Page 32 of Gravity
It takes me longer to extricate myself, and I’m nowhere near as effortless as he was. I end up knee-walking from the bank, and I push myself to my skates with my hands on the ice as Bryce cuts wide figure-eights with his face to the sky.
He breaks out the pucks and sticks, and, with the world as our playing field, we run wild. We pass the width of the river and take shots on a fallen tree trunk we call our goal. I try slap shots and trick shots, and he buries pucks in tree limbs and snow banks and makes a few disappear into the sky like he’s driving a golf ball down a range.
We play a game entirely of fantasy, like how young boys play when they’re alone. I battle in a make-believe corner, and then shoot the puck around pretend boards, chase, and streak up an imaginary blue line. He swerves in at my side, and we weave in and out, launching give-and-go passes like a fast stitch. He charges our fallen-tree goal, taking the puck in as I swing to the side at a sharp angle. At the last moment, he rockets the puck back to me, and I one-time it toward the goal. The puck soars over the tree trunk and disappears into the tangled, snow-choked riverbank, but Bryce throws his hands over his head and celebrates like we scored off the crossbar. I’ll take it.
For a while, we try a one-on-one game, but it doesn’t work. I’m not meant to play against Bryce. If I poke check the puck and steal it away, the first thing I do is try to pass to him, and when he is on a breakaway, he spins and searches for me. We flub the one-on-one a half-dozen times, forgetting we’re playing against each other, before we throw that away and go back to seeing how fast we can pass and go, pass and spin, pass and score. Together.
I reach speeds I never thought possible, and match Bryce for a half-mile long sprint before we glide for another quarter mile. We both try things that are impossible in a confined ice rink inside an arena. Can I hit a puck to the top of that tree? Can I knock that bough clean of snow?
Can I close my eyes and know where Bryce is by instinct and feel alone? I already know the answer to that one—yes.
We are, in every sense of the word, free. It’s us and eternity out here.
And we are connecting again.
He's smiling, his cheeks and nose cherry red, eyes bright, his laugh boisterous. Out here, he is the real Bryce Michel, the man I met in Vegas—on the ice, on the shores of a desert river, and out in an empty canyon under a star-strewn sky. Bryce may be a man famous in the city of Montréal, but his soul belongs here, where hockey was born.
This is the man I have been missing. Not my hero. Not the man from the posters on my teenage walls. TherealBryce, the man from midnights and empty drives and lonely rivers, and the man who looked me in the eyes and dared to risk everything because, somehow, I made his heart beat faster.
We skate for hours and lose all sense of time. The sun is hidden behind storm clouds that roll in from the Atlantic, churning the gray sky into whirlpools of black velvet and frost. Gentle snow, which has been falling all day, thickens, covering the surface of the river. We carve paths through the powder and then lose them again.
Eventually, we flop on the bank, legs outstretched and shoulders heaving as we fight to catch our breath. My legs are burning, quads and hamstrings worked harder than in any game. Our pucks are long gone. Every one has been shot into the wild or buried on the banks. Kids will find them when the snow melts in spring.
We’re shoulder to shoulder, exactly like we were at a different river. The questions Bryce asked that day echo within me, and now I'm asking the same questions he is. What does any of it—hockey, the game, the salary, the chase, the team, the city, the championships—mean without this? Without someone beside you?
I understand him today in a way I didn’t then.
We didn’t come here for me and my questions, though. We came here for Bryce. I lean into him and don’t pull away. “Did this help?”
He presses back against me. He’s been playing with his gloves like he played with that river rock back in the desert, pushing on the tips and twisting the stuffing. He exhales, then reaches his gloved hand across my leg and lays it over my own. “Mais oui,” he breathes. “Oui, it is helping.”
He catches snowflakes in his gloved palm. “This is how I learned to play. Me and my brothers, on a river like this. That way.” He points westward, beyond an ice-encased slope. “I come to the river when I need to remember. Or—” he shrugs “—when I need to forget. When I need to find myself again.”
I get it. I could find myself out here, too. My eyes slide to him.
The falling snow has covered our feet, and we can’t see our black skates anymore. Bryce tips his head back and stares at the sky. “Calisse, I think this is going to be a real storm. We need to get going before we get stuck out here.”
We tromp to the truck, throw our sticks into the bed and our skates into the backseat, and pile into the front. Snow has collected around the tires, and Bryce has to rock the truck from drive to reverse four times before the tires grip and yank us forward. The narrow game trail, sheltered by the overhanging trees, is no worse than before, but the snow-packed track we took from the highway to the forest is a whitewashed field. Bryce drives by memory and feel, picking where he thinks the road is. I have no idea if he’s right. There is nothing out here for reference.
What took us half an hour to traverse on the drive in takes us over twice that to drive out. Dusk descends, the sky turning from gunmetal gray to an ink-dark purple tinged with green. The colors of a storm.
The radio spits out a stream of static-clogged closure notices, moving from schools to community centers to highways. We share a look when the radio announces the highway we are heading to, the one that will take us south to Montréal, is already closed.
“We’ll have to find a place to stay for the night,” he mumbles.
“Is your family nearby?”
“Non. The other side of that range.” He nods his chin to a dark shape against the horizon, a line of peaks that in Canada are called mountains, but in the US, we’d call large hills with pointy tops.
At a tiny intersection off the highway, there's a snow-buried gas station next to a log-built mini mart, adépanneur. Behind the store is a small RV, outfitted with a satellite dish and a generator. A hand-painted sign hanging from the porch readsDépanneur du Fleuve. Neon signs for Molson and Labatt shine through the snowy gloom. Hand painted on the windows arebière et vinandlait et cigarettes.
Bryce parks, and we slip-slide our way to the porch. In the past hour, the falling snow has switched from something gentle and sweet to something furious and raging. The wind nearly blows us sideways. I have to grab hold of his arm to steady myself, and he grabs me back, his own steps uncertain and small.
We’re both starter snowmen after the less-than-a-minute dash from the truck, and we shake off the ice from our tuques and our jackets and our boots before we walk inside the store.
Bryce pulls his tuque lower, as if he can hide himself.
Thedépanneuris country through and through. It’s like we’ve stepped back in time, save for the 1990s-era cracked tile floor and the humming coolers lit by mini fluorescents along the wall. Freestanding racks of snack food create four little aisles in the center of the store. Along the walls, there's fishing and hunting gear, outdoor equipment, tools and parts, and odds and ends. It's the kind of place you go if you need milk or a nail or a tarp or a hose and you don’t want to drive one hundred miles to the nearest town.
