by RJ Scott
It was a connection, an understanding between us that the cold surface would feed information to me the whole time I stood there. The crack of a puck was ignored when the whispery scratch of skate on ice made me relax. This was Ten, heading my way. I didn’t even have to check around Arvid ‘Arvy’ Ulfsson, the six-foot-five Swedish defenseman who was blocking my view, as we worked on game vision. The idea was that Arvy would be an effective screen, and I wouldn’t see Ten enough to get a hold of angle.
But I heard Ten. I didn’t know how it worked, I couldn’t explain it, but I heard him.
He was a brilliant skater and has this quiet way of using the space around him, not all flashy and showy but determined and focused. I’d watched a lot of tapes of Ten over the past few weeks, since finding out I’d be with the Railers.
The thing about Ten was that he wasn’t predictable. He wasn’t the guy who always shot from the left. He was the one who danced and dangled and then did a one-eighty and went backhand. I'd seen him knock a puck from the air, hold off two defensemen, using his foot to corral a bouncing puck and then shoot glove side on a confident goalie and still find that small gap to get the puck into the net.
He was variable, so there was no surefire way to counter his shots.
I had to have patience and wait until the last minute. Listen for the whisper of his skates and take into account the way Arvy moved so I could make an educated guess on Ten’s position.
Arvy was good, though. He didn’t move a muscle.
For me, it was all about reaction, not only drop and stop. If I fell to my knees, blocker to the floor, stick protecting my five-hole, then I was sure to let in a goal that would clear my head.
I had to out wait Ten.
When he made his move, I was there, stopping the puck in my glove and curving it, so I slammed it to the ice, no chance of a rebound goal. I let out a whoop of glee.
They may have been conditioning shots, but I had stopped a goal from Tennant Freaking Rowe.
Shit. I stopped Ten.
Everything stilled in the arena, or was it me? Was everyone looking my way? Warning me not to mess with their star? I glanced past Arvy at that instant to see Ten circling back.
Fuck.
He grinned, stick-tapped my pad, the age-old sign of recognition, and laughed. “Nice,” he said and skated back to the rest of the team.
Arvy turned as well and winked. “Keep it up.”
No one was pissed I’d stopped Ten, or at least they wouldn’t show it on the ice, and for a moment I allowed the elation to fill me before I settled back for the next shot, this time from the captain himself.
Few positions on the ice can compare to the goalie. Goaltenders can be hailed as heroes or scapegoats, depending on the outcome of each game. At that moment, I felt like a hero.
How stupid is that?
Connor got a shot past me, as did a couple of the others, including Ten’s second shot, and his third, and fourth, but I was doing good, and Stan did nothing but grin all through practice as we swapped in and out of the goal.
I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I was sure as hell going to enjoy feeling competent while it lasted.
I needed to find an apartment. The Railers had put me up in a hotel until I found something, but even as I sat and made a list of what I wanted for the team realtor, I was reluctant to ask for anything fancy. I just needed a bedroom, a small kitchen, and a large living room that I could do my stretches in.
And a TV. That would be good. I hadn’t gotten my music system out of storage since I’d left my billet home. It was still there. My Yamaha amplifier, CD player, Mission speakers, and Rega turntable had been lovingly boxed up and put away, even though my billet parents had said the system could stay in my old room. They hadn’t understood why I’d wanted them to have an empty place they could use for another junior hockey player who’d need them as much as I had.
I’d made Daisy Jacobs cry when I’d said that.
Daisy and George Jacobs of Erie, Pennsylvania, are my real parents. Not by blood. Emma and Tom, their children, aren’t my siblings in real terms. But they are the only people I will ever call family, and they’d saved me.
And yeah, it sounds dramatic when I say they’d saved me, but they had. They’d offered me a home that was filled with love and laughter instead of the strict religious control of my own family and the alcoholic father who liked to use me as his punching bag. Hockey had been my way out of that life, and through that, I’d landed in the best place possible. I needed to hear Daisy’s voice.
