never read the signs."
"Galloway's not real."
"Galloway's very real to me, Shane."
The first TV timeout came at 14:20 of the first period, after an icing, with the score nothing–nothing, and he'd forgotten about it. That was the strange thing. He'd thought about it for seven weeks and forgotten it, because he'd been playing hockey.
The lights went down.
The screen over centre ice went black, and then it was him. Eighteen years old, at the draft, in a suit his mother had had taken in twice and was still too big, shaking hands with a man in a Metros jersey and smiling at the wrong camera. The building made a sound, a long low sound, and Shane didn't know yet what kind.
Then it was 2010. His first goal, a scramble, nothing, the puck going in off somebody's shin. 2012, the playoffs, a younger Hayden with a full beard and Shane beside him without one. 2015, the first Cup, the whole team in a pile in the corner. 2016, the second. Shane at a children's hospital in a Santa hat. Shane crying on the ice in 2020, holding the Conn Smythe as if it might go off. And, in the back of half the shots, in a corner of the frame, behind the bench or holding the door, a small bald man in a cardigan, older every year, with a towel over his shoulder.
The boos started up top. In the cheap seats, near the roof, where they always started. Shane heard them come down through the building like weather.
Then the applause came up under them.
It came from the lower bowl first, from the people who'd paid to stand at the glass, and then it spread, around the ends and up the sides, until it was louder than the booing and then much louder, and then people were standing. He saw it happen, through the glass, row by row. The man with the tape over the name was standing. He wasn't clapping. But he was standing.
Somebody behind him on the bench said, "Up," and it was Kostiuk.
Shane stood. He climbed onto the bench in his skates, the way you did, and raised his stick to the building, and turned with it, slowly, to all four sides, the way he'd watched other men do it here, men whose names were on banners in the rafters over his head. He couldn't see the screen anymore. He couldn't see much of anything. He'd lost his bet with Farah about forty seconds in.
Behind him, low down, a stick tapped twice against his shin pad. He didn't have to look to know whose.
When he sat down, Mathis was crying too, for no reason at all, and Dougie passed them each a towel without taking his eyes off the ice.
Montreal scored first. JJ, on the power play, off a rebound Shane would have been embarrassed to give up, and the building came back to itself, and the booing when Shane next touched the puck was so loud and so cheerful that he nearly laughed.
Ilya tied it in the second.
He did it the Ilya way: picked a pass out of the air at the Montreal blue line, went in one-on-one against the defenceman, went backhand, forehand, round him and in, and the goalie never had a chance. The bench came up off its seats around Shane, and he came up with it.
Then Hayden scored, with a minute left in the second. A shot from the top of the circle that went in off an Ottawa stick and fluttered over their goalie's shoulder like a moth, and Hayden came round the back of the net with his arms up and skated the whole length of the Ottawa bench, slowly, on purpose. As he passed Shane he tipped an invisible shot glass at him, and drank it, and wiped his mouth with his glove.
Shane laughed out loud. He couldn't help it. Kostiuk looked down the bench at him as if he'd lost his mind.
Two–one, after two.
In the room, nobody said anything for a while. Shane sat in the stall with his name over it, in this building, in the room he had walked past ten thousand times and never been inside. It was smaller than the other room. The paint on the ceiling was peeling over the showers.
He didn't stand up. He'd made himself that promise in October, and he kept it.
Ilya stood up.
"Okay," he said. "We're down one. In Montreal. On a Saturday. It's very nice. It's like being home." He looked round at all of them. "Okay, boys. Twenty minutes. Beer."
They laughed, and it was a different laugh from the one in October, and they went out.
Mathis tied it four minutes into the third.
Shane won the draw, Dougie got it deep and went into the corner after it like a man going into a house fire to save a cat, and the puck came out to Shane at the half-wall, and he put it on Mathis's stick in front, and Mathis didn't even slide this time. He just turned, looking stunned, and pointed back at Shane.
Two–two.
