Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
NOW
Stacey
I t’s been a long day in the sun. My body’s kinda wrecked. All I wanna do is crash next to Dash. Consume him.
The only light is the muted yellow from the old lamp on my bedside table. Dash makes fun of me for not updating my shit, but there’s been little time.
“I’ve married my father,” he said yesterday.
“Take my credit card,” I said. “Buy us whatever you want.”
But now I like him there, just like that, reading by my old lamp, the darkness surrounding him. My eyes land on what he’s reading, and I approach with caution. I said he could. I admitted that I was too scared about what I’d find in Mom’s secret journal.
I finally told Casey about it, and he won’t touch it with a forty-foot hockey stick. But he’s fine for me to do what I’d like. Dash asked if he could be my filter, read it first, relay it to me in sugar-coated language.
He looks up, eyes glazed with fresh tears.
Uh-oh.
“Sorry,” he says, wiping his eyes. “Don’t mind me, you know how sensitive I am.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” I stride over and tug the book from his hands. He relinquishes it easily, rolling onto his back. I tuck the journal away in the bedside drawer where it can’t hurt him.
“D-Do you want to know?” he says, staring at the ceiling. “Your dad wasn’t a bad guy.”
“Then why are you crying?” And tearing my heart to smithereens?
“Because the story’s still heartbreaking, and it could have happened to us.” That sends him into chest-heaving sobs. “It could have happened to us, Stace.”
Sitting on the bed, I pull his arms around me, and then I yank him up so he can wrap himself around me like a koala and cry into my neck.
“No, it wouldn’t have. It didn’t,” I add. But there’s an anxious swell in my stomach. Whenever I got close to having Dash, I came up with excuses—Casey was the one to point that out. It was because of Mom. Without realizing it, I’d absorbed her pain about whatever happened with her and Dad. It put a guardrail on love.
He suddenly pulls up. “Fuck, I’m doing it again. I was reading that journal for you, and now you’re the one consoling me.” He bares his teeth, making a frustrated sound. “I can do this. I can .”
I trap his wrists in my hands before he can make a dive for the journal.
“What are you smiling at, Stace?”
“You. I love you.”
“I love you, too, but I suck. I’m a shitty husband. Why do you bother with me?”
“Dash, Dash . Take a breath.”
He closes his eyes and takes a breath. Then another. I make him take a few more.
“If I wanna chose a shitty husband, I get to. It’s a free country.”
“Stacey,” he whines. He whines because he knows me well enough to know what I’m doing. He knows—when he’s not upset—that I married him because I think the world of him. That the idea of him being a shitty husband is absurd. Plain saying it won’t help.
“Tell me what happened to them.”
“I will, but I might cry again.”
“And I’m right here if you do.”
He sniffles, nodding. “Your parents were in love—honest to god fairytale love. You met your dad, you know? You and Casey were born before he left, and there’s a reason you’re so good at hockey.”
A raw form of breathlessness catches in my lungs. “Dad’s a hockey player?”
“Yep. He wasn’t an Alderchuck, though—that’s your mom’s maiden name.”
“You just said was.” He nods. Dad must be dead. The first knot in my chest forms. I never knew him, I didn’t think I wanted to know him, but having him back for a second like that … maybe I would have liked to know him after all.
“He sounds so much like you, it makes my chest ache, Stace.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Your mama loved him so much.”
“What happened?”
“It sounds like things were hard that first year you and Casey were born. He was drafted to the juniors, she had giant twins sucking her tits dry—her words, not mine.”
I laugh. Sounds like Mom.
“A lot was going on. It wasn’t any one thing. A gasoline can of problems thrown onto the fire of them missing each other like limbs. Lots of emotions, post-pregnancy hormones. Your mom was the one to end things. She pushed for a divorce, but he didn’t want it. He wrote her letters while he was away for hockey. He told her she was coming back for her and you and Case.”
“And then?”
“It worked.” He smiles. “But she wanted to tell him in person, so she told him to come home and they’d talk.”
It’s just like climbing to the top of a rollercoaster track. I know the drop’s coming.
“He wanted to see her so bad—your mom didn’t say that, I’m speculating—so instead of coming home with the team, he rented a car after the last game and planned to drive home from Kelowna that night.”
“H-He didn’t make it home, did he?”
Dash shakes his head.
Fuck, that’s a real punch in the gut. And I see what Dash means. What if I hadn’t gotten my head out of my ass and something had happened to one of us?
Not gonna voice that thought out loud. I tighten my grip on him, though.
“The combination of pain and shame was overwhelming for her,” he says as if he’s right there with her. “That’s why she couldn’t bear to tell you. She was so afraid you’d hate her, and even if you didn’t, she hated herself for it.”
“I could never have hated her for this.”
“She probably knew that logically, but shame twists your thoughts. She sent him away, ergo, she blamed herself. It’s the same for me, Stace. That’s why no matter how far I get from the Robin event, I can’t seem to forgive myself all the way for letting him do what he did. And look, I even said it again— let him. I can already hear Billy’s voice taking me through the chain of thinking that would lead me away from the story that I ‘let’ him. He manipulated me. Consciously, I know that. But somewhere deep inside I hear that nasty little echo saying, you could have done something, Dash , but you didn’t. That’s what shame does for me. From everything she bled onto those pages, it sounds like shame twisted her thoughts too.”
