Chapter Text
It’s fine. He’s fine. Everything’s fine.
Puck drops. Shane wins the face-off, passes behind him to Lambert who dekes and passes back to Shane, evading a London D-man.
It’s fine because it has to be. Because the instant he lets things not be fine, he’ll feel it again, the world around him shrinking to a point, black-hole levels of explosive panic on the precipice of big-bang, steeping pulsating congealing in his chest in a way that had him Googling heart attack symptoms and can you get heart attack age 15?
So – yeah. Everything’s fine. His new team is fine. The Ottawa Centennials have had a less impressive season than the Kingston Fortresses, but he can fix that. He’s Shane Hollander. He can get them to the OHL finals and then the Memorial Cup. He has to.
A lot depends on him now.
Pass to Stephenson; Stephenson shoots; London goalie blocks. Fucking hell.
It’s fine. It’s fine!
He doesn’t wear the A anymore. That was something he’d ceded in the trade. Traded in the middle of his first season like a failure, like a fraud, when he’d had to get special dispensation to even be drafted at fifteen in the first place, because he was Exceptional; and Kingston had trusted him, had lauded him – fifteen years old and first-line centre, alternate captain, the Future of Hockey. Now he’s on the second line on a second-rate team. His mom had called it a “worthwhile sacrifice,” but he thinks it’s more like penance.
It’s fine. He’ll fix this. He can fix this.
The captain is Bruce Lipinsky. He’s three years older than Shane, from Oshawa, and huge. Six-foot-three, at least. And mean – a slimy sort of mean that sits unpleasantly on a teenager’s tongue, chirps that might be hate crimes if they were uttered anyplace else but the ice. Not that the Fortresses had exactly been a let’s-hold-hands-and-share-our-feelings type of team, but at least the slurs had been kept to enough of a minimum that Shane had learned to shake them off the way he shrugs out of his shoulder pads after practice, just a part of his routine.
Lipinsky shoves Shane’s shoulder roughly as he joins the bench at the line change. “What’d I tell you about letting pussy-ass Stephenson have the puck?”
“He’s my left wing.”
“He’s a dumbass faggot who can’t shoot for shit.”
Shane counts to three. Breathes out. Breathes in. It’s fine. “He’s my left wing,” is all he says.
Lipinsky makes a noise that Shane imagines an elephant seal might make, just an ugly, guttural growl.
The London Lances win in a shutout, 2-0. On Ottawa’s own home ice. Fucking embarassing.
“It’s fine,” Jessica assures him. It’s their shared mantra. Everything’s fine. She finds him in a back hallway of the rink, flickering grey fluorescent lights, after he’s showered and changed and thunked his forehead on the cold metal of his locker and stood there, eyes closed, breathing, trying to still the cosmic singularity on the verge of detonating somewhere behind his ribcage.
“I’m tired,” he says, and he’s not even sure if he means from today, the game, the ache in his shoulder from a check against the boards, or if he means the other thing.
She nods grimly. “Me, too.” The other thing, then. “And I have to pee.”
“You always have to pee.”
“And whose fault would that be?”
It’s a running joke. It’s both their faults and no one’s fault and his fault entirely (corrupter of the innocent, evil) and her fault exclusively (slut-whore, reckless). It’s the fault of a condom that broke and a sex ed curriculum that hadn’t filled in all the blanks and a shirtless poster of Tampa’s new Scandinavian goalie that had sent Shane, panicked, hurtling into a frantic hookup with his girlfriend while her parents were out, on a night neither of them can take back.
She told him on a Wednesday in early September. He’d already started packing for Kingston, a modest suitcase which he imagined would fit snugly under the bed at his billet. He’d already heard from his billet hosts, an older couple whose son had played for the Fortresses before taking the university route instead of going pro.
This was all Step One of Phase Two of a sacred, preordained trajectory that he’d been on since the first time his dad ever laced up his skates and held his hands on the lake behind their cottage at Christmas, a trajectory that would end tidily twenty to twenty-five years from now in Phase Five – Hall of Fame Induction – at which point he would be retired and probably already married to an amorphously pretty lady with an amorphously cute child and an amorphously well-behaved dog.
And then—
“I’m pregnant.”
They were lying on his twin-sized bed, feet at opposite ends, knees curled in opposing directions like quotation marks. He could feel her gaze on him, head turned against the quilt his grandma had made when he was born, while he stared straight up at the popcorn ceiling, a staticky expanse of pulsing white.
“What?” he said. As if he hadn’t heard her, or hadn’t understood. Which, like. If only.
And Jessica didn’t repeat herself because she knew him, she really did. They’d known each other forever. She was one of those people he really couldn’t remember ever not knowing – not that they had been close, before, nor even really friends; but she was omnipresent in the peripheral orbit of his scholastic life, if only because her last name was Holmes and so they were perpetually lined up next to each other alphabetically for fire drills and class graduations, ever since kindergarten.
When they got to high school, they weren’t in any of the same classes anymore, because Jessica was smart. Like, smart-smart. She was taking advanced everything while Shane struggled his way through the bare necessities. It’s not that he was stupid or anything, but hockey was the whole point. There wasn’t time to study between practice and training and travel for tournaments; and it’s not like he’d need a diploma to succeed in his inevitable MLH career (Phase Three).
He kind of hated that he was a dumb jock, a stereotype. He liked to read, anyway. And so when she’d dropped into the seat next to him in the back of the auditorium while some guest speaker warned their Grade 9 class not to drink and drive, he’d barely looked up from the Gordie Howe biography hidden in his lap. Silently, she pulled her own book out of her backpack – a novel with a dragon on the cover – and began to read beside him, exchanging a quick, laughing smile when they both scrambled to act like they were paying attention as the Vice Principal walked past.
And, like. Of course he’d asked her out. God forbid a teenage boy have a platonic friendship with a pretty girl who likes to read. And he really likes Jessica. He does. She’s funny and sarcastic and talks about physics and precalculus the way he talks about hockey, entirely obsessed. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t like the social currency afforded to him by holding her hand in the hallway, approving glances offering relief from the usual standoffish chill and whispers of hey isn’t that the hockey robot kid.
