Chapter 11
Chip
This morning was an optional skate before tonight’s game against the Norfolk Barracudas, the last before the All-Star break.
I had some time off after skate on game day, which I’d been holding in my head because it meant nine days of no travel, no game-day routine, a schedule with white space, and a set of new hours to fill with training and anything else I wanted.
Dane had four-day stretches off in his rotation.
He and I had aligned three of those days with three of mine, giving us seventy-two consecutive hours, give or take a shower, that we hadn’t figured out what to do in.
“Cornish.”
Coach Ronan was at my stall. He had his coffee in one hand, his clipboard in the other, and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
“Coach.”
“Knee good?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.”
He moved on, but then Taft appeared before I got to my feet.
He stopped just inside the doorway and looked at Sable, who was lying on the mat by my stall. He didn’t say anything, just crossed the room and sat down on the floor next to her, back against the wall, knees pulled up. Quiet.
Sable pressed herself against his side and stayed.
Taft put a hand on her back and didn’t move.
I finished my grip on the lace and didn’t ask him anything. I’d learned that when Taft sat down on the floor without explaining it, he usually wasn’t ready for questions.
Cap came in with his clipboard and stopped when he saw Taft on the floor. He set it down on the nearest surface and went to a crouch in front of him, elbows on his knees.
“You okay?” Cap said. “You need the morning?”
Taft looked up at him. “No. Just… my brother called… ” He pressed a hand to his face. “It’s hard.”
“It’s all good if you need a break.”
“Just a minute,” Taft said. He leaned back into Sable. Her tail moved once. “I’ll be fine.”
Cap held his look for a moment. Then he nodded, one quiet nod, didn’t push, and then he left.
Taft sat there for a little while longer. I wondered if he was going to cry and wasn’t sure what to say. Sable held still against him the whole time. After a while, he got up, smoothed his practice jersey, and said nothing at all, which I understood completely.
“Thank you,” he said and left after Cap.
“Any time,” I offered, and he threw me a shaky smile.
Practice was ladder skates, edge work, a passing sequence on the breakout, three-on-twos through the neutral zone, and a fifteen-minute stretch on the cycle in the offensive zone, which I was good at and glad to do because being good at things was self-soothing.
Hockey, specifically, rewarded the way my brain worked rather than asking it to work differently.
I saw patterns before they formed. I tracked multiple moving variables without effort.
I remembered every sequence a defenseman had run in the last four games.
None of that was a choice—it was just what my brain did.
Cap and I ran the cycle drill against Bob and Owens, and at the end of practice, I was halfway out of my pads in the corner of the bench by my stall when my phone rang in my locker.
It was a specific ringtone—the default Apple one, descending three notes—for a list of key contacts that included Matt, Lena, and my mother in that order. The ringtone for those three overrode silent mode right now because of the imminent birth of my niece or nephew.
I dug it out one-handed. “Matt,” I answered. I sounded steady.
“Hey.” Matt’s voice was low and tight. “Lena’s in labor. Active. Came on fast last night. Mom is with her. Contractions are five minutes apart. I’m taking her to Genesee.”
“I’ll meet you there. I’m at the rink,” I said. “Practice ended six minutes ago. I can be at the hospital in about twenty minutes if I leave now. Faster if I run the lights, which I won’t do.”
“Don’t run the lights.”
“I won’t. I said I won’t.”
“Just… come.”
“I’m coming.”
He hung up.
Cap was watching me. The locker room wasn’t silent because locker rooms never were, but the volume in the corner where I was had dropped.
“Lena,” Cap said.
“In labor. I have to—”
“Drive carefully.”
“I will.”
“Chip.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Matt good luck from us all.”
“I will.”
I picked up Sable from Coach Ronan’s office and briefly explained, and he said he had everything handled and waved me away.
I knew Dane was on shift and there had been a fire engine on University when I’d driven in.
Not Station Eight. Station Three, I thought, from the decal on the engine that I caught as I passed.
I hadn’t let myself look long. I was choosing today to assume Dane was at the station eating someone’s dry oatmeal and not at a fire.
Traffic was horrendous, snarled and untidy, and a couple of roads were blocked off, making it worse. It took me nearly an hour to get to the hospital. Why would the city choose to do road repairs on the day I was going to become an uncle?
Late and out of sorts, I headed up to L&D on the fourth floor.
