13. Zak
The TVs at Salt Surf had been around long before Zak started working there, but she’d never bothered to look up at them. Mostly because she didn’t care about sports, and secondarily, because she was busy making shitty drinks for even shittier customers.
Given her history of apathy toward the grainy screens patrons in jerseys enjoyed yelling at, it didn’t register in her mind that she now habitually looked up whenever something vaguely resembling hockey news flashed by.
Not until she saw Chase’s name scroll across in the subtitles, then realized she was reading the subtitles, and then realized she’d specifically been paying attention to see if they said anything about him. Which, now that she knew she was doing it, seemed obsessive, weird, and unproductive.
Especially since—now that she was actively readingthe subtitles—she learned there were almost three months left till hockey season started, Chase had been out of the league since last May, and he had never played in the state of California.
It didn’t take a genius to put the pieces together. If his career ending involved him losing a leg and was still national news over a year later, whatever happened to him was worse than he had let on. Not that she expected anything short of awful.
There was no pleasant way to lose a limb as far as she knew, and that was part of the reason she hadn’t asked. The other part being, as ridiculous as it sounded, most days she forgot. After the initial shock wore off, it was just her and Chase again. Like a window back in time. No matter what passed between them, familiarity would always be a piece of it.
“We’re looking at yet another power shift in the Pacific Conference this year, with the Kodiaks only furthering their plummet from the top after two back-to-back Stanley Cup wins in ’94 and ’95. Their comeback season after the unfortunate loss of generational talent, Center Chase Payton, was not a total bust. Goalie Ivan Popov joined the team for the best year of his career, leading a solid defense to cover the gaps of an underwhelming offensive performance. But with the Kodiaks opting to trade defensemen for draft picks in hopes of filling Payton’s vacancy, we’re predicting another tough year for Tacoma.”
“Unfortunately, Jimmy, I think you’re spot-on. We know fans are still reeling from that terrible ’96 playoff game. Those of us at the stadium… I don’t think we’ll ever forget.”
The screen flashed from the reporters’ desk to replay footage.
Zak couldn’t decide where to look, or if she should be looking at all. This felt like an invasion of privacy even though millions of people had already watched it happen in real time.
There were a dozen guys gliding at lightning speed across the ice, all huge like Chase and made bulkier by layers of gear and uniforms. Eventually, she spotted him by the last name on his jersey. Number 10, shouting back and forth with a member of the opposing team. At first, it looked like routine smack talk, but within seconds, spit was flying out of the other player’s mouth, and Chase was raising his hands to keep the other man at bay.
The man’s face was bright red as he backed them up against the acrylic shielding and lobbed the first punch. Chase grabbed him by the jersey, slammed him into the side of the rink, and fought back until the referees detained the other player. But as Chase skated away, the other man broke loose. He caught up to Chase from behind, ripped the helmet off his head, and threw him to the ice.
Once the footage switched back to the aerial viewpoint, there was no detail to be seen. But seconds later, a river of red spread over the rink. Blood traveled through channels dug by skates, splintering outwards from Chase”s leg. A team of medics rushed in to haul him off on a gurney and, though they strapped his body down, his head lolled to the side. Unconscious.
Zak was going to be sick. First, over what happened. Then, sick with herself for time and time again glossing over this life-changing thing that had happened to him.
Of course he wouldn’t have divulged the gory details. She burned more energy avoiding him than talking to him most days, and whenever they did talk, his injury never came up. She didn’t want to ask, and why would he tell someone who had explicitly said, “Let’s not be friends”?
She backtracked five years. Six years. Seven, eight, nine. What else had she ignored when she was busy making assumptions about Chase based on her own narrow, disappointing history of experiences with other people? Was she icing him out because she genuinely didn’t like him, or because it was easier to say goodbye to people who sucked?
To her, Chase had been the man who had everything, but everything came at a cost.
Where he had the family who raised him, she had the family she chose. Where he had money, she had happiness. Where he had fame, she had freedom. And his fast ride to the top came with the hardest fall.