So what if, sometimes, he kisses Jessica while wondering what it would be like to kiss the right-wing on his U16 team who has a scruffy, adolescent beard that Shane thinks might scratch pleasantly against his skin?
So what if that night in Jessica’s bedroom had been awkward and unmemorable, but for the gripping panic that swerved through aortic valves and capillaries at each flashing memory of Tampa’s goalie’s glistening pecs?
By the time Jessica’s words really washed over him like high tide, like drowning, like the air had turned to saltwater, lungs gasping helplessly for oxygen, he thought, maybe, he should say the other thing out loud, the other awful thing, so they could lie there drowning in awfulness together.
Because the amorphous wife and kid and dog weren’t amorphous anymore. Sure, it was a good few years before any of it was supposed to happen (Phase Four), but if this was the endgame anyway, then surely he should have felt—well, not okay about it, obviously, but maybe less like the world was cataclysmically ending.
Less like something inarticulable and uncharted was being stolen away from him.
“I’m gay.” He didn’t even couch it with an I think. What would be the point?
A beat of silence.
“What?” she mocked.
“Shut up.” He laughed, a delirious thing. He finally turned his head to face her. They were upside-down to each other, her dark reddish curls splayed wildly across the bedding in apparent defiance of gravity.
She stuck her tongue out at him and squeezed her eyes shut and crinkled her nose, and he laughed again, because he couldn’t help it. Because Jessica always makes him laugh. She’s funny, and he likes her.
He clings to that, in the seismic, bone-tiring months that follow. A small, tremulous orb of gladness he can reach for when the black hole of terror threatens to swallow everything else: if it had to happen at all, at least it happened with his best friend.
---------------
Shane makes a list.
The only way Ottawa will get through to the OHL championship at this point in the season is if they win every single one of their remaining games. And in order to win every game, he needs a better team. And in order to get a better team, he needs to accomplish four things, in no particular order:
- Convince coach to move him to first line
- Help Stephenson figure out how to fucking score a goal
- Convince coach to start the backup goalie instead of the pad-wearing embodiment of nepotism currently in-net who may as well be a slice of Swiss cheese for all the good he does
- Take over the captaincy from Lipinsky
He decides to start with Stephenson, because that’s the easiest one. Stephenson is fast, smart, skinny and small enough to evade defense. Stephenson’s problem is that he broadcasts his shots with his hips, specifically on his left side. A goalie with myopia and a one-loonie salary could figure him out. The fact that Coach Larsen hasn’t called him out on it all season is – concerning.
When Stephenson manages to score top-shelf against a stymied goalie from Kitchener, Shane joins the celly and sets his sights on his next to-do.
---------------
Three days before he was supposed to leave for training camp in Kingston, Shane and his parents, and Jessica and her parents, sat on opposite sides of the Hollanders’ dining room table. Shane felt a bit like he was a businessman flanked by powerful attorneys, or something.
Jessica looked like she would rather be working on an oil rig than sitting where she sat, listening to this awful conversation unfold around them, about them, while they sat in dismal silence and listened to their futures be weighed and considered and tossed about like produce at a farmers’ market.
Telling his parents had been—well. He imagines it had gone better than when Jessica talked to hers. But still. His mom’s face had creased in ways he’d never seen before, origami folds of anger-sadness-mortification as she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed a deep, abysmal breath. Then:
“All your hard work, Shane. Everything we’ve sacrificed. How could you be so careless?”
His dad had put a steady hand to his mom’s neck then, and looked up at Shane with a chillingly reasonable expression. “Is Jessica alright?”
“She’s fine.” Everything’s fine. It was all they had.
Jessica, in fact, was not fine. Her parents were very different from Shane’s. He’d known this abstractly; he’d met them exactly twice, and both interactions had been tinged by an awkwardness Shane could only attribute to himself. But it turns out, maybe, they were actually something quietly terrible. Politeness that tasted like acid, words of greeting with a serrated edge. Shane couldn’t say exactly how he knew that they were racist – they didn’t say anything. They didn’t curl their lips and sneer at him and his mom the way his U10 coach had, before a closed-door meeting between Yuna, the league manager, and the threat of a lawsuit had led to the coach being hastily and quietly replaced.
But here – no sneers. No slurs. They just looked at him, sheepish and mortified as he was to be The Boy Who Impregnated Their Daughter. They had every right to be angry at him, obviously. But the look in their eye was something different, something squinting and hollow and strained. And he just knew.
The table between them may as well have been the ice at Scotiabank Place for how far apart they felt, and the chill in the air. It’s the table Shane grew up at – French homework, jigsaw puzzles, Christmas dinner, rounds of gin rummy so competitive his dad had banned it outright one summer.
A dizzying thought grasped at his stomach biliously: his kid will sit at this same table, probably. His kid. A deranged, absurd vision flashed in his mind: a baby seated across from him at this very table, naked but for a diaper, holding a fanned hand of cards and slapping one down, declaring in a tiny baby voice, “Gin!”
He closed his eyes tightly, shadow and light moving across his eyelids in bloodred silhouette.
The words cutting through the air around them couldn’t exactly be called a conversation. More like a negotiation. It started with an opening offer from Jessica’s dad. He was a grey-haired man with thin wire glasses and military posture.
“They’ll get married.”
“Absolutely not,” his mom countered. “They’re fifteen. They’re not getting married.”
(Shane would marry her, if she wanted him to. He would. He’d told her as much.
“I don’t want to marry you, Shane,” she had responded in a very kind and lightly teasing way, and he had tried not to let it show how relieved he felt. “I’m holding out for a Jonas Brother.”
“Which one?”
“I’m not picky.”)
His mom had prepared a binder of Options. Marriage wasn’t in there, but a lot of other stuff was. Brochures about adoption. Brochures about completely safe, non-invasive medical interventions. Printouts about Canadian law and minors and parental consent. Documents about custody agreements and guardianship. A list of vetted abortion providers, family lawyers, obstetricians, adoption agencies, therapists, babysitters, social workers, and at least one life coach.
One by one, the options narrowed.
The brochure on abortion prodded her parents into a red-faced fury. Mrs. Holmes clutched at the silver cross that hung around her neck and quoted something archaic and biblical with an air of distant, teeth-clenched authority.
