Hearts on Thin Ice

Chapter 1

Boston

Last March

Nick Sorensen pushed his hair out of his eyes. It had gotten shaggy while he was in the hospital. His mother leaned forward, gave him a fake smile, and released the hand brake on his wheelchair. Nick had hands—he could operate the damn lever himself. But she needed to fuss, and it was too much trouble to argue. Nothing seemed real anymore—not even his mother.

“Okay, here we go!” she said.

Across the room, his dad pushed up from the window ledge, holding Nick’s discharge papers. Nick gave the room a final glance. Through the window he could see a sliver of TD Garden, the ice arena where he played.

Hadplayed. The team had dropped him while he was in the hospital. One of the best forwards in the NHL, and they’d straight up released him. They didn’t think he could come back.

He shoved his hands over the wheels, propelling himself the hell out of there. The nurses applauded as he passed their station, and people in the corridors stepped to the side and clapped and took photos.

And then there were the logistics of getting him in the car and the drive to his apartment—thank god it had an elevator. He and Sammy had almost taken a place that didn’t, but it had been too close to a couple of Sammy’s exes, so they’d rented an apartment in a bigger building. It had a good view of Boston and no known feminine hazards.

When they got to his apartment door, his parents stood back. He had left this place laughing, with Sammy, bumping shoulders, off to meet four teammates to help with a destination proposal one of the guys had planned. They’d ended up with a crumpled fuselage in a field.

Nick turned the key, and his dad pushed the door open. He wheeled himself in and stared. It wasn’t the apartment he had left.

“Um, Kaylee and Matthew came a couple of weeks ago,” his mom said softly. “They needed to get Sammy’s things out of here. They just … needed to get it done.”

He nodded, blinking. So Sammy’s parents had talked to his parents about it, not him. He’d stopped being in charge of his apartment when he lost control of everything else.

“They said if they got anything wrong to let them know. They asked if we wanted to be here, but we thought they should have privacy.”

“And we didn’t have more vacation time,” his dad said. His mom shot him a poison look. Nick wasn’t supposed to know how hard it had been on his parents, the call about the crash and then him being in the hospital so long. They had come immediately, stayed for a week, and then, when he’d been transferred to the rehab wing for another six weeks, they’d taken turns. He’d told them to go home, but one of them was there every day anyway, which was pointless because he wasn’t talking. Mostly he looked out the window. His teammates who hadn’t been on the plane had shifted through in twos and threes. They brought him contraband food and classic video game cartridges and team updates. And they left quickly, in case plane crashes were contagious.

“Nick?” It was his dad.

Nick blinked and wheeled to the refrigerator. Someone had cleaned it out. He pulled out the silverware drawer—empty. The waffle maker wasn’t on the counter. Going through the kitchen like this was like losing a tooth and poking your tongue into the hole, exploring the parameters of the loss. “Sammy made waffles sometimes. He said that’s how you got six-pack abs—having waffles on the inside as scaffolding.” He couldn’t tell it like Sammy did. It had been funny.

“None of us knew what to do,” his mom said, “but they needed to get it over with.” He nodded and wheeled into Sammy’s room, shoving the door shut behind him. It was profoundly empty. There was more oxygen in outer space. The bed was gone, the dresser, the plant stand. His 3D puzzle of the Great Pyramid. There was a dent in a floorboard where he’d dropped a wine bottle once.

Nick opened the door and wheeled himself out, easing the leg around the doorframe. His parents stood in the living room, his mother holding her own hands. They were watching to see if he was okay, expecting him to settle back into a home with half of everything gone. He ran his thumb across the coffee table. There had been an illustrated book on ancient Egypt there when they left that night, bundled against the cold, Sammy’s red scarf bright against his almost black hair. It was gone now. Sammy had given the book to Nick for his birthday, but it made sense that the Gonczys had thought it was Sammy’s.

So many losses. Nick’s body had become an object strangers discussed and shoved metal plates into. And for all that he loved Sammy’s parents, it felt like they’d killed him a second time by removing the traces of him. Nick had thought he could still find him here, somehow. But he was gone. I need you to not be gone.

He had to get out of there. He wheeled sharply toward his own bedroom—nearly running over his mother’s foot—but he stopped short when he caught a glimpse of Sammy’s toothbrush in the bathroom, white crust on the bottom because he never rinsed well enough. Nick nodded toward it, and his father hesitated, then retrieved it and laid it across his palm. Nick closed his fingers around it, shut his eyes, and began to sob. He couldn’t keep it. He couldn’t throw it away.

He cried until the tears stopped on their own. His parents clung to each other. He held the toothbrush out to his dad, to let him deal with it. Then he wheeled into his bedroom and saw the white dress shirt on his bed. He’d switched shirts at the last minute when he remembered that Dragan had a bunch of white shit for his proposal—banks of white flowers interlaced with twinkle lights, all supposed to glow on the water under the moon. He would probably wear white himself, so Nick had thrown on a blue shirt at the last minute. The white one had lain here all this time, tossed casually on the bed, a mute testament to the tiny hinges of fate. If Nick had worn that shirt, would he have been ready first? Would they have taken his car? Would Sammy have boarded while he parked, instead of the other way around? Because Nick was the only survivor. When he’d taken his seat, he’d condemned the rest of them.

He grabbed viciously at the shirts hanging in his closet and only succeeded in twisting the sleeves.

“Here, honey. You want those down?” his mother said.

“I’m going to pack a suitcase. Grab a few books. Then I’m out of here.”

“Do you want to come home?” his dad asked from the doorway. “We can make a bedroom on the first floor.”

“Easy peasy!” his mother said brightly.

He wanted to beat the world until it howled. He settled for shaking his head. “I’m going to a hotel. I can’t stay here.” His parents’ house wasn’t home anymore. This apartment wasn’t home without Sammy. He was homeless.