Fire & Ice

by Rachel Spangler

  “And now the other team can’t knock Layla’s guard out of play, either.”

  “No, but seeing as how her guard isn’t really guarding anything, I think they are probably going to put another one right where they put their first one.”

  “Indeed,” she said with more gusto than the comment warranted, and then quickly added, “let’s watch and see.”

  She wanted to put her forehead down on the desk, but she didn’t dare. Even assuming the whole two cameras on this match were both pointed at the ice most of the time, she didn’t want to run the risk of appearing as though she’d actually fallen asleep on the job. She might sound like she was completely out of it, but she didn’t have to look the part as well.

  The player she’d come to think of as Tim’s lead played exactly the shot he’d predicted.

  “Well, she is consistent,” Max said.

  “That’s a bread and butter shot for a lead,” Tim said. “If your first player can’t throw a center guard, you don’t stand much chance of making the top fifteen in the world or staying there for long.”

  She quickly scribbled a note to that effect in the margins of the vocabulary notes she’d brought with her. “And what would you say are the bread and butter shots for the other players? You know, in case we have any aspiring curlers at home who want to know what to practice.”

  He raised an eyebrow as she kept her pencil at the ready, but his tone never wavered. “I’d say every curler worth his or her salt should be able to throw a rock that sits in any open spot in the house at any time. Also, a simple draw around a single guard right to the button.”

  She wrote even while asking, “And a draw means just a rock that sits in the house.”

  “Exactly.”

  She grinned. That was one of the terms on her list.

  “And the last shot any good curler should be able to play is a clean takeout, where they hit any open stone in the house, and knock it out without hitting something else.”

  “And we have seen all of those shots today,” she said almost excitedly.

  “I think you’d expect to see most of those shots in most ends at the professional level.”

  “Indeed,” she said again, and shook her head. Who the hell had she become? Reduced to asking apparently dumb questions and uttering inane asides or exclamations, she said nothing else until Callie delivered her last rock, but then the excitement of actually knowing how to keep score overtook her and she proudly declared, “That’s one point to Team Mulligan.”

  “And I know she’s disappointed with that,” Tim said, with a shake of his head.

  “Is she now?” Max’s voice cracked a little higher. “I mean obviously she is, but in a game when only one team scores, I think many people would see it as a good thing to be the team doing the scoring, but not in curling.”

  Tim laughed, and she forced herself to laugh along, even though she wasn’t sure if he was laughing with her or at her.

  “You’re not wrong,” he finally said, “but Callie holds herself to higher standards. All the women out here today do, and when a team has the hammer, they’re expected to take at least one.”

  “And remember,” Max said in an almost Pavlovian response to hearing one of her vocab words, “the hammer is what we call the last stone of the end.”

  “Right, and when you get to throw a stone no one had a chance to take out, you expect to sit it pretty close to the button, but the goal is always to make a play where you score two or more points with the hammer. Otherwise, the other team considers it a sort of win, or a tie at least, because they get the hammer the next time. A lot of teams would rather take a zero for an end and hold onto the hammer for the next one in the hopes they can do better that time around.”

  “Well, Tim, that’s not confusing at all.”

  He laughed again as the guy working the camera motioned that they were fading to commercial break.

  Silence fell between them, and Max tried, as discreetly as possible, to check whether the sweat from her armpits had soaked through her shirt. Thankfully, she appeared to be faring better on the outside than the roiling mess of emotions inside her might suggest. Her stomach hurt, her head pounded, her heartbeat echoed through her own ears, and she was so hot. How was she so hot in a room filled with ice?

  “You okay?” Tim finally asked.

  No. I might be having a stroke. She held the words in and rubbed her clammy palms over her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this out of sorts during a broadcast, probably because she never had. Sports were her solid ground, the place where she had the answers, the topic she could always use to hold her own. And she’d covered plenty of sports, not just ones she herself had played. She’d always managed to come through, though. Grit, research, charisma, and an innate understanding of what drove people to strive for excellence always mattered more than an intimate knowledge of game plans, or at least it always had until now.

  “We’ll pick up this end in progress. We’re running one of your personal interest pieces, Tim,” the cameraman said.

  “Do you know which one?” Tim asked.

  “The one on your lead’s ties to Scotland.”

  “Ah, yeah, the motherland of the game,” Tim mused and shuffled some papers.

  Max glanced down at her notes, which said nothing about curling being invented in Scotland. It hadn’t even occurred to her to delve into the history of the game. She’d been content with understanding the scoring and a basic glossary of terms.

  “Ready to dive back in?” Tim asked, concern evident in his voice as he added, “You look a little nauseated.”

  “Yeah, I might be coming down with something.”

  “I don’t mind picking up the slack,” he offered. “We all have tough days.”

  “Thanks,” she mumbled. She might’ve found that thought more comforting if she hadn’t brought this one on herself. Instead, she lifted her chin, and looked the camera dead on, bracing herself for another hour’s worth of mental and emotional drubbing.