(Jessica had brought up abortion on the day she told Shane. The Wednesday afternoon they’d spent lying on top of Shane’s bed while the weight of things hovered direly between them. She didn’t need her parents’ consent to do it. She’d considered it, researched it, turned it over in her mind like a smooth stone that might hold answers.
“I don’t agree with my parents, I guess, but I believe in the same stuff. Like God. You know?”
Shane hadn’t really known what to say about God. So instead he’d said, “I think you should do whatever you want to do.”)
On adoption, Mrs. Holmes bristled. “I will not be having a stranger raise my grandchild.” She looked at Jessica then, with a sour expression smirking on her lips. “Jessica will leave school and raise the child. It’s only right.” But said not like it was a logical step; rather, like it was a punishment.
“She can’t quit school,” Shane objected loudly and immediately, surprising himself. Jessica met his eyes with a warning, but he ignored her. “She’s top of our class. She’s going to graduate and go to U of T and study rocket science, or something. She’s so smart. She’s not, like, some teen mom dropout.”
“She is a teen mom dropout, young man,” said Mr. Holmes in his gruff and calculated voice. “You made her one.”
Shane deflated, sinking into his chair, wishing he could become furniture.
Mrs. Holmes looked sharply at his mom, lips pursed. “What about your son? Can’t he get a job, be a provider?”
“My son will be pursuing his hockey career. Nothing changes.”
What a thing to say when literally everything was changing. Shane nearly laughed.
His mom flipped to a page in the binder marked by a neon yellow sticky note, a cheerful little beacon jutting out from this three-ring tome of Options each of which represented a future-state Shane felt decreasingly in control of. A collection of parallel worlds, a multiverse, hole-punched and alphabetized by Yuna Hollander.
“My husband and I will raise the child,” he heard his mom say, distantly. It took him a moment to understand, only processing the words when Jessica met his eyes sharply in surprise.
His mom was still talking. It was the steady voice she used when she watched game tape with him, breaking down the opposing team’s plays. “Shane will be present in the child’s life, but his primary role will be to support financially once he begins his professional hockey career. Jessica can be as involved as she would like, but regardless, she will continue her studies.”
Shane looked across at Jessica, at her wide eyes which were shocked and wary, yes, but also – relieved. Then he looked at his mom beside him, the firm set of her jaw, a dead-set determination he knew well because he had grown up enveloped in it, the fierce loving urgency of a mother who would move mountains.
Mr. and Mrs. Holmes exchanged a weighty glance. “Isn’t your son about to move to Kingston?”
“He will begin the season in Kingston but will transfer to Ottawa at the January trade deadline.”
This twisted something unpleasant and boiling in Shane’s gut. It was a plan that made sense, and he hated that it did. The Ottawa fucking Centennials. A consequence of his actions.
“So,” his mom said, shutting the binder primly and setting her hands flat across the cover, “No abortion. No adoption. No one is getting married. No one is dropping out of school. No one is quitting hockey. Are we done here?”
There was no handshake to end the negotiation. Just a terse nod from Mr. Holmes, while Mrs. Holmes gathered her cardigan and purse from where they hung on the back of the chair. His mom showed them out.
Shane sat shell-shocked, sunken into his seat. His dad reached over and touched his arm gently. Shane looked up at him.
His dad opened his mouth to say something, then didn’t. He squeezed Shane’s arm, stood, and walked away.
---------------
Shane makes a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel.
Goals against average. Save percentage. Shots against, goals against, losses, wins.
Jessica helps, crowded next to him at the desktop computer in his dad’s study. She’s good at math.
He prints out the spreadsheet and drops it on Coach Larsen’s desk. “Start Walshe in goal on Friday. He has a better record against Brampton.” He has no right to talk to Coach this way, assertive and uninvited; he’s battling every instinct to apologize repeatedly while backing out of the office like it’s a parking space and he’s a plain-coloured compact vehicle, unassuming and unimportant.
Then he adds the other thing. The thing that’s not a lie, exactly, but not a truth. “Besides. Tremblay is favouring his right side.”
Tremblay is favouring his right side, but he’s not injured. He got a garish tattoo of a skeleton riding a motorcycle on his left bicep for his eighteenth birthday last week. He’ll be fine by Friday. But Coach doesn’t need to know that. And Tremblay is a dick.
Shane leaves the office before Coach gets in a word edgewise.
Walshe tends goal on Friday. Ottawa beats Brampton 3-0, their first shutout of the season.
Two things happen after that. Coach starts Tremblay and Walshe on a tandem. And, Shane is made Alternate Captain.
The list grows shorter.
---------------
Shane was quietly traded to the Ottawa Centennials in the second week of January; in exchange, the Fortresses received two mediocre defensemen.
He packed his suitcase and thanked his billet hosts, who seemed baffled by this course of events. He loaded his suitcase and gear bag into the trunk of his mom’s car and met her polite questions with monosyllabic responses until she shrunk away from asking for the rest of the two-hour drive.
He didn’t say goodbye to his team.
Jessica was at his parents’ house when they pulled into the driveway. He found her in the kitchen picking out edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with his dad.
He hadn’t seen her since September.
They’d been texting, obviously. She would drop a string of mundane anecdotes like mr. costello curved the midterm bc everyone did so bad or jennifer has mono LOL can’t believe she called *me* a slut mixed in with something completely devastatingly real like appointment went well, dr says its the size of an avocado and what should we name it?
She stood as he stepped into the kitchen and smiled brightly like she was glad to see him, which was a surprise because why would she be, when he had pretty much ruined her life? She wrapped him in a hug and the shape of her was alien and awful, an architecture of unfamiliar curves pressing into his side.
He poured a glass of water, gripping the cup until he feared the flimsy plastic might collapse in his hands when he noticed the black-and-white scan mounted on the fridge with a magnet from Banff National Park, casual, like it belonged there (it didn’t), next to a grocery list and a coupon for Chinese takeout.
Size of an avocado. What should we name it? Word association ping-ponged wildly through his fucked-up brain. We should name our child Guacamole. Guacamole Hollander.