I thumbed through my contacts and connected to Daisy, who answered on the first ring. I imagined her standing in her office, with its views of the Jacobs’ yard, their huge Newfoundland, Beck, asleep in a loose sprawl at her feet. I could picture it so easily that it hurt.
“Tell me everything,” she demanded by way of introduction. “Is Ten as sexy in real life as he is on TV?”
“I’m not telling you that,” I teased back, and I could imagine her pouting. She had a healthy love for Swedish goalies who played in New York, and, it seemed, Tennant Rowe.
“How are you, sweetheart? How did your first days go? Tom said he texted you last night, but he wasn’t sure if you got it.”
Guilt poked at me. Daisy had this way of saying “you should have texted your kind-of-brother back” without actually saying it.
“I didn’t see it, sorry. They’re running us ragged.” I wasn’t entirely lying. I had seen Tom’s text, but the Railers were intense about this conditioning work, and I was exhausted. Still, I’d also seen the two texts from Aarni and replied to those pretty quickly.
Boyfriends are different.
“I have to learn the process,” I added.
“He understands. I just wanted to let you know we’re all so happy to hear from you.”
She instinctively knew I needed that reassurance because that was the kind of mom she was. At the age of fifteen, I’d been playing in the Ontario Hockey League, and it was hundreds of miles from my real parents. I’d needed an American billet family in Erie, Pennsylvania, someone to live with, someone to look out for me. I’d lucked out with George and Daisy, who, after a while, I trusted enough to tell them all about my birth mother and deadbeat father. Yep, they knew all about my previous family life. If you could use the word family. Or indeed, life.
“I need to find an apartment in Harrisburg.” I deliberately changed the direction of the conversation before she began talking about how she missed me. It had been a few years since I’d left their home. I saw them as much as I could, but I couldn’t bear to discuss how much they all loved me, or in turn, how much I missed them. Not today.
“Don’t the Railers have someone to help?” Daisy asked.
“They do, but I’ll need to give them a list of what I want.”
“Somewhere to sleep, eat, and stretch, am I right?”
This was an easy conversation, and I resolved to text Tom back as soon as I got off the phone with Daisy.
“Mostly that,” I agreed, and then I went quiet.
“Sweetheart, is everything okay?”
I could’ve lied. I could’ve said that everything was fine, but it wasn’t. How was I going to cope without having Aarni close by? Who would run interference for me with everyone else? How was I going to deal when the day came for the Railers to realize I was an easy target?
“No,” I said. I couldn’t lie about the things that mattered, not when it had been Daisy who had taken me to every single one of my appointments with the counselor when I’d first arrived in Erie. She’d held my hand when I’d let her, and hugged me if I was desperate, and she never called me on any of it. Daisy Jacobs was there for me the entire journey to the NHL draft and then to that single awful point when I had to leave them behind and become an adult.
Thank God I found Aarni to look out for me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in her softest voice.
I didn’t very often want to talk about
things. What was I going to say? This wasn’t the first day at a new school; this was a professional contract with a Stanley Cup winning team. This was real goddamn life, and I wasn’t some kid who needed the closest thing I had to a mom to cuddle me and talk me off the ledge.
“I don’t know,” was about the best I could come up with.
“Oh, honey, did you get another letter?”
Just thinking about the essays I’d received from my birth mother, warning me about hell, and God and fuck knows what else she thought up, made my chest hurt. She wouldn’t let it go.
Can’t let me go.
As far as she was concerned, I was going to burn in hell for my deviancy, and she had to save my soul. They arrived regularly as clockwork, chatty missives about how well my birth dad was doing at work, how the priest asked after me and worried about my soul burning in hell. How Darren had gone to conversion therapy and had now settled with Gina, the daughter of the local car dealership owner.
