Pipe Dreams

by Sarina Bowen

  “Hi,” said a voice beside her.

  Startled, Lauren whirled to find the very reason for her misery standing there on the sidewalk, his rugged face regarding her curiously.

  Her stomach flipped over and then dove straight down to her knees. Mike Beacon in a suit had always been her undoing. His tie was loosened already, showing her a glimpse of the contrast between the olive skin at his throat and the crisp white dress shirt he wore. A five o’clock shadow dusted the planes of his strong jaw, gathering in the sexy cleft of his chin.

  She used to put her thumb right there beneath his full lower lip as she tugged his face closer for a kiss.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine, thanks!” she insisted, snapping out of it. She tore her gaze off of the only man she’d ever loved and looked up Flatbush for the RAV4 Uber had promised her. Every muscle in her body was tense as she waited for the goalie to just walk away.

  Which he did not do.

  She turned and pinned him with what the assistants in the Manhattan office termed the Lauren Glare. The laserlike effect of her stare made interns put away their phones and get back to work. It seared incompetent messengers into delivering packages in a timely fashion. It was a “powerful and terrifying weapon,” according to her coworkers.

  Beacon just smiled.

  What an asshole.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked.

  “Because you’re standing on a dark sidewalk at midnight?”

  Seriously? This from a man so obviously unconcerned with her well-being? If he gave a damn, he wouldn’t have walked out on her two years ago without an explanation. He wouldn’t have tossed her heart on the street, stomped on it, and then vanished from her life. Forty-eight hours before she realized he was gone, they’d been circling real-estate listings in the newspaper together, discussing whether they needed a three-bedroom apartment, or whether two would be plenty. While naked. In bed.

  Lauren didn’t remind him now, though, because she’d said it all before. For weeks she’d sobbed into his voice mail because he didn’t pick up the phone. She’d begged for an explanation, wondering what she’d done wrong.

  There was really no point in going there again. “Just don’t, okay?” she demanded instead.

  “Don’t what?” his husky voice asked.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. She turned to face him, her blood pressure doubling. “Don’t be nice. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Just stay between the pipes and guard the damn net. And leave me the hell alone.”

  He swallowed, and she saw a flicker of a shadow cross his face, but it was gone before she could name the emotion. Note to self—never square off against a champion goalie. They were the masters of playing it cool when they needed to. Lauren found herself staring again, trying not to remember how easy it had been to get him to toss off the mask and really live. “Nobody gets me like you do,” he used to whisper into her ear.

  It had been a lie, though. Obviously.

  A quick tap on a car horn broke the weird spell that had come over her. She turned to see a RAV4 against the curb, a man’s face peering up at her that matched the profile picture of the Uber driver she’d summoned.

  Thank you, baby Jesus.

  Without another word Lauren got into the back seat and shut the door. She couldn’t resist a parting glance up at Beacon, though.

  He stood there, hands jammed in his pockets, watching her car pull away.

  TWO

  AUGUST 2012

  Lauren surveyed the messy Syosset office as she walked in for the first time in four weeks. She spotted a couple of forgotten Starbucks cups on the windowsill, and the copy machine’s jam light was on. Could be worse. An hour of work would put everything back to rights.

  It wasn’t too high a price to pay for a long vacation on Fire Island with her high school friends. She’d needed that vacation badly. The play-offs season had ended in a third round loss to the Rangers, and everyone had been crushed as well as exhausted.

  But now she was sporting bikini tan lines and a happy outlook. In four days she’d start a new semester of night classes at LIU, inching closer to her BS in business management.

  Things were looking up.

  She tucked her bag away in a desk drawer and set about tidying up the office. She adjusted the air conditioning from sixty-six degrees (probably her father’s doing) back up to a more reasonable sixty-nine. The old grouch was next door at the practice facility right now, so she hummed to herself as she worked.

  “Nice top. Sexy,” her coworker Jill said when she arrived a half hour later. “It’s new, right?”

  “Mmm?” Lauren said, not rising to the bait. The top was sexy. It was sleeveless, exposing her tanned shoulders. It was hot pink with a playful gather at the bust without actually showing cleavage. She didn’t want to start off the new season with a tongue lashing from her father.

  “Have you seen him yet?” Jill asked.

  “Who?” she asked, playing dumb. She and Jill had sat side by side in this office for eight years. There was nothing in Lauren’s life that Jill didn’t know, including the fact that she was nursing an eight-year long crush on a married man. But Lauren could not be prodded into discussing it. What was the point?

  “Who,” Jill scoffed under her breath, and if Lauren had turned her head she surely would have seen the older woman’s eyes rolling. “Mike Beacon, that’s who. I’m surprised he’s not sitting on the end of your desk already, chatting you up.”

  Once again Lauren demurred. It was true that she and Beacon were close. As the team captain, he spent more time in the front office than any other player. That meant more time with Lauren and Jill. And, sure—he and Lauren gravitated toward one another. They were almost the same age, and they’d both been part of the organization for exactly eight years. Beacon had arrived as a trade from Quebec the same month that Lauren started working for the team. The joke at the time was that they were both rookies.