He abandoned the water glass on the counter and joined Jessica and his dad at the table, sorting through puzzle pieces: blue for sky, green for grass, red for the antique car in the foreground. His dad offered a small smile, which he did his best to return. They passed the afternoon like this, quietly, almost peacefully, until Jessica had to go back home.
A lot had changed and nothing had changed while he was in Kingston.
Jessica had turned sixteen and gotten her G1 license, but her parents refused to let her use their car or really do anything that would grant her any increasing iota of autonomy, so Shane’s dad had offered to teach her and drive around town with her, whenever she wanted. This had led to the odd pair discovering each other’s nerdy side, a shared, sincere and unbridled enjoyment of sudoku puzzles and CBC documentaries, which had led to Jessica and David Hollander becoming, for lack of a better word, friends.
Shane’s mom had begun laying the groundwork to quit her job at the communications firm where she had been for literal decades, having clawed her way up from intern to VP. Learning this nauseated Shane, a little, an unmoored and throat-clenching seasickness; that she would sacrifice her career for his, all because he was a stupid gay idiot who had managed to effectuate human life from a pathetic recipe of panic, shame, and horniness. She had filed to incorporate her own small business to manage Shane’s hockey contracts and business opportunities, and maybe take on one or two other CHL clients to keep things afloat. This would allow her to work from home while raising her kid’s kid.
Insanity.
His parents made him sign up for a class at the community centre called What To Expect 101. Jessica joined him. They were the only teens in the class, earning stares of judgement and pity from the happy glowing couples seated around the Feelings Circle at the start of each session.
The class actually wasn’t so bad. Jessica snorted with laughter when they were handed a one-eyed doll wearing a diaper filled with little plastic turds. They named the doll Guacamole Anne and informed the teacher of this with rock-solid, heartfelt sincerity, so that the teacher was forced to use the name in the roleplaying exercise in front of the whole class.
They learned infant CPR. This was something that hadn’t occurred to Shane, that there might be a situation where his child would be choking, windpipe blocked, lips turning blue, and he would need to save its life or else it might die before his very eyes. This kicked the gears in his brain’s panic factory into new throes of productivity. He spent three consecutive nights sleeplessly watching YouTube videos of stoic news anchors reporting on babies that had died in all sorts of terrible ways. Choking. Drowning. Measles. Dog attack.
It was Jessica who stilled his brain, finally, by reminding him that his parents would mainly be in a position to save the baby’s life if it came down to it, and didn’t he trust them? And yeah, he did. He really, really did.
His new team was exactly what he’d expected. One of the weaker teams in the OHL, though not the worst. (Erie was the worst.) Lipinsky was a bully. Coach Larsen was inept. His second line was alright; Stephenson had potential and Lambert was reliable. The starting goalie was abysmal.
The team knew about the pregnancy. He didn’t tell them, but Jessica came to games sometimes with his parents, and there was no point in lying about it. Some of them slapped him on the back, lewdly impressed, like he was some slick lothario. Lambert just asked politely when the due date was.
“It’s fine,” he told Jessica, and his parents, and his former winger from Kingston who was nice enough to text him now and then.
And he played like that – fine, just fine – sometimes scoring, sometimes not, as if the puck shared with him this grim sense of resignation, of a future already decided – until they lost to London.
They shouldn’t have lost to London. Shane could outplay London in his sleep.
“It’s fine,” Jessica greeted him in that back hallway of the rink, her pretty eyes, her strange round shape, lit up unearthly and wan under the busted light that flickered grey at odd and dizzying intervals.
It wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Jessica was a pariah at school, his mom was abandoning a job she loved, the guest room down the hall from his bedroom was being painted a mossy shade of green that his dad had proudly found on discount at the hardware store (“Perfect for the nursery, right, Shane?”), and he was second-line centre on the fucking Ottawa Centennials.
He felt like he had no control over any of it, like his entire life had been packed into cardboard boxes by movers he never hired, and stuffed into the back of a U-Haul at the top of a hill with the accelerator jammed down action-movie style. And the hill was endless, bottomless, and the contents of his life would just continue careening forward at F1 speeds all while he was folded into one of the boxes, body crumpled small, insignificant, useless and scared.
But there was one thing he could control. One thing he knew how to do well; one thing, maybe, he hadn’t fucked up beyond repair. The one place that should have felt like home, like destiny in a good way, like fulfillment and purpose and light, until he’d let himself flounder in self-pity and missed passes and It’s Fine.
Not anymore. He was Shane Hollander, and he was the Future of Hockey.
That night, he went home and made the list.
---------------
An opportunity presents itself to check off the remaining two items on the list, though to accomplish this, Shane must do something that is, perhaps, cruel.
Lipinsky is injured. Not seriously, not enough for Coach to scratch him, but enough that Shane notices where he’s protecting his right side and lying through his teeth to the team PT.
“You’re hurt,” he comments in the locker room, changing quickly, facing away from Lipinsky. Their stalls are next to each other now that Shane wears the A.
“I’m not,” Lipinsky mutters.
“Was it Sudbury? D-man checked you pretty hard.”
“Go eat a dog, Hollander.”
Shane flinches; but. He’s heard much worse in this locker room. So he breathes through it and digs his heels in.
There’s a line he shouldn’t cross. He does anyway.
“Just making sure you’re not being, like, some pansy faggot, playing soft,” Shane says, jaw so tight it aches. The words taste like pennies and wood mulch.
Lipinsky slams his locker shut and looms over Shane, breathing hard, eyes alight. For a split second, Shane can see the punch Lipinsky is ready to land, the balled fist, the subtle drawback. And then Coach Larsen arrives to debrief practice.
At their next game against Guelph, Lipinsky plays aggressively, uncontrolled and barbaric. The resulting tear in his shoulder is enough to take him out for the rest of the season.
---------------
Centennials name Hollander interim captain; lose Lipinsky to injury
CHL.ca | March 7, 2007
Ottawa, ON—Ottawa Centennials Head Coach Carl Larsen met with the team ahead of practice on Tuesday afternoon to announce an interim captain for the remainder of the 2006-07 season.
