2. Gideon ‘Taft’ Taftwell
Gideon ‘Taft’ Taftwell
Dr. Ellison’s office overlooked a line of maple trees that had already started changing for fall.
Orange leaves skipped across the parking lot whenever the wind found them, scraping over the asphalt before catching against the curb.
I watched one spin in a lazy circle until the breeze died and dropped it flat.
I’m not sure how long I’d stared out there, but it was always this way.
I was never the first to talk, and Dr. Ellison seemed to understand my need to sit in silence for a short time.
She always asked me the leading question.
“How was your summer, Gideon?”
I looked away from the glass. It was awful. I feel awful. I’m pathetic. I’m broken. I hated the way she called me by my real name when my team called me Taft, but then I liked it at the same time, which was all wrong.
“Okay.”
She didn’t rush to fill the silence. That was half the reason I kept paying her out of pocket instead of seeing Dr. Quackers, the team counselor.
He was fine if you wanted to talk about pressure and performance and how your shoulder felt after a hit, and I know he covered all the other stuff, but I wasn’t ready for management to know anything about anything.
Dr. Ellison didn’t care how many goals I’d scored and why, or whether the power play wasn’t clicking because of me messing up.
She was there to hear the things I’d spent ten years trying to deal with in my own slightly less than impressive way.
“If I recall, you went home to Michigan.”
“I did.”
“How was it?”
I leaned back into the sofa and rubbed my thumb over the inside of my forearm, over the scars under my Copperheads hoodie sleeve, pale now, raised in places, old enough that most people didn’t notice.
“Short.” She waited for more, and I sighed inwardly. “It was supposed to be four days. I left after family breakfast on the second.” The word family stuck in my throat. We certainly hadn’t been a real family since I was fifteen.
“How is your father?”
“Same.”
“Did he enjoy your visit?”
I could lie, but she’d see right through me. “No.”
“And your brother?”
I laughed, and there wasn’t much in it. “He turned up to breakfast and made it twenty-three minutes.”
Noah had grumbled about work to Dad—easy enough, seeing as Dad was a cop and Noah was a cop and they had easy cop stuff to moan over.
He’d talked to the waitress about the Lions and whether they had a chance this year.
He never once asked how I’d been, and when he did finally look at me, it was to ask how long I was staying.
I told him not long, and we exchanged a few other things, but it was enough to send me back home before the coffee went cold, to spend the rest of the summer back in Rochester.
Dr. Ellison uncrossed one leg and straightened her pant leg, leaning back a little, totally at ease as I slowly unraveled in front of her.
“Has anything changed?” she asked.
I considered the question, but it was a big no.
Dad still cut me out, and Noah still hated me.
My old room at Dad’s house still smelled of cedar and furniture polish.
The grandfather clock in the hallway still ran twenty minutes slow.
Ethan’s photo still sat on the unused piano beside Mom’s, and nobody had added a single new picture in ten years. The whole family had frozen in place.
“You’ve gone somewhere else.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking. I mean, I thought it’d be different. Ten years felt like it should have been enough.”
“But it wasn’t?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t. My father doesn’t blame me but has no idea how to talk to me, and I blame myself and have no idea how to start talking either. Noah…” I shrugged. “He’s just Noah.”
“We’ve talked about blame before,” she started, and I winced. I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned blame because she always pushed things.
“I don’t want to go into that today,” I said, but even though she nodded, I could see that my thoughts of blame were exactly what we were going to be discussing.
“What did you and Noah talk about?”
“He asked if there was any talk of me heading up to the NHL, and I said no, and he said, ‘Figures,’ and that was it.” I heard the rest of it anyway, the part he didn’t need to say out loud.
You’re the one who got to grow up. Not good enough for the big leagues despite everything. Still playing hockey. Still breathing.
My fingers curled around my forearm, and I caught Dr. Ellison glancing there.
“No new injuries, doc,” I reassured her, and she nodded. It would be three years on October 12th. I remembered dates. Hospital bathroom, three stitches, the trainer finding out because blood had soaked clean through the tape. I tilted my chin. “But I still think about it.”
Hockey filled the spaces in my head, and she’d once asked if I punished myself with hockey.