The minutes went down. Ottawa had chances. Montreal had more. Miitka stopped Ilya on a breakaway with his left pad, flat on the ice, and lay there afterwards looking up at the rafters as if he were pleased with himself, which he was. With five and a half minutes left the whistle went for an icing against Montreal, and the faceoff was in their end, to the left of Miitka, and Shane looked down the bench and saw Kostiuk put a sunflower seed in his mouth.
"Rozanov," Kostiuk said. "Hollander. Barrett. Go."
They went.
At the circle, Shane went to the wing out of habit, and Ilya caught him by the jersey.
"You take it."
"You're the centre."
"I'm the captain," said Ilya. "Take it."
So Shane took it. He put his stick down against the Montreal centre, a kid he'd played with for two seasons who knew exactly how Shane took faceoffs, and Shane did it the way he always did, and won it anyway, back to Ferris at the point. Ferris put it low. It went round the boards behind the net, and Troy fought for it, and lost it, and won it back.
And Ilya went to the front of the net.
He never went to the front of the net. In twelve years in this league Ilya Rozanov had spent as little time in front of the net as a man could and still score forty goals a season. The front of the net was where you got hit. It was a grinder's job, a fourth-liner's job, standing in front of the goalie with your back to him and your stick on the ice while two defencemen cross-checked you in the kidneys and tried to move you, so the goalie couldn't see. It was the most boring job in hockey, and it hurt.
He went and stood there. Montreal's big defenceman hit him, hard, across the back, and Ilya didn't move. He hit him again. Ilya leaned back into it and planted his skates and stayed, and Shane, behind the net with the puck now, heard him through all the noise of the building say something in Russian that was definitely not about the weather.
Shane came out from behind the net on Miitka's left.
His shoulders went square to the forehand. He felt them go. Everything in him said forehand: his head, his chest, his hands, the line of his body. Every goalie in this league knows you. Miitka had known him for seven years. Miitka had seen this exact play from Shane a thousand times in practice, on mornings like this morning, and he knew, the way you know a man's step on the stairs, where the puck was going, and he went there. He went across, hard, early, the whole of him going, his pad sealing the post on the forehand side.
You never lie, sweetheart.
Shane pulled it back across, underneath, onto the backhand. He didn't look where he was going. He felt the blade cup it the way it had in the garage, a thousand times, in the dark, with the little bulb ticking over his head. And he lifted it.
Short side. Top corner. Over the blocker, under the bar, into the place where, at home, there was a rusty bolt.
The net moved.
For a second the building was perfectly silent. Shane could hear the puck drop to the ice inside the net. He could hear Ilya, three feet away, with a Montreal defenceman still draped on his back, take in a breath.
Then half the building groaned, and the other half, astonishingly, cheered, and Ilya came off the defenceman like a man coming out of the sea, roaring, with both arms up and his stick in the air.
Shane didn't celebrate. You didn't, against your old team, in your old building. He turned and skated slowly toward the corner with his stick across his knees and his head down, and he could feel it on his face, all of it, and he let it be there.
Ilya reached him first. He'd been halfway into the most enormous celebration of his career. Shane saw him see Shane's face, and stop. He stopped dead, the way he'd stopped on the two-on-one in October in front of the empty ice. He didn't grab him. He didn't shout. He just skated up beside him, close, and put his big gloved hand flat on top of Shane's helmet, and left it there, all the way to the bench.
Hayden came past them on his way to the faceoff.
"Backhand?" he said, appalled, delighted. "Backhand? You son of a bitch."
It finished three–two.
He was the first star. When they called it, he went out and did the little lap, alone, and the building mostly clapped. Some people booed. The man with the tape over the name was gone. On his way back to the tunnel Shane looked over at the Metros' bench, and at the bench door, where a small bald man in a cardigan was standing with a towel over his shoulder, and Gilles looked back at him across the ice and nodded, once, the way he used to nod at the end of a morning skate when the skates had been right.
They let the cameras into the visitors' room at the usual time, and the reporters stood in the usual horseshoe, and there were more of them than there had ever been in front of Shane in his life, and half of them were from Montreal.
A woman from one of the French papers asked the first question. She asked it in French, then, kindly, in English, so he'd have no excuse.
