22. Maren #2
The sound of a fall was distinct in a hockey arena.
The different quality of a body going down wrong, the silence that followed before the whistle.
But the sound when a goalie was injured?
That was something else entirely. I was already standing when I identified the weight of what happened, and the crowd reacted too.
Griffin.
Not a collision. A stop, a pivot, and then his knee buckling on the cut. I watched him go down and my stomach dropped while my professional brain engaged simultaneously.
I was down the stairs and through the gate before anyone had noticed.
He was being helped up by teammates when I got to the tunnel. I fell into step without asking. The team physician was already there. I caught his eye and he gave me the small nod that meant it’s yours if he comes off the ice, the understanding we’d developed over months of working together.
Griffin played the next eleven minutes of the second period.
He shouldn’t have. I knew it the moment he pushed off the boards to get back in net, the slight hitch in his push-off that nobody else would clock from the stands. I clocked it from where I was standing.
With four minutes left in the period, Griffin made a save. Clean stop on a wrist shot from the right circle, covered it, whistle blew. Routine. Dead puck, players clearing the crease.
Except one of them didn’t clear.
I saw it before I understood what was happening—a Dallas forward, number eighteen, coming in late, well after the whistle, and driving his shoulder into Griffin’s back while he was still down on the ice covering the puck.
Not incidental. Not a momentum thing. Deliberate, late, and aimed directly at a goalie who was already hurt and who everyone in that building could see was already hurt.
The arena went quiet for exactly one second.
Then Eli Kovac dropped his gloves.
He was across the crease before number eighteen had fully straightened up, and he didn’t say anything first, didn’t posture, didn’t give the guy a chance to explain himself.
He grabbed him by the collar and hit him twice, clean and hard, and the bench erupted.
Ryan was over the boards and then back, held by two teammates, the captain instinct warring with every other instinct he had.
Cole was already in the secondary scrum that had broken out along the boards, two Dallas players and Kasperi tangled together, Cole in the middle of it with his jersey getting pulled over his head.
When the dust settled, Eli got two minutes for roughing and two minutes for instigating, all while grumbling, “Motherfuckers know better than to fuck with a goalie.” Number eighteen, two minutes for goalie interference.
Cole, two minutes for roughing. One other Dallas defenseman, two minutes for roughing.
Ryan received a warning from the referee that he acknowledged with a single nod and no expression whatsoever.
Double return. Four skaters off the ice at once, two from each side, the remaining players resetting at even strength with the period winding down.
Griffin had gotten to his feet during the fight. He was standing in his crease with his mask up, watching Eli get walked to the box, and when Eli looked back across the ice Griffin gave him one nod. That was all. The price had been paid.
I stood at the tunnel entrance with my arms crossed and my heart in my throat and watched the last four minutes play out with cold professional attention.
The slightly altered positioning, the fraction of a second’s hesitation on the cuts he’d never hesitated on before, the redistribution of weight he couldn’t afford to redistribute.
I’d seen it on his face the moment he came off the ice when the final horn sounded. Griffin came out limping. Not badly, controlling it, his jaw set, his weight carefully redistributed, but I’d spent years watching this body and I knew the difference between fine and performing fine.
“Don’t,” he said, when he saw my face.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You absolutely have a face.”
He sighed and let me fall into step beside him. His gait was off, favoring the left, each step placed with care, telling me everything I needed to know. I clocked it, the clinical part of my brain running its quiet assessment while the rest of me was his sister walking him to his car.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Tweaked it.”
“Griffin.”
“It’s a tweak, Mare. I’ve had worse.”
In the third period, Dmitri Sorokin took the net.
He was twenty-three and Russian and the youngest player on the current roster, and he made four saves in eleven minutes and gave up nothing, and the Sidewinders won three to one. Griffin watched the third period from the tunnel in his gear, his mask in his hand, not saying a word to anyone.
After the game was over, he didn’t want to be assessed, so I walked him to his car and watched him lower himself into the driver’s seat.
Slow, controlled, one hand braced on the door frame, and thought about Ryan, about this week, about the conversation that was supposed to happen in the next few days.
I crouched next to the open car door. “Come in tomorrow morning. Early, before anyone else is in.”
