Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Kieran
Ididn't recognize my packed bag.
Structurally it was fine: clothes rolled, toiletries sealed, and chargers coiled. The problem wasn't what it contained. It was what was absent. No team gear or suit. My luggage had nothing to do with hockey.
I zipped it shut and carried it to the front door.
Heath was in my kitchen.
Varga had seen us outside the Northbound and decided we were friends. It gave Heath and me a reason to be seen together, and I invited him home.
The first thing Heath had noticed when he walked in wasn't the view or the square footage or the kitchen that dwarfed his entire apartment. It was the photo on the bookshelf. He'd crossed the room, picked it up without asking, and studied it for a long time.
"Is that a beluga?"
"Yeah. Ansel."
"You're smiling in this."
I hadn't known what to do with that observation. Heath held the photo up, comparing the face in the frame to the face in front of him.
He set it back carefully, adjusting the angle so it sat exactly where it had been.
Now, the morning after, he stood at my counter eating cereal.
Barefoot on heated tile, wearing yesterday's t-shirt and a pair of my sweatpants cinched with the drawstring pulled to one side.
The hem rode up when he shifted his weight, showing the tendon above his heel, with a faint bruise on his ankle bone from a blocked shot two games ago that had already cycled through green to yellow.
He looked like he lived here.
"Flight's at noon," I said.
"I know. You told me twice." He didn't look up. "Also, your Cheerios are expired."
"They're fine."
"They taste like cardboard."
"That's what Cheerios taste like."
"Yours taste like Cheerios that died and someone buried them. Then, they exhumed them for one last bowl." He took another bite. "I'm still eating them."
I leaned against the doorframe. The bag sat at my feet. Thirty-six hours in California. Solo. I'd told the team I was using the All-Star break to decompress. Heath didn't know the real reason.
"So," he said, setting the spoon down. "California."
"Yeah. Few days."
"What's in California? I mean, aside from three hockey teams and Hollywood."
"Rocks. Ocean. The absence of lake-effect wind."
He smiled. "Sounds rough."
"Brutal. I may not survive."
Heath picked the bowl up and drank the remaining milk directly. It was a habit I found unreasonably attractive. He set it in the sink and turned to face me, hip against the counter.
"I'd never seen the Pacific until we flew over it on the way into San Jose," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Rhinelander to Thunder Bay to Chicago. My geographic range before the Ironhawks was basically the shape of a hockey stick." He shrugged. "Someday, I'll tag along with you. When the numbers are different."
He was planning continuity. I was planning an exit.
"You'd like it," I said. "The water's different."
"Different how?"
"Colder than you'd expect. And real waves. Walls of water that people surf."
Heath studied me. "Bring me back a rock," he said.
"A rock."
"Something from the beach. I don't care what kind. Just proof you went outside instead of sitting in a hotel room reading about fish."
"I don't read about fish. I read about marine ecosystems."
"Bring me a marine ecosystem, then."
I crossed the kitchen. Kissed him once, quick, tasting expired Cheerios and milk. He reached for my jaw for a second kiss.
"I'll text you," I said.
"You better."
***
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography sat on a bluff above the Pacific. Concrete and glass and sun-bleached walkways. Students moved through campus in sandals and field gear, carrying water bottles and laptops.
I arrived twenty minutes early for a lecture. Sat in the back row of a hall that seated eighty. The seat I'd chosen had someone's penciled note on the armrest: check Nakamura 2019 re: thermal stress.
The seminar was titled "Adaptive Strategies in Coral Reef Restoration: Lessons from the Indo-Pacific." Dr. Maren Voss stood at the front with a slide deck and a demeanor that reminded me of Coach Markel. Economy. Precision. No wasted motion.
She began with water chemistry. Parameters I recognized from my testing: alkalinity and calcium saturation. She applied it at a scale that made my thirty-gallon reef tank irrelevant.
A graduate student two seats over took notes by hand. Diagrams and arrows connecting concepts.
Dr. Voss put up a slide. A reef off Sulawesi, before and after. The before was bleached rubble. The after, taken four years later, showed branching coral in three species with fish hovering at the margins.
"This isn't dramatic work," she said. "No one's going to write a headline about a staghorn coral fragment surviving its first winter. But the fragment doesn't need a headline. It needs stable water and time."
I wrote that down on the back of the seminar handout. My hand felt strange holding a pen instead of a stick.
Stable water and time.
