Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Kieran
Three weeks taught me what my body could do without permission.
It could win faceoffs. Execute zone entries with textbook efficiency.
Backcheck through neutral ice and arrive at the correct position before the play developed.
It could sit on a bench between shifts and drink water at measured intervals and respond to Varga's commentary with sounds that passed for engagement.
My body was a professional hockey player. It had been one for years. The job didn't require the rest of me.
The rest of me sat in a dark condo most nights, staring at aimless entertainment on TV.
It drove to Shedd Aquarium on free evenings and recorded water parameters in handwriting that had lost its precision.
The rest of me went to bed on sheets that no longer smelled of Heath's cheap shampoo because three weeks was long enough for that to fade.
On the ice, none of that existed. I was Kieran Mathers, a dependable right winger.
We had a home game against Columbus. Tight standings in the Central. Everything counted.
Heath sat four spots down the bench. We hadn't spoken in twenty-one days.
He played hard.
His shifts had an edge, board battles where he finished checks he used to absorb, and puck retrievals where his elbows found ribs. There was a crack in the discipline Markel spent six months building, anger leaking through with nowhere else to go.
In the second period, Columbus scored on a broken play to tie the game. Our line went out. Heath cycled low and drove the net the way he always drove the net: full commit, elbows out, and refusing to leave the space.
Their defenseman met him at the crease. Legal hit. Hard, but clean.
The whistle blew. Play dead.
Heath didn't stop.
He crosschecked their defenseman between the numbers. Blatant and stupid. The referee's arm was up before the stick finished its arc.
Heath skated to the box without looking at the bench.
Varga mumbled beside me, "That's not him."
It wasn't.
We killed the penalty. Heath came out of the box and went straight back to the net front. Third period. Four minutes left. Still tied.
A shot came from the point. Heath screened. Bodies converged. Their defenseman caught Heath turning. The crosscheck landed square between his shoulder blades. Payback dressed up as positioning. Heath's chest hit the post and his body folded around the iron.
He went down.
Half a second. A full second. Two.
I shot to his side. My inside edge caught wrong on the step-over and I stumbled. I caught the boards with my glove and corrected, but the stumble was visible to everyone.
Markel was watching.
Across the ice, Heath pressed his hand flat against the surface. Palm on ice, steadying. He climbed to one knee. Then both skates. Rolled his shoulder once. Skated to the bench under his own power.
I stood at the boards doing nothing useful. Varga looked at me. Pratt's mask was turned my direction from the crease.
I skated back to the bench and sat down.
We scored with forty-one seconds left. Won 2-1.
On the monitor above the locker room door, the post-game broadcast showed the hit twice. Then the bench replay.
The commentator's voice: "Frustration creeping in for the Ironhawks."
Markel wrote the lines on the whiteboard before morning skate. No announcement. Heath's name wasn't there.
Heath saw it on his third lap. I know because I was watching his feet and caught a half-stride hitch.
Coach Markel had one word: "Reset."
Heath nodded once. "Yes, Coach."
He finished the skate. Ran every drill. Spoke to no one. After the session, Markel stopped him at the tunnel mouth. I was fifteen feet behind. I saw Markel's hand land once on Heath's shoulder, and Heath's chin dipped in response.
Then he dressed in street clothes and left without showering.
For the next game night, Heath was upstairs. Press box. It was a healthy scratch, the organizational term for a player fit to play who had been told not to. He wore a suit where a jersey should be.
Varga took the left wing on my line. He filled the position the way a competent understudy fills a role on Broadway.
Still, it wasn't the same.
Varga went to the net front because the system told him to. Heath went because it was the only thing he could do.
During a stoppage in the second, I looked up. The press box occupied a band of glass-fronted suites above the lower bowl. Heath was in the second row. Dark suit. Top button undone. His hair still showed the faint impression lines from a helmet he hadn't worn tonight.
He wasn't watching me. He was watching the play develop, and his body was playing it.
I almost missed it. Would have if I hadn't spent months observing how he moved. From sixty feet below, through distance and the full weight of twenty-one days of silence, I saw it.