There wasn’t much point saying no, what with morning skates I didn’t need to run.
Extra reps after everyone else had gone home.
First on the ice, last off it. Blocked shots that smarter players stepped around, playing through things that should have sent me straight to the medical room, because if I hurt enough by the end of the day, I could usually sleep.
I wasn’t punishing myself with hockey—it was my safe place.
I didn’t deserve it to be, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Stopping hockey meant letting the pain grip me, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Every day you make a choice to play hockey,” she said.
I stared back out at the trees instead of answering.
A boy in a navy hoodie crossed the parking lot with a hockey bag almost as big as he was, and for exactly as long as it took him to turn sideways, I saw Ethan in him, thirteen and gangly and always half a step behind, trying to keep up.
Then the boy turned all the way, and he was just some kid with a bag too heavy for him, and the resemblance went with him.
“If I stop, Ethan doesn’t get to play anymore.”
I could still remember lacing Ethan’s skates myself, double-knotting them because he hadn’t learned yet, him complaining they were too tight while I told him that was the point, the gap where his front tooth used to be showing every time he laughed at me for fussing.
Fifteen-year-old Gideon had made a mistake and cost Ethan his life.
I deserved to live this life filled with pain.
I needed to change the subject.
Searched for something new to talk about.
“I met someone interesting a few days ago.”
Ryan, with two stacking chairs wedged under each arm, apologizing before he’d even finished knocking into me, glancing at Walker and shrinking in on himself before Finn asked him for coffee. He’d lit up then, and the small wave he’d given me on his way out the door had been so…
Cute?
“You did?”
“I mean, I don’t really know him, but he works at the arena with our equipment manager, who is his dad.”
“What was interesting about him?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t know.
He has red hair. Blue eyes, and he wears eyeliner.
” Dr. Ellison’s mouth curved, waiting for more.
I thought about how pretty he was, and how he’d gripped those chairs as if his life depended on it, apologized before there’d even been a collision, and seemed lonely standing in front of the art guys.
“I think he seemed…” No, I didn’t want to start with what I thought—she should know more about him.
“He’s the kid who tried to steal Walker’s stuff, and Walker hit him, way back. Do you remember that?”
“I do. So, he’s a kid? He’s young?”
“Younger than me probably, but no, not a kid. I shouldn’t call him that.”
She paused. “And you started to say that he seemed…?”
“Yeah. I did. Lonely maybe?”
“You could try making friends with him?”
I balked at that. I had the guys in the art group, and I had the team around me. I didn’t need other friends who would get to know me, find out what a fuck up I was, and then exit stage left.
The rink was empty when I got there way too early.
Optional skate on game day meant no coaches pacing the benches with clipboards, no reporters hanging around hoping to catch a quote, no crowds pressing against the glass.
Just the steady hum of the compressors beneath the ice, the bite of cold air creeping through the corridor, and the smell of rubber mats, sharpened steel, and old hockey gear.
I let myself in through the equipment entrance, my pass chirping green against the reader before the heavy door clicked open.
The hallway beyond echoed with the hollow sound of my footsteps, every noise carrying farther in an empty arena than it ever did on game night.
Most of the lights were off, leaving long stretches of shadow broken by pools of fluorescent light over the work areas.
Ryan was kneeling beside the home net, the one I circled every morning skate, lengths of white cord coiled around his sneakers and spilling across the concrete floor.
Half the netting hung loose against the frame while he worked another section through the steel with a long net needle, his head bent over the job, a crease between his eyebrows as he concentrated, one hand pulling the cord tight while the other searched for the next opening.
With one hand on the door frame, I stood there and watched him work and didn’t move.
Restringing wasn’t something you handed to just anyone.
Get the tension wrong, and it wouldn’t show until a puck found the gap mid-game, and he was doing it to the Copperheads’ net.
He wasn’t his dad, and it worried me a little that someone untested was working on our nets.
He hadn’t clocked me yet. I could still turn around, go find the ice, let him finish this, and not interfere. Except I’d already spotted the mistake, and pointing it out wasn’t exactly the way to win friends and influence people. But—
“You missed a loop.”