thinks they know all about me but they don’t! Nobody knows anything about me!”
I was thinking about Constable Hamm — I see exactly where you’re headed, son. I was thinking of Gord thwacking me in the sternum. This son of a bitch right here.
We went back and forth like this in our mutual incoherence. That is, I was incoherent and panicky, whereas Sylvie, I think, was in the process of elucidating something, however heartsick she may have been while attempting to do it. We were on the highway now. I just wanted her to stop crying that way. It would be okay if she were trickling a little, but the sobs wracked her body like she was being flogged. I even thought she might pull over and ralph out the driver’s-side door at some point, like one of my high school buddies on the way to a dance.
“We can’t continue like this,” she gasped after a few heaving moments of speechlessness. “We don’t have to.”
“I have to go to jail, Mom,” I said, watching her because there was a weird momentousness to the way she was speaking all of a sudden. “We can’t, like, go on the lam.”
“After this, Gordie,” she said, shaking her head and reaching up to swipe an entire forearm across her eyes. “After this, everything changes.”
Needless to say she was right. Of course, that wasn’t what she meant. She didn’t mean that in about eight minutes she would take a blind turn while driving slightly on the wrong side of the yellow line as she finished blouse-sleeving another gush of tears from her eyes and a car would be coming just a titch over the speed limit in the opposite direction and the vehicles would brush against each other like two illicit lovers at a party, spin in opposite directions, they into a ditch, we into yet another oncoming vehicle before discovering a ditch of our own. That’s not what Sylvie meant by everything changes. At the time, however, I didn’t understand exactly she what she meant.
She meant, it took me years to understand, that she was leaving Gord. She and I, that is. The thing I always wanted; my ultimate, never-spoken wish.
Which of course is what ended up happening anyway.
08/17/09, 3:25 a.m.
I just realized I’ve got one more story to tell you.
I started playing hockey again a few years ago, can you believe it? Twelve years after stumping out of the locker room back in university and making my buddy Adam so proud of my principled stand against the cracking of human skulls. It happened not long after I bought my house. One of the first things I noticed about the neighbourhood, standing with the realtor at the upstairs window, was an outdoor community rink a couple of backyards beyond mine.
I watched it fill up with kids from the first snowfall in November and not empty out again until March. On especially cold days, rink sounds — the pock of pucks hitting the boards and the slash of skates gouging ice — flew across the frozen air into my yard. It sounded like all the games were taking place directly beneath my bedroom, and if I jumped out my window I’d land smack at centre ice like a dropped puck.
I’d stand there some evenings watching the kids going around and around, making their touching Hail Mary passes from one end of the ice to the other, and eventually I noticed that during a certain block of time on Thursday evenings, the kids got bigger. I took in the occasional pot belly here, a faceful of beard there. I saw how different guys seemed to come and go from week to week, some of them even showing up in the middle of a game, brandishing their sticks and being immediately accepted onto the ice. Next thing I know I’m at Canadian Tire buying extension cords but standing, for some reason, in the sporting goods section, feeling annoyed at the crappy selection of skates.
Flash forward two years later and at the age of thirty-four I’m finally doing my father proud — heading downtown to the arena every week to play in a league. And let me tell you, old-timer’s hockey is the best hockey going. There are no psychotic parents in the stands, no purple-faced coaches, none of that sweaty, draft-pick desperation. Guys can be old, guys can be pudgy; guys are slow. Guys are sometimes even — as in the case of our goalie for a