I closed my eyes as pain washed over me, and thoughts of Darren and what he’d gone through were front and center. He’d called me once, a long time after I’d left that first home, with the cruelty of my mother’s church a burden I couldn’t bear. He’d left a message on my phone, told me not to phone, told me goodbye, added that he’d found a way to be ‘normal’ and hoped I did too.
I tried to call him, but he never answered, and a couple of days later, the number had been disconnected.
“Bryan? Did you get another letter?” Daisy asked again, this time with rushed concern in her tone. She knew what I’d been like when they first started to arrive, had seen how they destroyed me each and every time.
“No. No letter.” I thought on my feet. “I’m just nervous at a new team.”
She let out a small sigh of relief. “Just remember, they’re as nervous of you as you are of them.”
She always said that about every drama in my life. It made me feel better, reminded me of moments with hot chocolate, warm store-bought cookies, and her gentle voice.
Aarni wasn’t impressed with me having that connection to the Jacobs family. He called it odd how close I was to people who weren’t even related to me. He’d never given me a convincing argument as to why I should stop thinking about them or treating them like my parents. So, I kept them to myself. It was the easiest way.
I certainly never told anyone that they’d saved me.
I told people I loved the Jacobs family as much as my own, but I was lying. I loved them more, completely, and the day I’d left their house, I cried. I’m supposed to be this strong hockey goalie, but when I was drafted by the Arizona Raptors, I sobbed in Daisy’s arms and demanded they all move to Arizona with me.
They didn’t, of course, but they were always only a call away, and when I was working hard in the Raptors’ development team, they came to as many games as they could. I played Fortnite with Tom every chance I got, even when I was with my first professional team on tryouts in Arizona and he was at college in Seattle learning to be something very important in criminal justice. Emma used to text me at least five times a day, trying to set me up with her friends, all of whom were “super cute” and “loved” hockey. She had a boyfriend now, and I knew what that was like, so I understood why she didn’t talk to me as much. I missed her texts though.
I glanced at the clock, knowing I had to go to my meeting with the tattoo artist, pushing down the worry and focusing on what Daisy was telling me, about Tom, Emma, George, and Beck.
“We’re so pleased you’re back in Pennsylvania,” she said. “We’re only four hours from you, so expect lots of visits. Will we see you before the season starts?”
“Soon,” I said, and then after an emotional exchange of love you and miss you, and a promise of sending me a gift, I finished the call with about thirty minutes left until my meeting.
Daisy wasn't precisely the baking kind of mom, but she sent me other things on a frequent basis, like gift cards for food, and letters that told me every piece of news she could think of. Last month, she’d sent me a tin of store-bought cookies she’d put in a tin that had belonged to her mom. I hadn’t opened the tin, because the air trapped in there was from the only home I’d known, and I didn’t want to let it escape.
That was how bad I had it. Some days I was consumed with the despair of my family being too far away.
I’d showered at the practice arena, so I pulled on clean jeans, a mostly fresh shirt, and one of the many Railers hoodies I’d been given. I’d agreed to be number thirty-one, the numbers large on my back, and a weird part of me didn’t miss the number thirty I’d had while playing in Arizona. This was a fresh start.
Aarni texted me a photo of his dinner, steak and fries, and a half-finished bottle of wine. It was followed by a selfie, of him with his arms around a blonde woman who had a wine glass in her hand and scarlet lipstick on her lips.
I hated her. I hated him for sending it to me.
No. I don’t. I love him.
Even if he doesn’t love me quite the same.
