Page 72 of The Fall
I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can.
On the ice, it’s worse. This air, this cold—it’s like the arena resents me. Vancouver feels hostile down to my atoms. This place doesn’t care if I’m here to play or die.
“Kendrick!” Coach’s voice shatters through me. “Get your ass in gear!”
The first drill begins before my hands can find the right grip on my stick. Becky waits a half-second, then asks, too loud, “Ready, Kicks?”
Catch the pass, deliver it clean, skate tight patterns. It should be rhythm, pure rhythm, easy as blinking. Instead, it’s chaos. Nothing sticks. My stick scrapes like it’s got Velcro stuck to it. My edges slip. I waver, and?—
I’m in Tampa. Hayes’s voice cuts through my fog:That’s it, Kicks, you got this!Blair and I are poised on the blue line, ready to take off. His eyes pierce right into me, and I see him inhale, exhale. Watch a bead of sweat travel down his temple beneath his visor. Catch the flicker of his lips, a there-and-gone smile, for me. The whistle blows. We’re in it together, sweeping down the ice, two parts of a whole. We dance around the defense, our other teammates set against us. He finds me in the seams. I bury the puck like we always do?—
“Wake up, Kendrick!” Coach’s bellow snaps me back, and the puck slides past the end of my stick.
I need to breathe, but I’ve forgotten how. I’ve got feet for hands, and didn’t we joke about that? At breakfast, right?What would you rather have— Imagine how big your skates would need to be! Well, not yours, of course?—
Tampa was my dream, but this is a shitshow. It’s the fifth, maybe seventh time I trip over my own uselessness that I know my disconnect goes deeper than frayed nerve endings and exhausted limbs.
A perfect pass, me and Blair in sync, the puck sailing from his stick to mine?—
The memory sucker-punches me; I catch a rut in the ice. The fall is fast and I hit the ice hard. I’m down, the wind knocked from me, the puck nowhere near.
My mind can’t pull out of itself. Tampa’s still inside me in flickers and flashes, ghosts that move on the ice in between here and there.
The ice doesn’t care about my grief, or my shattered dreams, or about the gaping hole ripped through my soul.
Fuck, fuck. I’m spiraling. When I went down, I didn’t come back whole. I didn’t come back right. I remember. I forget. My heart isn’t here.
“Fuck’s sake, Kendrick!”
Our final drill is a breakaway. I charge down the ice, alone. I see the lanes, the openings, and if I get the goalie to bite?—
The stick’s wrong. Or the puck is.No, it’syou, Torey, fucking loser.The rink widens, deepens, narrows. My edges give, the puck snakes away, the net rears up, and?—
I fall.
My crash into the boards cracks around the rink, ripping open a rotten, wounded place inside of me. I have a year of worthless memories festering inside me, a collection of meaningless moments, and still, still, I want?—
But I’mnothing. I’m not someone’s future or their forever, and I’m not the light that fills their eyes. I’m not someone’s best friend, or a team’s reliable goal scorer, a clutch player who took a team into the playoffs.
I am nothing.
Seventeen
Calgary unfurls beneath the plane,a welcome mat to nowhere.
The window is cold against my skin when my reflection meets my gaze. I’m pale and hollowed out, my color drained.
The rest of the team is ready to play. Vancouver isn’t in the running for anything; there’s no playoff spot to chase, no records to grab, but some of them want to play spoiler to other teams. Some of them need to play, to be on the ice, born to skate and shoot and move.
I remember feeling that way. Once.
There’s no one next to me on this plane, but God, it feels like there is.
There’s something—God, there’ssomething—digging at my thoughts. My heart kicks like it recognizes what my brain can’t latch onto. And then,there—a flicker, Blair’s voice, rising through the static that’s been consuming my mind for days.
That’s where we lived. That was our home.
We were on the plane. Calgary had stretched out in front of us as we came in on approach. The feel of his fingers in mine, the way his breath hitched when he pointed out the window. It was precious, this glimpse into his past. He trusted me with it.
