Home Ice

The red-eye out of Raleigh landed in Anchorage at 4:40 a.m., which meant Eli Mercer had been awake for twenty-two hours when he walked into the one building he'd spent seven years making sure his career never routed through.

The Frost practice facility smelled exactly the same. That was the first thing, and it was almost the worst thing: refrigerant and rubber matting and the faint sweetness of Zamboni exhaust, the smell of being twenty-two and stupid with possibility. Buildings weren't supposed to hold a grudge. This one had kept the receipt.

"Mercer." The equipment manager met him inside the players' entrance, a broad guy with a clipboard and a lanyard that said DUB in handwritten marker. "Flight okay?"

"Flight was three flights," Eli said. "The last one had a dog in first class living better than I do. Where do you want me?"

"Stall's set up. Fourteen still work for you?"

Fourteen. They'd kept his number free, or gotten it free, so somebody upstairs had been planning this longer than the forty hours Eli had known about it. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and kept his voice easy, because keeping his voice easy was the one skill that had survived three organizations without a scratch.

"Fourteen's great. Fourteen and I have history."

"Yeah," Dub said, not unkindly, and something in the way he said it told Eli the whole building had history, and everybody in it had done the math on his the moment the trade hit the wire. "Room's through there. You remember."

He remembered.

The Frost dressing room at seven in the morning was half full and fully loud — someone's playlist arguing with someone's opinion about it, tape screaming off a roll, a rookie getting buried for something to do with a rental car. Eli had walked into a lot of rooms midseason. There was a science to it. You came in light, you took the chirps, you gave two back, you didn't touch anybody's routine, and you never, ever let them see you scanning the stalls.

He scanned the stalls.

Jonah Beck sat third from the corner, where he'd always sat, one skate braced on the bench in front of him, taping a stick blade heel to toe in smooth, unhurried passes. He'd gotten bigger through the shoulders. Same forearms, same downward tilt of concentration, same everything, seven years thicker. The tape came around the toe, and Jonah tore it with his thumb, and smoothed the edge flat, and looked up.

For a breath Eli was twenty-two in a doorway with his whole life in his mouth.

Then Jonah looked straight back down at the blade, ran his thumb along it once more, and reached for the wax, and it was over. No nod. No nothing. A man checking his work.

"Mercer!" A defenseman Eli had played World Juniors against a lifetime ago — Okafor, big grin, tape ball already in flight — pegged him in the chest. "They told us we were getting a winger and they shipped us a suitcase with feelings."

"The suitcase has hands," Eli said, catching the tape ball on the rebound off his own chest, which got him the laugh, which bought him the ten steps to stall fourteen. His nameplate was already up. MERCER, white on Frost blue, screwed in like he'd never left, like the years between were a clerical error somebody had finally fixed.

Stall fourteen was across the room from Jonah's, three down on the far wall. He could hear the tape.

Eli unpacked the way he'd unpacked in Hartford and Raleigh and that one cursed half-season in the desert: fast, complete, nothing personal on the shelf. He was hanging his practice jersey when the room's volume dipped a degree, and he didn't have to turn around to know why, because rooms did that for exactly one kind of person.

"Mercer. My office. You're not in trouble yet — note the yet."

Marta Kowalczyk stood in the doorway in a quarter-zip and an expression that had once, allegedly, made an Olympic referee apologize. Eli had never played for her. He knew her the way everybody knew her: the clips, the pressers, the story about the timeout in the gold-medal game. Up close she was smaller than the reputation and somehow that made it worse.

Her office had one window looking down at the practice ice and no chair on the visitor's side of the desk. Message received. Eli stood.

"You know why you're here," she said.

"Injury insurance on the wing, cap-neutral, I kill penalties—"

"Don't do that." She said it without heat, the way you'd correct a drill. "You're a smart player, so be smart in here too. Management didn't trade for a winger. Wingers are everywhere. Wingers grow on waivers." She sat on the edge of her desk and looked at him with the flat assessing patience of a woman who had watched ten thousand hours of tape and could no longer be lied to by anything on skates. "I asked them to trade for Mercer-Beck."

Eli's face did nothing. It cost him, but it did nothing.

"I was doing television the year you two came up," Marta said. "Twenty-two years old, both of you, and the wall between you and the net might as well not have been there. He knew where you were going before you did. You went to the middle like the middle owed you money. I've coached three Olympic teams and I've seen that maybe four times, and it does not care about systems, and it does not show up on a whiteboard, and I have spent three seasons building a club that's one line short of dangerous." She let that sit. "Then I watched seven years of you being fine somewhere else while he was fine here. Fine's a waste of my time, Mercer. I traded for the thing I saw when you were twenty-two."

