17. Zach
ZACH
The arena lights dim and the crowd goes quiet as a tribute video starts on the jumbotron.
I can’t look away. Jack as a rookie taking a hit along the boards and bouncing up like nothing happened.
Then the years start layering. Different teams, different jerseys, the same relentless style of play.
A clip of him talking to the goalie, heads bent together, and I’ve been on the receiving end of that conversation.
I know exactly what he says. I’ve got you.
Stay with me. Next shot. He said it to me three days ago.
Hand on my shoulder pads, mouth by my ear, like it was just for me, and I stood there and took it knowing what I know.
Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before Jack.
I came up through juniors with goalie coaches and billet families and they were all kind in their ways, but none of them put their hand on the back of my neck before a game and told me they had me.
I didn’t know that was a thing a teammate could do.
I didn’t know I’d been missing it until he did it the first time.
The video shifts to his wedding. Photos of him holding a baby with wispy, red hair.
A toddler in a tiny jersey sitting on his lap in a locker room stall, and then she grows into a girl with freckles and a huge smile standing at center ice in a Puckaneers hoodie three sizes too big.
Mackie at five, maybe six years old, holding her dad’s hand.
Then Mackie at ten with a foam finger. A more recent one—Mackie and Chloe at a home game, sitting in the family suite, Mackie’s face caught mid-laugh.
I know that laugh. I’ve heard it in my apartment, in my car, through my phone at two in the morning.
I’ve felt it vibrate against my neck and my chest and my mouth and right now it’s forty feet wide on a screen in front of twenty thousand people and I’m gripping my water bottle so hard the plastic is creaking.
The ceremony itself takes eight minutes.
They give him the silver stick, the crystal, the framed jersey.
And then Mackie walks out onto the ice and throws her arms around her dad’s neck and buries her face in his shoulder and I can see his mouth moving against her hair, saying something only she can hear, while I sit on this bench doing the math on how many times I’ve lied to this man.
Practice days, game days, travel days, the flights where he sits next to me and asks how I’m holding up and I say fine and mean nothing by it.
I calculate it the way I calculate everything.
Ninety-three days since I first kissed his daughter.
She’ll be okay when he finds out. That’s the thing I keep circling back to.
She has years of being loved by this man stacked behind her and even if it goes sideways for a while it’ll come back, the way these things do when there’s a foundation under them.
She knows what that’s like. She’s never not had it, and I’m not jealous of what she has, but I’m terrified that when this gets ripped out from under us I’ll have nothing to fall back on.
The ceremony ends. Jack skates a lap. The crowd is deafening. Mackie and Chloe disappear back through the tunnel and I put my helmet on and grab my water bottle and try to become a goalie again but my head won’t stop the chant of liar, liar, liar.
We win 5-2. I don’t play. I don’t remember a single second of the game.
I’m sitting on my couch at midnight staring at the dark TV. I’ve been replaying the ceremony for three hours. The video. Jack’s face. Her at five years old. Then the phone rings.
She’s talking before I can even say hi, the way she does when she’s running hot. “That was amazing, right? Dad was so emotional. He cried during the video—I’ve seen my dad cry maybe twice in my entire life and tonight he just—” She stops. “Why are you so quiet?”
“Just thinking.”
I can hear her settle into something—bed, probably. There’s faint music coming through her end. Someone’s still up downstairs.
“Talk to me.”
I’ve been rehearsing this for an hour. Sitting here in the dark turning words over like I’m trying to find the right combination for a lock, except every combination I try opens something I can’t close again.
“I watched your dad hold you on the ice tonight and I couldn’t breathe.” It comes out flatter than I mean it to. More like a fact than a feeling. “All I could think about was how we’ve been hiding this from him.” I scrub my hand over my face. “I don’t see how I can keep doing this.”
The line is quiet. I can hear her breathing.
“So what are you saying. Are you breaking up with me?”
“No. God, no. I’m saying we need to tell him.”
“Define tell him.”
“This week. Tomorrow. I don’t care. I just can’t keep being in the same locker room as him pretending I don’t know the sound you make when—”
“Zach.” Her voice goes sharp. “We can’t tell him right now.”
“Why not.”
“Because we’re in the middle of the season. Because my dad just had the biggest night of his career and you want to follow it up with ‘Hey Anderson, I’ve been sneaking around with your daughter?’ That’s how you want to do this?”
She’s right. I know she’s right the way I know when a shot is going top corner before the stick even loads up. The timing is wrong. But the part of me that had to sit on that bench tonight and clap does the math on months of this. The numbers don’t work. The numbers haven’t worked in weeks.
“I don’t want to wait. I want it to be over. I want him to know.”
“And he will. After the season.”
“The end of which season. Regular season? And if we make a deep playoff run?”
“Then after that. I’m not telling my dad in the middle of a Cup chase.”
She says it like it’s a scheduling adjustment. Like we’re pushing a meeting back on the calendar. I think about how goalies spend their entire careers catching things that are flying at their face and I can’t catch a single break in this situation.
“So I’m supposed to look him in the eye while I’m—”
“While you’re what?” Her voice doesn’t waver.
“Loving his daughter? Taking care of her? Being the kind of guy he literally told Barrett you are? Zach, my dad respects you. When we tell him, that’s going to matter.
But if we blow up the locker room in the middle of a season, he’s not going to hear any of that.
All he’s going to hear is that his goalie was sneaking around behind his back. ”
“The timing always matters with you.”
“Because I grew up in this. I know how a distraction tears a team apart and I know what it would do to my dad and I’m asking you to trust me.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just—” I close my eyes. “Tell me this isn’t going to blow up in our faces.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Great.”
“But I can tell you that I’m not going anywhere. And when we tell him, we do it together. And my dad loves me enough to eventually get past it even if it takes him a while. And Barrett hasn’t said a word. So maybe he’s on our side.”
“Barrett’s on the side of not having to deal with it.”
“That counts.”
I laugh, surprised by it. She always does this—takes the thing that’s tearing me apart and finds the one angle where it’s almost funny. I don’t know if she does it on purpose or if that’s just how her brain is wired but it’s the only thing that works on me.
“End of the season,” I say. “And if I can’t make it that long?”
“Then I’ll help you. But you can make it. You’re a goalie. You’re built for sitting with things you can’t control.”
“That’s a terrible pep talk.”
“It’s the best I’ve got at midnight.”
She yawns into the phone.
“I should let you sleep,” she says.
“You looked incredible in your dress.”
“I know. I was trying to make you want me.”
“There’s not a day I don’t want you, Mackie.”
She laughs softly and then the line goes quiet before she finally speaks.
“End of the season,” she says. “We’ll do it together. You have to trust me.”
“I do. I do trust you. Get some sleep, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The call ends and I lie back on the couch in the dark thinking about the end of the season. April at the earliest. May if things go well. June if things go the way everyone in that building tonight is hoping.
Six months of looking Jack Anderson in the eye.
I close my eyes and try to sleep and the last thing my brain shows me before I give up is the image of her at five years old, holding her father’s hand on the ice, and the distance between that little girl and the woman who just hung up the phone is the distance between who I want to be and who I actually am.