In their ongoing war—Zak being a bitch until Chase loathed her equally, and Chase being nice until Zak stopped thinking the worst of him—shefinally surrendered. Chase won.
Zak didn’t get home until nearly four o’clock in the morning. It was oil-slick dark outside. Silent, except for the rap thumping from the unit a few buildings away.
And for some reason, Chase’s shiny black Mercedes 500 was still in the parking lot.
After her day at work, her mind instantly went to the worst. Maybe something happened to him, maybe he was in pain. Was he always in pain? Guilt prickled through her chest.
She resolved to stop thinking about Chase before going inside. Otherwise, he would definitely know something was up the second she walked in. She took a deep breath and unlocked the door.
For the first time in, well, ever, it opened smoothly.
All the lights were on, and way brighter than Zak was used to. She thought it might be in her head until she looked around to see all the burnt-out lightbulbs had miraculously disappeared. Chase leaned with one knee on the handlebar of a step stool, screwing the last new bulb into the light in the kitchen.
“What…?” was all that came out of her mouth.
There were plastic bags and empty boxes from the hardware store all over the place. It would have been a lot to handle on any day, but especially when she was running on three hours of sleep.
“CFLs,” Chase said. As if that explained everything. “They’ll help lower your energy bill, and they last longer. Half of these old ones were burnt out, I don’t know how you see around here at night.”
“Lamps…”
“Yeah, I put new bulbs in those, too.”
She didn’t know where to look first. Beneath her shoes, the curled edges of the linoleum floor, which used to catch between her toes, were flat and resealed. There was a knob on the sink, a new shelving unit in the living room stacked with all their band equipment.
If she closed her eyes, it was quiet. No humming noise from the refrigerator. No buzzing from the A/C. And, “Did you fix the leak in the bathroom?”
“Oh, yeah. And put a new showerhead on. Your water pressure was shit.”
“Yeah, I know the water pressure is shit, I—” She shook her head. “What the fuck is all this, Chase? How long have you been here? What are you doing? Why are you doing it?”
“That’s a lot of questions.”
She stared back at him.
Did those jeans fit him that well this morning when he first showed up? And when he reached for the mic stand, did his shirt rise over his muscled lower stomach, his hip bones, the way it did now? Probably.
However, she had been too busy looking at anything but Chase to appreciate his appearance, and she needed to get back to that place again. It was one thing to opportunistically snoop into his past. It was another to start checking out her entirely off-limits co-worker just because he might not be a total jerk.
“Look, just—give me a minute, okay? Before you say anything. Please.” He stepped down from the stool. “I get it. I get why you hate me. Well, kind of. There are still some gaps I need you to fill in for me.” He chuckled nervously. “I know I had some type of reaction, finding out about your life now. And that type of reaction, coming from money and privilege, probably makes me seem like a dick. But I swear to you, it’s not about what’s beneath me. It’s about what’s beneath you.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said, but Chase didn’t hear her.
“Any time something around the house needed work, my dad took me and my sister with him to fix it. I was lucky to have someone willing to teach me. And your story made me think of that,” he told her. “I don’t know what happened to you, but I do know you had to grow up fast. And I would never judge you because I admire you, Zak. I think it’s amazing what you’ve accomplished on your own, I think you deserve so much more than this, and I think it’s crazy that you want me to come along for the ride because I know nothing about music. So, before you yell at me for fixing shit—”
“I wasn’t going to yell at you,” she said, louder this time. “And I don’t hate you.”
“Oh?” he said, like there was supposed to be more to the sentence before he left it hanging.
“I don’t think I’ve had the full picture. Not ever, but especially not recently.”
Her face knotted as she sat on the couch. Thankfully, he took the cushion on the opposite side, leaving one two-foot square between them which she would henceforth treat like an impenetrable barrier.
“You grew up too fast too, didn’t you?” she said. “And you’ve been on your own. You moved to a completely different state, where you knew no one, right out of high school. You had the pressure of an entire multi-million-dollar organization on your shoulders.”
