Summer Light: A Novel

by Rice, Luanne

  “You’ve had a few days off now,” the coach added.

  “A chance to rest,” Martin agreed. And to fall in love with May. He wouldn’t let the other thought materialize: to get nervous about the series.

  “That’s good.” The coach crouched down, still looking Martin square in the eye. He talked about Martin’s deadly shot, how there wasn’t another player on the ice who could score like him, how tonight Martin should fight the urge to pass the puck to his teammates.

  “If Ray’s in the clear—” Martin said.

  Coach Dafoe shook his head. Martin’s mother’s early coaching had had one flaw: She had stressed good sportsmanship, and she’d taught her son to pass whenever possible. He passed flawlessly without appearing to cock the stick, fooling his opponents and sometimes his own teammates.

  “When in doubt, shoot,” Coach Dafoe said.

  “But Ray and Bruno—”

  “This could be your year,” Coach Dafoe reminded him. “The Bruins’ year.”

  “I know, Coach.”

  “We don’t know how good we are yet. That’s what we’re going to find out tonight. During the playoffs, I was watching you hard. You know I was. I didn’t like that critical occasion when you missed practice…”

  “I told you—” Martin said, but the coach stopped him.

  “Whatever you told me, the fact is you missed practice, and for three games straight you lost your concentration. For us to win, I need you to combine your defense and your offense, and I need you to lead this team. It’s a simple fact—you’re the dominant factor, and when you’re distracted, so is everyone else. Wherever you went, it took you out of your game.”

  Martin looked down at the floor. During the playoff series in New York, he had rented a car and driven upstate. The countryside had been white under a springtime ice storm, snow covering branches laden with apple blossoms. Coils of razor wire glistened silver in thin sunlight; the brick prison walls were black under a coating of ice. Deep inside sat Martin’s father, a man who skated like the wind, who had won three Stanley Cups, to whom Martin hadn’t spoken in seven years.

  Martin had sat in the car, staring at the prison. He had driven north from Manhattan, wanting to absorb some of his father’s greatness—he’d just sit outside, taking whatever he could through the walls. He had wanted a spark, something extra to bank the fires of competition he had burning inside himself at all times. But that first time up, Martin felt nothing.

  Later in the series, with the Rangers having their way against the Bruins, Martin felt dead inside; the fires were out. Down 3–0, Martin had driven back up to the prison in Estonia. This time he was going to go inside, see the old man and lay things to rest. The snow and ice had melted, but Martin just sat in the same spot outside the prison walls, their bricks red now in the sun instead of slick black.

  “You got your edge back in Boston,” the coach was saying. “Whatever happened in New York and Toronto, you beat it at home.”

  Martin nodded, his face impassive. He had met May, that’s what had happened. He had saved her on the plane, and now he had fallen in love with her. He held the leather pouch in his left hand. Unable to get what he’d been after from his father, he had gotten it from a stranger. Inspiration, connection, divine intervention, love at first sight: the extra edge. His blood pounded just thinking about it.

  “Four days’ rest,” the coach said, his hand on Martin’s shoulder, “and fourteen years of restlessness. You want to win the Stanley Cup. It’s time.”

  “Yeah.” Martin’s throat felt tight, and he felt the tundra winds building inside him. Not even loving May could stop them.

  “Nils Jorgensen wants to nail you.”

  “I know.” Martin pictured the Oilers’ goalie, one of his few true enemies in the NHL—the man who had fractured his skull and smashed his left eye socket three years ago.

  “He wants to make it personal,” Coach said.

  “It is personal,” Martin muttered.

  “Your father’ll be watching, you know.”

  “I figure he probably will.”

  “And your mother will, too.”

  Martin bowed his head. He wouldn’t let himself admit how much he wanted this win. He had lived and breathed hockey his whole life—it was as much a part of him as his heartbeat. His parents had brought him to this moment, but his father was in prison and his mother was dead. This was a part of him May might not ever understand; he wasn’t even sure he’d want her to.

  “I believe in heaven,” Coach Dafoe told him. “They’re up there.”

