2. Liam’s Soccer Game, April 2011
It was early April, and it was snowing in Toronto.
Sarah didn’t want to be outside at all, let alone hunched on a frosty wooden bench at one end of a soccer field, her hands tucked beneath her knees in inadequate handknit mittens, the lone observer of a casual soccer game that even the participants weren’t taking too seriously.
But Sarah had promised to cheer on her boyfriend Liam in his Friday night soccer game.
Sarah had, in fact, enthusiastically gushed about how much she would enjoy watching him doing something sporty.
As a young medical resident, Liam rarely had time to do anything athletic, and she wanted to prove that she could be a loyal, supportive girlfriend when he did.
So here she was, watching her boyfriend jogging back and forth through a light dusting of snow while Sarah shivered and wished that she had the courage to steal someone’s thermos of coffee and curl up under her bench like an arctic ground squirrel.
Liam and Sarah had been together since shortly after she moved to Toronto; she had moved to the city from Montreal to share an apartment with her cousin Paul.
Paul was a couple of years younger than her and had just finished getting a degree in theater; he needed someone to share his tiny, post-graduation apartment, and in exchange he had promised to hook her up with photography jobs shooting headshots for his actor friends.
Shooting headshots had quickly become her bread-and-butter—or at least the artistic side of how she earned her bread.
She also had a job doing graphic design at a small trade magazine targeted toward Canadian Mounties, which meant that Sarah worked from nine to five laying out articles about tactical negotiation techniques and then spent her weekends taking photos of hopeful young actors who earnestly sought her opinion on what color shirts to wear before staring moodily at the camera doing their best sexy glowers.
She was a little frustrated with her photography career so far.
Her goal had always been to do fine arts photography, creating artistic visions that were interesting, edgy, and new.
But she hadn’t found a perspective that could gain any traction with the local galleries: neither her moodier, more personal work nor her attempts at tourist photos had found a place on any gift shop shelves or lined any gallery windows.
Sarah was at risk of becoming a starving artist, exactly as her mother had once predicted.
During her first trip home from McGill, Sarah had announced her plans to become a photographer to her mother on their way home from church one Sunday, and her mother, Maureen, had fallen quiet for a good thirty seconds as they drove along the road in their small town.
“Does anyone actually make a living at that?” she had finally asked in a voice so gentle that Sarah dug her nails into her palms.
“You can if you’re good enough,” had been Sarah’s fervent response at eighteen.
Now here Sarah was, almost ten years later, and it turned out that she wasn’t good enough.
Paul was fun to live with, though. He was the cousin she had been closest with growing up, a de facto sibling since neither of them had any brothers or sisters.
They grew up a little over an hour apart in a stark, underpopulated stretch of the Avalon peninsula in Newfoundland, and they had spent every family holiday tearing around the woods behind Sarah’s house while her mother cooked a seafood casserole and Paul’s mother, Delia, complained about the car ride.
Sarah and Paul would play long, elaborate games together as treasure hunters or spies, searching for some valuable item that the bad guys were willing to kill to keep out of their hands.
Paul was always the writer, shaping the dramatic stories of their games, while Sarah spent long hours designing them spy glasses and an arsenal of tree branch weapons.
Now Paul’s optimism about his own creative career served as a dramatic contrast to her own.
Paul still believed that he could make it as an actor, whereas Sarah had begun to accept that she was going to have to adjust her artistic dreams to align with cold, hard reality.
That was one reason she was glad to be dating a doctor like Liam, someone whose path was predictable and well-paid.
Her mother had literally burned a prayer candle in gratitude when Sarah started dating him.
He was pleasant and polite, and he bought Sarah flowers on major holidays.
He was the one part of Sarah’s life that wasn’t a total failure in her mother’s eyes.
So Sarah had better not lose him. She shook her frozen mittens and slapped them together in applause as a cluster of soccer players wrestled for control of the ball near her.
Her cousin Paul’s face lit up with a grin as he passed it to his friend Ian; this was Paul and his actor friends’ casual league, which he had been kind enough to invite Liam to join for the season.
