10. Breakaway
brEAKAWAY
The photograph was on Connor’s kitchen table when Caleb arrived at the cabin, propped against a cardboard box with its lid folded back. Around it lay university game programs, an expired student card, a residence key tag, and a team photo from his time in Ottawa.
“Jessie found the box in the hall closet,” Connor said. “Told me if I’m old enough to have my own place, I’m old enough to store my own junk.”
“Like finding treasure!” Caleb said playfully.
“Or trash, if Jessie’s perspective says anything.”
Caleb picked up the student card. Connor was clean-shaven in the picture, his curls longer, and his expression more innocent somehow.
“That’s a lot of hair.”
“It was humid.”
“Sure…”
“It was aggressive humidity.”
Caleb set the card down and took up the team photo. Connor stood in the back row, narrower through the shoulders but already carrying himself with the same contained steadiness.
The lean, dark-haired player beside him was smiling, though Caleb couldn’t tell whether he was turning away from Connor or toward him. Connor tapped his finger at the guy.
“Daniel?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah.”
Their shoulders touched in the photograph. Both of them appeared to be holding back laughter. Caleb had never seen Connor quite that… unburdened. It made him feel warmth in his chest, and just a little bit jealous.
“You look happy,” Caleb said.
“I guess I was.”
Caleb returned the photograph to the table, quiet.
“Should I have not shown you? Does it bother you?” Connor asked.
“That you were happy?”
“That it was with him.”
“Of course you should have shown me. It was part of your life.” Caleb nudged the photo back toward him. “I mean, it’s something to process, but it’s not as though I need everything before me to have been miserable.”
Connor took that in without answering.
They sorted through the rest of the box.
Connor discarded old receipts but kept the game programs. The residence key had belonged to a sixth-floor room with a radiator that knocked through the night and a roommate from Timmins who once slept through a fire alarm.
He had no idea why he had kept it. He tossed it back in the box.
“What could you see from your dorm window?” Caleb asked.
“The parking lot.”
“Beautiful.”
“On clear mornings you could see a second parking lot behind it.” They both laughed easily.
Caleb found a meal card with three unused punches and held it up.
“You could probably still get breakfast at the cafeteria.”
“I’d rather eat the card.”
At the bottom of the box lay the university practice plan, its pages crowded with notes in several different hands. Connor ran his thumb across the faded crest, then returned it to the box with the programs and the map.
He kept the team picture out.
When the box was packed again, Connor carried it to the cupboard beside the stove. He returned for the photo and set it on the mantel beside the old brass clock. He adjusted it once, making sure it stood securely, then came back to the table without either of them commenting on the choice.
Frank sent a formal email on a Wednesday. It had an attachment: a schedule, a roster, a list of what to bring to the tryout. Caleb read it twice at the kitchen table with his coffee steaming next to him, then closed his laptop and looked out the window for a while.
He went down to the bar at noon, before Maya opened, and sat on the customer side of the counter while she prepped for lunch. He watched her work for a few minutes without saying anything. She let him.
“Frank sent the paperwork,” he said finally.
Maya set down her knife. She turned fully toward him. “Okay,” she said.
“It’s real. There’s a schedule. Frank wants me at tryout camp in September. No promises, just come and show him what I look like after a summer of real training.”
“You’ll do great.”
“You haven’t seen me play much.”
“I’ve seen you play enough! And I know how Connor talks about how you play,” she said. “That’s enough.”
He picked up his coffee mug and held it. She went back to the cutting board but her attention was still with him.
“You think I should go,” he said.
“I think you should decide what you want,” she said. “Not what I think. Not what Frank thinks. Not even what Connor thinks. What you want.”
Caleb opened his mouth. The tryout was an easy choice when Connor was not in the equation, easy to choose when Thunder Bay was only a road sign, an idea, and Connor was here. Together, they crowded each other out.
“I don’t know how to choose without making one of them feel smaller,” he said.
Maya rested both hands on the counter. “Then don’t worry about getting it right. Just say what feels true.”
He studied his coffee. When he spoke again, the sentence came slowly.
“I want both things.”
“You want Thunder Bay and you want Connor.”
“Yes.”
The knife moved through another lime with clean precision. “Caleb. This is still new.”