  “They?” Martin asked, looking up.

  “They’re up there right now, my mother and yours, rooting for us. Yelling, stamping their feet. Your mother used to make a real racket, watching the games.”

  Martin nodded. If his mother was up there, so was Natalie. He felt the leather pouch. Suddenly Coach’s words began to make sense. Maybe May was some sort of angel, a messenger from his mother and daughter. Four days of rest and fourteen years of restlessness: fourteen years of playing pro hockey without winning the Cup. He had won countless trophies, been voted MVP twice during the regular season. He had made it to the playoffs ten times, never before to the finals.

  “Remember what I told you,” Coach Dafoe said, his black eyes shark-stern as he backed away.

  “When in doubt, shoot,” Martin repeated. “Don’t let Jorgensen win.”

  “That, and don’t disappoint our mothers.”

  The first night Boston played Edmonton, Tobin’s husband and sons were busy readying a car for the soap box derby, leaving Tobin on her own. So she rode over to the Taylors’ to watch the game with May and Kylie on May’s bed with the television turned up.

  “Are you following the puck?” Tobin asked.

  “There it is.” Kylie pointed at the screen.

  “Everything moves so fast,” May said.

  “You can say that again.” Tobin laughed, and May knew she was referring to what she’d been told about dinner with Martin. Her husband and sons were into fishing and car racing, not hockey. So Tobin learned the lingo along with May and Kylie: penalties, right wings, blue line, center ice, the crease. May kept her eyes on number 21—Martin Cartier—and she felt thrilled.

  One, two glides, and Martin was in full flight, skating and slamming his way across the neutral zone and into Oilers’ territory. Skates clicking, blades slashing, the tympanic thump of bodies against the boards.

  “I wish I was there,” May said.

  “I’ll bet you do. Look—the camera’s on him. He’s staring straight into it.”

  “Right at us,” Kylie said sleepily.

  “I wonder if his father’s watching,” May said.

  “His father?” Tobin asked.

  “Sounds like they have a complicated relationship,” May said.

  Kylie snuggled against her half asleep, as she tried to stay awake long enough to see who would win. But her eyes were so drowsy, they were closing fast.

  “In what way?” Tobin asked.

  “They don’t speak.”

  “That sounds straightforward,” Tobin said. “Not complicated at all.”

  “But it’s his father,” May said, watching the TV.

  Tobin laughed. “He’d better be careful, what he tells you. Little does he know how you feel about fathers.”

  “Oh, now you’re my analyst?”

  “Always.” Tobin laughed again, but then the crowd went wild, and she and May turned their full attention to the game.

  “What happened?” May asked.

  “Something with Martin,” Tobin said, as they watched him skate across the ice with his fists pumping overhead.

  “He’s a lightning rod,” one of the announcers exclaimed as Martin scored his first goal of the night.

  “The Gold Sledgehammer,” the other said as Martin slammed into one of the Oilers, knocking him to the ice as he nailed the puck with his patented slap shot. “Cartier’s got the body of a heavyweight boxer and the kil
ler instinct to match,” the first announcer added.

  “The Gold Sledgehammer,” Tobin said admiringly.

  “Killer instinct,” May said, watching him lock eyes with Nils Jorgensen, the Oilers’ star goalie.

  The announcers explained their rivalry. In one of hockey’s most famous fights, Martin and Nils had tangled hard, with Nils’s nose being broken and his face needing substantial repairs. In retaliation, three seasons ago, Jorgensen had clocked Cartier, leaving him with a pulverized eye socket requiring surgery to repair a detached retina. Such was hockey, but when May saw the scars on the goalie’s cheeks and chin, she felt chilled to think Martin had done it and had it done back.

  Once the TV camera zoomed in on Martin’s face, and May thought she had never seen such intensity in human eyes.

  “They hate each other,” Tobin said.

  “They do, don’t they?” May was shivering.

  “Wow, May.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s a look we don’t see every day. Martin hates Jorgensen with a passion. Should I be worried about you?”

