Chapter 10
ROWAN
This many years into Rowan’s career, the feeling of home that Calgary radiated was dwindling. He was more at home in Dallas these days (where his house was still languishing on the market), but Calgary was still infinitely more comfortable than San Jose was.
Plus, he was a bit of a mama’s boy, and having his parents at his games always made him happy.
Aside from a quick power play goal in the second, every moment of the game against the Calgary Cowboys was hard won. Tommy took an awkward hit in the first period and they were down a forward for most of the game.
They ended regulation 2–2, with dwindling morale.
Coach Peters took a moment during the TV time-out between regulation and overtime to pump some confidence back into them.
And then Rowan and Theo had their first chance at overtime together.
They had spent time in practice working on their 3-on-3 OT strategy, but it was always different in-game. Heightened, more intense, unscripted. Theo won their face-off, and Rowan and Vic spread out, trying to cover as much ice as possible while remaining open for Theo’s pass.
Possession is everything in overtime, and Rowan got smashed into the boards, the puck pickpocketed by the Cowboys.
He sprinted to their D-zone and watched the 2-on-1 as the Cowboys shot on Sammy.
The puck was buried in his glove, and Rowan tapped his pads as he glided by, heading back to the bench for a shift change.
The second unit went out and held their own for a minute before it was time for Rowan and Theo to hop back over the boards, this time with Link.
There was no one in the world Rowan would have rather been on the ice with at that moment, regardless of how much Theo hated him.
The Cowboys were a big team, and even though Theo was a big guy as well, the check he received down in the attack zone was awkward, and he went down.
In the split second between being on his skates and being on the ice, he still managed to pass the puck straight to where Rowan was in front of the net.
A miracle of a pass. From there, it didn’t take much to send the puck into the back of the net.
Theo was already back on his feet. He wasn’t limping or struggling. He was smiling, and Rowan wished that his teammates would hold off on their celebratory crush of a hug so that Rowan could have one moment with just Theo. This Theo, who had just won the game with him and was giving Rowan a smile.
He didn’t get that. Instead, the boys came tumbling onto the ice, swallowing Rowan and Theo up in a hug.
Rowan loved nothing more than to win in Calgary. He knew he’d get tapped for media to talk about his home game, and he already knew what he was going to say.
“How did that overtime goal feel? One strength of the Serpents right now is that you’re such a fast team, which we really saw out there during the extra time.”
“Felt great, obviously. It’s good to see that in our first shot at overtime this year, we pulled out a win.”
“Do you want to talk us through that final play?”
“Not a whole lot to say. Theo is the best passer in the league. I have no idea how he got that puck to me. From there, scoring was easy. He did the heavy lifting.”
“It looks like you and Lane are having a lot of fun out there on the ice. Have you found the youthful vigor you had together in junior?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on out there, but it’s working, so we’re going to keep trying to do it.”
“You’re in your hometown tonight. We saw your parents in the crowd earlier. Are you going to get to spend any time with them?”
“Yeah, grabbed dinner with them, and I’m going to stay over tonight.
Sleep in my childhood bed,” Rowan laughed.
He knew out there on the internet somewhere was a video the Victory made of how he spends his summers, which included getting the tour and the lore from the house he grew up in.
Everyone wanted to see the little pond in their backyard he skated on when he was a kid.
It was always weird to have such personal things be public.
He didn’t like it, so he gave the same tidbits people already knew about him over and over.
* * *
“I feel like I don’t know what’s happening in your life these days, honey. What are you doing in San Jose? Tell me about your team. How’s Theo?”
“How’s Theo,” Rowan scoffed. He was slouched in the same kitchen chair he ate almost every breakfast and dinner in for at least the first ten years of his life. He had a mug of tea in front of him, because he knew he needed to have a drink assigned to him in order for his mom to stop offering.
“Are you two still...having trouble connecting?”
“You could say that. He’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want me to be there.”
“That’s a shame. I thought you two would just fall back into it. Michelle was a little more apprehensive.”
“You still talk to Theo’s mom?”
“Of course, honey. Not every day, but yes, we stay in touch. Hockey bonds the parents as well as the kids. You know that.”
Rowan shrugged. He didn’t have kids. He didn’t know.
“What did Michelle say?”
“That Theo probably still feels heartbroken and abandoned.”
Abandoned? “What are you talking about?”
“Honey, you left him behind. I know you didn’t do that on purpose, but it hurt his feelings. It sounds like he’s made that pretty clear.”
“He’s made the fact that he hates me clear. He hasn’t made the reasoning behind it clear.”
“Have you ever thought about how he might have been feeling at that point in your lives? He had the same big dreams for his career that you did, except he had to have his dream in your shadow. You flew right out the gates. He stayed put. Were you there for him then?”
