Prologue
Jack Parker
Five Years Earlier
Play:I’ve Just Seen a Face by the Beatles
Jack Parker, handsome, broody, and rich, with a chaotic party home and miserable disposition, seemed to unite some of the worst qualities of existence and had lived nearly twenty-two years in the world with very little to comfort or appease him.
“Hey,Parker…get your ass under the funnel.” Grady O’Callaghan, chaos personified, shook the tired frame of the hockey house—a colonial on the edge of Wentworth University’s campus—with his booming voice.
Dammit. Jack was usually outside by the time Grady tried this shit.
He had his sore muscles to blame for this slow exit. He swore his face had met with the boards more times in today’s Finals game than it had the rest of the season combined.
“I’ll pass. If you assholes burn the house down, save Gus—he’s in his room,” Jack said before he zipped up his sweatshirt, grabbed his literature assignment, a book of poems, and headed out the door.
There was no way in hell Jack was funneling anything.
Not when he’d seen that long tube in far too many orifices over the past few years, but never in the sink.
Outside, fresh salt air wafted in from the nearby bay and cooled Jack’s lungs. His breath crystallized on the exhale. Winter’s last laugh as April blinked alive.
Without a destination in mind beyond “far” and “away,” he strolled down the dimly lit walkway. A full moon hung overhead, casting an ethereal glow near the church at the end of the path.
Don’t wait for the sun to rise, Jack. Tomorrow holds no promise to be bright.His dad, the amateur philosopher, used to say.Learn to appreciate the moonbeams and starlight that shine through the darkest nights, and a different peace will find you.
He snorted to himself, shaking his head. If Jack had known the endless nights he would face, he might have heeded his dad’s advice. But it was too late to wander for light now.
What the hell was wrong with him? He should have been partying with the rest of his team. He should have been celebrating his game-winning goal. Celebrating theirchampionship.
But instead, he was aimlessly roaming his campus close to midnight, wallowing in the hollow feeling that had consumed his chest for the past five years.
What was the point of any of this if his dad wasn’t there to see it?
His dad should have seen the deke. He should have been there to celebrate it.
The never-ending earworm ofbut he wasn’t there, and he never will befollowed him around like a second shadow.
He wished he could say it was because his dad, as the Boston Brawling Badgers legend and two-time Stanley Cup Champion, was just too busy to make it to his son’s games. That John Parker wasn’t a family man, like his best friend Gus’s father, who was the scum of the earth.
But none of that was true. John Parker was the best father, husband, and hockey player Jack had ever known, and he was gone—not on a trip, but from the earth. Cancer had taken him at the age of forty-eight, stealing him from Jack when he still desperately needed him.
I don’t know how to pick myself up out of this, Dad. Give me a shot in the arm—something—to stop feeling this fucking miserable.
A white blur stood illuminated under the halo of a streetlamp ahead. Jack’s steps slowed. Was there an angel in the fountain?
“Oh,F—ernGully—” the figure exclaimed.
He laughed at the creative censoring and stepped back on his heels. The point of this walk was to be alone.
“Son of a biscuit. Why did I do that?” Water sloshed under the angel’s searching hands. Her foot caught on something as she flailed, and she flopped into the bottom of the basin with a yelp. “You just had to be dramatic, didn’t you? Well, see what you’ve done now?”
Gathering herself, she continued her frantic patting and shifted further into the light. Jack halted his already half-hearted retreat, held arrested by the cascading moonbeams that danced over her large pair of downcast eyes.
She walks in beauty, like the night.
The poem by Lord Byron he memorized for English called to him.