Paul’s wavy brown hair was damp in the wind, and he looked exhilarated and red-cheeked as he ran down the field.
Her eyes flicked back to Liam. He had dark blond hair and a lean body and wore the alert expression of a straight-A student, which was what had initially attracted her to him. Now he jogged back and forth in his defensive position, trying to track the action on the far end of the field.
There was another pass, a kick in her direction, and one of the players fell a few feet from her, his dark, curly hair startlingly familiar.
She felt a wave of shock at the sight of beautiful, deep-set green eyes: Rene Durand was on the ground, five steps away from the tips of her frozen toes.
He bounced up quickly to shake off a bruised ankle and started dusting off the light coating of snow from his elbow before his eyes met hers and widened in surprise.
She must not have been recognizable in the woolen hat her mother had knitted for her last Christmas—she hadn’t noticed Ren herself until then, too focused on pretending not to look miserable.
Sarah waved in acknowledgement, and Ren took two steps towards her as if to step out of the game before realizing what he was doing. He grinned quickly at her before turning to run back towards the other players.
He was here. Ren. A peculiar sense of elation rose inside her. She hadn’t even known that he was living in Toronto.
The context of a soccer game made it even stranger.
Ren had never been particularly athletic when she had known him.
He had been wiry and lean at university, his physique shaped by lucky genetics, late nights, and the occasional cigarette.
She remembered buying him ice cream or cooking him a frozen pizza a couple of times when he was seeing one of her roommates and admitted to having forgotten to eat for the entire day; back in school, she had mocked him for playacting ‘the starving intellectual’ and secretly envied that he could still look somewhat muscular without bothering to do anything.
Now she watched him racing across the frosty field as if healthy physical activity was totally normal for him.
She wondered if his personality had changed in some fundamental way.
It made her think about a rule she’d invented in high school with her best friend Marie: that whenever a guy was especially handsome, he would invariably be a brainless jock.
Marie had intoned it one day when they were fifteen: “The Lord distributes his gifts fairly. No boy shall be both gorgeous and interesting. If he looks like a model, then lo, he shall want to discuss his hockey games in painful detail and has never finished a book. So it was written and so it shall be.”
Sarah had snorted out a laugh as they listed the various hot boys in their high school by which sports teams they were obsessed with—a casual dismissal of people who would never have been interested in them anyway, as Sarah was well aware at the time.
She and Marie were the kind of social outcasts who dyed their hair bright colors and wore jewelry with skulls on it, and neither of them was turning down a lot of offers.
Ren had been the first guy Sarah met who had broken this pattern: he had striking cheekbones, gorgeous eyes, and a total lack of regard for organized sports. He didn’t follow any professional teams and had never once announced that he had started lifting weights or was training for a marathon.
So what was he doing here?
Sarah had time to ponder the question as she watched him charging back and forth after the ball.
The camaraderie between the players was obvious.
Her cousin Paul seemed to be particularly friendly with Ren, but all of the players were tossing each other friendly insults as they demanded the ball or attempted another almost-goal.
For the first time, she couldn’t help but wonder if the ‘handsome jock’ trend that she had noticed in high school might be about something else.
Women had always acted strange around Ren, pawing at his arm and laughing too loud when he made a joke, while men often acted jealous of him.
Maybe getting knocked around on a sports field was the one place where his dark eyelashes and moody good looks didn’t matter to people.
But why was she trying to guess at his innermost feelings? She didn’t know him anymore. He had disappeared from her life without explanation.
As the game wrapped up, her cousin jogged toward her as Liam chatted with another player at the other end of the field.
“Hey!” Paul called. “I have to run to an audition. Liam will get you home, yeah?”
“Somehow I’ll make it home alive.”
Paul smiled at her tone and put his hands on her shoulders. “Be safe. Trust no one. Use whatever weapons you can find.”
She nodded in mock agreement. “The mean streets of Toronto will try to break me, but I won’t go down without a fight.”