“I have—”
“Griffin.”
He looked at me for a moment. Nodded. “Fine. Eight o’clock.”
“And ice it tonight, twenty minutes, then heat. Alternate.”
“I know how to treat a knee, Maren.”
“I know you know but let me be who I am? Please?” I squeezed his arm once and stood. “Text me when you’re home.”
He nodded, a grimace on his face, then pulled the door closed and I stood in the parking structure and watched his taillights disappear and thought about timing and circumstances, and how important conversations kept finding new ways to push themselves further down the road.
I texted Ryan from the car. Not because I had news. He’d been watching it unfold and had seen all of it. Because I needed him, and for the first time, I could admit that freely.
Maren: Long night
The response came before I’d cleared the structure.
Ryan: Yeah. You okay?
Maren: I will be. I’m pretty sure Griffin’s going to be fine but he’s going to be stubborn about it.
Ryan: I know. I saw his face when he came off the ice. He didn’t want to talk in the locker room.
There was a pause in our messaging and then Ryan said what I knew to be true.
Ryan: The conversation is going to have to wait.
Maren: I know.
Ryan: I’m sorry.
I sat with that for a moment. The fact that he was apologizing for a circumstance neither of us had any control over, just because he knew the delay cost me something.
Maren: It’ll keep.
Ryan: Still coming over?
It was nearly eleven. I had a seven-thirty treatment and two patients after and I was tired in the bone-deep way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Maren: Of course.
I fell asleep on his couch.
I hadn’t meant to. I’d sat down while he was in the kitchen and the cushions were deep and the lamp was low and the television was on some hockey recap show at a volume that was more texture than sound, and somewhere between just resting my eyes and I’ll get up in a minute, I was gone.
I woke when he lifted me.
Not fully. Just enough. His arms slid under me and the couch disappeared and I made a soft sound somewhere in the back of my throat, a vague objection, and he said low and close, “I’ve got you, baby.
” The warmth of his chest was against my cheek and his heartbeat was steady under my ear and I thought, through the warm fog of sleep, that I should probably insist on walking.
My legs were right there. I was a functional adult.
I turned my face further into his shoulder instead.
The hallway. A door. The familiar smell of his room. Cedar and clean laundry and something underneath that was him, and then the bed rising up to meet me, the give of the mattress, the cool of the pillow against my cheek.
“Stay,” I said, or tried to. It came out blurred at the edges.
He chuckled. “I’m not going anywhere, solsken.
” His hands were at the hem of my shirt, then cool air, brief, and then the soft worn cotton of his T-shirt coming over my head, his palms guiding my arms through the sleeves like I was something worth being careful with.
The scent of him took over as the shirt settled on my body.
“Ryan.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Maybe confirming he was there.
“I know.” He pulled the blanket up. Pressed his mouth to my temple, warm and unhurried. “Go back to sleep, baby.”
I was already falling back under.
He slid into bed behind me. The warmth of him, the solid familiar weight of his arm coming around my waist and pulling me back against his chest. I’d spent a long time sleeping alone and telling myself I preferred it. I hadn’t known what I was missing until I’d had it, and now I couldn’t unknow it.
I couldn’t imagine going back. My own bed, all that space, none of him in it. The thought moved through me like a small, certain grief, and I pressed closer, and his arm tightened around me without being asked, and I thought, from somewhere at the edge of sleep, I don’t want to go back.
I was out before I could do anything about it.
In the morning there was coffee already made and a note on the counter in his handwriting. Blocky, deliberate, every letter placed with the same economy he brought to everything else.
Solsken,
Early skate. Don’t rush. Lock up with the key. It’s yours.
—R
I looked over.
There it was, next to the coffee maker. A key on a small enamel keychain.
A tiny rendering of The Ashby Letters cover art, the moonlit tower I’d recognize anywhere, the same image on the spine of the book sitting on his shelf in the other room.
He hadn’t gone out and bought something. He’d taken it off his own keys.
I picked it up and held it in my palm for a moment.
I stood in his kitchen in his T-shirt and the love I’d identified yesterday morning settled into something quieter and certain.
I wrapped my fingers around it, holding it tight in my palm.