by Jack Falla
It’s always just Cam and me. Cam’s wife, Tamara, stays home with their daughters—Lindsey, eight, and Caitlin, five. Cam’s parents spend most of September in France. And the women I was going out with would’ve rated a fishing trip lower than a product recall on lip gloss.
It’s the same routine every year. We spend the afternoon jigging for bluefish, come back to the house about six o’clock, clean one blue for dinner and two or three for the freezer, hit the shower, fire up the grill.
We eat on the back porch, which faces south overlooking Nantucket Sound and the distant shore of Martha’s Vineyard. I like September. Days grow shorter and nights cooler. It’s a meteorological overture to the hockey season. Cam says F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
And I like training camp. I’m not fighting for a job, preseason games don’t mean anything, and I haven’t begun to accumulate the welts, strains, and bruises that by midseason can erode my will to put my body in front of another frozen puck. I like getting back on the ice, catching up with friends and teammates. I even like breaking in new pads and gloves, especially a catch glove, although there’s an irony to a catch glove in that the more flexible it becomes the less it protects my hand. But there’s no such thing as pain-free goaltending, so I trade protection for saves and count it a good deal.
The way I feel after Labor Day makes me sorry for some of the summer people going home to boring jobs and to lives they feel trapped in. Or that they trapped themselves in because at some point they gave in to fear and did what they knew they could do—play it safe—instead of taking a chance on doing what they truly wanted to do. They call that “being realistic.” Hockey scares me, but I’d rather be scared than bored.
After dinner Cam breaks out the Cognac and we sit and watch the lights of the boats on Nantucket Sound. When we’re fishing we keep the conversation light. We talk about the fish, the coming season, the rookies who’ll be after our jobs, the schedule. We save the heavy stuff for after dinner. It was on the back porch three years ago that Cam and I first talked about Lisa’s death.
* * *
Lisa and I were married four years. No kids. But we were planning to start a family at the end of the season when I knew I’d be signing another long-term deal. In March of that year Lisa went for a chest X-ray. She had a cough that had been bothering her for months. That’s when they found the cancer. Lisa didn’t smoke. But more than 15 percent of the people who get lung cancer don’t smoke. Most of them are women.
By August the cancer was on the power play. One of the last times I saw Lisa was a Thursday night. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, alert and breathing oxygen through a plastic tube. We were half watching an early-season Thursday-night NFL game. Lisa’s father had played football at Boston College and Lisa loved the game. On a first-and-goal from the eight-yard line the San Diego quarterback took the snap and spun to his left where he was supposed to hand the ball to the tailback. But the tailback ran the wrong play and sprinted out for a pass. “Busted play!” yelled the TV play-by-play guy.
The quarterback scrambled around, ducked under the grasp of a defensive end, sidestepped a linebacker, and, while on the run, threw across his body to a receiver in the back left corner of the end zone. Touchdown.
“And the Chargers made something out of a busted play, Gene,” the TV analyst said as if he were giving us an insight into quantum theory. That’s when Lisa delivered the best sports metaphor I’ve ever heard.
“Life is a busted play,” she said.
A week later she was gone.
Lisa was right. Life is a busted play. Love too.
* * *
I met Lisa early in my junior year at the University of Vermont, where Cam and I played college hockey. The team was doing one of those end-of-practice skating drills that are tough for goalies because of the weight of our equipment. I’d put my gloves, stick, and mask on the back of the net to lighten my load. But an assistant coach, screwing around, dinged a slapshot off the post and into my left cheekbone and nose. Blood all over the place. I held a towel to the cut and skated to the dressing room, where Bobby Breyer, our trainer, undid my leg pads and skates. I was still wearing my “Vermont Hockey” practice shirt and pressing a bloody towel to my cheek when Bobby and I walked into the emergency room at Lake Champlain Medical Center. Lisa stood near the desk. The name on her uniform read “Lisa M. Quinn, R.N.—Oncology.” I didn’t know what “oncology” meant. I found out later she was only working the ER to sub for a friend. Lisa was a cute kid with short black hair, an upturned nose, and big brown eyes. Midtwenties. Perky cheerleader type.