His shoulders shifted left as the puck moved to the half-wall, and his weight transferred forward as the cycle began. His hands, resting on the rail in front of him, adjusted their grip the way they adjusted on a stick when he was reading a passing lane.
He was screening from the press box.
His body hadn't gotten the message. Told not to play and benched in a suit, his body was still finding the net front. Heath Donnelly was doing exactly what he always did.
He was staying in the play.
We won 3-1. Two wins without Heath. The machine was reliably efficient.
Somewhere above the ice, Heath sat in a suit and played a game no one had given him permission to play, and he didn't know anyone was watching.
My father called while I sat in the underground garage after the game.
I answered because not answering would generate a second call within the hour and a text that read Tried you. Call when you can.
"Kieran."
"Dad."
"Caught the game. Strong performance tonight." A compliment, and then the reason for his call. "I noticed they scratched Donnelly."
"Coach's decision," I said.
"Of course." A pause designed to sound thoughtful. "The extension was the right call. Clean. Professional. Thompson's office is satisfied."
"You've talked to Thompson?"
"His people reached out. Standard courtesy. They wanted to make sure the family was aligned."
The family. That would be Dad.
"The Donnelly situation," he continued. "I want to be direct. Whatever dynamic exists between you and Donnelly needs to be managed."
He gave no specifics. He knew his meaning was obvious because a Mathers understood what management meant without being told.
"I signed because they were trading him."
It was a sentence I didn't plan to speak. It was the first unperformed thing I'd said to my father in years.
Nearly sixty seconds of silence followed.
"That's not how professionals operate," he said.
"I don't care."
My words echoed in the car. I swallowed and recalibrated.
"I signed a two-year extension to keep someone I love on the roster. I killed my grad school applications to do it. The plan I've been building since I was nineteen is dead because I chose a person over a spreadsheet, and I did it without telling him, which makes me exactly like you."
I heard him breathe. One measured intake.
"We'll talk when you've had time to—"
I ended the call.
Four minutes to dismantle the bones of a relationship that had taken twenty-three years to build.
I threw the phone at the dashboard. The case cracked from the camera lens to the charging port.
I sat in the garage for another seven minutes. Then I started the engine and drove to the only place in the city where the water was warm and the animals didn't know my last name.
Delia buzzed me through the staff entrance.
"Caribbean Reef's been dosed. Lena left notes on the clipboard."
"Thanks."
"Did you eat today?"
"Yeah."
She studied me the way Pratt studied a shooter through traffic, quickly forming a silent conclusion. Then she went back to her crossword.
Behind the Caribbean Reef glass, a blacktip reef shark passed through my field of vision. Steady, unhurried, following the same circular route it followed every night.
Open-ocean sharks didn't circle. They migrated. Covered thousands of miles following thermal gradients and prey populations. The circling wasn't natural behavior. It was adaptive behavior. The animal adjusted to the enclosure so completely that the change appeared to be contentment.
We kept the atmospheric conditions stable and called it thriving.
I stayed at the window for a long time. Long enough for Delia to pass twice, slowing but never stopping.
As I climbed back into my car, my phone buzzed. The 807 Ontario area code.
I picked up.
"OH GOOD you're alive. I was going to give you four more rings and then call the Coast Guard, which—I don't actually know how to contact the Coast Guard?
Like, is there a number? Adrian says it's just 911 and they transfer you, which is WILDLY inefficient for an emergency watercraft situation, but—ANYWAY. You answered. Hi. This is Pickle."
No introduction was necessary.
"Don't talk yet. I'm on a schedule. Adrian's making something with phyllo dough, and he says I have until the timer goes off, and phyllo is delicate. Kieran, it waits for no man, so I've got fourteen minutes."
I heard a distant Lake Michigan wave hit the seawall.
"I called Heath two hours ago. Well, he called me.
Well, I called him, but he was already calling me, so our calls collided in the phone dimension.
Technology is haunted." A beat. Then something in his voice stripped down.
"He sounded like October. Before the roster stuck.
Before any of it. He told me he was right the first time.
That taking up space means you lose it."
I swallowed hard.