CHAPTER 1: ONE

# Chapter 1 — Oliver

The U-Haul was a fourteen-foot box truck with a radiator that ticked at highway speeds and a rearview mirror that vibrated loose at every road seam and a driver's-side window that went down but required both hands to get back up. Oliver had driven it for fifty minutes before he stopped trying to fix the mirror and started accepting the vibration as information about the road.

He drove north on I-95 with his gear bag in the box and two suitcases and a lamp he'd bought at the Target near the Hartford practice facility. The lamp was the thing that had made the Hartford apartment look like a life. He hadn't decided whether it was going to do the same thing in Beaumont.

The mask was in the passenger seat in its hard-shell case. He'd put it there because the box was not where the mask went. His mother had commissioned it for his draft year — a phoenix in burnt orange and gold across the crown, and along the back edge in flowing Farsi script the opening line of the Shahnameh: ز نام خداوند جان و خرد — in the name of the Lord of soul and wisdom. She was a Persian literature scholar; she had chosen a line that did not ask anything of the reader. Just: this is where we begin.

He had worn it for four years — the AHL, the ECHL before that, twenty-one Hartford playoff games, five Crown games in late April when Cardinal's knee had said no and the Crown had said yes. Larocque had told him at the end-of-season exit meeting that this was not a temporary situation anymore. That was six weeks ago.

He had spent six weeks in Hartford with that information and a lease that was not quite up and a lamp that was not quite packed, and now he was on I-95 with both of them in a box truck that vibrated, driving toward a city where he was going to have to stop being the kid who was about to get his shot and become the kid who had it.

He did not think about Dominik Voss. He thought about the distance between Hartford and suburban Boston, which was roughly ninety-six miles on I-95 with no traffic, which was not what he was going to get at two-fifteen on a Thursday afternoon in late July, but which he would deal with when it happened.

He dealt with things when they happened. That was what goaltenders did.

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His parents lived in Lexington, in a beige colonial that had been white when Oliver was born and had aged toward beige the way New England houses did — gradually, without incident, in a way that only became visible if you looked at old photographs. The house had a kitchen that smelled of dried herbs and a backyard that his father had converted to a garden in 2019 and a bookshelves-in-every-room quality that made it feel, regardless of the season, like a library that someone was occasionally sleeping in.

He pulled the U-Haul into the driveway at five forty-seven and sat for a moment with the engine running before he cut it. The radiator ticked three times in the quiet.

The front door opened before he was out of the cab.

His mother was already on the front step in the way his mother was always already on the front step — she had a talent for hearing a car arrive through two walls and a closed window, which Oliver had attributed at various points in his life to the Persian in her, the academic in her, and the particular attentiveness of a woman who had a child who drove too fast on highways. She was small, with dark hair she wore short now, and she had her reading glasses pushed up on her head in the way she wore them when she'd been pulled away from something.

"Ollie-jān," she said. My Ollie.

"Hi, Maman."

She came down the step and put her arms around him in the brief fierce way she'd hugged him since he was eight years old. She smelled of turmeric and rose water and whatever she was cooking.

"What are you making?" he said into the side of her head.

"Khoresh-e-fesenjan." She stepped back and looked at his face. The look was the same look she'd been giving him since he was sixteen — the inventory look, the one where she was counting something. "You drove from Hartford. How was the traffic."

"Moderate."

"And you are sleeping."

"Yes," Oliver said.

His mother looked at him.

"Yes," he said again.

She did not look convinced, which was the right read, but she moved on the way she moved on — she filed it in a different category, not finished, just relocated. She took his arm and brought him inside.

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His father was in the kitchen in the apron he wore on the weekends, which he wore on weekdays too when there was no reason not to, which there generally was not in July. Kamran Kashani was a chemistry professor at MIT who had the particular quality of a man who had spent thirty years explaining the same thing to different people and had achieved a level of patience that did not seem possible for a human being. He was taller than Oliver and had Oliver's coloring and his hands, and he looked up from the counter where he was cutting bread and said, in the even affectionate English he used when he was pleased:

"The truck is parked badly."

"The truck is a U-Haul," Oliver said.

"I know what it is."

"Hi, Baba."

His father put the knife down and crossed the kitchen and gripped the back of Oliver's neck once, briefly, the way he'd done since Oliver was old enough to stand at his shoulder. He did not hug. He never had — not because he was cold, but because he was the kind of man whose physical affection was calibrated to the specific moment, and the moment called for a grip and not a hug.

"Sit," he said. "Your mother is making fesenjan."

"In July."

"She started at three." His father looked at him with the chemistry professor's specific assessment — he was always running some kind of internal calculation, not suspicious, just empirical. "She was worried about you."

"She said that?"

