by Avery Flynn
Ugh...enough about him, she thought and grabbed a tube of her favorite lip gloss from the catchall bowl on the table. She slathered on enough to make her lips look rosy and inviting without looking too sexy. One more look. Yes, this was much better. She looked like a woman who was capable of doing anything she set her mind to. I am a woman capable of anything I set my mind to, she reminded herself with a smile.
And whomever this guest was...she'd make sure they loved the Open Arms Relief Centre as much as she did, and they'd open their wallet to help keep it going.
3
Jonas
"How are you feeling?" Edwin handed Jonas a bottle of water. "No headaches?"
"Not yet." Jonas thanked him for the water with a nod, unscrewed the cap and took a gulp of the cool liquid. The dull ache never really went away though he followed all the advice of his neurologist and the team doctor. Flying wasn't really the best thing for his concussion, but it had been the fastest way of getting the Cup to his hometown of Umeå in northern Sweden. He pinched the bridge of his nose and then massaged it. Sometimes that tricked him into thinking the headache would dissipate.
"Who was that at the airport?"
"A girl I used to know." Jonas wished it were that simple. A girl I used to know. A girl I loved so much it still hurts just thinking about how she left me. A girl I wish I could still have.
"Looked like you still want to know her."
"I do," he admitted. "She's the one who got away."
Edwin scrunched his eyebrows together and jiggled his eyeglasses up and down. He always did that when he was trying to figure something out. "Wait...was that Mary?"
"Mariam," Jonas corrected Edwin. "Yeah, that was her."
"So what happened? I mean--that chemistry between you two was intense."
"What happened? I had to choose between the league and her," Jonas tried to stave the bitterness creeping into his tone, but it still smarted even after all these years--the impossible choice thrust upon him. "I didn't want to make the choice. So she made it for me."
"I thought you called it off. That's what it said in all the papers."
"No, she walked away from him. I don't blame her." Jonas could still remember the ache of realizing she was ending things with him. "She was tired of the circus my life was back then. And she had her own dreams. I didn't want to stop her."
He slid on his mirrored sunglasses and leaned back into the town car's plush upholstery.
He could still remember the nights he'd spent trying to call her in between games and always being diverted to voice mail. Five days it had gone on until she finally returned his calls and broke the news to him: "I'm moving to London. I don't want to put off my studies any longer."
"I thought you were moving here—" He was playing for Buffalo then, not the most glamorous of locations, but it was his stepping stone into the league. From there he could move to a top tier team.
"I don't want to study in the US," she cut him off before he could continue. He tried to imagine her in her parents' home in Umeå, that terracotta-rendered villa shielded from the street by dense rose hip bushes. He used to walk by her house every day on his way home, even though it was out of the way for him, always hoping for a glimpse of her. "I applied for a spot in the international law program at University of London and I've been accepted."
"So that's it?"
"Jonas, I don't want to be the girl who just follows you everywhere. I've always said I wanted to be a lawyer. And that's what I'm going to do."
He'd been prepped to rail at her, but what could he have said? He'd applied for the league draft without even consulting Mariam or asking her what she'd wanted. No one ever seemed to consider back then that her goals mattered, not even Jonas. Everyone had trained their sights on Jonas, on his success and simply assumed that Mariam was happy to play his silent sidekick. He'd known better. He'd known all along that Mariam wanted more, but Jonas's own hockey aspirations had taken precedence.
Despite the thousands of miles and phone lines that separated them, Jonas could not ignore the seriousness of their situation. Mariam was not prepared to simply follow him across America as he chased success. She didn't want to wait patiently in the wings as the team's PR assured him that sooner or later fans would accept his black girlfriend. No matter how he tried to justify his own anger, he couldn't blame her for wanting to follow her own dreams. Especially since he'd pursued his dreams without every asking her if she wanted the same thing.
The media had a way of ignoring the not-so-nice bits of Jonas's past. He was pretty sure it was on order from the league's PR machine. No one ever ran stories about his alcoholic father who was in and out of rehab. Instead, they ran fluff pieces that called him the Rajuns' "sexy Viking" or "the Iceman from the North" and counted his "ten hottest girlfriends" or his "greatest hat tricks".
The one about his girlfriends still made him bristle.
This list was correct...but the most important woman in his life--the one he knew was the love of his life--was absent from the list. They never included Mariam. Even when there were plenty of pictures of them together from his first year in the league. He still bristled at the negative comments some of the more obnoxious "fans" had directed at Mariam. That first year he'd played in Buffalo, there'd been countless times when all it took was a photo of Jonas and Mariam together for the team's Facebook page to erupt in snide comments from puck bunnies and indignant fans who thought Jonas "could do better." The team's social media assistant deleted as many comments as she could but that didn't stop more from coming.
It was no wonder she changed her mind about coming to America to be with him.
It was no wonder that she walked away without looking back.
Jonas stalked the length of the hotel room, barely noticing the view of his hometown and the river Ume just outside the window. Nervous energy coiled inside him, threatening to release at any moment. Damn it, if he hadn't seen her...well, truth be told, he was hoping he'd see her even if he'd thought the odds of doing so were abysmal. If he could have a little more time with her... he didn't know what he expected. So much time had passed, but seeing her again--damn it, why did she have to be so beautiful? Why did her smile still leave him feeling dumbstruck?