"Shane. About April. Did you—"
"No," he said.
The room went quiet.
He could hear the showers dripping through the wall. He could hear Ilya's horseshoe, on the other side of the room, stop.
"I lost an edge," Shane said. "Left skate, inside edge, cutting to my left. I knew before I hit the ice."
"Why didn't you say that in April?"
He had been thinking about it for eight months, it turned out. Now that somebody had asked, he knew.
"Nobody asked me what happened," he said. "They asked me if I did it on purpose." He looked at her. "So that's what happened. And no, I didn't. I've never thrown a game in my life."
His phone, in the stall behind him, buzzed once against the wood. He didn't have to look. Later, on the bus to the hotel, he would read it: I COULD KILL YOU. THAT WAS PERFECT. TWO SENTENCES. I SAID TWO. And then, a minute after: crying in my office, don't tell anyone.
Across the room, somebody had asked Ilya about the goal. Shane heard him laugh, the real one, loud.
"Weak backhand," Ilya said, to his horseshoe. "That's what I always say. Very weak. Terrible. I don't know how he does it."
Kostiuk gave them the night.
"Practice is Monday at eleven," he said at the door of the bus, with the mug in his hand, wrapped in its towel. "Both of you. On time. Married people," he added, to nobody in particular, and got on.
The Pikes lived out in Beaconsfield, in a big square house with too many bikes in the garage. It was nearly midnight when the cab dropped them off. The kids were asleep. Jackie was not; she was at the stove in an apron over her pyjamas, keeping a lasagna warm that was the size of a coffee table, and she hugged Shane, and then she hugged Ilya for longer, and said into his shoulder, "That goal," and he said, "I know," and she said, "Not yours."
The sign was taped to the fridge. It was on three sheets of construction paper, end to end, in four different children's handwriting, and it said:
WELCOM HOME SHANE AND ILYA
and under it, in a different hand, smaller, crammed in at the end:
(WE ARE STILL METROS) (SORRY)
Ilya stood in front of it for a long time with a plate of lasagna in his hand. Then he took a photo of it, and then another one, closer.
Shane ended up at the counter with Hayden, the way he always used to, Hayden with a beer and Shane with a ginger ale, because Jackie had bought ginger ale. She had always bought ginger ale. There was a case of it in the pantry that, as far as Shane could tell, nobody in this house drank but him.
Hayden turned his bottle around on the counter for a while, looking at the label.
"Did you?" he said.
"You heard the scrum."
"I'm not asking the scrum, buddy. I'm asking you."
Shane looked at him. Twelve years. He'd been at Hayden's wedding. He'd sat next to him on four hundred buses.
"No," he said.
Hayden nodded. He nodded for a while.
"Okay," he said. "I knew. I just needed to hear you say it to me." He took a pull of the beer. "Not to the lady from La Presse. To me. So the next time JJ opens his mouth about it, I can put him through the boards with a clear conscience."
"JJ thought I—"
"JJ thinks the moon landing was a soundstage in Laval, Shane. JJ's opinions do not count." He put the bottle down. "I should've asked you in April."
"I should've said."
"Yeah, well." Hayden picked up the bottle again, and clinked it, very gently, against the ginger ale. "You're both idiots. I've always said so. Eat your lasagna."
From the living room came a small noise, and then Ilya's voice, very low, in English and then in Russian. The youngest Pike, Amber, five, in footie pyjamas, had come down the stairs on her bottom one step at a time, the way she did, and found a hockey player on her couch, and climbed onto him, and fallen asleep again almost at once on his chest with her face in his sweater. Ilya was sitting very still with both arms around her and his head tipped back against the cushion and his eyes closed, and he didn't open them, and he didn't move, the whole time they ate.
They took the train home on Sunday.
The bus had gone the night before, and the dentist car was in Ottawa, and Ilya, offered a ride by Hayden, had said that he wanted to take the train, because he had never taken the train in Canada and he wanted to see if it was boring. It was. Hayden dropped them at the station in Dorval for the late-morning train, and it went over the bridge off the island and out into the flat white farmland west of the city, the fields going past in long rectangles of snow with dark lines of trees between them, and a hawk on a fence post now and then, and nothing else at all.