  Callie dropped her curling bag next to a bench before flopping onto it with about the same form as the duffel. “Ugh.”

  “Yeah,” Layla agreed.

  “Fourth place,” Callie said for about the seventieth time.

  “Could’ve been worse.”

  “If you say, ‘we could have been fifth place or sixth place,’ I will choke you.”

  Layla’s grin suggested that might’ve been exactly what she’d intended to say, but then, glancing around, changed course. “You could have been that dude.”

  Callie followed her gaze to see Max slouched against a wall in the other corner of the arena. She had her hands jammed in the pockets of her slacks, her shoulders slouched forward, and the set of her jaw sent a scowl radiating across the room. She looked so isolated and angry, Callie had to stifle the urge to go to her.

  “I heard she shit the bed on TV.”

  “What?”

  “Not literally, but everyone is joking about how terrible her coverage was. They had to bring in a different broadcaster to bail her out. The Canadian team started a drinking game for every time she asked a stupid question, and they all got hammered.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah. If you had a contest to see who had the shittiest weekend, I think she’d win. At least we managed to do our job, and then some.”

  Callie frowned at the reminder of their own failures. “Did we?”

  “Come on, Cal, don’t start that again,” Layla said. “We finished fourth out of fifteen teams. We exceeded every expectation.”

  “Not mine.”

  Layla snorted. “Yours are a little crazy. You expect us to win every match.”

  “We’re capable.”

  “Maybe in that anything’s-possible-on-any-given-day sort of mentality.”

  “No,” she snapped, then caught herself. “I’m sorry. It’s just frustrating to see so much potential in us, and not be able to put it all together at the right time.”

&
nbsp; “Yeah, but we did actually put it together most of the time.” Layla picked up her pep talk. “We ran through the first half of the tournament. We played out of our minds. Literally every team we beat was ranked higher than us, and we only lost to two teams in the top five of the world.”

  “But if we keep losing to teams in the top five in the world, we’re never going to break into that group, and if we keep losing to other Americans, we’ll never make it—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “To the Olympics,” she finished.

  Layla hung her head so a few small braids that had come untucked from her stocking cap fell down over her eyebrows. “It’s two years away. Can we not do that to ourselves this season?”

  “I’ve been doing this to myself every season since I was ten.”

  Layla sighed. “I know. I’ve been there through every one of them, but can we try something different now? Can we just practice hard and play our best in the moment and let the results be what they’ll be?”

  Callie shook her head. It wasn’t that the idea didn’t appeal to her. She’d love to be the kind of person who didn’t always push for more, the kind of person who could rest on her laurels, or even the kind of person who could rest, period, but she wasn’t. “I wouldn’t be me without the weight of this goal on my back. I’m not sure I’d want to be me without it.”

  Layla kicked her foot lightly. “Then don’t change, because I wouldn’t want you to be anyone else, but come get a beer at the Patch, at least.”

  Callie rolled her eyes. “That’s the last thing I need, and the last place I want to be.”

  “Too damn bad.” Layla picked up her own bag and slung it over her shoulder. “If you’re going to be morose and obsessive, the least you can do is buy me a drink. That’s friend code 101, also basic curling etiquette.”

  “Actually, it’s curling etiquette for the winning team to buy us beers.”

  “Yeah, Team Dawes totally owes us the first round, but the second one’s on you, or I’m going to crank our hotel room heater up to ninety-seven degrees tonight.”

  Callie laughed lightly. “Okay, okay. You drive a hard bargain, but if I get to keep my Olympic dreams and the thermostat at sixty-two, I’ll meet you at the Patch and buy a round for the whole team.”

  “Sixty-nine,” Layla said with a snicker, “for the thermostat, not the beer . . . or anything else.”

  “Deal.”

  Layla pumped a fist triumphantly. “See you in there.”

  Callie rolled her head from side to side as her lead went to join their teammates and competitors at the area tournament organizers set aside at every stop on the tour for players, officials, and their more hard-core fans to hang out after matches. There’d be live music, drinks, probably some dancing, and tons of people eager to catch up or rehash the event. In other words, it’d be everything she didn’t want right now. Still, she felt a little better after talking to Layla. Maybe she needed to be pulled out against her will every now and then. It wasn’t like she could do anything about their results right now. If she went back to the hotel room, she’d only spend her evening staring at the ceiling and trying to do the math on what it would take for them to improve their world ranking next time out. Those equations rarely gave her anything more than a headache.

  Placing her hands on her knees, she pushed herself up, ignoring the way her thigh muscles had stiffened even in the few minutes she’d been sitting. Maybe moving around a bit would help that, too. Grabbing her bag, she headed out of the arena and down a long, low hallway.

  “Please, please don’t cut me loose,” came a voice from an offshoot hallway. The voice was familiar, but the pleading tone was what really drew her up short.

  “I know. I understand I was already on probation, but I need one more shot.”

