off nearly all my gear I was sweating so much. Then I just sat on the bench. Then I got up, headed to a stall, threw up, and sat down on the bench again. I drank some water. I sat there. After a while, Findlay came looking for me.
He knew my story. Findlay, as I’ve mentioned, was a social worker in the non-hockey part of his life. He was the guy who got me out of the Youth Centre early so my punishment wouldn’t mess too much with the school year. At some point during the fog of my fifteenth and sixteenth years, Owen had taken over coaching the high school team, the one I’d tried out for pre-Croft as a means of getting out of spending all my free time working for Gord.
Before that, I’d only played shinny, for fun. I was one of the few guys in my town who wasn’t gunning for the NHL from the moment I learned to skate — very likely a subconscious (or maybe not so subconscious) response to Gord’s oft-voiced fantasies of becoming the next Walter Gretzky. High school hockey wasn’t going to get me any closer to the Stanley Cup, but it was still hockey, therefore the one activity Gord would cheerfully let me off work to pursue.
But I was careful to never let my father see how much I loved it. Because if he knew I loved it, I knew he would wreck it. Because pretty much the moment I first set foot on the pond with a stick in my hands, I realized in a secret and essential way that hockey was actually mine — not Gord’s, not my NHL-crazed buddies’, not even the NHL’s itself. It was mine. It was the only thing in my life that shut out the noise, all those desperate voices — the ones that sounded like Gord (anger, fear) and the ones that sounded like Sylvie (sorrow, fear). All it took to break through to a more serene plane of existence, it turned out, was some hard skating, a beautiful pass, the magical-seeming synchrony of human minds and bodies when a play goes just right. It had to do with that feeling of being caught up in something bigger, of team in the purest sense — when you’re as individual as you’ve ever been while knowing you’re completely unalone. Completely with. Thinking back on it now it seems to me that hockey was the church I found before I found my church; the institution that brought home to me — a hell of a lot more effectively than any droning priest ever could — the virtues of Communion and Grace.
So it was my escape, in short. But it couldn’t be my escape if I let Gord turn it into another trap, which is why I showed zero interest in the leagues as a kid. Otherwise it would’ve been drills at 6 a.m at the pond on weekends. It would’ve been coaches filing restraining orders to staunch the flow of apoplectic phone calls, death-threats shrieked from across the street. It would’ve been pitying, disgusted looks from other parents.
High school hockey felt lower-stakes and therefore a safer bet. And once I was sprung from the Youth Centre, Owen placed me back on the team without even asking me, practically. He just told me what time to show up for practice, and because he was Owen, I did. At the time it made sense — as much as anything could make sense in that catastrophic after. Hockey had always been my escape, after all, and the idea of escape was sounding particularly good around that time.
But when Chisholm’s cranium hit the ice I came up against one of the biggest downsides to living in the after — the realization that no matter how hard I played, how much I tried to lose myself, escape wasn’t really on the menu anymore.
Now Owen stood in the doorway of the locker room, a bright blue Icy Dream toque perched on his head — a gift from Gord — watching me shake and sip water. “Chisholm’s fine,” he said after a moment. “He’ll sit out the rest of the game. Not too happy about it.”
“He could have a hairline fracture,” I said. “He could go home and say good night to his mom and go to sleep and not wake up. Sometimes brain injuries — they have to settle in.” I was babbling. I was basically regurgitating everything I’d learned