Ed was on the phone again, verifying times and places with the PR agency that was helping the team arrange the Cup's global tour. Ed relied on them for pretty much everything, but Jonas thought they were making everything unnecessarily complicated. He'd wanted to stay with his sister while the Cup was in town, but the PR agency nixed that idea.
"You can stay with her once the Cup and Ed are on their way to their next destination." Garsey had promised him as the travel arrangements were being made. They'd already forgotten he was supposed to fly back to the US to sign his new contract.
That was another thing he wasn't so certain of.
His agent wanted him to sign. Of course he did. It would fill his pockets. It would cement Jonas's own growing wealth, but he wasn't so sure he wanted to play another season. It had been five weeks since the Rage's Cup win, and his injuries were still plaguing him. The headaches weren't as bad nor as frequent, but he still couldn't deal with them when they came on. Doctor Singh hadn't given him clearance to even go back on the ice yet. If anything, she was skeptical about him ever playing again.
"This was your third concussion, Jonas," she'd said during his last appointment. She didn't even bother couching it in pleasantries or niceties. "You want sudden brain trauma? Go back on the ice again and get tackled again. You're not invincible. The next one could be the one that causes you permanent brain damage."
Jonas had been thinking about the consequences ever since. Hockey was his life. Hockey was what helped him deal with his mother's cancer and his father's addiction problems. Hockey was what helped him make it up to his sister after she'd put her own aspirations of figure-skating aside to make things easier for him to focus while their mother was going through chemotherapy. He owed Bella...even if she said she ow
ed him nothing, that he'd already done more than enough to help her when she needed it.
If he gave up, what did any of it mean?
The meet and greet with his sister, Isabella, and his father Arvid was the league's idea, not Jonas's. He wanted to see his sister and her children, but he'd wanted it to be private. With his father, he never knew what to expect. The last time Jonas had come to Umeå, his father had been surprisingly sober until the final day when his craving for alcohol superseded his desire to mend fences with Jonas. His father's alcoholism was one of the reasons Jonas had never invited him to America in all the years he'd lived there. He was too unpredictable, .and Jonas was wary of the scandal his father could cause. He'd seen too many other players miss out on great chances because of their family and friends causing problems.
Now though, Babs and the league thought it was good press to feature Jonas and his family with the Cup.
"You're still a mystery to them, Magnussen. You're not married, there's no girlfriend in the picture now, " Babineaux had said once Doctor Singh had given Jonas clearance to fly. "You've got to give them something or they'll just make something up."
The last thing he'd wanted was one of their invented stories. There'd been enough of those already. The last one had claimed that Jonas was caught in the most idiotic of love triangles with Zim and a bikini model that neither of them had ever heard of.
For some reason that story upped Jonas's value in the eyes of some of the puck bunnies. A few took to showing up at games with signs that screamed, "ICEMAN MAKE ME YOUR ICE QUEEN!" or "SLIP ME SOME ICE!"
He'd got used to these declarations. He'd even got used to the cluster of women who seemed to know exactly which bars they gravitated to for their post-game drinks. Jonas had mastered the blank stare that had gained him his frosty Iceman reputation. None of them knew the real Jonas, who—even after all these years in the league—still became flustered when he was interviewed on camera, still worried that the English words didn't come as easily as he wished. So he said little, smirked a lot, sometimes flashed a smile that could make knees quake and trained his pale blue glare at the cameras--and so the Iceman was born. He hated the nickname, but it stuck. And he had to admit that sometimes it was cool when he skated out onto the ice and he heard the fans chanting "Iceman! Iceman!"
His sister lived in the Fridhem section of Umeå. It was not far from the suburb where they'd grown up. Jonas was glad he'd been able to help his sister and her husband buy the house. It was the least he could do considering everything they'd gone through together. Their entire childhood had been marked by the twin shadows of their mother's illness and their father's drinking problem. They each had their own escape—Bella's was figure-skating while Jonas's was hockey, but then their mother's cancer treatments had stopped working and Bella quit figure-skating to spend more time with her. Jonas wanted to put his hockey dreams on ice and focus on his mother, but she'd encouraged him to keep playing.
"You need this," she'd said so many times. "This is your way to reach all of your goals. And that's all I want for you."
Coming back to Umeå reminded him too much of his mother and losing her, but he couldn't avoid it. Bella's job as a surgical nurse at the university hospital meant she couldn't simply take off and meet him whenever she wanted. Plus, she had three children to think about.
"You okay, Jonas?" Eddy wondered as they pulled into the street leading to Bella's house.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Just thinking, that's all."
They passed a row of red clapboard houses with white trim, each with perfectly manicured hedges rimming the front yards. "Is this where you grew up?"
"No, we lived in a pretty crappy apartment complex," Jonas turned away from the window and focused on the carpeted floor of the car. "My dad's income was too unstable for us to live anywhere like here. And my mom couldn't work once she got sick."