  May had been staring at the two faces on the TV screen, thinking that emotions worked in two directions: that if Martin hated Jorgensen, the feeling was probably mutual.

  “Worried about me?” May asked, surprised by her friend’s question.

  “A guy who can look like that,” Tobin said. “Who can fight another person, let himself get so wild…”

  “To me he’s so gentle, Tobin,” May said, remembering his kiss.

  “But he has it in him.” Tobin stared at the screen. “You can see it, can’t you? He’s violent.”

  “Not to me,” May insisted.

  “I wonder if he can control it,” Tobin said. “When something makes him really angry.”

  May thought of the owls in the barn, how they’d narrow their eyes and dive-bomb their prey, and that was how Martin looked to her at that moment. The idea of giving him rose petals seemed ridiculous, embarrassing, but as she slid farther down the bed, she was thinking it was meant to be….

  “You’re not saying anything,” Tobin prodded.

  “Gordon was a lawyer,” May said quietly. “He went to Harvard. He’s a partner at Swopes and Bray, and he belongs to the University Club. There’s no one more in control than Gordon. Is there?”

  “No.”

  “And no one has ever hurt me more,” May said.

  “I know,” Tobin admitted.

  “Martin won’t hurt me.”

  “Are they winning?” Kylie mumbled, suddenly coming slightly awake.

  “Yes, two to one,” May said.

  “Where’s Martin?”

  “There,” May said, crouching forward to touch his figure on the screen.

  “Martin skates fast,” Kylie said. “And he can skate backward.”

  “He can,” May said, not taking her eyes off him.

  “You can say that again,” Tobin said, letting May know she was on her side.

  Hockey had never meant anything to them. No team sports had. As girls, May and Tobin had played tennis, gone swimming and bike riding. They had hiked around Selden’s Castle every summer and cross-country skiied the Black Hall fields every winter. But now, watching Martin Cartier slam the puck at 101 MPH high into the net, May wondered what she had been missing.

  He went in, skating back and forth, moving as if he loved motion, darting forward and falling back, teasing the other team, receiving and passing and shooting for the goal in one fluid motion. Then doing it again from the other side. It was like dancing and fighting, all at the same time. May was mesmerized but she felt afraid of the impact—those scars on the Edmonton goalie’s face.

  “Go, go,” Tobin cried.

  The crowd was screaming, and the announcers were yelling. May watched the clock ticking down. She had dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands as she heard them say “…pass intercepted by Cartier, he takes it, he turns, he shoots…”

  “They won!” May said.

  “Oh, boy,” Kylie yelled.

  “The Bruins,” the announcer went on, “have won Game One, beating the Edmonton Oilers by the score of three to one, with a hat trick by the amazing Martin Cartier. The unpredictable, volatile, amazing Martin Cartier. What do you think, Ralph? Is the Cartier Curse broken? Is this Martin’s year to go all the way and win the Stanley Cup?”

  “I sure hope so, and I know all the Boston fans are saying the same thing back home. After a less-than-brilliant season and playoffs, Martin Cartier tonight showed himself to be—”

  “What’s the Cartier Curse?” Tobin asked.

  “I think it has to do with how long he’s been trying to win the Stanley Cup.”

  May turned off the sound, wondering about the Cartier Curse. They sat very still, May’s arm around Kylie, watching the TV screen. The camera showed wild shots of the crowd, the dejected Oilers, their furious goalie Nils Jorgensen, the jubilant Bruins.

  “That was incredible,” Tobin said, yawning as she climbed off the bed.

  “Thanks for watching with us.”

  “Better than listening to John and the boys revving the engine every ten seconds. You think hockey’s rough, try letting your kids turn the garage into a lab for their homemade car.”

  Outside, the night was warm. The windows were open, the white curtains fluttering in a light breeze. The air was scented with meadow grasses and wildflowers, a world away from the ice and violence of a hockey game. As May stared out at the old wedding barn, illuminated yellow in the white light of a half-moon, she could hardly believe that he had been right here, in her barn, just two nights ago…

  The telephone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Tobin said, lunging past May. “Hello?”