Playing in his first full OHL season, Shane Hollander was drafted first-round by the Kingston Fortresses on Exceptional Status before a mid-season trade to the Centennials, citing personal reasons. The Ottawa native was named Alternate Captain in February and serves as interim Captain for the remainder of the season while Captain Bruce Lipinsky recovers from a labral tear requiring surgery.
“Shane Hollander has been integral to the Centennials’ contention for the upcoming OHL Playoffs,” said Larsen. “His hockey IQ is off the charts and his proactive leadership style has already resulted in the Centennials’ best season in franchise history.”
“This is a huge honour,” said Hollander. “I promise I’ll give it my all.”
Lipinsky is expected to return in 2007-08 following rehabilitation.
---------------
They sweep the OHL Playoffs. Shane plays some of the best hockey of his entire life.
He comes home from the road bruised and exhausted. He sleeps in his bedroom under the quilt his grandma made when he was born, the quilt where he and Jessica had lain staring at the ceiling and then at each other in a tenuous combination of delirium and dread, uttering two truths that would change them.
The nursery is green; a crib is assembled. His dad loses the Allen wrench and buys a replacement at Canadian Tire.
Jessica passes her finals. She even sets the curve in Mr. Costello’s class. Obviously.
His mom’s coworkers throw her a farewell party with cake and balloons and gift bags of corporate whatnot; she definitely doesn’t shed a tear or two as she walks out of the sleek glass building for the last time, this place where she had risen to heights through ambition and sharp-edged competence.
Shane turns sixteen. Jessica gets him a soft comfy neck pillow for road trips, decorated with tiny anthropomorphic avocados. His parents give him a new gear bag to replace the one with the fraying handle. It’s nice. It’s useful.
There’s a night when Shane is reading in his room, and his dad raps softly on the door. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
His dad stands there at the threshold, this silent steady man who has bandaged scraped knees and patiently explained math homework and devised an oatmeal cooktime precise to the second because it’s an exact texture on the precipice of mushy that Shane will tolerate with peanut butter and protein powder on gamedays; before stepping inside and sitting stiffly on the edge of Shane’s bed. He smooths the quilt beside him while Shane closes his book, one of the dragon ones that Jessica recommended.
“So,” his dad says with a disbelieving sort of exhale. “You’re about to be a dad.”
“I guess so.” The word dad paces like a nocturnal predator in the pit of his stomach, clawed and sharp-toothed and meant to be feared.
“I just want to make sure you’re taking this seriously, Shane.”
“I am,” he replies, too quickly, and shrinks back from the angularity of his own voice. “Sorry. I am, I promise.”
“No, it’s—I know you’re taking it seriously, Shane. I know you’re taking it responsibly. I’m just not sure you understand what’s about to happen. What it means.”
Shane inspects the edge of the quilt, where green and blue squares meet a trim white border. What’s about to happen means so many things. An end and a beginning. A fear, a transformation, an inevitability. He picks at a loose thread and thinks of his grandma, who died when he was six. She always smelled like peppermint.
His dad shifts closer and watches where Shane’s hand makes anxious work of the thread until it’s frayed. That’s one thing about his dad; he never expects what Shane can’t offer, never forces eye contact when it’s not freely given, never inserts probing questions into considered silence.
Instead, he reaches a hand over Shane’s and grips it firmly, groundingly, until his thumb untenses and the string releases from between his fingers.
“You’re going to love that kid, Shane,” his dad tells him, hand still holding his. “You’re going to have so much love in you, you’re not going to know what to do with it.”
Shane swallows, shakes his head; he’s not sure what he’s objecting to besides the prevailing incorrectness of the entirety of the last eight months. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until his dad’s arms are around him, warm and there, and now he’s wracked with sobs that shudder in his stomach, in his shoulders, while his dad’s face is pressed into the back of his hair.
---------------
The Centennials fly to Vancouver for the Memorial Cup. His mom flies with him so she can rub elbows with MLH scouts. They face the Medicine Hat Bobcats, Sherbrooke Firebirds, and Vancouver Cyclops in a round-robin tournament.
In the end, it’s Ottawa versus Vancouver. The game stays tied 2-2 into the third period. And then, with four minutes left, a Vancouver winger scores on a lucky rebound off a goalpost and that’s it. Ottawa has lost.
Shane has lost.
He’d gotten them so close. He’d checked off his list one by one and frenziedly engineered a history-making season for a team that had spent years settled into habitual mediocrity. To come so far, to climb and claw, only to fail.
He lingers in the shower, water too hot, scalding. Changes numbly into his sweatshirt and jeans; and finds his mom among the other consoling families in a multipurpose room near the players’ exit.
“Shane, sweetie,” she says, and it’s not a comforting tone at all. “Do you have all your things? I’ve booked us on the redeye.”
“Huh?”
“Jessica’s at the hospital, Shane. She’s having the baby.”
A cup loss and the vast, impending, lifelong fallout of his own stupidity. This is actually the worst night of his life.
His mom, somehow, manages to sleep on the five-hour flight. Shane is dimly aware of some movie playing on screens overhead while he scratches and scrapes the cuticles of his thumbs raw.
When they land, while a slow parade of tired passengers shuffles through the aisle, stowed bags lowered with careless heed for elbows and heads, his mom switches her cellphone back on; it dings with missed messages. “It’s your dad,” she explains. “Oh. Shane.” She grabs his wrist and presses gently with her thumb, as if she’s trying to remind him of something.
“What?”
She gives him a watery smile. “It’s a girl.”
(“I don’t want to know the gender,” Jessica told Shane, after an appointment where the doctor had asked. “Makes it kind of real, doesn’t it?”
Such a rare admission from her, who has worn these months coolly, almost confidently; who has laughed off hallway insults and conspired with Shane on a list of increasingly goofy name ideas, all while maintaining straight A’s and learning how to drive and pacifying the worst incarnations of her parents’ indignation.)
Well. It’s real now. It’s real. Because the gauzy ambiguity of the baby and the child and it now has a new shape – daughter – a pink-coloured word, out of step with his harsh icy world, locker rooms, chirps, high-sticks. He doesn’t know what to do with this word. It tastes like raw cinnamon and sounds like shattered glass.