“I had good times though,” Chase said. She noticed he wasn’t refuting her other points. “Memories with my team, experiences I never would have had. I got to travel and compete. Got to work every day to be better than I was the day before.”
“But you didn’t need to move to Washington or play hockey for that. That’s just who you are, isn’t it?” she thought out loud. “I’ve been bitter, for as long as I can remember, thinking you had the perfect life. I was jealous of your family, your talent, your success. Eventually, your career. It all seemed so easy for you. And the fact that you were never once truly mean to me made it all worse because I convinced myself your kindness had to be fake. No one can be that perfect.
“I’m right about that, but I wasn’t right about the imperfect parts. Every family has its issues. You don’t even feel like you can tell yours about changing careers. Your dream job didn’t only come with a massive paycheck, it came with massive costs. And I of all people should have considered that talent doesn’t just happen to you. You have to work for it.”
She didn’t want to admit it. Didn’t want to boil this moment of understanding down to a video clip, when really, it shouldn’t have taken proof of a near-death experience for her to give him a chance. But not telling him she knew felt like a lie, and that wasno way to make amends. “I saw the game. On ESPN. At work.”
“The game,” he repeated. “My game? My last game?”
She nodded.
Chase’s posture went rigid, and she broke her own rule on impulse. She couldn’t imagine what was running through his head, but nothing she could say would make it better. So, she put a hand on his knee and, though it made her heart slip in her chest, she tucked her ankle under her thigh and faced him directly.
“That’s not why I’m saying all this. I’m saying this because I know I’ve been terrible to you, and I suck at apologies. And also, because you’ve done nothing but try to help us all out. So I wanted to try, too. To not be horrible.”
She hoped her tone was more convincingly sincere than the words themselves. To her ears, it sounded like a mess, and Chase’s straight, almost panicked expression wasn’t conveying any sort of acceptance like what she was hoping for. “I just thought I should tell you I saw what happened. And if you want to talk about it, you can, and I’ll listen. I can’t promise I won’t say something insensitive, but I’ll try my best.”
That dragged a small laugh out of him. He looked down at her hand on his leg, as if she needed a reminder of it when the fibers of his jeans were currently burning a hole through her palm. Maybe he wanted her to move it. So she did, back to her lap.
“Do you want to know?”
“Only if you want me to.”
“I’ve never told anyone.” Chase rubbed the spot mid-calf where his prosthetic leg connected to scarred flesh. “My parents and Lydia, they had doctors and nurses to tell them. My parents told my coaches. Coaches told the press. The whole world knew before I got discharged from the hospital.”
And they still wouldn’t shut up about it either, if today’s segment was any indicator.
“Well, you saw the fight. That guy had been defending and got pissy about a goal. They were losing. Bad. He needed somebody to take it out on, I guess. We got into it, and he ended up checking me pretty hard and I lost my footing. Next thing I knew, I was knocked down on the ice and the blade of his skate went through my ankle. But that wasn’t what made them amputate. It was the infection that set in weeks later. I ended up going into septic shock.”
He spoke slower than normal. Regulated and deliberate, but anxiety was threaded through every word. “My kidneys started failing. Then my heart. Then my lungs. The doctors had to put me in a medically induced coma. I was out of it most of the time. Sleeping. High on drugs. Barely breathing. Burning hot and freezing cold all at the same time. I didn’t wonder if I was going to die. I knew I was going to die, and at that point, I don’t think I cared.
“But then I woke up a week later. That’s when I found out they had to take my left leg. I was on dialysis for another few months, while my organs recovered, and the rest of the time I spent in physical therapy. And it’s weird. It was like I couldn’t be grateful to be alive because I was so shocked to be alive. Plus, the pain was constant for a while. Pain that couldn’t be treated because it was all in my fucking head. And all people cared about were interviews, interviews, interviews.”
“People suck,” she said. “That’s why I’m not nice to them.”
