Just My Goalie

Your phone wakes you at 6:12 a.m., and it doesn't stop.

It's buzzing so hard it walks itself across the nightstand and falls on the floor. You fish it up, squinting. Forty-one notifications. The team group chat. Your mom. Three numbers you don't know. A guy you played juniors with who hasn't texted you in four years.

The first thing you open is from Obinna.

bro. call me. or don't. but LOOK

And a link.

You know before you click it. Your body knows. Your stomach drops the way it does when a puck leaves a stick and you already know you're too late.

It's a post from Slapshot Social, the gossip account every player pretends not to follow. A black-and-white photo, grainy, taken from a distance and zoomed in. The porch of the lake house. The top step. Two men under one blanket, foreheads touching. One man's hand on the other's neck.

You can't see your own face, really. You can see his. Anybody could. That profile is on a blimp.

The caption: GOLDEN BOY'S 2AM "TEAM BONDING"? Tidewater captain Joren Radcliffe and new backup goalie spotted getting cozy at his lake house. We have questions.

Two hundred thousand likes. It's been up for forty minutes.

You go downstairs. His bedroom door is open. His truck is gone.

There's a note on the kitchen island in neat block capitals: WENT IN EARLY. COFFEE'S MADE.

The coffee is made. You stand there holding the pot and staring through the window at the dock, at the tripod still strapped to the last post, and you don't drink any.

Your phone keeps buzzing. Your mom: Call me when you can, sweetheart. Whatever it is, I love you. You type back I'm ok, I'll call later, which is a lie with an honest ending.

Riverlight is wrong when you walk in. Too quiet, then too loud. The guys in the locker room look at you and look away. A trainer says "Morning, Ethan" in a voice like you have a diagnosis.

Ossi's at his stall taping a stick. He doesn't look up, but he says, "You don't have to talk to anybody today. Remember that," and you'd hug him if you could move.

Obinna catches your arm in the hallway. "You good, Ethan?"

"I don't know."

"Okay. That's honest." He squeezes, once. "Whatever you need."

Out by the media room you can hear it before you see it: the buzz of reporters who smell blood. Cameras. Microphones on poles. A little crowd at the end of the hall by the Tidewater backdrop with the lighthouse on it.

And there he is, in the middle of it, in a team quarter-zip with his hair still wet from the shower, smiling.

Next to him stands a woman with a perfect blowout and two phones, one hand on his elbow like she's steering a boat. Bobbie Kinsail, director of communications. You met her on your first day; she shook your hand and said "Welcome to the family" and checked her phone while she said it.

You stop in the hallway, out of sight of the cameras. You can't make yourself go closer. You can't make yourself leave.

"Joren, can you address the photo?"

"Joren, what's your relationship with your new goalie?"

"Joren, is there anything you want to tell your fans?"

Bobbie leans in and says something in his ear. You watch his throat move as he swallows. You watch the golden thing settle over his face like a mask settling over yours before a period.

"Yeah, look, it's honestly kind of funny," he says, and he even laughs a little. "He had a rough night against Calgary. Anybody watching knows that. We sat outside and talked about the game. That's it. That's what teammates do."

"Can you clarify the nature of..."

"He's just my goalie." Joren shrugs, easy, every inch the boy on the cereal box. "He's my roommate because the condo flooded. We were talking about the game. I'd do the same for any guy in that room. That's the whole story."

Just my goalie.

Somebody laughs. The reporters move on to the power play. Bobbie's hand pats his elbow, good boy, and he nods at the next question like nothing happened.

You don't hear the rest. You walk out the back door into the rain.

You drive home without the radio. The wipers squeak. The firs are black and wet and endless.

That's the whole story.

You know why he said it. You're not an idiot. You know what's on the cereal box, and what happens to players who get dragged out before they're ready, and how many men in this league have had to choose between the closet and the game. You know he's terrified. You know, in some calm part of your brain, that you'd maybe have done the same at his age, in his skin.

None of that stops it from landing like a puck to the throat.

You were just his goalie. You were nothing he couldn't laugh off in front of a camera.

You pull into the gravel drive and sit there with the engine ticking. Then you get out and walk down to the dock in the rain, because something has been bothering you since six in the morning.

The photo was taken from a distance. From low down. From the water side.

At the end of the dock, Tyce's little black box is still strapped to the post. The red light isn't blinking anymore. You crouch and look at the lens. It's aimed straight at the porch. At the top step. At exactly where you sat.

Not a buoy light. A camera. The team's camera.

Someone inside the Tidewater took the night you sat in the cold with him, the night he said two words he'd never said to anyone, and sold it.

You stand up slowly. Your hands are shaking, and it isn't the cold.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket.

You almost don't look. You look.

Joren: I'm sorry.

Three dots. Then gone. Then three dots again, for a long time, like he's writing a whole page and deleting it.

Joren: I'm so sorry.

Joren: Can I explain?