Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Heath
The horn sounded, and the bench emptied. I stood because everyone else did.
Gloves hit helmets. Somebody grabbed my jersey from behind.
Varga's voice cut through everything, syllables I couldn't separate from the nineteen thousand other voices competing for the same air.
Cross found me and pulled me into a hug that was mostly shoulder pads and momentum.
Rook materialized, tapping my helmet twice with his glove.
We'd clinched. I registered the fact how I registered faceoff wins. Data.
Confetti cannons went off. An equipment guy was already at the bench with a snow shovel, swearing about Zamboni intakes. Playoff ice couldn't afford debris.
I hugged people I didn't know. My arms did the work.
Markel was at the tunnel mouth, hands in his jacket pockets. "Good work. Not done."
The locker room was quiet for a clinch. Cross, already unlacing, told a rookie: "This is when it gets mean."
I sat at my stall and started unlacing. Left foot first.
Around me, the room did what it always did. Varga held court. Pratt stretched in silence.
Three weeks ago, I'd been on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet, wondering if anything I'd built was mine.
Tonight we clinched. I pulled the second skate off and set it beside the first. Blades aligned.
Toes pointed forward. My routine hadn't changed since Thunder Bay.
On some nights, the ritual was all I had.
My phone sat on the shelf above my helmet. I reached for it without thinking.
I opened the banking app. The balance loaded.
I did the math, calmly, not like a 3:00 a.m. spiral that ate through sleep and sent me checking skate rivets a fourth time.
Paycheck received. Playoff bonus accruing.
Subtract rent, insurance, and groceries.
Subtract the monthly transfer. Subtract what I'd already set aside for the surgery.
The gap that had been twenty-six thousand was now eight.
Eight thousand dollars. Manageable. Not comfortable, but the number no longer required me to play every remaining game with no fluctuations in a system that was always fluctuating. I typed the transfer amount. Confirmed the routing number. Hit send.
I closed the app and opened my messages.
Forty minutes ago:
Maggie: Watching the game. You looked good out there. Call when you can.
I typed back:
Heath: Transfer sent. Check in the morning. How's Dad?
Maggie: Resting. Pre-op consult went well. Dr. Okafor says he's a good candidate. Surgery holds for the 19th.
Heath: Mom?
Maggie: Mom's Mom. She organized the entire recovery plan into a color-coded binder. She has tabs, Heath. Laminated tabs.
I smiled.
Heath: Love you.
Maggie: Love you too. Get some sleep.
I set the phone face down on the shelf.
Dad's surgery was happening. Not because of a contract someone else signed or cap math I'd never been shown. Because of thirty-seven games of net-front work and bruises I'd earned standing in spaces other players left.
Whatever Kieran had done with the extension—whatever he'd moved or protected or decided without asking—it didn't change the shifts I'd played or the reads I'd made or the fact that Markel had kept my name on that whiteboard.
I stayed. I earned it.
The locker room was nearly empty. Varga's voice faded down the hallway.
Pratt's stall was dark. I sat in my base layer with tape residue still on my fingers and the bruise yellowing on my ribs.
I pulled on a shirt. Packed my bag. Left through the tunnel, past the security desk where Davidson sat with his mystery novel and his coffee.
"Good game, Donnelly."
"Thanks."
"Playoffs, huh?"
"Yeah."
He smiled. "You earned it."
Two people had said that to me tonight. Neither of them was the person whose opinion used to matter most. Both of them were right.
The next morning was an off-day. Coach Markel had given us forty-eight hours before the schedule resumed, which in April meant forty-eight hours of pretending you could still walk down stairs without planning each step.
I walked. Not toward anything. Just motion.
My neighborhood was doing its Tuesday thing. A kid in a knockoff Ironhawks hoodie was trying to stick handle a crushed soda can along the sidewalk. He kept losing it to the cracks in the concrete and swore like he’d heard it in the lower bowl.
I called Thunder Bay.
Pickle answered on the second ring, which meant he'd been holding the phone. His standard was five to seven, because he was always in the middle of something that required both hands and at least one apology.
"Donnelly!" Loud. Something crashed in the background. "Hold on—HOG, I TOLD YOU THE CLAMP GOES ON THE OTHER—hold on."
A door slammed.
"Okay. I'm in the hallway. Hog's trying to fix the skate sharpener again. He found a YouTube tutorial. It's going badly."
"Hey."
A beat. I heard the shift—Pickle recalibrating, reading tone the way he read a loose puck.
