9. Back Road
BACK ROAD
The locker room had mostly cleared when Caleb got his gear off. Kowalski dropped onto the bench beside him, still in half his equipment, the way he always did before a private word he wanted to treat casually.
“I hear Frank Desjardins made you an offer,” he said.
“Have you known Frank long?” Caleb asked.
Kowalski shrugged, the shrug of a man who had made a phone call and considered the matter closed. “Years. Talked to him on the phone last week. Told him there was a kid worth looking at. You deserve this chance.” He stood, reaching for his jacket. “Don’t make it weird.”
He was gone before Caleb could answer.
The house Connor grew up in was a bungalow on Birch Street, three blocks from the arena.
The south side of the roof had newer shingles, the porch rail had been repainted, and the small garden along the front walk had been turned and mulched against the frost. There was a truck in the driveway that wasn’t Connor’s and a pair of kid-sized hockey skates hung by their laces from the porch railing, the blades still wet.
He had texted Caleb: come by at four, we’ll go for a drive.
It was the most he’d offered without being asked since the silence.
Caleb had said okay and not asked what it meant.
Now he stood on Birch Street with his hands in his jacket pockets, seeing Connor’s life from a different angle.
A dog barked somewhere; a television carried through an open window while the late afternoon drained out of the day.
The front door opened before he reached the porch.
The girl was maybe fifteen, dark-haired, with Connor’s eyes and the wariness of someone used to assessing strangers quickly. She took in Caleb with frank appraisal, leaning against the doorframe like she owned it.
“You’re the hockey guy,” she said.
“I’m a hockey guy,” Caleb said. “There are several of us.”
She considered this. “Connor said you were funny. You’re sort of funny.”
“High praise.”
“I’m Jessie.” She didn’t offer a hand, just the name. “Connor’s getting his boots. Mom’s lying down.” She said the last part flatly, like it was information she had learned to make ordinary.
“Okay,” Caleb said, matching her register.
She held him a moment longer. Then she stepped back from the door and let him in.
The house smelled of coffee and wood. A backpack slumped against the stairs.
Dishes dried in a rack by the sink. No one moved upstairs.
A row of family photos ran along the hallway wall, and Caleb didn’t look at them directly because looking felt like an intrusion.
At the edge of his vision he caught pieces: the family at different ages, a man with Connor’s jaw and Jessie’s eyes, a boy of maybe twelve or thirteen with Connor’s curls, both of them squinting into summer light in front of a lake Caleb recognized.
Connor came down the stairs pulling on his jacket. In the narrow hallway, his shoulders filled the space. When he saw Caleb and Jessie together, his face eased. Relief, maybe. Or just the surprise of seeing two parts of his life in the same room.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yeah,” Caleb said.
“Don’t be weird about her,” Jessie said to Caleb.
“I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all anyone can ask.” She disappeared into the kitchen.
Connor held the door and Caleb went back out into the cold.
He heard Connor speak quietly to Jessie, the words lost as the door swung closed.
Jessie answered from the kitchen, and Connor waited until she did before stepping onto the porch.
The exchange was brief and ordinary. Caleb kept thinking about it after they reached the truck.
They drove out of town on the highway heading northwest. The buildings of Veil Lake thinned and then stopped, and the boreal forest closed in on both sides.
The spruce and jack pine were heavy with the last of the winter’s snow, boughs bent low, shadows deep between the trunks.
The highway was clear, but the shoulders were packed high from the plows.
Connor turned off the highway after twenty minutes onto a gravel road Caleb didn’t know.
The rattle under the tires softened on packed snow, and the forest came closer, the trees standing at the road’s edge.
A raven followed them for a while from the treeline, then angled off between the pines and was gone.
The road curved toward a frozen creek, and Connor pulled over where the shoulder widened into a natural turnout.
Connor cut the engine. Metal ticked as it cooled. Wind moved through the tops of the spruce and subsided. The creek was frozen solid, its surface swept clean, the ice a deep blue-grey in the fading light. On the far bank, birch trees stood white against the darker evergreens.
They sat in it without speaking. The cold was already beginning to come through the truck’s floor.