  The difference was that Beacon arrived in Long Island with a wife and toddler in tow, and made half a million dollars a year. While Lauren worked for her father—the team manager—because he wouldn’t pay for her to attend college.

  “It’ll be good for you to figure out how the real world works,” her dad had said. “Save up some money and then get that business degree if you want it so damn bad.”

  Eight years later and she was still taking two courses every fall, but none in the spring, because play-offs season often made final exams impossible.

  Her whole life had been ruled by hockey, with no end in sight.

  Meanwhile, after eight years, Lauren and Mike Beacon were good friends. Their jobs required having each other on speed dial, and at the top of their texting apps. It didn’t matter that the happy sound of his laughter always bounced around inside her chest, or that she had the exact shape of his smile memorized.

  She didn’t dwell on it, the same way she didn’t pine for the penthouse apartments listed in the Real Estate section of the New York Times. Some things weren’t meant to be hers, and thinking about them too much only made her feel pathetic.

  “Jill,” she said, changing the subject, “are we still planning that charity skate for the end of September? I can’t remember which date we decided on.”

  Her coworker just stared at her, and Lauren began to feel self-conscious. Her new top wasn’t that sexy. And there was no way Jill could know that while she’d stood in front of the dressing room mirror at Macy’s, she’d been thinking about a compliment Beacon had paid her last spring. You look good in pink. You should wear that color more often.

  “He hasn’t been by yet?” Jill asked, pressing her luck. “Really?”

  “No?” Lauren said, letting her confusion show. “It’s nine o’clock. Time for the morning skate. We never see players at this hour. Why would he be in here?”

  Jill’s
eyes widened slightly. “I just thought he’d be by to talk to you, is all.”

  Lauren was tired of games, so she turned away and began the process of logging in to her desktop computer. The number of e-mails in her work account was probably astronomical, because for once in her life she hadn’t opened it while on vacation. She lifted her takeout coffee cup and took a sip.

  “I mean,” Jill continued quietly, “things will probably be different for you now that he’s left his wife.”

  Lauren choked on her coffee. It hit the wrong spot in the back of her throat, and she coughed violently. “What?” she hacked, trying to get a breath of air down her constricting windpipe.

  “You didn’t hear?” Jill looked very pleased with herself. “He caught her cheating with the tennis instructor. He moved out the same day. I heard he rented a house on the edge of Old Westbury.”

  “Oh,” Lauren managed, her eyes watering from both the coughing and from a suddenly dizzy spell. “How sad,” she said, and meant it. They had a cute nine-year-old with her mother’s smile. And poor Mike! Betrayal was so ugly.

  Jill just clucked her tongue. “We’ll see how sad you are a month from now.”

  The coffee turned to battery acid in her stomach. Lauren stood up and carried her coffee cup right over to the trash bin and chucked it in.

  THREE

  APRIL 2016

  The day before the first play-offs game, Mike Beacon was right on time to pick his thirteen-year-old daughter up from Brooklyn Preparatory Academy. And when another car pulled away, he even snagged a coveted spot at the curb, sparing himself the indignity of doing laps around the neighborhood until Elsa emerged.

  Kids had already begun to stream out of the imposing wooden doors, and he watched the social clots of preteens take form and then reshape. The girls all seemed to talk at once, with nobody actually listening. The boys at the center of the scrum seemed more interested in shoving each other around a little bit. One kid grabbed a retro metal lunch box out of another’s hands and then ducked behind a group of giggling girls. His victim gave chase.

  Beacon just shook his head. You couldn’t pay him to be thirteen again. What a painful age. He could never please his teachers. He couldn’t please his parents. Hockey had been the only thing he did well. So he’d just kept doing it. At thirty-two, it was still the only thing that he was sure he hadn’t fucked up.

  One trick pony, much?

  Elsa emerged from the doors eventually. Even though his sightline was compromised by dozens of other bodies, he spotted that pink stretchy thing holding her hair in a ponytail. Then she came fully into view, her violin strapped to her back, moving slowly. And talking to another girl.

  He sat up a little straighter, trying to see who it was. Not that he was picky—Elsa needed friends. They’d moved to Brooklyn only seven months ago, in September, and he still felt guilty about making her switch schools just six months after her mother’s funeral.

  Shelly had been in the ground just over a year. It was a lot for Elsa to process.

  But moving was the only way he could get more hours with Elsa. Her pricey new private school was just two and a half miles from their pricey new home, which was less than two miles from the practice rink and training facility. If they hadn’t left Long Island, there was no chance he’d be picking her up from school right now. He’d spend all his time on the LIE trying to get back in time just to say good night to her.

  Elsa had spotted the car and was weaving through the crowd at top speed now. A moment later the passenger door opened and his daughter flung herself into the seat. She wrestled off the instrument case and slammed the car door. “Let’s go,” she said.

  He didn’t, though. “Hello to you, too,” he said instead.

  Elsa rolled her eyes. “Hi, Daddy. How was your day?” The question dripped with forced politeness.