"She called your aunt in Irvine and talked for forty-five minutes. That is how I know she was worried."

Oliver sat down at the kitchen table. The kitchen table had been the same kitchen table his whole life, a heavy oak thing with a scratch on one corner from when his sister Anahita had dragged a geometry set across it in the seventh grade and his mother had decided the scratch was character and left it there.

The smell of the fesenjan was in the room already — pomegranate and walnut, the winter smell, the smell of the heavy good things. His mother made it in July when she thought he needed feeding in a specific way. Not food in general. The specific food, the one she knew would work.

He let it work on him for a minute.

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Anahita arrived at six-thirty, which was late because she was always late, in the way she had been late to every family meal since she had gotten her driver's license and discovered that arriving slightly after everyone else conferred a certain informational advantage. She was twenty-two and finishing her master's at Boston College and she had the family coloring and none of the goaltender's stillness — she moved through the kitchen the way a forward moved through the neutral zone, with her chin up and her elbows out and a clear sense of where she was going.

She dropped her bag on the chair next to Oliver and looked at him.

"You look tired," she said.

"Hi, Nahid."

"You look like someone who has been awake since four AM and is performing the face of a person who has been asleep."

"I slept fine."

"You drove here in a U-Haul," she said, sitting down and reaching across him for the bread. "Nobody who drives a U-Haul is sleeping."

Oliver looked at her. She looked back, and there was something in the look — the particular protective clarity of a younger sibling who had been keeping track — that made him want to laugh and didn't, because he was tired, actually, and the laugh required more than he had at the moment.

"I'm fine," he said.

Anahita took a piece of bread and did not argue. She had learned that Oliver's I'm fine was not a conversation stopper but a conversation shape — it meant not here, not now, not in front of Maman. She honored that.

His mother brought the fesenjan to the table. His father poured the tea.

"Befarmā," his mother said. Please, help yourself. And then, in Persian, softly, to Oliver: "Āqāye mādar, mikhāhi az khodet beporsi?"

He understood it. He understood Farsi better than he spoke it now, after years of American rinks and English-only dressing rooms. She was asking him if he wanted to ask himself something — if he was willing to look at whatever he wasn't looking at.

"Bale, Maman," he said. Yes, Maman. Which was not exactly true but which was the closest true thing he had available at the kitchen table in Lexington in July with the fesenjan on the table and his family watching him eat.

His father turned his tea glass a quarter turn on the table.

Oliver ate.

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The meal went the way family meals went — Anahita's thesis, his father's questions she hadn't anticipated, the gutters that still needed replacing, his mother's opinions about the walk score of the North End apartment. The things that were in the room moved around the edge of the table and were not served.

They did not talk about the season.

His parents had a practice, established when he was twelve, of not asking about hockey unless he asked first. His mother had told him: the ice is yours. We will not follow you there unless you invite us. They had honored it for twelve years.

He did not invite them tonight because the season was not the thing in the room. The thing in the room was that Oliver Kashani was twenty-four years old and moving permanently to a city where Emil Voss was already waiting two streets from Oliver's new address, and where Emil Voss's older brother had spent five minutes in the players' lounge in late April looking at Oliver in a way Oliver had been not-examining ever since.

His mother refilled his tea without asking. He said thank you in Farsi without thinking: "Mamnoon, Maman." She touched the back of his hand once, briefly, and did not ask anything else.

She let the fesenjan do its work.

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He slept in his old room, which had been converted to a guest room at some point while he was in the AHL but which still had the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling he'd put up when he was nine. His mother had left them. He'd always assumed she didn't know they were there; in recent years he'd decided she knew and had made a choice.

He lay on the narrow guest bed and looked at the stars, which had lost most of their glow but still held a faint residual luminescence if the room was dark enough. He counted eleven before he stopped.

He did not sleep.

He had not been sleeping well since April, which he had decided to attribute to the call-up and the move and the transition, all of which were true and none of which accounted for the specific shape of the wakefulness — the particular occupation of lying still in the dark thinking about something he was not going to think about. He had been doing it since November. He had not examined the difference in frequency between November and now.

At four-fifteen he got up, very quietly, and went down to the kitchen and made himself a tea from the box of Golestan his mother kept in the cabinet, and he sat at the kitchen table in the dark with the tea going warm in his hands and the scratch on the corner of the table visible in the dim light from the backyard.

He thought about the apartment in Beaumont's North End — four windows east, hardwood floors, a closet he had studied in a floor plan for an unreasonable number of hours. He thought about the Crown crease and the rake of the boards and the math he'd run every time he'd stood at the players' lounge window in late April. He thought about Rémi, who had said come see her after your first start, and what the dog would tell him.

