Chapter 12
Jamie — Past
I was eleven years old and for approximately two hours on a Saturday afternoon in March I forgot to be careful.
Danny Korek from next door knocked on the front door and asked if I wanted to come out. My mom answered before I could stop her, and I ended up in Danny's driveway with a basketball and nowhere to be until dinner.
Danny was the kind of kid who made things easy. Loud in a way that filled the empty space so you didn't have to. He moved through the world like he had never once considered that it might not want him in it. The complete opposite of me. I always found this baffling. I had also found it to be the best thing I'd ever seen up close — that kind of ease, the way it looked from the outside, like something you could catch if you stood close enough.
We played for a while. Basketball first, then something that stopped being basketball and started being its own game with rules we made up as we went. He was funny. Not trying-to-be-funny. Just naturally funny, the way some people are, where things fall out of their mouths and land and you're laughing before you even understand it.
I scored on him and he lost his mind.
Jamie.
Like I'd done something incredible. Like it was the best thing he'd seen all week. He grabbed my arm — both hands, shakingit — and I was laughing before I even realized I was laughing. The kind that came up from somewhere I'd forgotten existed. The kind that didn't check with you first. I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like that.
We ended up sitting on the driveway after, catching our breath, shoulders touching because the driveway was sloped and that was just where we ended up. He was telling me something about his cousin and I was listening and at some point I wasn't thinking about anything except what he was saying. I was so busy being happy that I didn't notice my dad at the window. I found out later it didn't matter how long he'd been there. The way I was looking at Danny was enough to be considered wrong within a second of him watching.
He didn't say anything when I came inside. He was standing in the kitchen with his keys already in his hand and a look on his face I had spent years learning to read. Flat. Contained. The stillness of a man who had already decided what was going to happen and was simply waiting for me to follow. My mom was upstairs. I could hear the television through the ceiling. Could feel the distance of her.
"Get your gear."
I opened my mouth.
He looked at me.
I closed it immediately.
I went upstairs and got my gear and came back down and he hit me in the kitchen before we left, before I even registered it. Open palmed. Fast. The side of my face into the counter, hard enough that the room tilted and I had to grab the edge of it to stay up. My ear rang. The sound of it was very loud in the small kitchen. I didn’t make a single sound.
He didn't say anything after either. He picked up his keys from the counter and walked to the door and just waited for me to follow.
I followed.
My mom didn't come downstairs. The TV upstairs just got louder.
He drove me to the rink without speaking.
Twenty minutes in the car with my ear still ringing and the side of my face starting to swell and my dad's hands on the wheel at ten and two like he was driving somewhere ordinary. The radio was off, all I could hear were the soft sounds of traffic outside. I watched the streetlights and counted them and kept my breathing even and didn't touch my face. Didn't cry. I knew he was listening to see if I would. I already knew better.
He paid for the ice time at the front desk. Nodded at a guy he knew. Acted like a man doing a normal thing with his son and dropped my bag at the boards.
"Edges. Go."
I went.
He sat in the bleachers with his arms folded and watched me for the first hour. Edge work. Shooting sequences. Edge work again. He didn't coach. Didn't correct. Didn't say a single word — just watched with that flat expression that I had learned was worse than anger. Anger I could work with. Anger had edges, escalated, burned out at some point. This was something else. Something crueler. Deeper. Endless. He never ran out.
I ran the drill again.
My ear stopped ringing around the forty minute mark. My face kept swelling, but the cold was helping. I kept my head angled away from the bleachers so he couldn't see it clearly. Around the second hour he got up and went somewhere — coffee, the bathroom, I didn't know. I kept going. It didn't occur to me not to. Like a trained dog, I just kept going because I wasn’t told I could stop yet.
I needed to use the bathroom around three hours in.
I knew because there was a clock above the penalty box and Ispent a long time looking at it. Five more minutes. I could do five more. I ran the sequence. I did the edges. I looked at the clock. When he came back I skated to the boards and told him.
He looked at me like I was stupid for even asking.