“What happened?” Lisa asked.
“Stopped a puck,” I said.
“Hey, that’s more than you did against Harvard,” she said, laughing and holding out her hand. “You’re J. P. Savard, right? I’m Lisa Quinn. And I’m kidding. I’ve seen you guys play. You’ve got a good team. But not last Saturday. What happened?”
“Couldn’t handle Harvard’s power play,” I said, and explained that Harvard used an unbrella power play, where one defenseman plays back near the blue line like a basketball point guard. “Then they put two forwards at the top of the circles and two more down low near the net. Guy at the top had a cannon. He’d blast it at me and the little guys down low would go for the tip-in or rebound. Seems every time we hit a guy near the net we got called for interference. They scored five goals on the power play, two of them during five-on-threes. Of course I didn’t do anything that would remind anyone of a goaltender.”
Lisa laughed and hustled me into the ER. She stayed with me while a lady doctor put in the stitches, and then Lisa worked some administrative magic to get us to the front of the X-ray-room line so we could see if the cheekbone was broken. It wasn’t. “Bad news. Not broken. Gotta face BC Saturday,” she said. I liked her attitude and blunt humor.
Lisa’s father was a University of Vermont season ticket holder and he often took Lisa to the games. But he and Lisa’s mother were Boston College alumni, so Lisa wasn’t getting her usual ticket for that Saturday’s sold-out game against number-three-in-the-nation BC.
“No problem,” I said. “They reserve tickets for players. I’ll get you two.”
“Thanks. How much?”
“Can’t sell ’em. NCAA rules,” I said. I only added the NCAA thing so I wouldn’t seem too eager. “I’ll leave them at Will Call.”
“They’ll rename it Won’t Call if you play like last Saturday,” Lisa said.
The next day I told one of our managers I wanted two tickets left for Lisa Quinn. And I wanted to know the seat locations.
I try not to look into the stands before or during a game. I don’t want to be distracted. And there’s nothing in the stands that can help me. But when we skated out for the BC game I took a peek at the section behind the net, third row, where I knew Lisa would be sitting. I wanted to see whom she was with. I felt relieved when I saw it was a woman. Maybe Lisa doesn’t have a boyfriend, I thought.
That peek probably cost me. I let in the first shot, a fluttery seventy-footer from outside the blue line. It broke off of my catch glove. I still don’t know how. Might’ve dipped. I could see heads drop on our bench and hear the groan from the crowd. Cam skated up to me and slapped me on the pads with his stick, and if you were in the stands, you probably thought he was saying something encouraging. But what he was doing was his Jay Leno—“You friends with that puck, JP? Saw you wave to it. Hey, only fifty-nine more minutes to go.” Cam has odd ways of turning down the pressure.
This is where a goalie has to do some acting, projecting to his teammates a confidence he doesn’t feel. I whacked my stick across my pads and took up my stance at the top of the crease, crouching lower than usual, trying to strike a pose that said, “That’s all, they don’t draw another breath.” But nothing truly sends that message like making the next save. And in goaltending, as in life, the hardest play to make is the one after the one yo
u just screwed up. The next shot came from BC’s top scorer, Paschal Fleming, on a breakaway. He opened his stick blade as if he were going to take a high shot to my stick side, but then he whirled to his backhand and tried to shove the puck inside the post. I butterflied—dropped to my knees with both legs fanned out. Fleming’s shot deflected off the top edge of my left pad. I caught the puck as it bounced off the pad and before I toppled backward into the net but with my left arm held forward so as not to carry the puck over the goal line. It was a spectacular and slightly embellished save and one that got the team and me back in a game we’d go on to win 3–2 even though we were outshot 39–21. When the horn sounded I flipped up my mask and turned around to give Lisa a wave. She smiled and waved back. I looked for her in the lobby after the game but she wasn’t there.