He did not think about the morning in the players' lounge when Emil Voss had walked in not alone. He did not think about four seconds in the window and the thing in the center of his chest that had not been peripheral. He did not think about six years of finding Dominik Voss easy to look at from the periphery, or the text tell him I said good, or the fact that he was moving to the city where Emil lived and Dominik would therefore be present at irregular intervals in ways Oliver could not predict.

He was very good at not thinking about these things.

He drank his tea and went back to bed and watched the glow-in-the-dark stars lose the last of their light.

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He left the next morning at nine, after his mother had made him eat eggs and bread and had put a container of yesterday's rice in his bag without asking whether he wanted it, which he did. His father came outside and stood with him by the U-Haul while Oliver transferred the mask case from inside the house to the passenger seat.

"This apartment," his father said. "The North End. Is it near the water?"

"About five blocks."

His father nodded. He was looking at the mask case with the expression he'd worn when Oliver had first asked for goalie pads at fourteen — not resistance, just the calculation of a man accounting for an outcome he had not originally planned for.

"The mask is the same," his father said.

"Same mask since the draft, yeah."

"Your mother chose the line because it begins at the beginning. Not in the beginning — just: this is the first coordinate." He looked at Oliver. "You are moving to a new coordinate."

Oliver had spent four years behind the phoenix and never thought of it that way — as a coordinate rather than a thing.

"Yeah," he said. "I am."

His father gripped the back of his neck once, and let go.

"Park the truck better in Beaumont," he said.

Oliver got in the U-Haul.

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The drive from Lexington to Beaumont was four and a half hours on the coastal highway — north through Gloucester and Newburyport and across the state line, then up through the pine barrens and the long marshland stretches where the road narrowed and the salt smell came through the truck's ventilation system even with the windows up. He had made this drive twice before, for the April call-up — had flown the first time, driven his own car the second. The U-Haul was a different experience. The U-Haul had opinions about highway speeds above sixty-two miles per hour.

He drove at sixty-two.

He thought about the things he was going to have to do when he got there: return the U-Haul to the facility on Beaumont's east side, take a cab to the apartment, pick up the key from the lockbox, figure out where the lamp went. He had arranged with Emil to help move the couch on Saturday — Emil had also mentioned, approximately two weeks ago in a brief phone call, that Dominik might be around if Oliver needed another set of hands. Emil had said it the way Emil said all significant things: in a single low-temperature sentence, at the end of a conversation about something else. Dom might be around Saturday. Oliver had said: sure, that's fine. Emil had said: okay.

Oliver had thought about that exchange approximately forty-seven times.

He thought instead about the goaltender's first rule of a new city: count the distance from the apartment to the rink. Not driving distance — walking distance, on foot, in all weather. Fourteen blocks on a direct route, eleven through the park at the bottom of Harrison Street. He had looked at the satellite view of the park longer than was strictly warranted.

The truck climbed a long rise and the sea appeared to his left — a flat grey-blue line between the pine tops. He drove. The mirror vibrated loose at a road seam and he didn't reach for it.

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He stopped at a roadside motel at six-fifteen, which was later than he'd planned because the traffic through the motel-and-outlet stretch north of the state line had been its own kind of weather. The motel had a neon sign in three colors and a parking lot that could fit a U-Haul and a check-in clerk who handed him a key card without making eye contact, which was the right amount of transaction for the hour.

The room had a desk with a lamp and a heating unit under the window and a view of the parking lot. He set the mask case on the desk. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it for a moment.

He took the notebook from his gear bag.

The notebook was a standard black Moleskine, eighty pages, the same model he'd been using since he was nineteen — he bought them in packs of three from the art supply store near the Hartford practice facility and had filled twenty-three of them over the years. The rule was simple: he wrote in it after games he played zero seconds. After games he'd played — actually played, from the first puck — he didn't write. He didn't need to. The game itself was the record. But the games he'd watched from the bench, all the games in full pads with the water bottle and the bench view and the unspent adrenaline cycling through him with nowhere to go — those he wrote about. Not strategy. Not analysis. Just: what he had seen. What the bench had seen that the starter couldn't.

Twenty-three notebooks of watching.

This was the first time he was going to write in the notebook not after a game but before a year.

He opened it to the first blank page.

He held the pen.

He thought about what twenty-three notebooks had accumulated: the Hartford bench, the AHL playoff bench, the Crown bench in late April with the phoenix mask on and the Beaumont crowd enormous and loud in a way the AHL had never been. He thought about coordinates. He thought about his mother's hand on his, briefly, at the kitchen table.

He wrote one sentence. He had not decided what it would be until he wrote it.

I have known the Voss brothers since I was seventeen. Tomorrow I move into the city where Emil lives. I am not thinking about the older one.