Caller ID

For two days you look at everyone in Calgary like they might be the one.

The equipment manager who sharpens your skates. The federation's video coordinator, who definitely had a camera in that barn. Beau, who narrates your life anyway. You even ask Kob, half joking, in the hallway after practice.

"Have you been texting me for three years from a secret number?"

Kob looks at you with deep pity. "Brother. I can't even remember my own anniversary. Efua has to put it in my phone with an alarm."

So it's not Kob.

You don't ask anyone else. You don't know how. Excuse me, are you the person who's been holding my head above water after every loss since I was twenty-six? There's no way to say that in a hockey rink.

And then there's Sweden.

The exhibition is at the big downtown arena, sold out, on national TV coast to coast. It's the last game before the federation makes its final cuts and the team flies to Prague. Everyone knows it's an audition. The Swedish team is fast and mean and has three NAHL All-Stars on the blue line, and the crowd is so loud at puck drop that you can feel the anthem in your shin pads.

You play well. You know you do. You win your draws with your left foot shut. You set up Kob for a goal in the first. Tarquin scores in the second on a wrister so pretty the Swedish goalie taps his pad in respect. Two all after sixty minutes. Overtime, three on three.

Forty seconds in, you pick up the puck behind your own net with time and space. You see the whole ice open in front of you like a door. You see Tarquin breaking up the right side, and you know exactly where he'll be, and you cut to go.

Your left edge catches a rut.

It's nothing. It's a half second, a stumble, a bobble. It's enough. A Swedish forward picks the puck off your stick in the slot and puts it past Beau before he can even get across, and the red light goes on, and nineteen thousand people go silent all at once, and then the boos start.

You stay on one knee on the ice for longer than you should.

In the room, nobody says anything. That's how it works. Guys tap your pads on the way past. Beau sits in his stall with his mask still on, which he does when he's upset. The rookie who calls you sir won't look at you.

Tillotson unlaces his skates next to you, slow. "Sweden thanks you, Ethan," he says. Not loud. Loud enough.

You don't answer. You stare at the floor between your feet.

The press is worse. The scrum is twelve deep and every question is the same question with different words. What happened on the turnover. Do you think this affects the captaincy. Do you think this affects your spot on the roster. You say my edge caught and that's on me and I'll be better until the words stop meaning anything.

When you get back to your stall, Tarquin is sitting in it.

He's still in his gear pants and a sweaty undershirt, his hair stuck to his forehead. He's holding a cup of Gatorade out to you, and his face is doing something you don't have a name for. It isn't cocky. It isn't anything you've ever seen him point at you.

"Hey," he says, softly. "Hey. That rut's been there since warmups. I hit it twice. It wasn't you."

"Don't."

"Ethan. It wasn't—"

"I said don't." It comes out loud. Half the room turns. You don't care. "I don't need you to be nice to me, Fairbrother. I don't need you to make me feel better. You'd be skating circles around me on the highlight reel if it were the other way around. So don't."

Something closes in his face. He stands up. He sets the Gatorade down on the bench, very carefully, like it might break.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, Seventeen."

He walks away. Kob, two stalls down, puts his face in his hands.

The ride back to the residence is silent. Tarquin isn't on the bus. You don't ask where he went. You walk the hall to the suite with your bag on your shoulder and your skin crawling, and you let yourself in, and the suite is dark and empty and smells like his soap.

You sit on your bed in your coat. You put your phone face up on your knee.

You don't want to count. You count anyway.

At one minute, you hear the suite door open and close. At two minutes, the bathroom light goes on across the hall and the fan in there starts to hum. Tarquin's back. He doesn't come near your door.

At four minutes, your phone lights up.

Sleep.

That rut was there since warmups. Your edge caught. That's not a mistake, that's ice. You made the right read: the lane was open and he was there. Nobody who knows hockey thinks that's on you. Please don't believe the ones who don't know hockey. Sleep.

You stare at it until the screen dims.

Three years. Thirty, forty, fifty messages. Every bad night. The playoff loss in Seattle. The night you got benched in Winnipeg. The night your Nan died and you played anyway and lost 6–1. A stranger who never asked for anything, who said sleep like it was something you were allowed to do. And tonight you are so tired of not knowing that it feels like a bruise.

You press the number. You press call.

It rings once in your ear.

And somewhere outside your door, not far, not far at all, a phone starts to buzz.

You go very still.

It's on the kitchenette counter. You can hear it rattling against the laminate, three steps away, through your half-open door. Your phone rings in your ear a second time. The buzzing outside answers it, exactly in time, like an echo.

You stand up. You walk out of your room.

Tarquin's phone is lying face up on the counter beside a half-eaten box of cereal, plugged into the wall. It's lit up with an incoming call. On the screen is a photo of you, an old one, a press photo from your first year as captain, mid-laugh, cropped tight.

The contact name under it is 17.

You hear the bathroom door.

Tarquin is standing in it with a towel around his neck and his hair dripping and his face completely white. He's looking at the phone. Then he's looking at you, at the phone still ringing in your hand, and you watch him understand that you've seen it. You watch him know.

The phone buzzes one last time and goes quiet. The call drops to voicemail on both ends.

Nobody says anything for a long time.

"I meant to stop," Tarquin says. His voice is barely there. "I didn't."