“My mom started drinking after my dad died,” Connor said. He kept his eyes on the creek. “Not right away. About a year after. By the time I figured out what was happening, it had been happening for a while.”
Caleb said nothing. He’d learned that from Connor.
“She’s not… it’s not constant. She goes months sometimes without any trouble.
Does really well, actually. Works at the school office, keeps the house, comes to Jessie’s games.
” He watched the creek. “And then an anniversary or a hard week catches her. Sometimes nobody can tell why. And she goes under for a bit.” He paused.
“This month is always the hardest. The accident was in February. The ice was the problem, a drainage issue in the shaft, they said afterward. Like that was supposed to help.”
Caleb looked at the creek. Ice again. The thing that looked solid until it wasn’t.
Connor’s father had died in the mine, killed by water where water should not have been, and the family had been rearranged by what everyone called an accident.
The word was too small. An accident was dropping a glass, missing a pass, taking the wrong turn.
This was a life cracking underneath someone before they had time to move.
“How long has Jessie known?” he asked.
“Longer than she should have.” He said it without self-pity.
“She’s good, Jessie. She handles things.
Maybe too well for fifteen. My brother checks in when he can.
He’s in Sudbury. But it’s mostly me and her.
She was the one who texted me that Saturday.
Mom wasn’t getting out of bed. Jessie had a game and she didn’t want to miss it but she didn’t want to leave her alone. ”
He said it flatly, pride banked beneath the words. “She’s got a tryout in March. Provincial program. Under-seventeen. She’s going to make it.”
The message sat delivered and unread on his phone. The Saturday that hadn’t happened.
“She made the game?” he asked.
“She scored twice.” Connor’s voice warmed. “She’s better than I was at her age. Better hands.”
“She’s got your eyes,” Caleb said.
“Yeah,” Connor said.
“I should have told you,” Connor said. “Instead of just going quiet. I didn’t know how to explain it and I didn’t try, and that was the wrong call.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “It was.”
“That’s it? No ‘it’s okay, I understand’?”
“I understand why,” Caleb said. “I’m still angry.”
Connor almost smiled. “Your mother really did teach you something.”
“She taught me several things. I’m still sorting out which ones to keep.”
Wind moved through the high branches again and settled. The creek had gone darker, the shadows of the birch trees lying long across the ice.
“Ottawa,” Caleb said.
Connor was quiet, looking at the creek. “What about it?”
“You said you found out things about yourself that you couldn’t find out here. You said there was someone.” He kept his voice even. “You didn’t say more than that.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” Connor shifted in the seat, bracing for what he had decided to say.
“His name was Daniel. We were on the team together. He was from Sudbury, so he was away from home too. Figuring things out without everyone watching.” He stopped.
“We started spending time together. Study sessions. Extra ice time. And then one night after a road trip it was just obvious. What had been there.”
“How long?”
“Almost a year. We were careful. Hockey teams teach you that. But it was real. It was the first time I understood that I wasn’t broken. That the thing I’d thought was a malfunction was actually just me.”
Caleb knew that feeling.
“What was he like?”
Connor considered the question. “Funny. Quietly funny, not performing it. Smart. He was studying engineering. He’d call me out when I was closing off.
He had good instincts for that. On the ice he played left wing.
We had this one combination in practice: I’d carry it up the right side and he’d read my shoulder before I passed, already moving.
We didn’t need to talk. He was the first person I was ever honest with.
Not just about being queer. About everything.
Where I came from. What I wanted. What scared me. ”
“And then your dad died.”
“And then my dad died.” He said it simply.
“Daniel drove me to the airport. We stood at the security line and he held onto me for a long time. I said, ‘I’ll call you.’ He said, ‘I know you will.’ He knew I wouldn’t.
Not because I didn’t want to. Because if I stayed connected to him, to who I’d been there, I’d never be able to do what I had to do when I got home.
” He studied his hands. “So I didn’t call. ”
He was still looking at his hands. In the fading light through the windshield, his jaw was set, his profile very still. Caleb wondered if he had ever said any of this out loud before.
“Did he understand?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. He’s married now. To a man… in Toronto. I saw the wedding photos on Facebook a while back. He looked really happy.”