  Callie peeked around the corner, and there behind the stack of brooms and refrigeration equipment huddled the shrinking form of Max Laurens. She seemed smaller than ever, and not just because she’d crouched down with her back against the wall and her knees to her chest. She pressed a phone to one ear and her finger to the other.

  “Can’t you put me on, like, double probation?” she asked. “Can’t you make it a thing?”

  Callie couldn’t hear the answer, but she suspected it wasn’t good, because Max only continued to fold in on herself. “Please don’t fire me over this. I’m a good reporter.”

  The rawness of that statement made Callie suspect Max had said it as much for herself as for the person on the other end of the conversation.

  “Okay, fine, I used to be a good reporter, and I can be again. I have to be. I’ve lost everything. This job is all I have left. Please don’t take it away. I know I can do better. I can be better.”

  Callie’s heart twisted in her chest. She knew that desperation and that desire. She also knew how it felt to watch something you love slipping away. She held her breath, waiting for some cue that Max’s pleas hadn’t fallen on a heart of stone.

  “Okay,” she finally said, her voice raspy. “No. I promise. I’ll have everything to you far in advance of the next tournament. I’ll prove it, Flip. I’m all in now. You can run the job advertisement, but don’t replace me until I have a chance to file a couple more pieces.”

  That didn’t sound promising, but at least it didn’t sound like she’d quite gotten fired, either. Callie started breathing again and rested her shoulder against the wall just around the corner. Max would at least have the chance to keep her job, or maybe reapply for it; she wasn’t sure. She also wasn’t sure why she cared enough to lose a single breath over Max’s problems. If she’d been as bad as Layla’d said, Max probably deserved to be fired. She certainly hadn’t applied herself, not the way Callie and her teammates had. They’d killed themselves to get the little bit of progress they’d achieved while Max had wasted weeks sulking and making snide remarks, and then had spent the past few days trying to make them all do the work of bringing her up to speed.

  Callie pushed off the wall and walked quickly away before the desire to go to Max could overtake her. She had nothing to feel guilty about, but she knew the haunting echo of Max’s pleading would likely mingle with her own grasping and bargaining as she lay awake in bed tonight.

  Chapter Seven

  When Max arrived at the Buffalo Curling Club five days after the tournament, she found Callie curling alone again. She didn’t know if that was better or worse than having the whole team there. Certainly, Callie was nicer and more prone to speak to her than any of the others, but she’d hoped to start working on that today.

  She’d spent the better part of a week studying the sport of curling. She didn’t have any other choice. Flip had already started shopping for her replacement, and she could only pray he didn’t find someone before she had a chance to redeem herself. After the embarrassment she’d suffered at the stupid Beef Masters, her first task centered on self-education. Thankfully, most of her sports knowledge had been self-taught. She’d only had to go back as far as her own roots to dredge up the skills necessary. She’d read books and watched YouTube videos, some of which were admittedly more confusing than helpful, but she now had a solid grasp on at least the basics.

  She had also watched enough full-length games to understand how much she still needed to learn about strategy. There was so much blocking, and building, and anticipating future shots, she’d come to recognize an almost chess-like quality to the mental aspect of the game. She might be able to work that angle going forward, but she also knew from her hours holed up watching replays that the charm of this game, if it existed at all, couldn’t be shared with the casual viewer on X’s and O’s alone. She had to have a personal interest angle, or no one would follow her long enough to reach the appreciation level necessary to delve into strategy. And for the moment, she had only one person to choose from.

  She sighed, then straightened her shoulders. She’d learned long ago she couldn’t play the hand she wanted. She could only play the one she got dealt, and
honestly, as she watched Callie’s long. graceful form in a fully extended lunge, she had to admit she’d been dealt a lot worse in the past.

  The woman had a body the cameras would love, paired with the face of a girl next door, set off by the most intensely focused hazel eyes. It wouldn’t be a hardship for people to watch her, even on mute. Maybe if she’d seen that sooner, she could’ve run with it, but she’d passed the point where she could phone in some pretty pictures and inane prose. She had to find a way to truly engage readers, and she suspected that meant she had to find a way to engage Callie herself.

  As Callie finished her slide, she stood up, but instead of following her rock down the ice, she turned and glanced over her shoulder. As her eyes met Max’s, a corner of her mouth curled up slightly, and with a little tilt of her head, she motioned her forward. Then she went back to work. The invitation had been subtle, but it was enough to spark something that felt suspiciously like hope in Max’s chest, and she followed willingly.

  “Where’s your team today?” she asked, pulling up next to Callie as she rearranged a few rocks at the far end of the ice.

  “Life.”

  “I thought they’d be all amped up after the tournament last weekend.”

  “You’d think,” Callie said drolly, then seemed to catch herself. “I mean, I’m sure they are, but life gets in the way.”

  “Life?” Max asked at the second use of that vague term.

  Callie shrugged. “It’s nearing the end of the heart of the semester for Brooke, who’s in the last year of grad school. Ella’s soon-to-be stepdaughter has strep throat, and Layla is working extra shifts at Dick’s Sporting Goods to make up for the shifts she missed last weekend.”