“Will you call her, for Christ’s sake,” Cam said about a hundred times over the next few weeks. But I didn’t have the nerve to call her. In December she called me. She wanted to know if any players could stop by the hospital’s pediatric oncology ward and visit patients. I told her we had a few days off before Christmas and Cam and I would come in.
“What’s a pediatric oncology ward?” I asked Cam.
“Cancer,” he said. “Kids with cancer. An hour in that place is going to make a torn ACL seem like a month in Paris.”
Cam and I visited the Lake Champlain Medical Center three days before Christmas. We brought a bunch of plastic ministicks with “UVM” on one side and “Go, Cats, Go” on the other. Our team nickname is the Catamounts. A catamount is an eastern mountain lion. No one in Vermont has seen a live catamount in about a hundred years. Logic doesn’t play a big role in the mascot business.
Cam also brought a box of three dozen green-and-gold “Vermont Hockey” hats. He tried to get the bookstore manager to donate them but when the manager said, “Well, I think I can offer you boys a discount but I have profit accountability here and…” Cam whipped out his wallet, peeled off three hundred-dollar bills, slapped them on the counter, and told the bookstore guy: “Discount this. And keep the change.” Then Cam grabbed the box of hats and we left. “JP, there’s a time, a place, and a target for fuck-you money, and that was all three,” he said, tossing the box of hats into the back of his SUV.
* * *
Lisa wasn’t in the ward when we arrived, so one of the other nurses—I thought she was the one sitting with Lisa at the BC game—took us into a room with two patients and introduced us. “And you have to meet Rudy Evanston,” she said to me, taking my elbow and guiding me over to a boy who looked to be about ten or eleven years old. Rudy said he’d been a goalie in youth hockey before he was diagnosed with leukemia. Most of Rudy’s hair had fallen out because of the chemotherapy.
He said he had some questions about goaltending. He wanted to know how to move from post to post with the play behind the net. I showed him, grateful to have something to talk about because, otherwise, I had no idea what to say to these kids. I used the legs of his bed as goalposts. I took off my shoes so I could slide on the floor as if it were ice. I was using one of the ministicks to show Rudy how to intercept passes from behind the goal line when Cam interrupted. “Don’t listen to him, Rudy,” Cam said. “He only has two moves. Sometimes he flips. Sometimes he flops. What the hell.”
“Language … watch your language, please,” Lisa said, entering the room just in time to see me slide into the right bed leg and collide with the side table, spilling the pitcher of water. Rudy laughed. Lisa scowled. I went into the bathroom in search of paper towels.
Lisa thanked us for coming and led us from room to room, introducing us to each kid. A lot of them were bald. Bringing those hats was a great move by Cam. We gave one to every kid, bald or not. And we had a few left over for the nurses.
“How many of these kids are going to make it?” I asked her when we were between rooms.
“You never know. Probably more than half. We treat each kid like he’s going to make it. Attitude’s a big deal here. And theirs can depend on ours. So pick it up, OK? Fake it if you have to,” she said, flipping an elbow into my ribs.
I said I wouldn’t last ten minutes working in a kids’ cancer ward. “How do you face this every day?”
“By thinking I make it better,” she said.
It was three o’clock when we wrapped up our visit. Lisa was working an eight-to-three shift, so she was getting out at the same time Cam and I were leaving. She said she was going to lunch, so I took a chance. “Buy you lunch if you’ll give me a ride back to campus,” I said.
“Deal,” she said.
That’s where we started. We spent an hour telling each other about our childhoods and families. She was brought up in nearby Essex. Father was in pharmaceutical sales. Mother taught middle-school English. Lisa had majored in nursing at Boston College. She’d been working for two years. She was twenty-four, two and a half years older than I was.