“I know how long it’s been.”
“I’m not saying what you feel isn’t real.
I’m saying…” She stopped. Started again.
“I left home at twenty-one. I’ve been here for a few years and I’ve met a lot of people.
Some things felt bigger than they were. Some things felt smaller.
And in the end, I was wrong about which was which half the time.
” She looked directly at him. “I don’t know which this is. I don’t think you know yet either.”
“So you think I should go.”
“Don’t turn down Thunder Bay because of a guy you’re still getting to know. Even a good guy.” Maya nudged the lime halves into a row with the flat of the knife. “You came here to figure out who you are. I really like Connor, but you’re not done figuring that out yet.”
Caleb traced the bar top, the wood worn smooth by decades of elbows and glasses.
Maya made the time sound small, but the back road returned to him: the frozen creek, Connor’s hand finding his in the dark.
It felt like a lot more. He couldn’t make those things feel less real just because they were new.
“What if you’re wrong?” he said.
“Then go to Thunder Bay and play hockey.” She picked up the knife again. “If you’re wrong, you’ll know. You won’t learn it sitting here. And I don’t think Connor is going anywhere anytime soon.”
He sat with that. The cooler compressor kicked on beneath the bar. Behind the counter, Maya went back to the limes. The light through the front window had the flat white of the second half of winter.
“Do you want me to go? To leave?” he asked.
She didn’t answer immediately. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t. You just got here and I just…” She stopped. “You’re the first person here who knows me all the way through. That’s not a small thing.”
“It’s not,” he said.
“But I’m not going to say that to you as a reason to stay. That would be doing what Mom and Dad did. Making my needs the map for your life.”
Caleb looked at his sister. The authority was real, as was her confidence. Underneath both, though, he could still see the younger face she only showed in the kitchen at midnight or here, with the bar empty and him sitting across from her.
“You’re not them,” he said.
“God, I hope you’re right,” she said. “I’m trying.”
The early-afternoon crowd came and went. By four-thirty, only a few customers remained, spread along the bar with no apparent intention of ordering anything else. Maya said she was going out back for air and disappeared through the kitchen door.
Five minutes later, Caleb tied off the garbage bag beneath the prep counter. It was mostly lime rinds, paper towels, and the remains of a crate that had once held beer glasses. He carried it through the kitchen.
The back door had not caught properly. Voices came through the narrow opening.
“You’ve got the face you make when you’re not fine but not sure if you should say so,” he heard Riley’s unmistakable voice say. She had come by for Maya, not a delivery.
“You know the faces I make, do you?” Maya asked.
“I’ve been delivering to this bar for two years. You’ve got several. That one’s specific.”
Caleb stopped with one hand on the door. He should have made enough noise to announce himself. Then Maya spoke again.
“My brother,” she said. “He’s got an opportunity. And a reason to stay. And he doesn’t know which one to choose.”
“Which do you think he should choose?”
“The opportunity. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Riley repeated with a note of sarcasm.
“What?”
“You said it pretty fast.”
“It is obvious. He’s nineteen and he’s being given a chance at something real for the rest of his life. The reason to stay has been there for only weeks.”
“Weeks can be plenty.”
“Plenty for what?”
A boot scraped against the alley gravel.
“To know you don’t want to walk away yet,” Riley said.
“What are you getting at?” Maya asked.
“You already proved you could leave when you had to. You left. You built this place.” Riley’s voice softened. “Maybe you don’t have to keep proving you can walk away.”
The garbage bag pulled heavily against Caleb’s hand. He remained where he was, caught between the fact that they were discussing him and the knowledge that neither of them knew he was there.
Riley kept going. “I come through every week. I watch you make sure everybody gets home and nobody takes a swing at anybody, and I keep wondering who does that for you.”
The alley went quiet.
“Riley…” Maya said. The way she said the name told Caleb that the conversation had stopped being about him.
He lowered the bag to the kitchen floor.
“I’m not trying to stick my nose in,” Riley said. Her voice carried through the opening as Caleb stepped away. “I’m just being honest. You should try it sometime.”
Caleb returned to the bar. The garbage could wait.