  “Why, thank you for asking! It was awesome!”

  Her heart-shaped face broke into a cheesy grin, and he laughed. She was still his girl, at least for today. Supposedly teenagers turned into heartless monsters, but it hadn’t happened yet. Not too often, anyway.

  He put the car in Drive and waited for an opportunity to pull out onto Lincoln Place. He didn’t know any other teenagers. His teammates’ children were mostly preschool-aged. Not only was Beacon a veteran player, but he’d gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant when they were both eighteen.

  In fact, the first thing he’d noticed on Parents’ Night at Elsa’s fancy new school was that all the other fathers had gray hair. They were lawyers and bankers and television producers. Many of them asked questions about homework, and how to prep for Ivy League college admissions essays.

  Beacon wouldn’t know an Ivy League essay if it bit him in the ass. But he had a kickass kid who was currently scrolling Snapchat and humming a concerto or an etude or a gavotte. Whatever the fuck those were.

  “Hey,” he said to try to get her attention. “Good news. Hans texted me to say I’m going to be in town for your spring showcase.”

  She looked up. “Awesome. I need a new dress.”

  He snorted, waiting to turn onto Fourth Avenue. “He also warned me that you thought you needed a new dress.”

  “But I do,” she said firmly. “Unless you want me to bare my ass to the row of second violins. All my dresses are getting too short.”

  “I see.” He didn’t bother to call out for saying “ass” because he tried not to be a hypocrite when he could avoid it. “And I suppose you have a shopping destination in mind?”

  “Yup. A boutique in the Village. You can take me there on Sunday. Or Hans can.” She went back to her phone.

  He stole a glance at her face in profile. Every day she looked more like Shelly. She had the same curls in her red-brown hair. And she bit her lip when she was concentrating, just like her mother had.

  Poor, doomed Shelly. Married the day after high school graduation to a guy who did not know what the fuck he was doing. A mother at nineteen. A hockey wife who moved from their home town in Ontario to Quebec and then to Long Island at the whim of the teams who traded him.

  Dead before her thirty-first birthday. Her last words were, “Take care of our baby.”

  Mike tapped the steering wheel with his thumbs. I’ve got her, he promised Shelly silently. To his daughter he said, “Be good for Hans while I’m away.”

  “I’m always good for Hans.”

  That was fairly accurate. “Haul yourself out of bed in the morning, though, so he doesn’t have to beg.”

  “Sure,” she said, face still in her phone. “I’ll get up on time so he doesn’t go all queen on me. That’s his phrase,” she said before he could object.

  He laughed, because it did sound like Hans, their live-in violin teacher and nanny. Or manny, as Elsa called him.

  “Why can’t I just come to D.C. with you, anyway? It’s the play-offs!”

  “There’s this thing called school.”

  “I went to Nashville with you in third grade.”

  “That was different. You were just a little kid, and we’d made it to the third round.”

  “So if you make it to the third round again, I want to travel.”

  “We’ll see. How’s the homework situation tonight?”

  “Evil, evil, evil.”

  “That good, huh?”

  “Fucking algebra.”

  “Elsa. No f-bombs. They haven’t assigned you to a tutor?”

  “Nope! Thank God.” His daughter hated math. She and her mother had spent some very long nights at the kitchen table, Shelly explaining how to add fractions or whatever for the tenth time, Elsa crying that she couldn’t do it. Shelly arguing that she wasn’t trying hard enough.

  He always conveniently removed himself from those battles. But now all the parenting problems were his alone. Teaching his daughter algebra was far above his pay grade, but
he knew Shelly wouldn’t want her death to be the reason that their daughter never learned math. So he moved math tutor to the top of his lengthy worry list.

  The short trip home took twenty minutes in stop-and-start traffic, but he wouldn’t have minded if it took even longer, since Elsa had to talk to him while they were in the car together. Once they reached their brownstone she would disappear into her bedroom, headphones on.

  “What else did I miss?” he asked, braking for yet another red light.

  “Hans and Justin and I went to that new sushi place on Clark Street. You have to come with us next time. I ate octopus tentacles just to gross out Hans.”

  Beacon snorted. “Did they have anything he liked?”

  “He said the tempura was killer.”

  “Good to know.” Their babysitter indulged Elsa too much. It was hard to say no to a grieving seventh grader. Beacon couldn’t seem to say it, either.

  “One icky thing happened.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When we were walking home these boys were awful to Hans and Justin.”

  Uh-oh. “Awful how?”

  “Justin hugged Hans good-bye at the subway entrance, and these kids started calling them names. You know. The other f word.”

  Jesus. While his daughter loved to test him by cursing, she knew never to use a slur against someone else. Unfortunately she was learning that others had no problem doing so. “Did you get the sense that you were unsafe?” It made him feel like a heel to ask, but his daughter’s safety was his first concern.

  “No,” she said quickly. “There were like a million people around. And these guys just did a flyby. Like, they weren’t brave enough to get in Justin’s face and say it.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. It must not have been a big deal, because Hans would have told him if things had gotten scary. It was probably just the same bullshit he dealt with all the time.