“Oh, Dashie.” His pain is my pain. My mom’s pain is my pain.
“Don’t look like that. You know my motto about this stuff. It might force me to pause sometimes, but it’s not going to stop me.”
“That’s what makes you so brave and not, in any way, a shitty husband.”
He smiles. “Can I show you something? It’s in the journal.” I frown, and he laughs. “The book’s not gonna bite me. And I won’t read anymore—tonight—promise. It’s just a few pictures.”
“You won’t read any more of it alone, either.”
“Alright, Captain Alderchuck. Now can I get the pictures?”
I rake my eyes over him. He’s better. Just some fresh tear trails. I wipe those away with my thumb. All gone.
“Okay.”
He hands me some old-ass pictures with terrible pixelation. My throat thickens with emotion.
“Oh my god. He looks just like us.” There are a few differences because we have some of our Mom’s features too, but we look like father and sons. He’s holding us in the picture, me on one side, Casey on the other.
“Your dad was hot,” Dash says. “Look at the next thing.”
His hockey card. Huh. There he is, forever trapped in time at that age, which would have been somewhere close to our ages now. “His name was Aaron Myles. Our middle names.” Casey’s middle name is Myles. I love having a piece of him with us.
“Yeah, I don’t know the ins and outs of that one because I suspect when you were born your surname was Myles, which is weird. I can’t picture you as anything but Alderchuck. So maybe she changed things when he died.”
“Did she ever get the divorce?”
“Nope.”
She wanted to keep him forever.
A big knot, an old one, releases, expelling years of … what? Guilt? Sadness? Pain? I didn’t want to deal with Mom’s stuff because I knew most of it was cheap trinkets and thread-worn clothing. I didn’t want to look over her life and pine for what she never had. Mom was special, I wish she’d had the chance to have a special life.
But look, she did. Dad meant so much to her that she never bothered to find love again. I always thought it was because of me and Casey. It wasn’t. She found the love of her life, her happy ever after. Someone she loved so much that she couldn’t see herself with anyone else.
I get it. Dash is it for me.
“But since, in Canada, you only have to assume your spouse’s name,” he continues, “it was simple for her to switch back to her maiden name. Ask me how I know about that process.” He raises amused eyebrows.
“You said you were fine with it.”
“How was I supposed to say no when you gave me the signature Alderchuck kicked puppy dog eyes?”
“Wish I felt bad about that one, but I don’t.” I smirk.
“Then you admit it.”
“I admit nothing, Mr. Alderchuck.”
He beams. He loves being Mr. Alderchuck. “One more thing before we stop talking about sad and terrible things, and then I do need to stop.”
I push the hair off his face.
“I’m going to see about being a healthy scratch this season—just for a couple of months,” he says when he can see all the objections in my eyes. “The Robin thing gives me a good reason, and it’s mostly my reason, but I want to see if I’m ready to retire. I’ve played a solid career, the average length for a lot of players.”
“You know how I feel about you quitting hockey.”
“And you know how I feel about being away from you.”
“Was this the work of Mama’s journal? I’m banning it. You’ve read enough.”
“ Stacey. ” I try to calm down. It’s not working very well. “Yes, and no. It made me think about things for sure, but I’d already been contemplating it. I still haven’t told you about how rough the year was without you. I almost came home in the middle of the season, and my sessions with Billy went from once a week to three to four times a week. Hockey’s not worth that kind of stress to me.”
“I’ll come back to the Wildcats. I’ve got enough money saved to do something with and?—”
“No. No way.”
He’s got that look about him, the one he gets when his mind’s made up. I could argue, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as I once was.
“Tell me the idea of me being with you when Robin’s released isn’t appealing to you, and I’ll eat my hat.”
“Okay, fine.” I’d been planning to get some kind of injury for when it happened anyway, so I could go to him. “But it’s just a trial run.”
“Just a trial run.” Dash trembles. “Stacey, this is me. I’m strong and I’ve come a long way, but I’m tarnished. I know you don’t like to hear that, but I am. And I’m not being self-deprecating, I’m explaining how my insides feel. I’m always gonna work on getting tougher, but I also need to follow the pathways of least resistance along the way. The best pathway for me is with you.”
I hate hearing him say he’s tarnished, I don’t see him that way, but I finally understand. Someone broke him down, and he’s sewn back together, but some of the pieces are mismatched and there are cracks.
Vulnerable, sensitive, anxious, needy—he sees these things as imperfections, but I see them as beautiful pieces of his personality.
Without warning, I flip us. He’s on his back, and I’m straddling him. I kiss his neck because it makes him shiver.
“Your best pathway is with me,” I promise. I lay down more kisses, he shudders.
Just as I chose him, he chose me. Fuck it. Fuck the world. Fuck everything else.
“I’m your architect, remember?”
He said I built his mind castle.
His brown eyes gaze up, adoring me in the special way they do only for me.
“You did.”
I’ll build him whatever he needs, in whatever way he needs it. That reminds me of something.
“Speaking of building and fixing shit, I’m your husband now, only I fix shit around here. Something breaks, you come to me. No more Hunter.”
He laughs. “I knew that bothered you.”
“Brat. Now, promise.”
“I promise. I promise,” he yelps when I tickle him for good measure.
“Glad we cleared that up.”