As soon as they’re out of the jet bridge, he bolts for the nearest washroom and empties his stomach of the Tim Horton’s bagel his mom had force-fed him in the Vancouver terminal.
They take a taxi to the hospital because his dad is with Jessica, and so he has his duffel and his gear bag on his shoulders as he steps into her room, and it occurs to him that between his sticks and skates and uniform and favourite sweatshirt and Jessica and his parents and his apparent daughter, every earthly thing he has ever particularly cared about is inside these four walls.
He sets his bags down near the door and his dad is immediately pulling him into a hug with strong, reassuring arms. “Congratulations,” he says.
“Um. Thanks.” It hurts because he knows his dad means it, all too earnestly; congratulations like he has achieved something, when in fact this very night he has spectacularly failed at the one thing he was supposed to be good at.
His dad squeezes his shoulders the way he used to before Timbits games, a century ago, it feels like. “Come see,” he beckons, and guides Shane over to Jessica’s bedside.
Her parents stand on the other side of the bed; Mr. Holmes, tight-lipped and sombre; Mrs. Holmes waging a losing battle with her own facial expression, an uncharacteristic softness winning out.
Jessica is drenched in sweat and smiling feebly and holding a small blanket-wrapped thing.
“You look like you’re the one who just played a cup game,” he tells her.
She crinkles her nose and sticks out her tongue. “You want to hold her?”
“Not particularly.” It’s out of his mouth before he can filter the thought, and it comes out kind of joking the way he and Jessica always are, but it’s true, at the core of him.
He doesn’t want to feel the weight of her.
He has a fleeting, panicked vision not of dropping her, but of throwing her to the ground.
“Well, you’re taking her. My arm’s falling asleep.” And now she’s passing him this soft, fragile, wriggling thing and it’s in his arms and thank goodness his parents made him take that stupid fucking class because he knows what to do even though he’s pretty sure he left his brain somewhere in British Columbia.
“Oh, Shane,” his mom coos over his shoulder. “She’s beautiful.”
He snorts out a laugh because it is, objectively, untrue. This is an ugly baby, wrinkled like a sharpei dog, mottled furious pink like some rotten exotic fruit, with a steep, square-shaped forehead and a shock of dark fuzz across it forming a lopsided unibrow.
“She looks like E.T.,” he observes, because it’s the first coherent thought that floats to the surface of the liquified ooze where his brain used to be.
Jessica laughs, an honest and exhausted sound, then remembers that she should be insulted and scowls. “No she doesn’t,” she objects.
“She kind of does.” He transfers the baby back to her carefully, feeling at once relieved and useless to be empty-handed. “The forehead, right? And her eyes are kind of far apart—”
“Oh my god, you’re right,” Jessica complains. “We could name her Elliott?”
“Or Reese, like Reese’s Pieces.”
“I don’t hate that.”
Behind him, his mom tuts. “You’re not naming your daughter after a candy, Shane.”
And then Shane remembers, because sometimes he’s not totally useless—“Wait. I have this.” He strides over to his duffel bag on the ground by the door and unzips the outside pocket, where there’s a worn, folded sheet of paper.
He’d printed it out ages ago, from a website called TopBabyNames.ca, using his billet hosts’ noisy home printer in Kingston. He’d highlighted some names, underlined some, crossed out others. He’d never shared this with Jessica; it had felt like conceding that all of this was happening more tangibly than he had been ready to admit.
She unfolds the paper with one hand and gives him a sideways look, at once teasing and trusting, and pauses when she gets to the middle of the page. “Well, it has to be this one, right?”
He looks at where she’s pointing, then down at the baby, uncertain what Jessica sees that makes her think this name is the name, the one that fits. “Why?”
She smiles tiredly at the baby in her arms, and shrugs. “It’s a hockey name.”
Later, Mr. and Mrs. Holmes go home and his mom and dad go in search of lukewarm coffee from a vending machine, and Shane sits in a big chair at the edge of the room holding his daughter while Jessica sleeps. His daughter his daughter his daughter. He forces himself to think it over and over again until it stops sounding so fucking wrong.
He doesn’t feel what his dad said he’d feel, love bursting out the seams of him.
Maybe something is wrong with him, with the part of him that’s supposed to love like that.
Maybe he is a hockey robot.
What he feels borders on neutral – which at least is better than the abject terror that has shaped the last few months, even the last few hours.
He feels a sense of responsibility, of gravitas, housed in a glass orb nestled in the coils of his intestines, fragile; if he breathes too hard, it might break.
And, oddly, miraculously: relief. A cool breeze; a hard-fought win in overtime. Ultimately, he will have very little to do with his daughter’s care and keeping, because his parents will be raising her, because that’s the plan his mom had devised in a three-ring binder. Because he is patently unqualified and, in all honestly, unwilling, for any other plan to take shape.
Everything’s fine. It is, sort of. Hockey is the whole point – the plan, the path forward. He can take the Memorial Cup next year, he knows it. If he works hard, which he will, he can make it onto the junior national roster and play in the Prospect Cup. Maybe not next season, but definitely by Regina in ’08. He has the whole summer ahead to train and bulk up and hopefully get his G1 license and also figure out how the fuck to be a dad.
Her eyes are brown, like his.
She’s so fucking small.
Her name is Sidney.
---------------
When Shane was six, his grandma died, his dad’s mom; and her cat Pistache came to live with them.
Pistache was an ancient tabby with a limp in his hind leg, a wonky left ear, and an anguished whine at mealtimes. Shane was scared of him. Shane was also mildly allergic.
And somehow, eventually, Shane got used to having him around. The stuffy nose and puffiness in his eyes faded a bit – not gone, just less bothersome. Now and again Shane would even venture a cautious pet across the creature’s back or a gentle scritch at the nape of his neck, yielding purrs and head-butts. Exactly once, Yuna found Shane and Pistache curled up together in bed, both snoring soundly.
Eventually his Aunt Rita came and whisked Pistache away to her apartment in Mississauga; and that was that.
Shane knows it’s wrong, factually if not morally, to compare his infant daughter to an elderly cat he had known and partially feared for a period of eight weeks in his childhood. And yet.