"That was a long time ago," Eli said, and heard how it sounded, and kept going anyway. "Different game now. I've changed how I play."

"I know. I've watched all of it." She stood, which ended the meeting the way a whistle ends a shift. "Line rushes at nine. You're on Beck's wing, right side. I don't need you to be friends. I need you to be what you were. You've got a home stand to show me it's still in there." At the door, she added, without turning: "He tapes his stick heel to toe and he hasn't missed a morning skate in four years. Whatever happened between you is none of my business until it's half a second late on my top line. Then it's my business."

The hallway back to the room was forty feet of rubber matting and team photos, and Eli walked it past a wall of framed history he wasn't in, and past one photo he was in — the old one, the two of them at twenty-two, mid-celebration, Jonah's glove fisted in the front of Eli's sweater like he was holding him up or holding him there, and both of them laughing with their whole faces at something the camera never got to hear.

Somebody had kept that on the wall. Buildings and their receipts.

The ice at nine was fresh and loud under a full team, and for twenty minutes Eli lost himself in the blunt honest mercy of work: edges, flow drills, the ache in his hip flexors from three flights, the specific joy of a sheet that had just been cut. Hockey was the one room he'd never had to manage. His body knew what to do out here even when the rest of him was a scanner in a suitcase.

Then the assistant called line rushes, and the world got small.

Jonah took the middle. Eli swung to the right wall. Between them stood twelve feet of ice and neither of them had said one word to the other, and the whole team was watching in the way teams watched — sideways, chatting, missing nothing.

Théo Roussel settled into his crease at the far end, mask tipped up, and considered the two of them with an interest he made no attempt to disguise. "Ah," he said, to no one, to everyone, "the famous combination." He pulled the mask down. "No pressure."

First rush: Jonah won the wall drop cleanly, took two strides through the middle, and moved the puck to the right side, flat and firm and textbook — to the spot on the wall where Eli had been half a second before. It rapped the boards behind him and skittered to the corner. Dead play.

"My fault," Eli called, chasing it, because saying my fault first was another skill that had survived three organizations.

It was not his fault. He'd cut inside off the wall exactly like he'd done ten thousand times, exactly where a center looks for him, and the pass went where he'd been standing, as if delivered to a version of Eli Mercer that had stopped existing long ago and somebody forgot to tell the tape.

Second rush: same thing, mirrored. Eli read the seam and drove it; the puck arrived behind him, precise as a bill.

Third rush, Eli slowed his route to meet the pass where he now understood it would be — and it snapped past his front foot into space, leading him toward the ice he'd have attacked at twenty-two, the middle-lane cut he didn't take anymore because somewhere across three organizations he'd taught himself the wall was safer, the wall was where you didn't get hit, the wall was where you didn't want too much.

The puck sat in the slot, alone, in the exact center of the ice he used to own. An invitation, or an accusation. From a man who had not looked at him once.

Every pass arrives where I was, Eli thought, collecting it, flipping it back to the coaches with his face arranged into cheerful neutrality. Or where I should've been. He's not missing. You don't tape a blade like that and miss. He's asking a question.

Okafor banged the boards. "Chemistry class, boys! First day! Nobody passes first day!"

"I'm auditing," Eli called back, and got the laugh, and used it to cover the look he finally allowed himself — one full second, no more — at the man circling low through the faceoff dot with his eyes on nothing.

Jonah Beck, twenty-nine, alternate captain, had a stubborn jaw going soft-focus under a helmet cage and shoulders that could carry a franchise, and he moved through the drill the way he'd moved through Eli's memory ever since: deliberate, unhurried, certain of where everything on the ice was going to be. Everything except the one thing that kept refusing to be where it belonged.

They ran eleven more rushes. Jonah spoke exactly four words to him — "wall," "time," "wheel," "again" — each one a flat functional stone dropped into twelve feet of silence. Eli chirped the rookie, chirped Okafor, chirped Théo, who chirped back in dry Québécois-flavored English that "the suitcase has hands, yes, but the hands are jet-lagged." Eli said not one word about Anchorage, or the years, or the photo in the hallway, and Jonah said not one word at all, and between them the puck kept arriving, over and over, half a second into the past.

At the final whistle Jonah peeled off toward the bench without a glance, and Eli stood on the fresh-cut ice of the one building he'd spent seven years avoiding, twenty-five hours awake, understanding the terms with total clarity.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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