Rowan shrugged. “I didn’t know he was having a hard time with it. My team was losing every night. His team was top of the league.”
“You know the two things are different. Your team might have been losing, but everyone was still talking about how good you were, all across the league. And no one was talking about Theo at all.”
“He wasn’t there for me, either. He stopped answering my calls.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.” What was this, therapy? He assumed he would spend this time getting updated on one of his seven cousins, who were now all graduated from high school and always had a huge list of real-life updates. Instead, he was getting the third degree. “This isn’t my fault.”
“Maybe it’s not, sweetheart. But if you haven’t tried apologizing and talking about it, you might want to think about it.
If you play this well together when you aren’t even talking off the ice, think about what the Serpents could be when you click.
And more importantly, it’s pretty clear you need a friend out there. Try.”
The most painful thing that Rowan had ever experienced was realizing that at some point, Theo had gone from the person he texted every thought in his head to, every funny meme, every stupid, silly thing he came across, every worry and fear, to being the person he had to dig through his texts to even find their thread.
Their messages dwindled to congratulations on good games, or trophies.
And then they stopped completely. And Rowan was so in his own head about everything that was happening in his own life that he didn’t know how to hold on.
He hadn’t considered that everything he was texting Theo—how hard the NHL was, how much he missed home, how he was sick of invasive interviews—might hurt him. And he didn’t know what to do about that now.
* * *
Rowan’s childhood bedroom was a fossilized version of his teenaged self.
After he started playing junior hockey, he didn’t change anything because coming back home to it was familiar and comforting.
He spent his first couple NHL off-seasons here too, a redecoration feeling like too much work to put into a space he spent little time in.
He bought a condo in Calgary when he was twenty, and he off-seasoned there now. It was just the occasional Victory at Calgary (or San Jose at Calgary, now) game where he spent the night with his parents.
Getting involved in sports was a great way to accumulate a lot of ephemera. His walls, desk, and dresser had scattered trophies, medals, pucks, mini-sticks, tournament programs, ribbons, and photos.
God, the photos. His mom bought him a digital camera when he went off to play in the OHL, demanding to see a little of his life if he was going to move away when he was sixteen. He spent years taking thousands of photos. He had piles of them printed out, and dozens of them on his walls.
There were a lot of landscapes. A lot of shots out of a bus window on the way to or from games. Lots of photos of the boys kicking around at school or in hotel rooms.
But mostly, there were a million photos of Theo.
Rowan had never tired of looking at his face.
No matter how many photos he took, he always wanted more.
Theo had smile lines at the corners of his lips, and cheeks that were so round and kissable when he laughed.
Later photos featured his missing tooth, which Rowan had been unhealthily fixated on.
His eyes were steel gray, and Rowan had never seen another person with the same color.
The best part of looking at Theo’s face was knowing that Theo was his person.
Despite never assigning an official label to what they were doing, Rowan’s teenage heart had never had any doubt that Theo was his.
The section of his wall by his bed was a shrine to Theo that he’d put up their first summer break apart, after the draft when Theo already felt so far away from him.
Rowan had been shocked at all of the events he was expected to attend that summer, before he was even in the league.
The photo shrine helped when he was lonely.
There were photos of the two of them, and photos of just Theo, cheesing for the camera, or completely unaware of Rowan’s presence.
Sleepy Theo and happy Theo and shirtless Theo.
He remembered what it felt like to love this boy with his entire heart. He’d carried an ache proportional to that love around with him for years. Rowan, however unconscious of what he was doing, had chosen his career over his love for this boy.
The jury was out on whether that choice was going to pan out, but either way, he couldn’t fall asleep with so many little Theos staring at him.
Carefully, he pulled each photo off his wall, the loops of Scotch tape he’d adhered them with leaving a little residue behind.
He’d pay to have his room painted at some point.
He sat back on his bed against the wall, a stack of photos of Theo in his hands. He knew he should do something normal, like put them in a drawer, or even throw them out. But he didn’t. He tucked them carefully into his duffel bag, in his laptop case where they wouldn’t get bent.
It was weird to think that one day, he’d put his camera down and never picked it back up. He’d felt like a tourist when he’d dragged it around his first few months in the NHL, and eventually, it had ended up back at his parents’ house.
Before he went to bed, he opened his closet to see if his camera was on the shelf where he’d left it, and there it was, in a camera bag covered in a light layer of dust.
By now, he was sure it was a laughable number of pixels, a mostly fried battery, an SD card with forgotten photos on it. Rowan wasn’t satisfied with every part of his life, but he had no qualms about the money he was making. He could buy himself a new, beautiful, expensive camera.
He took the camera out of the bag and felt its weight in his hands. It still had the same chunky starter zoom lens that the camera body came with. Sure, he could buy a new one. But this one was familiar.
There was just enough space in his duffel for him to bring it back to San Jose with him.