Page 35 of Goaltender Interference

“It wasn’t my...but I...”

“Aiden, it’s really...well, it’s notfine, but I get it, man. You were right. No, don’t look at me like that, you were. It wasn’t the right time. I don’t blame you for not wanting to be the first ones to come out, especially not that way, especially when it wasn’t like either of us were leaving our teams anytime soon.”

“I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to do the right thing.”

“Yeah, well. You did. You did hurt me. But I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot. Maybe it’s better things ended when they did. Before we really started hating each other.”

“I thought I did hate you. I hated you for a long time, after I saw the wedding photos.”

“I thought I hated you, too,” Matt said. The corner of his mouth tipped up in one of those familiar smiles, one of the ones that showed the dimple. “Not the best reason to get married, but I had a decent run of that, too.”

“I don’t hate you, though. I haven’t—”

“I know, Aidy. I know.”

They sat in silence for a while and Aiden watched two kites tangled in the air, owners trying to tug them apart as they fell. “What happened? With Emily?”

“Same thing that always happens when you marry someone for the wrong reasons, I guess. One day she got tired of the fact that we had nothing in common and she couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to stick around. The money only goes so far when you’re that lonely.”

He was smiling, again, rueful, and so sad that Aiden wanted to reach out to touch him, but stopped when he noticed a small kid coming toward them, snapback in one hand and a pen in the other. “Ah—you got a fan,” he said, pointing.

Matt sat up and signed the hat. Smiled his warm smile, made small talk, told the kid he’d have a great season in mites, whileAiden pretended that he didn’t exist, imagined melting into the grass and disappearing.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Matt, whether player assistance had been for alcohol or drugs or mental health, or any combination of the three. Whether Aiden had done that to him, even unintentionally. He didn’t know how to feel about it. Like many of the other things he’d felt the last six months, it was too fluid to get his hands around.

Instead of boxing it up, this time, he let it wash over him. Like he used to do, except it was so much larger a feeling than he’d had in a long time.

“How about you?” Matt asked, as they watched the kid running back to his parents, eagerly waving the hat. “Has there been anyone in your life?”

“A few,” Aiden said. He shrugged. “Kind of a serial monogamist, I guess. Never more than a year or two, though. Nothing that really lasted. I wasn’t what they wanted, I think. I couldn’t ever...really be that.”

“Yes.”

What Aiden didn’t say wasyou ruined me for other men.

They sat in silence for an interminable amount of time; Aiden didn’t want to check his phone to put a boundary on it. All around them, kids ran and screamed and played. Couples made out on picnic blankets. Boaters on the lake cut through the water. Artists painted the crowd. An entire park’s worth of people streamed around them, going about their lives, unaware that something in Aiden’s chest had eased, minutely, for the first time in a decade.

“Oh, I missed this,” Matt said, laughing, startling Aiden out of his thoughts.

“What?”

“That good old Aiden Campbell dissociation face, the one where you go hang out in your mind palace in the middle of a sentence.”

Aiden made a face at him. “You’re lucky we’re in public, or—”

“Or what?”

He leaned sideways to whisper in Matt’s ear, in itemized detail, the things he would do.

“Oh,” Matt said, after taking a moment to process them. His face slowly flushed red, from the neck up. Aiden kept going and he said, “Well.Oh.”

On the walk back home, Aiden thought again about the therapist. It had been five or six sessions now, and he’d watched her long enough to recognize her habit of looking at him like she could see right through him or saying, “Oh, ouais?” in her soft voice. It made him shift uneasily, especially when he was specifically trying not to answer a direct question she had asked him right before that.

There were certain things she kept bringing up that he didn’t want to talk about at all, like the way he could consider beginning to separate his own personal identity from his role or function to a team or pointing out that some of the explanations he provided to her regarding his behavior—which he felt were reasonable, even logical—were rationalizing maladaptive actions.

He was really trying to take it seriously, but there were more than a few sessions where he was so frustrated and uneasy about trying to put into words all of the shit that had been knocking around in his head for years that he considered not going back.

He kept going back, anyway, and every week, Dr. Gauthier smiled like he had done something admirable and said, “Welcome back, Aiden.”

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