Page 81 of The Fall
I pass my phone to the state trooper and hand him the ashes of my life.
The trooper and I wait in silence. He asks to search my truck, and I let him. He seems disappointed when he comes up empty—no booze, no pills, no drugs. What can I say? Other than going crazy, I’ve always been a boring kid.
Finally, Wilhelm’s truck pulls onto the shoulder. I climb into his passenger seat without a word.
He doesn’t say anything on the drive back to the city. He doesn’t even look at me. The silence between us is a wall. Wilhelm’s eyes are glued to the road. He’s predictable. Controlled. A man not shaken by other people’s wreckage.
I like my captain vibrant and alive.Shut the fuck up, Torey.
“You know there’ll be consequences for this.”
I nod. My tears keep rising no matter how hard I bite them back. “I know,” I whisper.
Silence again; silence all the way home.
Inside my apartment is barren silence.
I shut the door with the gentlest click I can manage and let my keys slide across the counter. The fridge hums. Streetlights stripe the floor through the blinds. I turn the tap and hold my hands under the cold water. Red swirls, thin as thread, then clears.
Even when I wanted to become a ripple, I couldn’t manage it. What a joke. I went to the edge and flinched, and the horizon stays a line I can’t cross.
I had a plan that wasn’t a plan. Point the truck toward the shore. Step into the surf and keep walking until the cold turns to nothing, until the line between air and water finally lets me through.
But the beach wouldn’t take me. The road spit me back out. The ocean won’t open, not for me.
I stare at the dark and let the feelings flow: the shame, the relief, the hunger, the anguish. All of it drifts and returns, drifts and returns, like a tide I can’t swim through and a shoreline that refuses to forget me.
Blair is a man I cannot reach.
Nineteen
Blair’s jerseyhangs off me. The sleeves brush my wrists, his name stitched across my back like a burn.
My eyes wander over the sketchbook in my lap. There are too many sketchbooks now. They litter the floor, the couch, the counter. My apartment is a graveyard of graphite where he exists and I don’t.
My TV flickers in the corner. It’s Tampa versus Philly on repeat. I know every play, every shift, every split-second decision, and I whisper along with the announcers when they call Blair’s name.Blair Callahan at the face-off dot… wins the draw clean.
It’s stupid, watching this game again, but I can’t stop.
Maybe if I hadn’t tried so hard to hold on to the memories, I wouldn’t be here, with ghosts shredding my mind to ribbons of what-could-have-been. I don’t know who the fuck I am anymore. Whoever I was in Tampa—the Torey who could score game-winners, the man Blair loved—I’m not him.
All I know is that I’m not a hockey player anymore.
There are nineteen missed calls on my phone from my dad. I can’t even begin to imagine what I could say to him to explain this. I’ve never been more thankful for the vastness of the PacificOcean or the demands of his job. He’s not here, and he doesn’t have to see what’s become of his son.
My thumb brushes over Blair’s eyes, smudging the charcoal as my phone rings. I glance at the screen. Dad?
Not this time. No, it’s the general manager of the Orcas.
They’re making it official.
I think for a second about not answering, about letting this call join the others in a pile of missed connections, but I tap accept.
“Kendrick.” My general manager’s voice is flat and clipped, and he doesn’t waste words. “I have news for you. And before you say anything, you don’t have a choice. Understand me?”
I swallow. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
“You’re gone.”
