Chapter 38 - Nate #2
Tessa on her front porch, barefoot in the summer dusk, belly round under one of those soft dresses she loves, hair in a loose braid. Waiting for me. Hand on her stomach. The sun caresses her features as if it, too, knows how special she is.
I chase that dream with everything I have in me.
Every time the city noise starts to roar in my head, every time the crowd’s chant echoes in my bones too loudly, I go there.
To the porch.
To her.
To the idea that my life could be more than performance and pressure.
One night, I sit on the back step of the farmhouse with Mom, the sky wide and full of stars. She sips tea from a mug that says BEST HOCKEY MOM and wears her old cardigan with the fraying cuffs. I swear the woman runs hot.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“I’m thinking,” I answer.
“Dangerous,” she teases gently.
I huff out a laugh. “Yeah. Seems to be.”
We sit in silence for a while, listening to the wind in the trees.
Finally, I say, “I’m tired, Mom.”
She looks over, eyes soft. “Of what?”
“The noise,” I say. “Not the game, I still love the game, but who I have to be to keep it. The one who smiles when he wants to scream. The one who says yes to things that make him sick. The one who forgets that there’s a whole world outside of the rink and the cameras and the goddamn contracts.”
She doesn’t rush to reassure me. That’s the thing about my mom. She doesn’t hand out easy comfort. She lets the truth sit, even when it’s ugly.
“You know,” she says slowly, “when you left for Summit City the first time, I was so proud I thought my chest would burst. You were getting exactly what you’d always said you wanted.”
“I was,” I agree. “And I don’t regret that.”
“I know,” she says. “But I also watched you change. Bit by bit. Less of my boy came home every summer. More of the hockey ego did.”
She sighs, and her breath comes out in a cloud. I watch my mother work through something in her mind, like she's trying to find the right words.
“I didn’t know how to help you,” she admits. “Didn’t know if I should. It wasn’t my life to live. But I worried. A lot.”
My throat goes tight. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did a few times. But that just seemed to put your walls up higher. Like you weren't ready to hear it,” she says simply. “And maybe you weren't... maybe you needed to get here on your own.”
“Here,” I echo, looking out at the dark outline of the fields. “What is ‘here,’ exactly?”
She studies me. “Here is the place where you realize it's your life, to live, and you are the only one who can change it.”
I stare at my hands, the hands that have held a thousand sticks, gripped a hundred trophies, cradled one woman’s face like it was the only thing that mattered in the world.
"I am trying to put all my pieces together, it just feels like sometimes the harder I try, the more I split myself."
She hums for a minute and then says, "Nate, playing for the Kodiaks isn't the only way that you can be a part of hockey. I know you always envisioned being in the NHL. But you don't seem happy. Look at what that has cost you."
“Do you think I can fix it?” I ask quietly. “What I did to her.”
Mom doesn’t lie. She never has.
“I don’t know,” she says. “That part isn’t just up to you. But I know this: the man who did all those things is not the man you were raised to be. The man sitting here right now, owning what he did, trying to be better… that’s my boy.”
My eyes burn, so I look away.
By the end of January, the guys had quietly started using my penthouse as more theirs than mine. I tossed McKenna my keys one day when he mentioned his water heater blew in his building.
“Crash there until it’s fixed,” I said. “Place is just collecting dust.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah. Just don’t break anything.”
Reeves checks in more than he used to, subtle things in the room like, “You good?” and “You need anything?” and “You talked to her?”
I always answer the same.
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
But there’s less panic in it now; it feels less like I am free-falling and more like I am starting to see exactly where I am going.
But the truth is, I’m not okay, and I don’t know if I will be without her.
But for the first time, I’m not trying to fix that with more noise. More buying. More giving them pieces of myself I don’t have to spare anymore.
I skate, work and help my family.
I dig cars out of snowbanks when it's needed, and I clear her driveway when she’s not looking. I write letters I might never send.
And at night, when the world is finally quiet, I sit on the porch and look out at the land that raised me and let myself want things I used to be too afraid to say out loud.
A life that’s small in the ways that matter and big in the ways I have missed.
A life where the loudest thing isn’t the roar of a crowd…
It’s the sound of her laugh.
The creak of a porch swing.
The steady, soft heartbeat of a future I might not deserve...
But I’m finally becoming the kind of man who could at least stand in front of her without lying about who he is.