Me
zach
Zach
goodnight mackie. for realthis time.
Me
merry christmas baby
Zach
merry christmas
I plugmy phone in and stare at the ceiling and my brain won’t let go of one clip. Not from tonight. From the other night. His forearm across my hip. Two words in a voice I’d never heard from him.
Stay still.
And every single thing in my brain—every spiral, every plan, every process I didn’t even know was running—went quiet. Like someone found the off switch.
Which is. I mean. That’s information I have about myself now, I guess.
I pull the covers up to my chin and close my eyes and try not to think about the fact that the two most significant discoveries of my Christmas break are that Barrett knows our secret and that I apparently become a completely different person when Zach Almardon tells me what to do.
Cool. Merry Christmas to me.
17
ZACH
I’mon the bench in full gear watching the clock count down the way I always do, running through my pre-game sequence, except tonight my head won’t stay where I’m putting it because in approximately three minutes, Jack Anderson’s family is going to walk onto the ice for his 1,000th game ceremony while I sit here and not react.
The arena lights dim and the crowd goes quiet as a tribute video starts on the jumbotron. I can’t look away. Jack as a rookie taking a hit along the boards and bouncing up like nothing happened. Then the years start layering. Different teams, different jerseys, the same relentless style of play. A clip of him talking to the goalie, heads bent together, and I’ve been on the receiving end of that conversation. I know exactly what he says.I’ve got you. Stay with me. Next shot.He said it to me three days ago. Hand on my shoulder pads, mouth by my ear, like it was just for me, and I stood there and took it knowing what I know.
Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before Jack. I came up through juniors with goalie coaches and billet families and they were all kind in their ways, but none of them put their hand on theback of my neck before a game and told me they had me. I didn’t know that was a thing a teammate could do. I didn’t know I’d been missing it until he did it the first time.
The video shifts to his wedding. Photos of him holding a baby with wispy, red hair. A toddler in a tiny jersey sitting on his lap in a locker room stall, and then she grows into a girl with freckles and a huge smile standing at center ice in a Puckaneers hoodie three sizes too big. Mackie at five, maybe six years old, holding her dad’s hand. Then Mackie at ten with a foam finger. A more recent one—Mackie and Chloe at a home game, sitting in the family suite, Mackie’s face caught mid-laugh.
I know that laugh. I’ve heard it in my apartment, in my car, through my phone at two in the morning. I’ve felt it vibrate against my neck and my chest and my mouth and right now it’s forty feet wide on a screen in front of twenty thousand people and I’m gripping my water bottle so hard the plastic is creaking.
The ceremony itself takes eight minutes. They give him the silver stick, the crystal, the framed jersey. And then Mackie walks out onto the ice and throws her arms around her dad’s neck and buries her face in his shoulder and I can see his mouth moving against her hair, saying something only she can hear, while I sit on this bench doing the math on how many times I’ve lied to this man. Practice days, game days, travel days, the flights where he sits next to me and asks how I’m holding up and I say fine and mean nothing by it. I calculate it the way I calculate everything. Ninety-three days since I first kissed his daughter.
She’ll be okay when he finds out. That’s the thing I keep circling back to. She has years of being loved by this man stacked behind her and even if it goes sideways for a while it’ll come back, the way these things do when there’s a foundation under them. She knows what that’s like. She’s never not had it, and I’m not jealous of what she has, but I’m terrified that when this gets ripped out from under us I’ll have nothing to fall back on.
The ceremony ends. Jack skates a lap. The crowd is deafening. Mackie and Chloe disappear back through the tunnel and I put my helmet on and grab my water bottle and try to become a goalie again but my head won’t stop the chant ofliar, liar, liar.
We win 5-2. I don’t play. I don’t remember a single second of the game.
I’m sittingon my couch at midnight staring at the dark TV. I’ve been replaying the ceremony for three hours. The video. Jack’s face. Her at five years old. Then the phone rings.
She’s talking before I can even say hi, the way she does when she’s running hot. “That was amazing, right? Dad was so emotional. He cried during the video—I’ve seen my dad cry maybe twice in my entire life and tonight he just—” She stops. “Why are you so quiet?”
“Just thinking.”
I can hear her settle into something—bed, probably. There’s faint music coming through her end. Someone’s still up downstairs.
“Talk to me.”