Lisa’s life sounded like a TV sitcom to me. I was born in Montreal, where my father, Rogatien, worked on a construction crew. He did this to raise money for his real business, which was drinking. He left my mother and me when I was five. Went to work—or so he said—and never came back. I hardly remember him. I don’t recall that he ever hit my mother or me but I remember him yelling a lot. Mainly, I remember our house, in the then-working-class Plateau section of east Montreal, as being a gloomy place. I think our apartment was on the north side of the building, so we didn’t get much sunlight. I also remember the empty beer bottles, still smelling of their long-gone contents, that I used as toys to build forts. To this day I don’t drink beer, because I don’t like the feelings that smell evokes.
My mother, who’d been born in Maine, moved us back into her widowed mother’s house in Lewiston, an old mill town on the Androscoggin River. My mother changed her name and mine from Lachine—my father’s last name—back to Savard, her family’s name. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. My mom got a job in a grocery store. She started as a cashier and ended up supervising the checkout section. We didn’t have a lot of money. I never planned to be a goaltender but I kept getting picked for travel and all-star teams and eventually got a scholarship to St. Dominic’s High School. St. Dom’s called it a “need-based” scholarship calculated on my family’s low income. My mother called it a need-based scholarship as in “we need a goalie.” I started three years at St. Dom’s but Vermont’s Marco Indinacci was the only major-college hockey coach to offer me a full ride.
* * *
Lisa and I dated all through my junior year, when Vermont went to the NCAA semifinals and, right afterward, I got an offer from the Bruins. It wasn’t a great deal, because it was a lock they’d send me to their farm team in Providence, where I’d make minor-league money. But the contract included a $200,000 signing bonus. I dropped out of school because I needed the money. Coach Indinacci understood. “Got to take it,” he said. “Best I can offer you is a Ford 150 from an alumni-owned dealership and a lady tutor who likes hockey players.”
I got called up to the Bruins in early November of my second season, and by March I was pushing Harry “Head Case” Harrington for the starting job, a job I got when Head Case lost three straight games to New Jersey in the playoffs and then hit the modern pro athlete trifecta—driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and possession with intent to distribute.
I signed a three-year one-way deal (same money whether I was in the NHL or the minors). That’s when Lisa and I got married and bought a house.
It was a great marriage. While it lasted.
* * *
I didn’t date in the year after Lisa died, partly because I thought it would be disrespectful to Lisa and her family (a lot of what players do ends up in the papers), but mostly because I didn’t want to. The remarkable thing about that season is that I played well.
The games were the only time I could get outside of myself and feel something besides aloneness. Hockey was therapy. I started going to the rink at 3 p.m. for 7 p.m. games. I eve
n took part in the morning skates on game day, something I hadn’t done very often, ostensibly as a concession to the fact that I was starting more than sixty of our eighty-two regular-season games and all of the playoffs. But that excuse was a crock. I was just trying to cut down on the number of meaningless shots I had to face. Meaningless shots can hurt you just as much as game shots. Peckham “Packy” Dodd, our coach, let me get away with this for two reasons: we were winning and I was playing well. Performance is everything in the pros. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer and cannibal the cops found with human body parts in his freezer? If Dahmer had been a goalie with a .920 save percentage, team management would’ve said he wasn’t a murdering cannibal, he was a misunderstood kid with an eating disorder.
Cam and I were on the back porch of the Cape house when he asked me how I was doing. I knew he didn’t mean hockey.
“First lap around the calendar is hard,” I said. “Birthday. Anniversary. Christmas—”
Cam cut me off: “Hey, JP, Lisa wouldn’t want you living like this. She wouldn’t want you to be alone.”
“Lisa doesn’t want or not want anything,” I said. “She’s dead. Gone.”
“She’s not dead as long as the people who loved her remember her,” Cam said, paraphrasing a Hemingway line he’d quoted at Lisa’s funeral. “I don’t suppose you’ve changed your position on the afterlife?”
“You got some game film to show me?”
“Freakin’ atheist.”
“I’m not an atheist. I’m an agnostic. Atheists don’t believe. Agnostics doubt.”
“An agnostic is just an atheist who lacks the courage of his conviction,” Cam said.