The elevator was empty—a small mercy, because the ceiling fixture in the Genesee elevator flickered, which I’d hated since the night of the fire, and I had to cover my eyes and was thankful there was no one else in there to ask me if I was okay.
I gave the desk nurse my name and Lena’s.
I told her Sable was a service animal. She nodded once and pointed me to a small private waiting room down the hall.
My mother was there, as was Lena’s mom, Bridget.
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Bridget.” Lena’s mom and I weren’t friends.
She’d disapproved of me being Matt’s best man at his wedding, saying the reasons were obvious.
I’m guessing it was the autism thing and the chance I might have started throwing out stats about something inappropriate.
She said I was awkward, but not to my face, just to my mom, who then put her in her place.
My best man speech rocked. Since then, I’m not sure she and Mom are friends either.
I know Matt finds her impossible, but some people are just born to be impossible, and I ignore them.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Mom got up and hugged me. That was fine because, aside from Dane, Matt, and Lena, she was the only one I was happy to hug. Bridget glanced up at me and flinched. I certainly wasn’t going to hug her.
“How is Lena?” I asked.
“She’s fine. Doing well. Matt is in there with her. Sit. Tell me about practice.”
I sat and told her about practice. The cycle drill, the back-door pass the goalie had saved, and how my knee had held.
I told her about Cap’s face when my phone rang.
I gave her numbers about labor and the active phase, the time from the first contraction, and Apgar scores, and what we would and wouldn’t be told in advance of being told it, because giving my mother the numbers first was how I’d loved her since I was small.
While I walked her through it, she put her hand on top of mine, Sable lay across both my feet, and Bridget read something on her Kindle.
I stared at the ceiling tiles, tracking the pattern of stains across them. I counted the magazine subscriptions on the table. I held my mother’s hand for one stretch of a long minute. We didn’t talk during it. I had nothing to say. She had nothing to say. I texted Dane:
Chip: Lena in labor. At hospital. Mom here. Will update.
Matt came to the door wearing scrubs they had given him to put over his clothes. There was sweat in his hair. His eyes were red, but he was smiling.
“It’s a girl. You guys want to come meet her?”
“A girl?” Bridget gasped, and Mom grinned next to me. I had a niece.
The hospital room was warm. The lights were low.
There was a machine in the corner that had stopped beeping.
Lena was in bed in a thin gown with her hair stuck to her temples and a bundle in the crook of her arm.
The bundle was very small, very still, and very wrapped.
Lena was looking down at the baby in awe.
“Hi,” Lena said. Her voice was wrecked.
“Hi.”
“Come meet her.”
I sat in the chair on the right side of the bed while my mother sat in the chair on the left. Matt stood at the foot of the bed, and Sable settled at my feet without any prompting.
Lena turned the bundle a little, so I could see the baby’s face.
She was the size of a loaf of bread. Her face was red and squashed.
Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open in a small, disgruntled O.
A tuft of black hair stuck out from under her cap, and one hand had slipped out from under the blanket, making a tiny fist by her chin.
She wasn’t still—there was a small, rapid breath going in and out.
I was looking at my niece for the first time as a real person, not a number, and all the numbers I’d practiced in the car fell out of my head at once.
“Her name is Iris Elizabeth Cornish,” Matt said, his hand on my shoulder, giving me all the information I needed to make sense of my new niece. “Six pounds two ounces, nineteen inches. Born at 1:23. Her Apgar was ten.”
Mom held her, and then Lena asked me if I wanted to hold Iris.
“Are you sure he should?” Bridget asked, her voice tight, eyes flicking between the baby and me as if I might do something wrong.
“Mom—” Lena snapped, sharper than I’d ever heard her, the word cutting clean through the room. “He’s Iris’s uncle. Of course he should.”
Bridget flushed instantly. “I didn’t mean… I just… ” She pressed her lips together then looked at me. “I’m sorry, Chip. Of course. I’m sorry.”
I was used to Bridget being wary of me. I might have a career, partly own a gym, and have my own place, but she still framed every encounter with me around the A-word.
I genuinely didn’t care, and it wasn’t a battle I was even interested in fighting.
I’ve watched videos and even practiced on a swaddled stuffed bear Matt and Lena had given me at Christmas, until I had a system: I can hold my damn niece without dropping her!
I reached for her, and my mother coached me. “Okay. Lean forward. Cradle the head with your forearm. There, like that. Other hand under her… ”