“They kind of do, don’t they?” He smiled, darkness receding from his eyes. “But you’ve always kept it real with me. And that’s why I don’t care if you’re nice, Parker. Nice is overrated. I’ve been being nice my whole life, and all it’s done is saddle me with fake friends and familial obligations and a warped sense of self.”
“I hate to break it to you, but I think you have a seriously warped perception of everything. Because that was not a check. That was some dirty, street-fighting type shit, and you should have sued that guy into oblivion.”
“I think they gave him a match penalty if it makes you feel better.”
“A prison sentence would make me feel better,” she said, leaning further away from his space and against the armrest. She looked around the apartment again and let out a deep breath. He must have been here the entire day, and still, she couldn’t think of anything to say to him other than, Don’t do it again. “I don’t know how to thank you for all this, Chase.”
“Don’t.” He shrugged. “I have a lot of free time.”
“And I have no idea why you would choose to spend it like this.”
He sank further back on his side of the couch. “Well, you’ve never been one of my choices before.”
You? As in her, personally? She must have misheard, because he was sitting there casually as if they had been talking about the weather. Acting like he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary. Like he hadn’t said “you,” instead of “you guys” or “all of you” or “the four of you.” What she would give right now to be the kind of person who didn’t worship words and torture herself over the smallest of details.
“Do you want to stay on the couch tonight? We have practice in like”—she checked the stove clock—“five hours.”
“I might take you up on that, actually. Wouldn’t want to be late.”
“Definitely not. You need all the practice you can get,” she joked. Though, she wished he would be late, just once, so she could know what it was like to brush her teeth and hair successively instead of simultaneously.
Zak went to the hall closet for some spare blankets and a pillow and dumped them on the couch. “Dallas will be getting in soon, sorry if he wakes you up. Edge is staying the night with family though.”
“It’ll be fine.” He stretched out and propped the pillow under his head, then both hands.
She kept her eyes trained on his face, and only his face. Was it helping soothe this bout of exhaustion-induced hysteria? Not really.
“Give it to me straight. How bad do I suck?”
What? Oh. Band practice. That was what they were talking about.
“You don’t. It pisses me off how much you don’t suck.” And even more that he didn’t realize it. Frankly, she couldn’t believe he was asking her such a stupid question. “Your biggest problem right now is you have to create your own sound. You’re used to singing along, parroting other voices, and you haven’t found your voice yet.”
“How?”
She sat on the coffee table, elbows on her knees. “It takes time, but it’ll happen. I don’t know how to explain it. One day, it’ll click, and everything will fall into place. The music will come more naturally to you. You won’t have to work to reach it, you’ll have to start reining it in instead. At least, that’s what happened for me. Especially when I started writing my own stuff. I didn’t have anyone to copy anymore, and that’s what’s happening for you now.”
Chase nodded to the ceiling. There had never been a doubt in her mind he would fit into their sound as if by divine design. But to look at him was to notice he stood apart from the rest of them. The picture of California. Skin kissed by the sun, hair tousled by the breeze, and eyes as blue as the Pacific. Brightness in a bottle.
No wonder she hadn’t noticed the darkness.
“Will you teach me?” he asked, turning onto his side.
“How to write music?”
“Yeah. All of it. The notes you’re always talking about, or keys. Whatever. I feel like I’m running around here deaf and blind.”
Zak swallowed the lump in her throat. “You’re really trying, aren’t you?”
It was all she could ask for. Even if she was losing precious sleep over not knowing what would become of her band within the coming months.
“Of course I am. I didn’t agree to this so I could mess it up for you. Lifelong athlete, remember? I like to win.”
He smiled, and she smiled back. And based on the way he held her gaze, the way the corner of his mouth wobbled ever so slightly, the way he exhaled like someone knocked it out of him—he realized it, too.
It had been a long time since they’d smiled at each other like that. Seven years.
Zak pushed to her feet and backed away in a few quick paces. Hand on the switch plate, she told him, “Yeah. I’ll teach you.” Then flicked the lights off. “And Chase?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
His voice sounded raw, like it had after the first couple of practices. “Anytime, Zak.”