Maya came through the kitchen several minutes later. She stopped when she saw the tied bag beside the back door. The hesitation lasted less than a second, but Caleb knew his sister.
She returned to the bar. Caleb rearranged the clean glasses beneath the counter.
Silence held between them.
He went to the lake that night.
He shouldn’t have. He knew that before he laced his skates on the bank, knew it from the sky.
Clouds had come in from the northwest during the afternoon and swallowed the stars.
There was no moonlight. The lake was darker than Caleb had ever seen it.
He could not see the far bank, the treeline, or the place where ice became air.
He went anyway.
The first push off the bank was into nothing.
His skates on the ice, his breath in front of him, darkness everywhere else.
He could see maybe ten feet ahead. Beyond that, nothing.
He skated into it. The cold found his face and hands, the exposed strip of skin at his wrist where his jacket rode up.
He was moving faster than he could see, trusting muscle memory and the fact that his body knew this place better than his eyes did.
He went faster than was smart, faster than the visibility warranted, his edges pushing onto ice he couldn’t see.
The cold hit him straight on. Frank’s email, Maya’s boot in the gravel, and Connor’s hand finding his knee under the table crowded him as he leaned into the speed.
The assurance that September was a long way off had answered none of it.
Then he pushed harder, past what was sensible, what was safe. He gave in to the unknown.
His father’s mapped future rose before him, followed by the grief and relief of leaving it. Maya’s words came next: you’re not done yet. He didn’t know whether they were true, whether done was even the right word, or whether he wanted it to be.
In his whole life, he had never been in this place, expected to move before he could see clearly and to trust that what lay ahead and beneath him would bear him up.
The darkness was total around him. He was moving too fast for the conditions, and he knew it, but the knowing didn’t slow him. He was looking for the edge, the place where the ice gave or didn’t.
He thought: this is what I’ve been doing. Skating into the dark and waiting for the edge, for the end, for the inevitable crash.
He almost didn’t see it in time.
A seam opened in the clouds. Moonlight hit the ice, and the world came back all at once. The far bank, the treeline, the cabin chimney, and the thing standing at the edge of the lake less than forty feet in front of him.
His edges bit into the ice and he stopped, hard, the spray of it catching the moonlight, and he stood there breathing, facing it.
The bull moose was enormous. It stood where the ice met the bank, legs in the shallow snowdrift, head turned toward him with slow curiosity, its breath making clouds in the moonlight, its eyes catching the light and holding it, dark and steady.
They looked at each other.
The lake was silent. The moonlight shifted. The shadows of the trees moved across the ice, and the moose stood in the middle of it all, standing in the moonlight, indifferent to his choices and indecision. It simply was.
The moose regarded him for another moment. Then it turned and walked back into the treeline.
Caleb breathed in the cold air and let it out again.
The first full breath was enough. He stood on the ice in the moonlight, waiting for his heart to slow.
He had recklessly thrown himself into the unknown, hoping chance would decide his fate so that he didn’t have to.
After a lifetime of “God” deciding, he didn’t know how to choose for himself.
The word that came to him was grace.
The clouds closed again, total darkness slowly returning.
Taking what light remained, he skated back to the bank while he could see the way.
He sat on the log and unlaced his skates while the encounter still shook through him.
Then he waited with his hands between his knees, the treeline still.
Somewhere in it, a branch shifted under the weight of snow. Soon that too was gone.
Then he took out his phone.
Caleb: “I’ve been thinking about September.”
Caleb: “Can we get together tomorrow and talk?”
He sat with the phone in his hand and waited. His breathing and the faint shift of branches were the only sounds. The cabin was invisible somewhere through the trees.
The reply came after a few minutes:
Connor: “yeah”
Connor: “ok”
Connor: “see you at the cabin”
Caleb read the three messages on his screen. He pictured Connor at the bungalow, Jessie at the kitchen table, Ann watching the TV in the other room. He pictured Connor reading his text, proper and punctuated, trusting him completely.
He was ready to make his choice.
He put the phone in his pocket, picked up his skates, and walked back along the lake road to the truck.
The spruce stood black on both sides. His boots on the packed snow were the only sound.
Ahead of him, the lights of Veil Lake showed through the trees, small and yellow in the dark.
He didn’t remember when he started seeing them as home.