They had the two seats at the end of the car. Shane had the window. Across the aisle a boy of about ten, in a Metros toque, had recognised them on the platform and been staring at them in perfect silence ever since, while his mother did a crossword and pretended he wasn't.
"The skates were perfect yesterday," Shane said.
He said it to the window. He'd been thinking about it since the morning skate.
"It was the building," he said. "I know it sounds stupid. But I've skated on that ice more than anywhere. It knows—"
Ilya started to laugh.
He tried not to. Shane watched him try. He put his hand over his mouth, and then he turned his face into the headrest, and his shoulders shook, and the boy across the aisle stared harder than ever, and the mother looked up from the crossword.
"What," said Shane.
"It wasn't the building."
"What do you mean it wasn't the—"
So Ilya told him. Gilles, the grinder, Sheila's liver. Half-inch on the card. Five-eighths on the skates, since 2012, every single day. "He's two hundred pounds," Ilya said, in a very good imitation of Gilles, eyebrows and all. "On half-inch, he ploughs like a tractor."
Shane looked at him.
"Ten years," he said.
"Nearly."
"I laminated it for him." He could hear his voice going up. "Every two years. I bought a machine."
"I know. It's in our basement."
"He let me—for ten years he—"
And then he was laughing too. He couldn't stop. He laughed so hard he had to bend over with his forehead on the seat in front, and the boy across the aisle gave up all pretence and turned all the way round in his seat to watch, and the mother said "Lucas," sharply, and then, after a moment, started laughing a little herself, at nothing, the way you do when a whole car of a train has gone strange.
When he could breathe again, Ilya had something in his lap. A grey rag, folded over. He put it on Shane's knee.
"Gilles," Ilya said. "For you. He said you should have asked."
Shane unfolded it.
He knew what it was before he'd got the second corner back. He'd know a runner anywhere, by the weight in the rag. The white tape around the heel. 24 / AVRIL, in the marker Gilles had used on every piece of tape since 1990. He turned it over, and ran his thumb down the inside edge, the way he'd watched it done four thousand times, and found the nick. Small. A bite out of the steel no bigger than a fingernail clipping.
He sat looking at it while Coteau went by.
"You had this last night," he said.
"Since last night."
"You didn't show me."
"I didn't need it," said Ilya.
Shane looked down at the steel in his hands for a long time. Then he put it down on the rag, and took out his wallet.
The spare card was in the back, behind his health card, where it had been since 2009, in one version or another. HALF-INCH HOLLOW. BOTH BLADES. CHECK THE EDGES WITH THE GAUGE EVERY DAY, INCLUDING OFF DAYS. He took the pen out of his coat and tried to write over the half. The ink beaded up on the laminate and wouldn't take.
"It doesn't write on plastic," Ilya said.
"I know."
He picked the runner up again and turned it, so the chipped edge was out, and put the point of it to the card, over the half, and pressed. The steel bit. It left a thin white scratch in the laminate. Then another.
It took him most of the way to Alexandria. The train rocked. Twice his hand slipped and he had to go back over it. Ilya didn't help, and didn't say anything. He watched with his chin on his fist, the way Shane suspected he had watched from the top of the stairs, and the boy across the aisle watched too, kneeling up on his seat now, his toque pushed back.
When it was done, the five was all right and the eight looked like a snowman. Shane held it up to the window. The light came through the scratches.
"There's nothing on the back," Ilya said.
"There's never been anything on the back."
Ilya held out his hand. After a second Shane put the card in it, and the runner, and Ilya turned the card over to the blank side and bent over it with his tongue between his teeth, and Shane leaned his head against the window and watched the fields, and somewhere between Alexandria and Casselman, with the heater ticking under the seat and the long white country going by, he fell asleep.
When he woke, the train was slowing for Ottawa and the card was back in his hand, face down.
On the back, in scratched capitals that ran downhill toward one corner, it said ASK GILLES.
Ilya was asleep against his shoulder with the runner in his lap, wrapped up again in its rag, and both his hands over it.