It’s like the easing of an allergy, getting used to her. The sounds, the smells, the plaintive helpless look of her, become less prickly and more background. Routine. Crying becomes nighttime ambience and morning alarm clock. There is structure to her existence, not unlike his own during season: feeding, sleeping, shitting; storybooks that rhyme and one annoying TV show about a monkey named Bruno.
Jessica comes over most days that first summer. Sometimes she spends the night. She pumps breast milk (which manages to confirm for Shane, if he wasn't sure before, that he really, definitely, does not like breasts); and she sits on the floor of the nursery cross-legged beside Shane and Sidney, and the three of them cooperate on a silent, sisyphean assembly line, stacking colourful plastic blocks into a tower that is almost immediately knocked over and reconstructed.
“They’re babies with a baby,” he overhears his mom say to his dad, one afternoon. And her voice is empty of the crisp, pointed edges that had become soundtrack to every mealtime and car ride and phone call home in the lead-up to all of this. Instead, she just sounds – sad.
Here are the things Shane knows for sure:
He cares about Sidney’s well-being. He does not want her to be hurt or sick. He hates when she cries.
He supposes he feels this way, really, about any baby. He’d be a psychopath if he didn’t, right? But if he were ever presented with some twisted trolley problem where he had to choose between his baby and some random baby off the street, he knows who he’d save.
So. That’s something.
Also, this: He likes talking to her.
It’s stupid, really. She can’t understand him. She’s a literal baby.
But he could swear she listens to him, really listens, with wide, intent eyes and academic focus that reminds him, alarmingly, of himself in the rink. He never talks to her in front of his parents, because the whole thing is embarrassing. But at night, sometimes, he lowers himself onto the floor of the nursery and looks at the shadow of her through the bars of the crib, and tells her things.
She’s the second person in the world who hears him test those words he’d first uttered to Jessica on a Wednesday in September; a pair of sour, unwanted syllables that stick to the back of his teeth like chewing gum that’s lost its flavour.
“Maybe I’m wrong, anyway,” he wonders. “And even if I am—you know. It’s not like I can tell anyone or, like. Do anything.” He thinks back to his mom’s words in September when he’d told his parents about Jessica. How could you be so careless?
Sidney just blinks back at him unhelpfully.
When Lipinsky gets sent to London during the June trade window amid an uncertain post-op recovery, Shane tells Sidney about the scrabbling wad of guilt trapped in his throat, the manipulation he’d orchestrated with a psychological incisiveness he hadn’t known he possessed. Even if it was Lipinsky’s own hubris that had led to his downfall, it was Shane who had pulled the pin and handed the guy a live grenade.
“I hated saying those things,” he tells her. “I won’t say shit like that again. I promise.” He pauses, assesses what he just said. “Sorry, stuff, not shit. Shit. Sorry.”
Finally, there’s this:
In July, he flies to Calgary for development camp with the junior national team. He flies with Stephenson, who was also invited; while his mom and dad stay behind with Sidney. He’s only gone for five days. He doesn’t miss her; he doesn’t have time. He’s razor-focused on the game, the burn in his legs, the cold air in his lungs. Puck, stick, skates, net: familiar and beloved and his. Hockey is the whole point.
He doesn’t miss her; he doesn’t.
But when he gets back home, he knows he feels glad to see her.
And that, really, is something.
---------------
The season starts, and Jessica goes back to school, and the plan concocted a year earlier, during a dining room negotiation as tense as a face-off, is set into motion. Shane spends the last week of September in Barrie, Brampton, and Kingston; in October, he’s on the road in Kitchener, Sarnia, London, and Belleville. He returns from a November road trip in Sault Ste. Marie late at night, after a grueling loss and an eight-hour bus ride, muscle-tired with eyelids heavy from reviewing tape the whole trip back on Coach Larsen’s dusty laptop. His mom is still awake in the dimly lit living room when he gets home, holding Sidney tucked to her chest, singing softly and swaying.
He sets his bags in the hallway and watches the scene, puzzled, some buried detail nagging in his brain like an itch.
Oh.
“She’s bigger,” he observes.
He’s been gone nine days.
His mom meets his eyes with a knowing look, a little pained, a little smug. “They grow up fast, Shane,” she says.
Wordlessly, she strides over to Shane and transfers Sidney into his arms, and it’s still fucking weird, holding a living breathing person and being expected to pretend that this is normal. She looks sleepy; he knows this because he has gotten used to the faces she makes in the predictable arc of her day. Sleepy looks like this: face crinkled up, blinking eyes, a relaxed frown weighing down the corners of her lips.
“Same,” he tells her.
He settles her into the crib and sits down in his spot on the floor, and tells her about the horrible game. The pass he’d missed from Lambert; and an awful shot on goal that had ricocheted uselessly out of the crease without the goalie needing to lift a finger. Just an off day, he knows, but he feels like the core of him is broken.
He hates failing. He hates losing.
He hates himself, a little. Just a little; just enough.
“Thanks for listening,” he whispers. He’s pretty sure she’s asleep, but he thinks that’s a weird way to end their one-sided conversation, so he stands and looks into the crib, at the rise and fall of her breathing, the slope of her shape, small but not as small as she used to be, and adds a curt “Good night,” before trudging the slow, tired few steps to his own room, and closing the door.
---------------
He’s an alternate for the national team that year. He flies out to Calgary in December for the International Prospect Cup but doesn’t make it out of selection camp. He’s weirdly okay with that.
Maybe it’s because the season is going well, though he doesn’t dare say that out loud. The Centennials are certain to make it to the OHL Playoffs, at least. And he can taste the nearness of the Memorial Cup, so close last time, just beyond his grasp.
He wants it this year. He wants it more than anything. He wants it with a sparking hunger that sears through him every time his blades hit the ice.
He wants to come home at the end of the season and tell Sidney that he’d done it, that he’d won it all. Whether despite her, or for her, he’s not sure.
---------------
“Guess what.”
Jessica often starts their phone calls like this. Not once has Shane guessed correctly. “What?”
“You have to guess.”
“Um. Sidney sat up again?” He still isn’t sure what the big deal is about sitting up, but his parents and Jessica had all freaked out when it happened the first time.