When the lecture ended, my phone vibrated against my thigh. Team group chat.
Varga posted a video of himself attempting to surf in Miami, captioned Cowabunga or whatever. Below it, I scrolled through a string of responses. Then:
Cross: Where's Mathers? Bailing on us during All-Star weekend?
Pratt: He said he's decompressing.
Cross: Decompressing from what? His perfect life?
I shoved the phone in my pocket and approached the front of the hall where Dr. Voss was putting her papers back in a leather case.
"Dr. Voss?"
She looked up. "Yes?"
"I'm applying to the program. Deferred entry. I had a question about the field component."
"Of course. Walk with me?"
We crossed the bluff toward her office. She asked what my background was. I told her Shedd volunteer work, water chemistry, and rehabilitation protocols. Didn't mention the NHL.
The anonymity was so clean it almost stung. I was six-two, visibly athletic, and she didn't look at me the way people in Chicago did. I was just a tall person asking about coral.
She asked what drew me to restoration specifically.
"The patience of it," I said. "You can't force recovery. You create conditions and then you observe."
She nodded. "Most applicants lead with ambition. You led with observation. That's unusual." She held a door open. "The reef doesn't care about your thesis statement."
Her office was small. Bookshelves overstuffed. A window that framed the ocean like it was another piece of the room's furniture. She walked me through the field component—Belize and Indonesia, six weeks embedded with a research team, collecting data at depths that required certification.
I asked intelligent questions. Sample methodology. Publication expectations. Cohort size. She answered without hedging.
"When would you be looking to start?"
"Two years, maybe earlier."
She didn't ask why. "We'll be here. The ocean's not going anywhere."
I walked back out into the sunlight. Standing on the bluff, I understood, in my body, that I would be good at this. Not the inherited good at hockey. Good in a way that was mine.
I called Heath that night from the hotel.
He picked up on the second ring.
"How's the ocean?"
"Still there."
"Good. I was worried it might've left." Heath's tea kettle whistled. I heard him pull it off the burner. "What'd you do today?"
"Went to a seminar. Sat in the back. Took notes."
"About fish?"
"About coral reef restoration in the Indo-Pacific."
"So. Fancy fish."
"Corals aren't fish."
"Fancy not-fish. Got it."
I leaned against the headboard, letting the warmth of Heath's voice wrap around me.
"The program director reminded me of Markel," I said.
"Terrifying and economical?"
"She told me the reef doesn't care about my thesis statement."
He laughed. "I want that on a shirt."
"What are you doing?"
"Exciting stuff. Made soup. Watched a thing about bears. Called Maggie." A pause. "Cleaned the apartment even though you're not here to see it."
"You cleaned for me?"
"I cleaned because you ruined me. I keep noticing things now. The grout. There's grout I didn't know about, Kieran. You've made me aware of grout."
"You're welcome."
"I wasn't thanking you."
I heard him settle, the specific creak of that one cushion on the couch molded to his shape.
"Varga posted a surfing video," I said.
"I saw. He used a GoPro. The wipeout at the end is cinematic."
"Cross asked where I was."
"Saw that, too, and you didn't respond."
"Didn't need to. Pratt covered."
"Pratt covers a lot."
I heard Heath sip his tea. "Weird being here without you," he said.
"You're doing fine," I said.
Quiet for a beat. "That's not what I mean."
The ocean pushed against the shore outside my window. In Chicago, the radiator ticked.
"I know," I said. "I miss you."
I'd never said that to anyone. Not to my parents when I left for juniors. Not to any human being in twenty-three years.
Heath let the sentence stand. He gave it space.
"Good," he said. "The bear documentary's actually incredible. This one grizzly keeps trying to catch salmon and falling face-first into the river. Eleven times. Doesn't quit. Pickle energy."
I laughed.
We talked for another half hour. He told me about the soup, and I told him about the bluff over the ocean and the waves. I didn't mention Dr. Voss or Scripps.
His breathing slowed toward sleep.
"Get some rest," I said.
"You too. Night, Kieran."
"Night."
The next morning I drove south along the coast until the buildings thinned, and the cliffs took over. Parked in a gravel lot and walked down to a rock shelf above the waterline.
I poked around the tide pools. A purple sea urchin. Hermit crabs. I crouched at the edge of a pool and watched.
Then I walked to where the rock met the open ocean and sat down.
I sat there until my brain turned quiet. When thought came back, it arrived clean.
If I left hockey, I lost Heath.