Page 3 of The Rest of the Story
Brody’s face from the morning I walked into the lounge after Kathy had kicked Coates from the team forever roared to the forefront of my mind. How he had looked from me to Shea and back, and something had shifted deep inside of him.
Memories flared like fireworks, each one rising, bursting, burning.
Rescuing him and the others from the hotel, taking them to dinner, and then showing up the next morning to help everyone scrape together the pieces of their broken team.
The way Brody looked at me when I said he and the othersdeservedto be there, on the Outlaws, in the NHL—
How he’d looked like he was falling inside himself when I told him I saw greatness in his future, that he was destined to be one of the league superstars and lift the Cup over his head. He’d gone quiet, had skated by himself for solong—
When had Brody decided not to die? When had he decided to live?
All those extra hours of practice he put in, listening to me like I was delivering the hockey gospel. Those parties, how determined he was to have us surround him, and how he hated, more than anything else, to be alone. The night he got his first NHL goal, and how the whole team stormed the ice and took a penalty just so we could wrap him in our arms and bellow his name. “This is the best night of my life,” he’d whispered after, surrounded by all of us piled into the rookie house, him holding on to his goal puck as he slumped against Lawson.
All of it, every single moment, might never have happened.
Christmas, that video call with his parents. His mother squishing Brody’s face against her and Brody radiating happiness as he introduced me to his mom and dad. They could have been six months into mourning that day, their son dead and buried in a snow-covered grave, and instead of warm smiles and his father’s certainty that Brody had always been destined for greatness, all there would have been was a cold headstone and an endless, echoingwhy. Why, why, why. Because one sick fuck wanted to play with Brody’s mind, turn him against himself, separate him from the world, beat him down until he was nothing, nothing even to the voice inside his own soul, who had convinced him the only way out was to end everything.
Shea had kept him alive through sheer, brutal stubbornness. I remembered the two of them, how Shea was glued to Brody’s side, never leaving him, always within touch range. Shea didn’t know—he’d have told me, Iknowthat—but he must have felt those undercurrents moving within Brody. Without a shadow of a doubt, Shea felt that something had been terribly, horribly wrong.
A howl broke through the brittle stillness. We jumped—
But it was Lawson, not a monster rising out of the darkness. Lawson, grabbing his skates and shoving his fists into the boots, and then throwing himself at that spit of wall next to his seat, those five terrible feet where Coates had attacked Brody. Lawson slammed his skate blades into the drywall, over and over again, slicing and shredding and sledgehammering it into splinters and shards. He dropped his skates and went at the ruins with his hands, flinging broken pieces to the ground, where he stomped them to dust and smithereens. Through it all, he was bawling, half-mad with fury, half out of control with agony. Destroying that wall was all he could see, all he could do, and when it was gone, when nothing was left but the studs and open air, he collapsed to his knees and dropped his chin to his chest, weeping.
Gavin crawled on barely-working hands and knees to Lawson’s side. Lawson sank into Gavin as Gavin sank into him, twin sculptures of misery.
Months ago, I’d thought we were a kaleidoscope, shifting pieces of broken beads and glass twisting into new and beautiful shapes. Every time you looked at us we were different, I’d thought. Stronger. More exquisite. But I’d forgotten that it’s the brokenness of a kaleidoscope that brings out the beauty, and as easily as there can be order, everything can fall apart. Can shatter. Now shatter we had, because all those fractures and cracks we’d had at the beginning were still there, no longer covered up by wins or glory or video game parties. We were still twenty hurt men, and though we’d tried our best to crawl out of the darkness, the darkness had decided it wasn’t done with us yet.
Brody was still in my arms. His sobs soaked my hoodie. The wall clock said puck drop was over eleven minutes ago. We weren’t anywhere near playable or ready to take the ice. Our arena was destroyed, and our fans, our family, and—most of all—each of us, were shattered and in shock.
I had no idea what to do. The helplessness of it all left me unmoored, abandoned by my own self. Wasn’t I the one who got shit done? Wasn’t I the one who could rally the team, draw us together, get us back on our feet? All I wanted to do was stay here, on this floor, with Brody in my arms. Simultaneously transport myself directly to the hospital, where Shea was magically walking out of surgery, his leg fully healed, his bone transplanted and replaced, and we—all of us—piled into our trucks and our Jeeps and our sports cars and drove down to Key West and bought that boat, and then we sailed the fuck off into the horizon.
Kathy sank to her knees beside me. She’d appeared out of thin air, it seemed, but she must have slipped into the dressing room sometime during the shitstorm when everything came out. Her face said she’d heard every word.
She laid one hand on my back and the other on Brody’s, and she said, soft enough to be gentle, loud enough for the whole team to hear, “He will never come near any of you again. We’re going to put him where he belongs. We are going to lock him up and throw away the key. He’ll pay for everything he’s done.”
There was a part of me, a primal, dark part of me that ran hot with my father’s blood, that said no, no, Coates wouldn’t live to see the inside of a prison cell. He’d never get there. I’d take care of that on our way out of town, when we were all headed south to sun and salt and sand.
Kathy reached for Logan, the closest one to us, and tugged him in. Logan almost fell into Brody and me, but he molded himself around Brody a heartbeat later, sniffling and wiping at his tears as he laid his forehead on Brody’s shoulder. Connor and Josh followed, and then Gabe and Ridley, and then Gavin dragged Lawson, who was nearly catatonic, across the floor to join the pile. Kathy slid to make room for Lawson, put him right up next to Brody, as close as he could get. Lawson looked like he wanted to die, right then and there, at Brody’s feet, drown himself in the puddle of Brody’s tears.
Every man was whispering to Brody, words I couldn’t hear, words that belonged before my time with them.
I looked across the bowed heads to Kathy, trying to communicate by eyebrows and twisted facial muscles and a flicked glance at the clock.We are supposed to be playing a game right now.
She shook her head.No game.
We need to forfeit, I mouthed. Forfeit. End the game. Take a loss.
Kathy nodded. But instead of standing, instead of rushing out to the referees and the league and calling up hockey operations in Toronto to explain what was going on, she stayed huddled on the dressing room floor with us all, arms locked in arms, heads together, breaths comingled, tears shared.
Fuck the league. They could wait.
Thirty
We stayeduntil Brody swam back up from the darkness and he could breathe again, and the others had hints of color coming back to their faces. Kathy and I stepped to the far end of the room as the team coalesced around Brody, and we started talking next steps.
“The game is forfeit,” she said. “It’s over.”
“Good.” I nodded, pursed my lips. Our first loss in a long time, but we had no business tying on skates, today or tomorrow, and a postponement would only have staved off the inevitable. “Can you ask for the next game in Winnipeg to be pushed?”