  May sat quietly, holding Kylie, listening.

  “Well, congratulations on winning the game,” Tobin said, and May knew it was Martin. “The Gold Sledgehammer himself. I’ve heard so much about you…that’s right, Tobin. How did you…really, she did?…” Tobin grinned, her gaze sliding to May.

  “Let me speak to him,” May said, holding out her free hand.

  “We go back a long, long way,” Tobin said. She listened silently, as if Martin was going on at length. May’s pulse kicked over, wondering what he might be saying. Tobin’s expression was sharp, amused, but as May watched, it softened. “Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” Tobin said after a long while. “Very glad.”

  Handing the phone to May, she said, “It’s for you. I’ll put Kylie to bed, okay?”

  “Thanks,” May said, taking the phone.

  “You have a good friend,” Martin said.

  “I know,” May agreed. “She came over so we could watch your game. You were great.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You won!”

  “Actually, we did,” he told her.

  “Yes, the Bruins—all of you,” she said, correcting herself.

  The connection was scratchy, as if he was calling from a portable phone. In the background, May could hear men’s voices laughing and shouting. She pictured the locker room, or what she imagined of a locker room, filled with victorious hockey players.

  “I don’t just mean the team,” he said.

  “Then—”

  “You and me, May,” he said. “You were with me out on the ice. I don’t know how or why. I just know it’s true.”

  May’s heart pounded. She thought of being with Martin in the game. She imagined flying down the ice with him, helping him win, keeping him safe. “That’s because of the rose petals,” she said. “That’s what they’re for.”

  “Well, they worked.”

  This wasn’t May. It wasn’t May at all to be holding her breath, straining her ears, just to hear someone at the other end of the line. May had been shut off for so many years. She had stopped believing in this kind of connection for herself. It might be possible for the brides she worked with, but not for her.

  “I’d better go,” he said. “I’ll call again, when we g
et back to Boston, eh?”

  “I’ll keep watching you,” May promised.

  “Tell your friend and Kylie I said bonne nuit.”

  “I will.”

  “Bonne nuit to you, May.”

  “Good night, Martin.”

  Then May stood in the dark, holding the phone as she gazed out at ghostly cats hunting around the moonlit barn, closing her eyes to keep his voice in her mind.

  Boston won the opener, but needed a double-overtime goal from Ray Gardner to take Game 2. Game 3 also went into overtime, and this time the Oilers won it 1–0, Nils Jorgensen brilliantly blocking every shot Martin made.

  Back in Boston, Martin’s ankle was killing him. An old knee injury flared up. The trainers wouldn’t leave him alone, trying every treatment known in New England and some imported from ancient China. Ice, laser, massage, acupunture. The Oilers took Games 4 and 5, and the Bruins won Game 6, tying the series. Martin thought of his father in the brick-red prison, watching every mistake he made. Bowing his head, he cringed, blocking the thought from his mind.

  Coach Dafoe found a picture of Martin’s mother in an old hockey yearbook, and he pasted it next to a snapshot of his own mother and taped it to Martin’s locker. Ray Gardner’s wife was going to Mass every morning to pray for victory, and Jack Delaney said his daughter had lost a tooth and left the tooth fairy a note asking for the Bruins to win instead of her customary dollar.

  Martin talked to May after every game. He wanted to invite her to the Fleet Center, to watch in person, but caution prevented him. He needed every bit of concentration to focus on winning the Cup. Every bit of focus, every molecule of strength, had to stay in his brain and bones.

  When he was younger, he’d invite women to watch him play, and he’d get off on showing them his stuff. But May was different. He didn’t need to show off for her, and now, with so much riding on this postseason, he didn’t quite trust himself to think of May and win at the same time.

  After midnight, sleepless after losing to the Oilers, Martin questioned his plan. With all the other guys relying on prayers, teeth, and dead mothers, Martin didn’t feel quite so strange about the rose petals, and he considered the possibility that he was screwing up his chances, keeping May away. He called her house.