Page 63 of Gravity
“Dieu merci pour tout.” A voice at the door makes us turn. Coach Richelieu is there, looking like he ran to the hospital on foot. He's in athletic shorts and a ratty t-shirt, his hair wild and his eyes wide. He looks from the pleased and happy faces of the doctors to Bryce, awake and sitting up and holding on to my hand. His eyes close and his head tips back against the door.
Coach strides to the bed and kisses Bryce on the forehead, then listens as Jacques and Dr. Morin run through Bryce's treatment plan over the next few days. Bryce again points to his questions about the game, about his conditioning, and about getting back on the ice, this time for Coach.
“As soon as you're ready,” Coach says. "And not a moment earlier. But, Bunny, put out of your mind, right now, any fears that you don't have a place with us after this. You are this team's heart. You're not going anywhere.Oui?"
A tear slides down Bryce’s cheek as he nods.
“For tomorrow's game—” Coach claps his hand on Bryce's leg. “Our scratch will be here with you.”
Right now—other than Bryce—our team is reasonably healthy and in playing shape, minus the aches and the bruises. But if Coach asks for a volunteer to scratch tomorrow's game? We'll have to arm wrestle each other.
Dr. Morin is a different man now than he was last night, when he was preparing us for the possibility that Bryce may never open his eyes again. His smile is soft and he seems pleased—though exhausted—as he speaks to Bryce. “We'll start getting you prepped for surgery later this morning. You're a fighter,Monsieur.Vous êtes fantastique.I'll see you soon.”
When the doctors leave, the rest of the team shuffles back in, most of them clutching paper cups of coffee. Slava hands me one, and he tells Bryce, “If you want any, you'll have to lick it off his lips.”
* * *
The morning passes in a whirlwind.I think it's impossible for time to move so quickly, but it does, and all too soon, Dr. Morin is back to take Bryce to the operating room.
“I estimate it will be a four to five hour surgery, depending on what we find. Four hours will be quick, and if it goes as long as five hours, we've hit a few complications. Try to get some air, okay?” Dr. Morin looks at me.
Yeah, right. Just the thought of Bryce going back into surgery has me feeling like a spring about to snap. There’s way too much tension and terror compressing me down into a corner of my psyche.
But the guys won't let me pace the halls outside the operating room for the next four to five hours. We're all strained, every one of us stretched and strung out and shredded, and we're showing the ragged edges of our anxieties in different ways. We need to burn this off before we explode.
Coach Richelieu orders a team workout in place of the day's skate and pulls strings so we can use the hospital's gym. Nineteen hockey players descend on the hospital's workout and rehab facilities, and for two hours, we share space with little old ladies and gentlemen in physical rehab, kids visiting from the oncology ward, and men and women learning how to live again after traumatic amputations. In Canada, hockey players are stars like football players are in America. Within minutes of us entering the gym, the room is buzzing.
By the end of the workout, we know everyone's name, we've taken a hundred selfies, and we've shared workout and rehab routines with everyone there. Four kids challenge me to a sit-up race. Somehow, I come in dead last each time. Valery earns himself a horde of open-mouthed children—and grown women—when he takes off his shirt and starts pumping out pull-ups. Slava challenges him to a contest, and he tells the kids to grab on to Valery's legs to slow him down. Slava wins, but only barely, even though Valery has a giggling toddler dangling from each of his legs.
Etienne and Janne swing dance with the little old ladies like the smooth players that they are. MacKenzie spends most of his workout with the two guys who each lost a leg and a woman who lost her arm.
It's exactly what we need. Exactly what I need, too. My worry for Bryce never fades, and he is always in the center of my every thought. But I'm not trying to scale impossible fears about his future or what happens next, and I don't slip into whirlpools of cascading anxieties. Instead, my thoughts areBryce will be in hysterics when he hears about thisandhe will never let Slava live this down.
After the gym, we still have two hours until Bryce is due out of surgery, so we scatter, promising to meet back up at the four-hour mark in his room in the ICU. Valery drives me back to the arena, where I gather my and Bryce's clothes, cell phones, keys, and wallets. Then MacKenzie and I drive out to Bryce’s—and my—home. We shower, throw on clean clothes, pack a duffel for Bryce and me, and drive back to the hospital. Everyone else returns showered and changed and with an overnight bag, too. They each brought a pillow and a blanket, and Janne has his PlayStation under his arm.
Four hours and nineteen minutes after he took Bryce into the operating room, Dr. Morin brings him back to us. Bryce has a nasogastric feeding tube inserted, and the thin plastic winds out of his nose and around his ear, then rises to a bag hanging on his IV pole next to his fluids. The whole team is here, and we let out a cheer even though Bryce is still sedated and unconscious.
“Everything went great,” Dr. Morin says. “He should wake up in a few hours.”
I park myself at Bryce's bedside and take his hand. Oxygen shushes. Monitors beep. Our teammates talk softly until MacKenzie burps and announces, “Je meurs de faim! Let's order pizza.”
When Bryce's eyes flutter open, we are there. Pizza boxes clutter the counters, and Janne, Etienne, and Karel are battling each other to the death on some fighting game they've hooked up to Bryce's in-room TV. Valery is snoring on the tiny and uncomfortable couch against the wall. MacKenzie and Slava are playing poker across the foot of Bryce's bed, their cards laying on top of the blanket and between his feet. I am beside him, holding his hand. His cell phone is charged and waiting for him, and there's a text message from me that he'll find later, something I wrote an hour ago while I watched him sleep.
“Bonjour, mon amour,” I whisper. “Welcome back.”
Bryce smiles.
* * *
Ottawa doesn't standa chance against us. Not for Game Two or for the rest of this series. We're playing—no, we'rewinning—for Bryce.
We're animals on the ice in our pre-game warmup. I thought we were on fire when playoffs began, or even before that during the regular season when we were riding high on our victorious streak. Everything we were pales in comparison to the infernos within each of us now.
Before the game, I video-call Bryce from the dressing room. We do the same thing we always do before games. Bullshit and jokes fly around the room, and laughs bounce off the walls. We build each other up, and he's still a part of it, a part of us, because he's there, on the other end of the phone.
Etienne won the arm wrestling contest to be the one who got to hang with Bryce tonight, and they are together at the hospital on the other end of the call. Etienne is in his Étoiles t-shirt and a backwards ball cap, and he's leaning against Bryce's side in his hospital bed. Bryce is wearing one of my zip-up Étoiles hoodies, the zipper open at the neck for his tracheostomy valve. “Mac,” Etienne starts, before giggling at what Bryce has scribbled on his clipboard. “Bryce says he's sorry he's not there to feed you any leftovers from the goalie tonight. He says he hopes you can remember which direction to take the puck without him dragging you around the rink.”
“Oh, jokes, eh?” MacKenzie balls up his stick tape from practice and throws it at my phone. Bryce grins through the screen. “I will score a hat trick for you tonight, Bunny. You wait and see. But don't drink any champagne without me! Wait until I get there!”