I’d forgotten where we were supposed to be meeting, and that put me on edge. Was I supposed to go straight into the tattoo place itself or meet the artist in the bar? I knew his name, it was on the card, and it wasn’t a name I’d heard before—Gatlin. That I did know, but I was on edge. There was something about the man from yesterday that unnerved me. Possibly, it was his tattoos. I'd seen sharks, turtles and other Polynesian ink that extended past his wrist onto his left hand. The ink work on his right arm was more colorful. Staring had seemed rude, so I’d only gotten peeks here and there. It could have been the quietly confident way in which he stood and talked to Stan, his light blue eyes focusing on me every so often. Or the way he’d smiled at me and waited for me to speak to him. He’d asked me questions about names I wanted on the helmet, or images, and that had unsettled me as well. Or I could’ve been feeling nervous just because I’d forgotten where we were to meet and now stood on the sidewalk outside his shop looking like an idiot.
I decided the shop was the best bet, but before I could move, he opened the door from inside, a ready smile on his face and his hand extended.
“Hey, Bryan.”
I took his hand and shook it, and then he juggled a sketchpad and pencil case and closed the door behind him.
“Hope you’ve brought your appetite. They make the best burgers here.”
We walked to the bar, no more than thirty steps, and I must admit, from outside, it didn’t look like the best place to eat, but as soon as I set a foot inside, I felt at home. Probably due to the fact they were playing Queen, and the waitress grinned at Gatlin as if seeing him made her day. He pulled her into a quick hug, and we followed her to a table in the corner, right next to an old jukebox. I didn’t immediately sit, taking the time to glance at the playlist. From Queen to The Beatles, by way of Dire Straits and Black Sabbath, there were no bad songs that I could see.
For all the shit I’d grown up with until I was fifteen, I’d had access to a library of vinyl records and an old HMV record player. Music had been my escape.
The jukebox had apparently been set up with a playlist already purchased, as it slipped seamlessly from Queen to Black Sabbath, and I nodded along to the beat for a few seconds before slipping into the chair opposite Gatlin.
“You like Sabbath?” Gatlin asked, shock in his voice. I immediately felt defensive and pushed that down when I realized I was just about to freaking apologize. “How old are you?”
I lifted my chin. “Nearly twenty-three, but I have all the Sabbath albums on vinyl.”
Gatlin sat forward in his chair, “Even their live recordings, like Live Evil?”
“Yep.”
He moved back and exhaled with a whistle. “Nice. One day I’ll have to come over and listen.”
I swallowed. “My turntable and deck are back in Erie, and all my records.”
Somehow, I’d shut the direction of that conversation down. I had to be careful; Aarni said I was too trusting, an
d I didn’t know Gatlin at all.
“That’s where you’re from originally?” The conversation was interrupted by our waitress filling water glasses and pointing us to a board for menu choices, which seemed to be limited to four options. “My usual,” Gatlin said and stared at me expectantly.
“Chicken,” I said, and she left us alone again.
He opened his sketchpad, and in a few deft strokes, he had created a simple helmet shape. “So, something for the Railers?” He was leaping ahead, detailing steam and iron, then took out a blue pencil to shade, and all I could do was stare at his bent head. He had short, light brown hair, the same brown in his beard which had liberal amounts of silver in it as well. It was difficult to tell how old he was, although the gray implied he was older than I was by more than a few years. His skin seemed soft, his forehead furrowed in concentration, and I knew when he looked up I would be staring into the kindest blue eyes. He was the complete opposite of Aarni. He was slimmer; he had more tattoos, obviously, and gray in his hair.
Aarni has kind eyes as well.
No, he doesn’t. They are fire and passion, not kindness.
I shook my head to clear it from thoughts of comparing Gatlin to Aarni. I was with Aarni, and I was loyal to a fault, despite the image of the blonde woman draped over him tonight. He was the kind of man who needed other men and women to love him. I just needed one man. That was how our relationship worked.
“Family? Parents, siblings?”
I realized that Gatlin was staring at me again. “No.” I was immediately on top of that one before I realized what it must have sounded like. “I mean I have them; I just don’t want them on…” I waved away the rest of the sentence. His expression was puzzled but only for a brief moment, and then he smiled again.
“Hometown?”
I thought about the place I was born, in the middle of nowhere Canada, with the woman who I’d called Mom.