"You okay?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"That's two answers and one of them is a lie, but I can't tell which. What's going on?"
"Did you call him?"
I didn't need to say who. Pickle had called a number he shouldn't have had, and whatever he'd said had cracked something open that three weeks of silence hadn't touched.
"Yeah." No hesitation. "I called him."
"How'd you get his number?"
"Pratt."
I paused mid-stride. "Pratt gave you Kieran's number?"
"Texted it to me. No message. Just the number and a period. That man is terrifying, and I love him."
Pratt, who'd been parked at the Northbound the night Varga interrupted. Who'd said good screen the next day and nothing else. Who saw everything and reported nothing and, apparently, kept a line of communication open to Thunder Bay that I hadn't known existed.
"What did you say to him?"
"I don't remember exactly. I was—Adrian was making something in the kitchen and the timer kept going off and I was kind of—" He stopped. For Pickle, a mid-sentence stop was an event. "I was mad, Heath."
He didn't call me Heath often. I was most often Donnelly.
"I was really mad. You called me and you sounded like October. Like before any of it stuck. Like you were back on the floor checking numbers."
He was right.
"So yeah. I called him. And I was maybe—I was a lot."
"What did you say?"
"I told him he doesn't get to decide stuff for you. That's—that's not how you do it. You don't just—" A frustrated sound. "He made the call without you. That's the thing. He just made it. Like you weren't even in the room."
I turned a corner onto a block I didn't recognize—three-flats and a barber shop with a faded sign in Polish.
"I know."
"Are you mad at me?"
"No."
"Because Adrian said I overstepped. He did the face. You know the face."
"You didn't overstep."
"I definitely overstepped. But I'd do it again, so."
Quiet on his end.
"What happened?" he asked. "The actual thing. Tell me."
I gave him the shape of it. Flat. No dramatic framing. Kieran signed the extension. He didn't tell me he'd signed it to stop a trade. Three teams had called. My name was in a package. His signature dissolved it. He knew all of this and decided I couldn't handle knowing.
Pickle listened. I heard him breathing, which meant he was actively not interrupting, which for Pickle required the discipline most people reserved for penalty kills.
When I finished, a long exhale.
"Okay," he said. "So he fucked up."
"Yeah."
"Big."
"Yeah."
"And he's still there."
"He's still there."
"So the question is whether that's enough."
The wind picked up. I hunched into my jacket. "He decided for me. Like I couldn't handle it. Like I'm—"
"I know what it's not." His voice was calm. "I told him. You don't get to save someone who didn't ask you to. That's not saving. That's just deciding. For them."
Silence.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He said you would've refused. That you would've demanded a trade before you let him give up his future for your spot."
My jaw tensed. "He's right. I would have."
"Obviously. But that's your call to make."
A bus passed. Air brakes hissing. I waited for more. Pickle had never once in his life stopped at one sentence when three would do, so when he went quiet again I let it happen.
"He's not bad, Heath. He just did the wrong thing for the right reason and that's—" Another crash on his end that he ignored. "That's still wrong. But it's not the same as someone who doesn't care."
I didn't respond.
"You don't get to decide for someone and call it love. But you also don't throw someone away because they got scared and made a bad play." He paused. "We've both seen guys do dumb shit in the third period because they were trying too hard. Doesn't mean they don't belong on the ice."
I exhaled.
"He's still there," Pickle said again.
"Yeah."
"Then decide what you want to do about it."
Something metal hit the floor. Biscuit barked once.
"I gotta go. The sharpener situation has escalated. Hog might cry. I've never seen him cry, and I'm not sure the building can handle it."
"Pickle."
"Yeah."
I searched for the right word. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me. Thank Pratt. The man's running an entire operation from behind that mask. I want to study him."
"Goodbye, Pickle."
"Go be stubborn about the right things, Donnelly."
The line went dead. Pickle hadn't told me what to do. He'd done what he always did—crashed into the middle of it and pointed at the thing that was already true, the thing I could see if I stopped letting hurt and frustration sit in front of it.
I pocketed my phone.
Two days passed. I worked out. I practiced. I ate meals that required a cutting board.
Thursday evening, I sat on my bed with my phone in my hand.
The apartment was quiet except for street noise muffled by the windows. The pipe cleaner figure stood on the side table, slightly askew from where I'd bumped it that morning. I straightened it without thinking.
I pulled up the text thread with Kieran. His last message was three weeks old.