"Sorry, I forgot about that."
"It's okay, Ed. It's been a long time since she died."
The street curved now and they drove up a slight incline to Isabella's house. The last time Jonas had been here Bella's youngest daughter had just been born and Bella asked him to spend the summer in Umeå. He'd stayed for two weeks in the house he bought for his sister with the first big paycheck he earned from the league, a house in the same neighborhood where Mariam had grown up. His father had managed to stay sober most of the visit, then he'd become maudlin and drank until he was so angry he took a swing at Jonas, not caring that his son could overpower him in a heartbeat, and passed out on the couch. The pattern was the same for four days--a new bottle of gin would appear, Arvid drank it like water, argued and picked fights then fell asleep on the couch or in his armchair. By day four, Jonas had had enough of it. He cut short his Swedish summer break, took a flight to Stockholm and met up with Ola Sjölander at his summerhouse in the archipelago. That was three years ago. Since then, he'd flown Bella and her family to meet him in warmer, more neutral destinations like Spain and the South of France. Anywhere his father wasn't and that wouldn't remind him of his mother...or Mariam.
When they pulled into the driveway of his sister's house, his niece Malin was keeping watch from the porch. She'd grown so much since the last time Jonas had seen her. Her masses of flaxen curls were like an electric halo, untamable and yet charming. As the car came to a stop, Jonas heard her calling, "Morbror, morbror!" Uncle, uncle! His heart pulled tight in his chest. Damn, he'd missed this. Once he was out of the car, he scooped up his five-year-old niece in his arms, ignoring the twinge of his ribs and held her close.
Already, Malin was babbling nonstop. "Mommy said you were coming today, and I told her you were coming to see me, but she said you can't stay long, and I said you would stay longer if I asked you, so can you stay longer, Uncle Jonas? You only just got here, and Mommy says you have a lot to do today, but you can come and sleep here and then we can play with my hamster and then you can climb trees with me, can't you?"
"Slow down, Malin," Bella laughed as she emerged from the doorway, with the latest addition to the family—baby Lukas—in her arms. Jonas pressed a kiss to his nephew's peach fuzz covered skull and then kissed his sister's cheek.
Bella looked so much like their mother. Seeing her again after nearly a year brought it home for Jonas. "Welcome, home, big brother," she said with a happy laugh as she hugged him. "We've missed you."
Behind them, Edwin fidgeted and cleared his throat. Jonas made introductions and added, "He's here to keep me and the Cup out of trouble."
"Is the Cup with you?" Bella's already wide eyes grew even wider.
"It's in the car," Edwin confirmed. "It's nice to finally meet you, Bella. I've heard a lot about you and your family."
"Is Dad here?"
Bella shook her head no. "He says he wants no part of this."
"So... how will we fix this shot then?" Edwin asked, interrupting. The league-authorized photographer had arrived together with the three authorized press photographers from Dagens Nyheter, Svensk Dagbladet and AP.
"My husband is here. I'll get him." She deposited Lukas in Jonas's free arm. "You look good with a baby in your arms, Little Brother."
Malin was still wriggling around, clinging to him and chattering away.
"Iceman, is it okay if we take a few shots now?" The AP photographer was the first to speak. Her camera was already in her hands, ready to snap the money shot.
"Yeah, go ahead...just...no flashes, okay?"
The clicking and shots went on until Bella returned with her husband, Ivar. She'd obviously combed his tangle of jet black hair and made him as presentable as she could in a short amount of time. Instead of the band t-shirts and faded jeans Jonas was accustomed to seeing him in, he was wearing a pale blue polo shirt and chinos.
Edwin had already uncovered the cup and polished it. Now, with the help of the security guards traveling with them, he brought it forward.
The lilac trees were still blooming and their heady scent distracted Jonas. If they were going to
take any pictures, he'd rather do it with the tree's foliage in the background rather than his sister's house. It would at least give her some semblance of privacy.
It took a while to get everyone situated. But soon they were all perfectly positioned around the Cup, with Lukas and Malin sitting in the Cup and peering out. The photographers called out more instructions and, with each minute that passed by, more of Bella's neighbors came outside, pretending not to see the spectacle going on her in yard.
"How does it feel to have a hockey hero for a brother?" One of the photographers asked Bella.
"He's just Jonas for me," she said, but the pride in her voice was unmistakable. "I'm always proud of him, whether he plays hockey or does something else."
"How's that feel, Jonas?"
"Great, especially since I feel the same about her."
"How's it feel to be back home?"
"It's great...it's been a while." Jonas knew the photographers and journalists wanted more from him. He slung his arm around his brother-in-law's shoulders and added, "It's good to be back with my family. Ivar, Bella and their kids are the most important people in my life."
The questions continued for a few more minutes. A restless Malin clambered out of the cup and clung to Jonas's side. He tried not to wince as she pressed into his still sore leg, but Edwin noticed and gestured for the photographers to wrap it up. Travelling so long and far was catching up with Jonas. All he wanted was to lay down in a dark room and get some much-needed sleep. And Bella, sensing he needed this, took his arm and led him towards the house, with Ivar and Malin trailing behind them.