“Well, yeah. But no. That’s not it.”
“Just tell me?”
He can hear her grinning through the airwaves from his hotel room in Niagara. “I passed my G2 road test.”
“No shit. Really?”
“Mm-hmm. And my parents are letting me use their car, finally.”
“That’s great.” He hopes he sounds appropriately enthused. He’s really tired.
“Hey. Can I ask you something?” There’s a clicking sound, soft in the background; he can picture her lying on top of her brightly floral bedspread, surrounded by textbooks and spiral-bound loose leaf, fidgeting with the eraser end of a mechanical pencil.
“Yeah. Of course.”
There’s a rustling as she sits up and leans forward. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Don’t you miss her? I mean, I miss her the whole time I’m at school, and that’s only, like, six hours. You go away for days.”
“Oh.” He’s not sure what to say that won’t make him sound like a horrible person. Because the truth is that he doesn’t really think about her at all while he’s on the road.
Well, no. That’s not exactly true. He thinks about her in the same way he thinks about all the rhythms of his life; she’s just a piece of things, now, an implicit part of what home means when the bus drops the team off back at the rink after consecutive games in Oshawa and Owen Sound, and his dad’s grey Honda Civic is there in the parking lot to pick him up, and his dad opens the trunk and helps him load in his gear bag and says something like, “Ready to get home?” Before, that used to mean returning to his mom’s intensity and his dad’s stolidness and his bedroom filled with trophies and medals and books and the quilt his grandma made when he was born. (Had Pistache known that she’d made it, when he’d slept there, croissant-shaped and snoring? Had he watched her sew it, blues and greens, steady hands, from a warm sunlit spot in her small little home?)
Now, going home also means Sidney; another square in the tiring and familiar patchwork fabric of the everyday.
But he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he says, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just mostly focused on hockey.” That’s not a lie, anyway. He pauses, hesitates, then asks – because he’s curious; because it’s something missing from him, something broken in him like a software malfunction – “What’s it feel like, for you? Missing her.”
“It’s like—I don’t know. Like there’s a string, between us.”
“A string?”
“Yeah. Like I’m on one end of the string and she’s on the other, and all day I’m sitting in class and I can just feel her, like, pulling tight on the other end. And I just can’t wait to get to your house after and see her and hold her.”
“That sounds hard.”
“Yeah,” she exhales. “It is.” He hears the whoosh of fabric and thinks maybe she’s slid off her bed and onto the floor, knees tucked to her chest. “Your dad says he has a friend at the Canadian Space Agency who can get me an internship this summer. In Longueuil.”
“Jess, that’s perfect for you.”
“I know. And I want to do it. It’s just—”
“The string?”
“The string.” She sighs. “Am I a bad mom, if I do the internship? I’d be gone for, like, two whole months.”
“No. No way. The whole point is, like, my parents are raising her, right? And you’ll go to university eventually, so maybe this is a good practice run.”
“Maybe.”
Shane is feeling wide awake now. He remembers what his mom said when he’d first told his parents – everything we sacrificed. He remembers her coming home from her job for the last time with a cardboard box of everything that had once occupied her desk in a corner office. All so he can make it to the MLH and Jessica can become a rocket scientist and nothing would stand in their way. “Take the internship. Longueuil is only, what, two hours?”
“Two and a half.”
“Easy. I’ll be home in the summer. I’ll have my G2 by then. I’ll take her to visit you.”
“You can’t drive in Quebec on your G2. Just Ontario.” She laughs. “Besides, there’s no way you’re passing the road test.”
“Hey,” he objects.
“You’re a terrible driver, Shane. You’re scared to change lanes.”
“Yeah, because it’s fucking scary.” He rolls his eyes and hopes she can tell that he did. “Fine. Whatever. My parents will drive. Just—do the internship.”
“Okay,” Jessica says. “Okay, yeah. I want to do it.”
“Okay. Good.”
They’re silent for a while. He hears the scratch of pencil on paper and thinks she’s resumed the homework she’d abandoned for their call.
“Jess?” he says.
“Still here.”
“You said—before. You said she sat up again?” It’s not a big deal; he doesn’t understand. But he wants to understand.
Jessica smiles into the phone, and tells him all about it.
---------------
His parents and Jessica and Sidney, tucked snugly into her carseat, drive ninety minutes to Kitchener to see him in the Memorial Cup final. His mom has somehow procured a Centennials onesie, which manages to make Shane feel something unnamed and tenuous, seeing the tiny logo on her chest as if she’s proud of him, which is ridiculous, because she’s a literal baby.
The Centennials barely scraped out of the round-robin, taking down the Gatineau Torches in overtime; a defenseman named Boizieau made things very difficult and kept the score 1-1 right up until the end.
Now they face the Spokane Explorers. Stephenson and Lambert are on first line with him and Walshe is starting in goal. The forward line for Spokane are aggressive and fast but Stephenson is smarter and faster, and Shane is faster than all of them, and Stephenson dekes and passes and now Shane has the puck on the breakaway, net swishes, horn sounds, and now it’s two minutes left in the third and the Centennials are up 4-2, and now it’s just a matter of defense while the clock ticks down and then.
They’ve fucking done it.
It’s the best fucking feeling. Winning the whole damn thing; lifting the ostentatious silver cup over his head and grinning in a way he can’t stop because, yeah, he’s fucking earned it. Shane feels like he’s made of helium, like he’s skating weightlessly, like the entire past year of weird and horrible and not-so-horrible has all condensated into something indelible and worthwhile that he can pluck from the air and keep in his pocket.
He meets his family in another bland multipurpose room in the back of the rink, just like the one where, a year ago, he’d felt defeated and exhausted and terrified. Jessica holds Sidney in one arm and pulls Shane into a hug with the other, and it occurs to Shane that he’s never hugged his daughter before, not really.
He kisses her on the forehead, which is also something he’s never done before, and it’s a little awkward but it feels right for the moment. And he looks at her brown eyes which are his, and which watch him in that quiet studious way that lets him know she’s listening when he talks to her in the dark of the nursery at night.
“Happy birthday, Sid,” he says. “I got you a trophy.”